Do you believe in a deity? Either way, what is your reasoning?
I'm curious to hear what people on a philosophy forum have to say about their own person theistic beliefs. I realize that even the most religious people will understand the necessity of faith; that a deity isn't something we can prove or disprove through empirical methods. But many philosophers have put forth rational arguments for the existence of a deity, so theistic belief isn't something unheard of in or incompatible with the discipline of philosophy.
So, whether you believe in a deity or don't, share your reasoning.
So, whether you believe in a deity or don't, share your reasoning.
Comments (77)
My general attitude is that while I've never been atheist, I've also never been oriented Church or biblical Christianity. I'm not at all hostile to it, but growing up in the 60's, the main influences in my teenage spiritual formation was popular Eastern mysticism books - Alan Watts, D T Suzuki, Krishnamurti and the like. I studied Comparative Religion as a mature-aged university student and tried to join the dots between various forms of religious and spiritual culture. Then much later in life, I came to realise the profound spirituality of Christianity, which I now appreciate from a very different perspective to how it was presented to me as a child. But I'm still not inclined to return to a Biblically-oriented faith.
On forums I generally argue against scientific materialism. By that I'm not necessarily referring fully worked-out and conscientious philosophical position, but a lot of the folk wisdom that circulates that believes it is grounded in science as opposed to religion. The focal point for a lot of that is indeed the contentious issue of evolutionary materialism - the view that Darwin somehow dissolves the entire previous corpus of the Western tradition in the acid of the realisation that we're really just hominids. In fact while I fully accept the material facts of evolutionary biology, I don't at all accept the meaning that is generally attributed to it. As I never believed that the Biblical creation myth was literally true, the fact that it's NOT literally true doesn't strike me as particularly important. But an astounding number of people believe that 'life began by chance' and that the Universe is essentially devoid of meaning, as if they are established scientific theories, when they're not at all.
So now I see the various religious and spiritual traditions as chronicles of the human encounter with the divine. This means, obviously, that I believe in the reality of the divine, but technically I remain agnostic, which I think is a sound position.
A few beliefs of mine:
-The existence of a deity can't be proved or disproved via reasoning at all.
-Any knowledge of God has to be direct, experiential knowledge in the same way that other inner knowledge is direct; the experience of the aesthetic, for instance. So any reasoning about God that isn't predicated upon experiential knowledge is useless, in the same way that any reasoning about the aesthetic without direct experience of the aesthetic is also useless.
Panpsychism is not a kind of Theism at all, and I'm not sure what route one would take to go from Panpsychism to Theism.
So, the question that arises is "Are there any good reasons for thinking that such a being is real?" Depending on what you mean by "good reason", most Theists answer that question with a "Yes there are". The question then morphs into "Just what are these reasons and do they consititute "good" reasons?"
I maintain that there are no good reasons for thnking Theism is true and some plausible reasons for thinking it is false. If I am right, then most forms of Judaism, Chistianity, and Islam are wrong.
What reasons against theism do you find to be particularly strong?
What is the evidential argument, that one that says that because of the amount of suffering in the world, the best explanation is that there is no God? That is, the probability of there being a God is low?
The evidential argument from evil requires that other proofs haven't worked to demonstrate God's existence. The logical argument from evil is the only thing that could counter a successful demonstration of God's existence by showing that this ends up positing a being that is incompatible with the empirical reality of evil.
I am also a "thin ice atheist" -- that is, I don't feel a lot of security in not believing in God. I've taken that position and haven't broken through the ice yet, so... we'll see what happens.
The compromise I have tried is more like Unitarianism: drop the trinity (maybe keep God the Father); keep Jesus and skip Paul; avoid thinking in literal terms about God; keep the Crucifixion, drop the Resurrection; keep the Bible; drop large chunks of theology. But then, that isn't quite enough. God the Father is still something of a problem. So, I end up with something in-between wishy-washy Unitarianism (which is kind of lukewarm to start with) and thin-ice atheism.
