Today, we conclude the descriptive phase of our analysis of spirituality; as such provide the cognitive data necessary to postulate useful and meaningful conclusions, as to what human theological systems can tell us about spirituality, i.e, is spirituality [1] an evolutionary psychological-CNS process for dealing with physical uncertainty, cultural mores and beliefs, or existential despair (acknowledged or not) or [2] is a cultural-evolutionary development of experiencing higher realms of operations, be such affective or cognitive (the infinitude of God).

Such consideration requiring a few blogs.

Scientific Materialism, Philosophical Atheism and Idealism: Materialism and atheism are not recent points of view. Documents show that such teachings are found in both Hellenistic Greece and in Vedic India. Moreover, such beliefs have been resilient to theistic pressures for some 25 centuries, and have culminated in scientific materialism in the most developed countries of the world.

Atheism (derived from the Ancient Greek ἄθεος [atheos] meaning “without gods; godless; secular; denying or disdaining the gods, especially officially sanctioned gods” is the absence or rejection of the belief that deities exist. Atheism, as a philosophical system, is generally compatible with prescientific and scientific materialism.

Atheism was clearly present in Greece by the 5th century BCE; being considered a severe crime against the city states punishable by death, as was the case in Athens with Socrates. Moreover, atheism was not a rare philosophical point of view:

Protagoras stated at the beginning of a book that “With regard to the gods I am unable to say either that they exist or do not exist.”

Diagoras of Melos (fifth century BCE) is known as the “first atheist”. He blasphemed by making public the Eleusinian Mysteries and discouraging people from being initiated.

Somewhat later (around 300 BCE), the Cyrenaic philosopher Theodorus of Cyrene is supposed to have denied that gods exist, and wrote a book ‘On the Gods’ expounding his views.

Euhemerus (around 330–260 BCE) published his view that the gods were only the deified rulers, conquerors, and founders of the past, and that their cults and religions were in essence the continuation of vanished kingdoms and earlier political structures. Although Euhemerus was later criticized for having “spread atheism over the whole inhabited earth by obliterating the gods,”his world view was not atheist in a strict and theoretical sense, because he differentiated that the primordial deities were “eternal and imperishable”.

Epicurus (around 300 BCE), drawing on the ideas of Democritus and the Atomists, espoused a materialistic philosophy where the universe was governed by the laws of chance without the need for divine intervention. Although he stated that deities existed, he believed that they were uninterested in human existence. The aim of the Epicureans was to attain peace of mind by exposing fear of divine wrath as irrational. The Epicureans denied the existence of an afterlife

One of the most eloquent expressions of Epicurean thought is found in the 1st century BCE poem of Lucretius “On the Nature of Things,” in which he held that gods exist, but, argued that religious fear was one of the chief causes of human unhappiness and that the gods did not involve themselves in the world.

Atheism and materialism are also found in India, including hymns in the Rig-Veda. For instance,
the Rig Veda demonstrates that skepticism existed as to the fundamental question of a creator God and the Creation of the universe. In many hymns, the categorical acceptance of a Creator God [the Nasadiya Sukta (Creation Hymn), tenth chapter of the Rig Veda states, “Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.”]

Verses present in the Brihadaranyaka, Isha, Mundaka, and Chandogya Upanishads are considered atheistic because of their stress on the subjective self.

The Mimamsa sect was a realistic, pluralistic school of philosophy which was concerned with the exegesis of the Vedas. The core text of the school was the Purva Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini (200 BCE–200 CE). Mimamsa philosophers believed that the revelation of the Vedas was sacred, authorless, and infallible. Moreover, it was essential to preserve the sanctity of the Vedic ritual to maintain dharma (cosmic order).

As a consequence of the belief in sanctity of the ritual, Mimamsa rejected the notion of God in any form. The early Mimamsa rejected the concept of God, believing that human action was sufficient so to achieve the necessary circumstances for the enjoyment of the fruits of existence.

Samkhya is an atheistic, strongly dualistic orthodox school of Indian philosophy. The earliest surviving authoritative text on classical Samkhya philosophy is the Samkhyakarika (350–450 CE), which proclaims the notion of higher selves or perfected jiva-atmas, but, rejects the notion of God.

Cārvāka, was a materialistic and atheistic school of Indian philosophy fully developed as a system by the 6th century CE. Cārvākas rejected metaphysical concepts like reincarnation, afterlife, an extracorporeal soul, efficacy of religious rites, heavens and hells, fate, and accumulation of merit or demerit through the performance of certain actions. Cārvākas refused to ascribe supernatural causes to describe natural phenomena. Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1200 CE.

