Can we think our way to religion,
or does religious experience transcend cognition (i.e., thought)? Closely
related is the question of whether theology is just a special case of
philosophy or another domain altogether. The pivotal chapter 2 of the Bhagavad-Gita
saga in Hinduism can be interpreted in favor of the latter: gnostic vision
of the divine, such as of Krishna showing his fullness later in the myth to Arjuna,
may launch off from the intellect, but without continuing as an intellectual
pursuit once the threshold of religious experience is reached. By analogy, we
can see the edges of a black hole in space, but we can’t see beyond its
threshold, within the hole because light cannot bounce back out given
the magnitude of the intense gravity that a black hole has. Similarly, a deity
can be thought of as intense being—so dense that we mere mortals can
only gasp in wonder when we are presented with something so far beyond the
limits of human perception, emotions, and cognitions, hence the intellect too.
The full essay is at "Religious Vision Beyond Intellect."