My moral compass still works pretty well -- or maybe more accurately, as well as it ever did, for what that is worth. I behave about the same as an Atheist and as a Christian, for better or worse.
One thing I do believe in is the value/goodness/utility/benefit/etc. of belief. It seems to do most people much more good than harm, unless, of course, it is one of several "off the deep-end" belief that one should go on crusades or jihads to square up the world with one's peculiar beliefs. Bad practice. Fundamentalism, regardless of which religion it appears in, is nothing but trouble.
As a Christian I didn't find any problem with the Big Bang, Darwin, or technology.
I find my self drawn to a type of plurality pantheism, I am highly skeptical of any humanoid deity. Part of my conviction is that life and man arose from matter, which logically entails that matter in itself must have the potentiality to become spirit. So kind of a panpsychism.
I highly recommend reading Spinoza's concept of God in Ethics.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I would also recommend Spinoza for you. Believe it or not, I was in the exact same place you seem to be in now about ten years ago. I had been an uncertain/unsatisfied atheist ever since studying philosophy in college. I had never been very religious, and on examination of myself I learned that I was agnostic, and that (for the time being) I could not bring myself to believe in even any sort of God concept I knew of. Then I read Spinoza and it was really a life-changing experience. Everything he said just made so much sense to me, as if I had felt it all along but never knew how to describe it on my own. I won't try to summarize his views because I wouldn't do it justice, but his concept of "God" just made sense to me. No guarantee any of you will feel the same about it, but definitely worth a read either way.
One thing I will say is that Spinoza's works got him excommunicated from both the Catholic Church and the Jewish community, and his books were banned for over a hundred years after his death. If that doesn't make you want to read him, I don't know what will.
You would probably enjoy Spinoza's concept of God, as well. It's funny, you and I have had somewhat similar paths. As I said, in college I became an uncertain atheist, but I never actually called myself one precisely because of the "new atheism" movement. I couldn't stand Dawkins and wanted no association with him (I've grown to appreciate him more now, but still disagree with a lot of what he does and says).
Also, I discovered Alan Watts just a few years ago and immediately fell in love. He also helped me to see the profound spirituality of Christianity just as you say you did, but just as you I haven't returned to the Church and don't plan to. I appreciate it much more than I used to, but the Christianity of today is nothing like what it was originally, and even the beginnings of the church strayed too much from what Jesus' messages actually were (or what I believe them to have been, since none of us can say for certain).
Anyway, I appreciate hearing your stories. I love getting glimpses into people's journeys and experiences, especially when the topic is something so personal.
Not to derail, but I'd be fascinated to hear more about your reasoning here. As I read that sentence, I keep going "Yes! Wait, no! what? yes! No!"
One of the subjects I studied was the suppression of the gnostics in the early Christian Christian era. There was a large cache of ancient manuscripts found, called the Nag Hammadi scrolls, which contained many lost scriptures, including many gnostic writings that were previously unknown.
Quoting TheMadFool
It seems abundantly obvious to me that about the most, or even only, evil acts are committed by humans. I won’t give examples but it wouldn’t be difficult to. Of course there are immense catastrophes, and also epidemics and the like. But whether they’re evil is another matter. Personally I feel many of the depictions of God as evil rely on the image of a celestial film director, or dictator or oriental potentate - which is exactly what God is not, although the Church has plainly depicted God in such terms, much to their discredit.
Quoting Wayfarer
I didn't realise you knew God personally, you should really speak to the hundreds of theologians who been trying to find out what God is for the last 2000 years, I can't believe you've kept it to yourself for all this time you mischievous devil.
Yeah, if you bothered to read like 5 of those theologians, you'd realise that their understanding of God was actually quite close in most regards. Of course, when things get mystical, you have to drop your dualistic mind, you may find that hard to do.
Panpsychism can result in more or less this view. Substance, if sentient (as some versions of panpsychism hold) entails a kind of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Substance, in so far as it is not its modes, is unchanging and eternal and dependent on nothing else. The trouble is then separating this view from all the nasty baggage that unfortunately often comes with a religious view. Sprigge said he wanted to take the superstition out of religion and I concur.