Both Jainism and early Buddhism did not subscribe to a supreme deity or mover. Jainism is a dualistic religion with the universe made up of matter and souls. The universe, and the matter and souls within it, is eternal and uncreated, and there is no omnipotent creator deity in Jainism. There are, however, “gods” and other spirits who exist within the universe and Jains believe that the soul can attain “godhood”, however none of these supernatural beings exercise any sort of creative activity or have the capacity or ability to intervene in answers to prayers.

Non-adherence to the notion of a supreme deity or a prime mover is seen by many as a key distinction between Buddhism and other religions. While Buddhist traditions do not deny the existence of supernatural beings (many are discussed in Buddhist scripture), it does not ascribe powers, in the typical Western sense, for creation, salvation or judgement, to the “gods”, however, praying to enlightened deities is sometimes seen as leading to some degree of spiritual merit. Buddhists accept the existence of beings in higher realms, known as devas, but they, like humans, are said to be suffering in samsara, and not particularly wiser than we are. In fact the Buddha is often portrayed as a teacher of the deities, and superior to them. Despite this, they do have some enlightened Devas in the path of buddhahood.

In later Mahayana literature, however, the idea of an eternal, all-pervading, all-knowing, immaculate, uncreated, and deathless Ground of Being (the dharmadhatu, inherently linked to the sattvadhatu, the realm of beings), which is the Awakened Mind (bodhicitta) or dharmakaya (“body of Truth”) of the Buddha himself, is attributed to the Buddha in a number of Mahayana sutras, and is found in various tantras as well.

Strong pockets of atheism continued to be present in the Middle Ages, gradually increasing in expression as the power of the various Churches to punish such ‘deviant beliefs’ diminished.

In 18th century CE Europe, we find the beginning of modern scientific materialism. Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism.

Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many, all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast to each other: Idealism or materialism. The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality, and the primary distinction between them is the way they answer two fundamental questions: “what does reality consist of” and “how did it originate?” For idealists, spirit, or mind, or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary and matter secondary. For materialists, matter is primary, mind , spirit, or ideas are secondary, the product of matter acting upon matter.

The materialist view is in opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance or mind (see René Descartes). However, materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.

Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, at a more reduced level.

Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in “special sciences” like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.

Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. However philosophers such as Mary Midgley suggest that the concept of “matter” is elusive and poorly defined.

Materialism typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, vitalism, and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of Determinism, as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.

During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history). Later Marxists developed the notion of dialectical materialism which characterized later Marxist philosophy and method.

Idealism is the bed-mate to scientific materialism. Idealism is a term having several meanings. The English term is derived from the Greek idein (ἰδεν), meaning “to see”. The term entered the English language by 1743. Any philosophy that assigns crucial importance to the ideal or spiritual realm in its account of human existence may be termed “idealist”. Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core.

Beyond this, idealists disagree on which aspects of the mental are more basic. Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning. Epistemological idealism is the view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind.

Subjective idealists, like George Berkeley, are anti-realists in terms of a mind-independent world, whereas transcendental idealists like Immanuel Kant are strong skeptics of such a world, affirming epistemological and not metaphysical idealism. Thus Kant defines idealism as “the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining”. He claimed that, according to idealism, “the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof. On the contrary, however, the reality of the object of our internal sense (of myself and state) is clear immediately through consciousness.”

However, not all idealists restrict the real or the knowable to our immediate subjective experience. Objective idealists make claims about a transempirical world, but simply deny that this world is essentially divorced from or ontologically prior to the mental. Thus, Plato and Gottfried Leibniz affirm an objective and knowable reality transcending our subjective awareness—a rejection of epistemological idealism—but propose that this reality is grounded in ideal entities, a form of metaphysical idealism. Nor do all metaphysical idealists agree on the nature of the ideal; for Plato, the fundamental entities were non-mental abstract forms, while for Leibniz they were proto-mental and concrete monads.

As a rule, transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism’s epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is ultimately mental; objective idealists like Plato affirm reality’s metaphysical basis in the mental or abstract without restricting their epistemology to ordinary experience; and subjective idealists like Berkeley affirm both metaphysical and epistemological idealism.

This finishes our brief outline of the divergent set of theological beliefs present in ancient and modern Eurasia (excluding China). In the next blog, I will comment upon the significance of such a set diverse beliefs as to the development of a conscious soul and an enlightened approach