Letters from Le Vrai

Deepak Calls the Kettle Black

2011-10-16T07:50:00.005-05:00

In what is almost always an exercise in irony (and a lack of awareness thereof), Deepak Chopra excoriates Richard Dawkins and his latest book, The Magic of Reality. The book is geared towards younger readers; this is just one of the many problems Chopra has with the book.

Now, I haven't read this latest effort by Dawkins, but I have a generally favorable view of the man; but my point in this post isn't to correct any misunderstandings or misconceptions Chopra may have about it. My goal is just to contrast and compare Chopra's view of reality with the generally accepted scientific view.

Generally speaking, Chopra claims that Dawkins has taken the magic out of reality. Chopra, of course, represents the real reality; and for a steep price, you can experience this through one of his retreats.

Now, one can be skeptical of the vehemence with which Chopra attacks Dawkins, especially in the light of the fact that Chopra has his own book to promote - one he co-wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, appropriately named War of the Worldviews.

In Chopra's book, Mlodinow writes:

"While science often casts doubt on spiritual beliefs and doctrines insofar as they make representations about the physical world, science does not -- and cannot -- conclude that God is an illusion."

I agree that the scientific method can't disprove the existence of God. But it certainly casts an overwhelming amount of doubt upon its existence, especially if this God is alleged to act in the physical world.

And this is precisely what Chopra claims for his notion of spiritual reality. The many pricey programs and retreats on his site claim to do what medical science (including psychiatry) does: physical and emotional healing.

I admit that there is some support for the therapeutic effects of meditation and yoga on the human brain and body - and these were measured using the scientific method. There is no need to posit any spiritual entities or causes for them.

Chopra chides Dawkins for claiming that "to discover what is real, we use our five senses"; in support of his rebuke, he rightly claims that quantum mechanics and Eintstein's theory of relativity challenged what the five senses told us about reality. However, both quantum mechanics and relativity theory make predictions about reality, and both have been tested and subsequently confirmed through various experiments.

But what about Chopra's notion of a spiritual reality with spiritual causes? The following quote is taking from an interview with Chopra in 1995:

Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.

Do not adjust your set - that feeling of vertigo you have is due to the fact that you've just eaten some tainted word-salad.

But, ridicule aside, none of what he just said is anywhere near the consensus of actual physicists. Here is the opinion of one prominent physicist:

Quantum physics is claimed to support the mystical notion that the mind creates reality. However, an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations.

And by "observations," he means actual, repeatable, controlled experiments with no pre-conceived notions about consciousness.

So it's not difficult to see that Chopra speaks confidently of that which he not only knows nothing about, but that which he really can't know anything about. What can it possibly mean to experience something not manifested at the sensory level? Chopra doesn't know. He merely asserts. He can't truly "know" anything without his senses. And he talks about "consciousness" as if it's the best known thing in the world. He criticizes Dawkins for not taking into consideration what those philosophers and neuroscientists involved in consciousness studies have to say about it. For instance, he says:

How microvolts of electricity and neurochemicals flying across synapses produce the entire world is a deep mystery, often referred to as the hard problem in consciousness research.

If by "produce the entire world" he means produce the entire world of our subjective consciousness, then he's correct; but none of the scientists he mentions believe that our mind/brain produces the world outside of our conscious experience, what most people call the "objective" world, or "objective" reality.

His boldness puts me in mind of Nietzsche's critiques of consciousness and the "will," especially with regard to Schopenhauer's conception of it in his The World as Will and Representation, which is very similar to the common Hindu understanding. Nietzsche's thought even seemed to anticipate the work of researchers like Daniel Wegner of Harvard, or wrote a very intriguing book called The Illusion of Conscious Will, where he casts serious - some say definitive - doubt on both our conceptions of consciousness and will. I'll quote Nietzsche at length on the subject:

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, "in spite of fate," as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary. If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator: by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down: or rather, without the former there would long ago have been nothing more of the latter! Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism: all the better if it be then thoroughly tyrannized over! Consciousness is thus thoroughly tyrannized over and not least by the pride in it! It is thought that here is the quintessence of man; that which is enduring, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him! Consciousness is regarded as a fixed, given magnitude! Its growth and becoming are denied! It is accepted as the "unity of the organism "! This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has as its result the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it and even now it is not otherwise! It is still an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye, and hardly yet plainly recognizable : to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive, a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that so far our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative to errors!

Nietzsche has much more to say about consciousness and the will, but this passage is long enough and should suffice. Another thing Nietzsche valued was the development of the scientific method - properly understood - and not the fruits of the scientific endeavor in particular. Nietzsche is a severe skeptic, and believed that every claim and presumption, no matter how sacred or hallowed, should be taken to court and investigated. He even famously said that "convictions are prisons."