EDIT: The big difference, of course, is that substance obviously is not separate from the world. If theism has that in its definition then I'm not a theist.
How would you distinguish Pantheism, e.g. Spinoza or Hegel, from Panpsychism?
BTW: Theism holds that God is separate from the world because God created the world.
Have you ever seen that trick where one person goes out into the street and points up at something, soon they have all the passers-by looking up to the same place, but there's nothing there?
The point is we're an easily led species who generally tend to converge on similar notions, doesn't make them any more right.
Okay... where was I claiming that easily converging on similar notions makes them right? All I said was countering your notion that theologians don't have a decent understanding of what God is, an understanding that is adequate as far as reason can go, but no further.
Quoting Inter Alia
But, I was involved with a youth group that was respectful of other denominations. After I graduated from high school, I went to a Christian college in another state and met Christians with all kinds of various beliefs. I started looking for a good church... I think I hoped to find one that was accepting of evolution and science in general, and one that didn't treat women like 2nd class citizens. I never did find that church (I suspect some do exist).
Somewhere along the line I started declaring myself to be an atheist. It just seemed to me that all religions were man-made. I had no way to of judging between different denominations or even religions. I now believe that if the Christian God exists, then he must be a vindictive monster who loves slavery- at least that's the way he looks when I read the Bible. If the Bible got some things wrong about God (or anything else)... then why trust it at all?
I love Socrates as portrayed by Plato. I hear him saying, "Maybe we're wrong... maybe the Gods are better than us." It's almost funny to me that when religions write about their "good" God, he ends up looking like a monster (or at least as human as the people who imagined him). I wouldn't say that I believe, but lately I find myself I kinda hoping that there is a virtuous God, and/or a God so other that He can't really be imagined. I'm just not sure where to look for Him. I do like reading the Christian Existentialists... specifically Gabriel Marcel. On the other hand, there are days when I consider the history of Christianity (and the influence of Christians on the latest election in my country) that I hesitate to associate myself with Christianity in any way.
Then again the story of a God who loved humanity so much that He was willing to suffer greatly in order to redeem them is a good one. Maybe Christianity can be and deserves to be "saved".
Apparently by theism you refer to something else than theism, and by philosophy of religion you refer to something else than philosophical thinking of the topics of religion, because that's not what theism means.
Shame that the PSR is falsified in the Free Will Theorems of Kochen and Conway.
For further reading, I recommend Google and Wikipedia :)
If you've really been teaching the definition of monotheism as theism for 25 years, I feel extremely sorry for your students, although surprised as well if they've never corrected you, because this is all secondary school material.
Perhaps, then, I need to be more specific. What I gave as a definition of Theism IS the way in which it has been used in Philosophy. Since this is a Philosophy Forum, I thought it redundant to call it Philosophical Theism, also know as "Classical Theism"
Since you recommend Wikipedia as a scholarly source, let me refer you to the article there called "Classical Theism" here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_theism"
Since you have questioned my integrety as a professor, please do me the favor of reading that article.
Sort of, but not exactly. If the Christian (and Muslim) God does not exist, I don't see any reason for positing a different kind of deity. So the question is what reasons are there for thinking that there is/are "lesser" dieties. I find J.S. Mill's argument for a more limited God unconvincing, as it relies on a First Cause Argument.
Another question that I think needs to be addressed is whether there is any reason for believing some "supernatural" dimension of reality exist. This question could be independent of that of any deiity. E.g., there could be reincarnation without any deities at all.
So, what reasons do you think there are for the existence of a divine being, and what type of divine being do those reasons support?
So when you say "share your reasoning" I assume you're talking about the use of good argumentation based on logic, not an opinion based reasoning. After spending roughly 40 years within the Christian community and teaching Christian apologetics in some churches over the years, it's my belief based on analyzing the arguments that there are no good arguments for the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. Of course that's not to say there isn't any evidence to support Christian beliefs. For example, there is sufficient evidence that Christ was a real historical person, and that he had disciples, but that doesn't mean there is sufficient testimonial evidence to support the claim that he was God incarnate, or that he rose from the dead.
