Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteEdited response to conversation elsewhere--
The best approach where the facts do not exist may start with examination of the phenomenon itself.
I don't think I'm wishy-washy as an agnostic: I'm merely humble as I can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.
What interests me as a poet--writer, photographer, musician--is how the idea of God, a triplet in music, or solarization got there in the first place and then sensibly woven into someone's cultural fabric.
If you want to say that language invention resides in the nature of the mind, I may go with that: humans are not the only intelligent and playful species on the planet. But then I'd want to move on to the relationship between language (any art) and the experience of ecstasy individually and en masse as approaching some ultimate experience afforded by nature or . . . the divine.
The Star Trek character "Data" had quite a few things to say about sensuality and love over the years as he was made to make logical sense of emotion (he was after all "fully functional" and his "neural nets seemed to miss the presence of many persons when they weren't around") but I don't think the writers had him comment much on the nature of God: what if they had? Would he have been made to demur from comment for being too limited a machine to contemplate or assess the "all" or the "infinite"? Or may he have noted patterns of thought in "sentient beings" across the galaxies so similar in construction but arrived at independently or in isolation as to comprise a real enough, even predictable enough, "space" of their own.
There is no literal space in anyone's heart for the expression, "a place in the heart", but it's just that place the moves us--really, compels us--to love, to make war, to make sense of our nature, and to have the audacity to act with certainty on what we "believe" or "feel" rather than what we know.
I think that form of space real and worth investigation.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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