Source: “The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration Of The Spiritual Realm”, By John Hick*,* Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, 2013.
6. Turning the Critical Realist Key.mp4
6. Beyond the Veil - Critical Realism and the Transformation of Reality.m4a
This material introduces critical realism as a framework for understanding how humans perceive reality, especially in the context of religious experience. It posits that our understanding of the world is not a direct apprehension of things as they are, but rather a transformation of environmental "impacts" through our unique sensory and cognitive apparatus. Just as light waves are transformed into color vision, so too is the "impact" of the ultimately Real interpreted through the lens of individual and cultural conceptual frameworks. Therefore, different religious traditions, with their distinct historical and communal contexts, act as "containers" that shape how the Transcendence is experienced and described, leading to diverse understandings of the divine, whether personal or non-personal. The text argues that this critical realist perspective helps explain the apparent conflicts between religious beliefs, suggesting they are varied, yet potentially authentic, responses to the same underlying reality.
Here are the major topics derived from the source, each summarized and presented individually without references:
Topic 1 The concept of information, particularly in a cybernetic sense, extends beyond propositions or facts. It encompasses every impact the environment has on an individual. A key aspect of this understanding is the continuous transformation or translation of this information as it is appropriated and processed by us. This initial transformation is fundamental to how we perceive and interact with our surroundings.
Topic 2 Consciousness of our environment is characterized by a constant transformation of information from one mode to another. This is evident in how our senses operate. For instance, light waves, which inherently lack color, are transformed within our visual system into the experience of color vision. Similarly, sound waves, which are not intrinsically noises, are translated by our auditory apparatus into the experience of hearing sounds. In broader communication like broadcasting, radio waves are translated into sound waves and then into heard sounds, illustrating this continuous process of transformation.
Topic 3 Different life forms, equipped with distinct sense organs and varying structures of consciousness, experience the world uniquely. For humans, sight is typically the dominant sense, with a significant portion of the brain dedicated to processing visual stimuli, providing our primary framework of consciousness. However, for other creatures like moles, smell is paramount, and for bats, sound is the dominant sense. This diversity means that what one species is aware of can be completely beyond the perception of another, even if they share the same vast network of life. The virtually infinite information available in the world is selectively reduced and transformed into different fields of consciousness by different life forms.
Topic 4 To illustrate the varying ways the world is perceived, an analogy is drawn using a common object like a table. From human perception, a table is a solid, hard, brown, three-dimensional object. However, a physicist's account describes it as mostly empty space filled with infinitesimal packages of discharging energy, none of which possess the properties we perceive, such as color, weight, or fixed position. This highlights that perception is not a direct apprehension of "things in themselves" but an interpretation based on the observer's makeup.
Topic 5 Extending the analogy of diverse perception, the source introduces hypothetical non-human observers, such as various alien species, each with unique sensors and conceptual systems for processing input. These different beings would each perceive something distinct from what others perceive, and also from what humans perceive, when observing the same object. This serves as a distant analogy for how individuals formed by different religious traditions might experience the Transcendent in profoundly different ways, emphasizing that the perceived reality is shaped by the observer's specific filters.
Topic 6 The ultimate reality, referred to as the Transcendent, is described as inherently ineffable and transcategorial, meaning it is beyond the capacity of human experience and cannot be adequately described or contained within human conceptual systems. It exists as it is, but its nature cannot be articulated using human categories of thought. Instead, we can only describe its "impact" upon us, which is filtered by our limited receptivity and translated through our conceptual frameworks into personal or non-personal "objects" of religious experience.
Topic 7 The term "impact" when referring to the Transcendent is not used in its literal sense of one physical object colliding with another. Instead, it signifies a connection with an intrinsic aspect of human beings described in various spiritual traditions as the "image of God," "divine spark," "that of God in every man," "atman," "true self," "selfless self," or "universal buddha nature." This internal aspect is what is affected by the ultimately Real, to the extent that an individual is open to that reality.
Topic 8 The specific forms that awareness of the Transcendent takes are human constructions. These forms are created from a combination of inherited imagery within a particular religious tradition and each individual's unique life story and psychological makeup. For instance, if a tradition conditions an individual to conceive of the Transcendent in personal terms and to engage in I-Thou prayer, the individual will likely experience a personal divine presence. Conversely, if a tradition promotes non-I-Thou meditation and non-personal conceptions of the Ultimate, the religious awareness will manifest in different forms.