I'm also not limiting my belief to knowledge acquired through the use of logic. I say this to point out that there are other ways of acquiring knowledge, logic is only one tool, but it's a very good tool. It's possible of course that someone could have a direct experience with God, but of course how could you show that your experience is valid? People do claim such experiences, but they tend to be very subjective, and open to a wide variety of interpretations. For example, I've been in churches where people are singing and praising God and as a result of an emotional experience they believe the Holy Spirit is speaking to them. Another example is that many within a religious community will read the Bible, and maybe a passage or verse generates an emotion, and as a result, they'll interpret this as God speaking to them. I say all of this to point out that although sensory experiences are valid ways of acquiring knowledge, internal experiences are very subjective an open to a wide variety of interpretations. You can always interpret some internal experience in terms of your religious belief. It then tends to become self-sealing, and not subject to being falsified.
Finally, many within the church will claim that it's not a matter of evidence or correct reasoning, etc, but it's a matter of faith, i.e., they believe their faith speaks to something higher than reason or evidence. However, there is a huge problem with this kind of thinking, i.e., it's very subjective an open to all kinds of claims. This kind of thinking can lead to almost any kind of religious belief. One can always avoid well reasoned arguments against one's religious beliefs based on the idea that it's a matter of faith. It's true that people acquire their religious beliefs in this way. However, most rational people want to know if it's a fact that God exists, an objective fact.
I have to agree with BlueBanana, there are many issues with what you've said here. I'm far from a professor, but I do have a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and studied philosophy of religion in many classes in college, and none of my professors ever referred to Classical Theism as just Theism. Neither did any of the authors we read. Probably because it's inaccurate to do so. What if I started calling Polytheism just "Theism"?
"Theism is the worship or belief in multiple gods and goddesses"
It's misleading and just plain incorrect.
And now you're essentially saying that, because one type of idea is the most predominant in the area where you are located, it's okay to speak as if it's the only idea. That's just not how things work, especially in philosophy.
One day I was watching my dog play or do something silly/cute. I can't remember the exact thing she was doing because she's being cute like a gazillion times a day. That exact moment is when I turned from believing only in physicalism and determinism to religious pluralism.
It wasn't exactly my dog, though. The reason for this was my subjective experience of that moment and my subjective experience of my dog's awesomness. That was the first time I truly felt consciousness and I was fully awake.
Well, enough of this rambling about my dog as a divine messenger of the one true God, the meaning of my life, the bringer of light, the one who shall banish the squirrels from our yards etc etc. Basically it's the hard problem of consciousness and the emergence of experience from matter. (But just saying, what's dog spelled backwards?)
What leads to my view of what the deity/deities are arouses from these experiences. I know there're deities, and I know the omni-everything God is false because of the problem you pointed out. My beliefs are partially formed by my irrational bias and wishes, but, based on those claims, I believe that the false assumptions in classical theism are omnipotence and/or omniscience. The god (or gods - their number is an irrelevant minor detail that I'm not bothered with) is omnibenevolent, which includes that they want freedom and free will, which means they can't work against it.
Quoting Mitchell
There could also be reincarnation without any supernatural dimension, or even any supernatural entities at all.
I'd be interested in when this "supernatural" dimension first appeared in the philosophy of religion. It seems that Aquinas, following Maimonides, and ultimately Aristotle, regarded the Soul as Form of activity of the body - the soul is non-material, but it is certainly physical, and is subject to the laws of physics.
Perhaps the first occurrence of "supernatural" is the Gnostic heresy?
Do you happen to know when the error of separating God from Reality firs occurred?
2. My definition of Theism was simply meant to make clear what concept of God I was going to talk about and whose existence I was going to deny. I would like to bring our focus back to the question asked by the O.P.
3. My remarks about what concept of God was the focus of Western Philosophy was not in any way meant to suggest that philosophers should only address the concepts operating in their culture. It was a flippant attempt to explain why other forms of Theism, as well as other concepts of divinity, have not been given much, if any, attention.
4. Just in passing, I’d like to note that J. S, Mill wrote an essay titled “Theism” in which he argued against the Classical Theistic conception of God and argued for the existence of a more limited God who is unable to do anything about the Problem of Evil.
I'd put the first appearnce of an eternal realm separate from the physical world in Plato. Although he called the Forms "divine", they weren't in any sense "gods".
The appearance of (a) God separate from the world seems to me to be, in the West, to occur in Genesis 1. God existed separate from the world and created the world. To say that God is separate from the world does not rule out his interacting with the world. What it does rule out is both Pantheism and totally immanent deities.
Surely it is the accounts of the miracles of Jesus Christ, including walking on water, bringing the dead back to life, feeding the multitudes with a loaf of bread, restoring the lame and the blind, turning water into wine, then being resurrected from the dead and ascending bodily into Heaven.
As far as Platonism is concerned, the early, Greek-speaking theologians, notably Clement of Alexandria and Origen, among others, integrated Christian beliefs with Platonic philosophy. Plato and Socrates were said to be 'Christians before Christ', meaning that although they were technically 'pagan philosophers', they still exemplified the kinds of virtues associated with Jesus Christ.
From a philosophical point of view, many of the problems around understanding the relationship between divinity and the world arise out of the attempt to 'objectify' deity or think of him/it as something that exists somewhere. As the 'aphophatic' tradition of theology points out, God is not only beyond the world but also beyond any attempt to conceive of him/her/it. But God has manifested or appeared in the world - according to Christianity in the person of Jesus, (although the identity of the Jesus with God was actually a major source of conflict in the early Church.)
Quoting tom
Bearing in mind, Aristotle's laws of physics were thoroughly refuted by Galileo, and they included teleology, final causes, which likewise are excluded from modern physics.
Annie Dillard reminds us that the practice of attributing miracles to religious teachers also occurred in Judaism.
There needs to be a distinction between objective and transcendental. I think understanding of Kant is important in this respect. In particular the demonstration that what we know of reality is what appears to us, not what reality is in itself. Our apprehension of any objective facts whatever is mediated by our senses and grasped by the intellect according to the categories of understanding. This emphatically does not mean that the world only exists in the mind or in perception, as other forms of idealism assert. What it does mean is that knowledge of phenomena is necessarily mediated and limited by the human sensory apparatus and our own categories of the understanding. So the appeal for an 'objective fact' about God is to overlook that fact, and in effect to demand that God is something that can be known by the same means we know other objects in the world.
Now I perfectly agree that religious enthusiasm is a fertile source of delusion and wish-fulfilment, there's no question about that at all. But I think it's a large leap from there to then claim that all supposed claims of divine illumination or intuitive insight by sages and religiously-inspired individuals is merely or only subjective. There is a vast literature surrounding such accounts, not only from one culture or one period of history, and one thing that is striking in it, is the degree of commonality between those accounts, even if they're separated by enormous periods of time and language. That is the insight of such popular works on comparative religion, such as Alduous Huxley's book The Perennial Philosophy and Huston Smith's The World's Religions. If you reject all that you really end up with some species of scientism or positivism which is an arid wasteland from the spiritual point of view.
Rather to my own puzzlement I've become a sort of religious atheist in these, my latter years. I can rarely make sense of 'arguments' for 'deities'. But I recognize profound feelings in myself and others, including people I know well, and some of these are 'religious'. Such feelings sometimes are judgements: that something is beautiful, or important, or an excellent clue to right action. Insight can arise out of such a mixture of emotion and reasoning.
I also see religion as a practice. There is a drama of one kind or another: a ritual in a church, chanting in a temple, or people getting together to talk or sing or dance. People emerge from such dramas with a sense of deep meaning.
'Belief' seems to me a bit of a gloss on all this, a sometimes clumsy way of trying to make sense of these feelings and experiences in the light of all that's gone before us. I like to read and watch Greek dramas as a guide to all this. Some of us are like Sophocles and take the rituals and the gods seriously; some of us are more like Euripides, doubting the gods make any sense at all, but having a regard for divinity all the same. I think a Euripides would be as sceptical of the strutting gods of analysis as of the weird mono-capitalise-me-Gods that the Middle East bequeathed to us.
I think the sense of 'objective' Sam refers to is not the sense of 'empirical object' but is in the sense of 'intersubjective'. If the reality of God is not/cannot be an intersubjective fact, then what can it be but a subjective opinion, feeling or item of faith, or else a metaphor for an experience?
How about, none of these, but that’s a really useful thing to articulate!
That doesn't answer the question; it just deflects it. You don't believe in God yourself, in any case; according to your own testimony.
Actually, I retract what I said about 'objective' being in the sense of 'intersubjective'. If God is actually real independently of human experience, then that does not constitute an intersubjectve fact, but a kind of objective fact, even though God obviously cannot be an object of the senses. That goes for anything that we might want to claim exists absolutely, or independently of human experience, because logically any such purported existence can only be other than existence as an object of the senses.
Hence, 'transcendent'. That doesn't mean 'vague wishy-washy amorphous entity'. Not objective, because firstly, not an object but a subject; and secondly, the precondition of the existence of all individual subjects and objects.
D.B. Hart: “one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.”
Hey McD - did you notice the writings of Karen Armstrong on these issues, about 6-7 years ago now? A couple of short reviews that go to the point you're making:
Metaphysical Mistake
Review of her A Case for God, Alain du Botton.
(Both from The Guardian.)
If your own subjectivity has an existence which is not merely merely imaginary then it has in that sense an objective existence.
Obviously the same goes for God. If 'transcendent' means 'beyond human experience' and you answer the question as to what kind of existence God has beyond human experience by saying He has a transcendent existence that amounts to saying no more than thst He has a ' beyond human experience' kind of existence'. Whether He does have such an ecistence we cannot kniw (because it is beyond huan experience) so for us it cannot but be an opinion, feeling or metaphor.
Less sure about Spinoza, but I believe for Hegel (or Schelling) it depends on what the panpsychism entails. If it entails that anything has consciousness, then we'd missing the point of Schelling and Hegel when they say there just are certain things that are inorganic and mechanical, and have no consciousness. If we mean the Absolute has consciousness (which we all participate in), as a irreducible and organic whole, then sure, it can be a form of panpsychism. However, the world of Hegel and Schelling is notably a type of organicism more than panpsychism. Generally consciousness is viewed for them as the highest potency of matter.
[quote=Frederick Beiser]The allegorical form of this explanation is that “God creates the world in order to portray himself” (39). This means that the infinite is a kind of divine artist, creating the entire world for its self-knowledge. The infinite is therefore to be conceived as a kind of intelligence, what Schlegel, anticipating Hegel, calls “spirit” (Geist) (39).[/quote]
Antigonish sums up theology better than I ever could.
But I don't want to labour the metaphor, so I will just keep silent.
It's the only rational thing to do.
If someone experiences God and you say that could be an instance of "higher knowledge" which proves that God is real, that begs the question as to how you could distinguish a genuine instance of such knowledge from a bogus one. this would seem to apply even to one's own experiences. So it would seem that there is no possibulty that faith could ever be superseded in any instance.
I can't see how there could be any criterion to judge the veracity of any purported knowledge other than intersubjective corroboration which would seem to be impossible when it comes to so-called "higher knowledge". On the other hand I might be utterly convinced by my own experience, but I could never expect others to be convinced on that account. And even my own conviction on account of my own experience would really still come down to faith.
Calling Spinoza a Pantheist in the first place isn't really accurate. Not only is his concept of "God" far more intricate and complex than simple Pantheism, but it isn't even really comparable. "God" for Spinoza was synonymous with Nature--which today we would likely call The Universe--but either way he was referring to all that exists. And his argument wasn't even really that Nature is a deity. It's impossible to summarize in just a few sentences so I won't even try, but I figured I'd give my two cents about it. I recommend Spinoza's Ethics to people every chance I get. It's difficult for many to get through, but I personally found it to be a fascinating read.
So how is his philosophy not just natural philosophy, or science, for that matter?
Quoting Janus
Valid observation. But this is where the role of the spiritual preceptor or advisor comes into play. In actual fact that is the historical origin of peer-reviewed science, however nowadays of course, that assumes the very attitude that I wish to distinguish in this case. For example in Zen Buddhism, the student is trained in such a way as to realise satori, or insight, but this realisation is then subject to a pretty rigorous degree of assessment by the superiors, who in turn have been trained in just the same manner.
I’m sure there are analogous methods in other traditions, and also as pointed out by Pierre Hadot, in traditional training in philosophy itself up until it's near-total 'secularisation' in modernity.
None of that is to say that it’s an easy thing to adjudicate or that there can’t be instances of counterfeit or bogus claims. But the point I’m trying to make is that there are, or were, domains of discourse within which there is an understanding of such forms of knowledge, but which don’t regard such knowledge as simply ineffable, private or subjective. And I think that view is very much in line with the way religious or spiritual knowledge was understood in late European Protestantism, which was very much grounded on the individual's relationship with God and also very much predicated on salvation by faith alone.
He really covers a lot, from theology to metaphysics to ontology. And it's all connected. The only real way to learn about it is to read it yourself. Like I said, trying to summarize is very difficult and wouldn't do it justice.
But you have to have faith in their spiritual wisdom, and they have to have faith in their own wisdom, in order for them to hold such a role. Also, presumably they are not telling you to believe specific things about God or any higher reality. but are just teaching methods to achieve heightened or altered states of consciousness, and even if you achieve those the problem of what they actually indicate, if anything, about the true or ultimate nature of reality still remains a matter of faith.
Think of the Gnostics; some sects believed that the creator of this world was not the Supreme Unknowable God, but Yaldabaoth, a fallen,deluded and jealous demigurge who they also believed is the very God of the old testament. They claimed that their visions revealed this truth to them. This is a very definite claim about what is objectively the case.
Or take Gautama; either he or his followers claimed he could remember his past five thousand lives. How do he or his followers know he was not deluding himself about that? The answer is that neither he nor they could know that; so they, even Gautama himself is still, inevitably, operating on faith.
All that is known directly are appearances, feelings, events, people, places things. Anything we call knowledge beyond the appearances of the everyday is based on faith of one kind or another; and that includes science. Science is a special case, though, because of its tremendous predictive power and the enormous body of consistent, coherent and testable knowledge about the world that has been accumulated. Ultimately, though, it's still a matter of faith as to whether science tells us anything about a mind independent reality. Only mathematics and geometry achieve the kind of certainty that our everyday experiences have.
I don't know much about Jewish mysticism but I do know Spinoza was raised Jewish (until he was excommunicated for his extremely controversial ideas), so that would make sense. I personally think the praise he receives is warranted, but I also admit that I'm sure a big part of his popularity was due to how controversial he was and his works being banned by the Church for over a century after his death. No doubt that did (and still does) alter people's perception of him at least a bit.
Quoting Wayfarer
I definitely understand that, we're all different and have different things that interest us and call to us. Back in college I tried to read more Wittgenstein because one of my professors I looked up to was very passionate about him, but I just couldn't get into it.
Oops, I forgot about Plato.
Anyway, I think we are so used to the idea of a separate supernatural realm, that we impose it on religious texts. I'm not convinced that it is necessary to take that view in reading Genesis.
When moses asked God his name, he replied "I shall be whom I shall be". Those seem to me to be the words of someone who is in physical reality rather than separate from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am
Thanks Wayf, I hadn't made the connection with Karen Armstrong's thinking, no.