But it seems that Chopra and those like him use the method(s) of introspection, meditation, and Yoga; and Dawkins - and scientists generally - uses the method of introspection, "extrospection"- if I may coin an awkward term - hypothesis formation, intersubjective hypothesis testing, as well as a rigorous skepticism in every step of the method. While Chopra's methods may make a person feel subjectively better, and in some instances improve their emotional and physical health, they don't necessarily get us any nearer to reality, which is what Chopra criticizes about Dawkin's new book. Scientists value and rely on their method because the employment of it produces a coherent picture of the world and makes prediction and control possible - indeed, it makes life possible. All the mystical, truly subjective (as opposed to intersubjective) experiences, intuitions, epiphanies, and dream-insights are typically unique to the individual who has them. And like I said, while it might make that particular person feel better, it doesn't necessarily reflect reality - which is what Dawkin's is trying to instill in the youngest of minds.

On 'The Creation Story for Atheists' - A Review of a Review

2011-10-10T17:12:00.003-05:00

The Discovery Institute, the main think tank of the Intelligent Design movement, has an article posted on its site titled, "The Creation Story for Atheists."

Instead of pointing out the irony in a movement that refuses to name the 'designer' in its hypothesis for the complexity of biological life - but has no problem posting all sorts of articles claiming that the Christian god is that designer - I want to address the article itself. It is a review of a book about religion and evolution called God and Evolution: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith.

In keeping with the Intelligent Design movement's history of opposing the scientific theory of evolution for religious reasons, the author of the article leads with this lengthy paragraph:

Here’s what we’re up against today: Two out of three college biology teachers call themselves atheists or agnostics, as do ninety-five percent of the biologists in the National Academy of Sciences. Of the leading scientists involved in evolution, eighty-seven percent deny the existence of God, and ninety percent reject any purpose in evolution. The reason is easy to find: Darwinian evolution, “the creation story” of atheists, now operates “as the normal stance of science.” In high-school and college textbooks, Darwinian evolution is taught as a blind, heartless, purposeless, unguided process that makes any spiritual explanation of life superfluous. This is our current tax-funded orthodoxy enforced by court orders. Worst of all, what is “almost universally taught in textbooks” is that man himself is the unintended byproduct of blind material forces. Is it any wonder that our culture is sinking into nihilism?

Now, as I was reading this, I was thinking Amen! to most of it - at least until the last sentence.

She's correct: evolution implies an unguided natural process; and human beings are an unintended outcome of this 'blind' material process. Where I think she goes wrong is when she concludes that all of this leads to nihilism. But first, we need to ask ourselves if our culture really is sinking into nihilism. Many people throw the word around pejoratively without defining what they mean by it - or possibly even understanding it.

Nihilism, as I understand it (and which is based primarily on a Nietzschean reading), is a psychological state that results from the realization that the natural process of perpetual change aims at nothing; that there are no values intrinsic to the world; and that there is no metaphysical unity behind this process that is in continual flux. Additionally, having realized the aforementioned delusions about reality, one admits to oneself that this is the only life there is, without recourse to after-worlds or divinities; additionally, one can't endure the thought that this life is all there is.

Now, most people who throw the word "nihilism" around think this is a permanent or indefinite state. However, I agree with Nietzsche that nihilism is a transitional state. Nihilism is the necessary consequence of the devaluation of values we've previously held. In other words, when we realize that the values we've relied upon to guide our lives are no longer tenable - or even possible - we experience a sense of disorientation, and oftentimes even despair. That feeling of despair is nihilism.

But is it permanent? For some, yes. For someone who is not compromised by mental illness, suicide can be the necessary consequence of a 'perfect' nihilism. Aside from self-destruction, a nihilist could seek to effect the destruction of everything about the world that outrages him. Perhaps this is what the author has in mind. Perhaps her formula might look something like this: scientific materialism => atheism => nihilism => moral catastrophe.

Of course, the common conception of nihilism usually evokes two abominable and dangerous ideas: lack of meaning, and lack of value. I would imagine that, in most people's minds, a nihilist who lacks or denies purpose or meaning probably won't lead to moral ruin, at least not on a societal scale; however, a lack of value - especially a lack of metaphysical value (that is, value grounded in God or some other other-worldly realm) - would make most people assume that such a nihilist has not only abrogated all traditional values, but is also actively encouraging others to slouch towards Gomorrah.

But let's unpack this a little bit. First, it's a fact that it does not logically follow that atheism is the inevitable result of scientific materialism or, as is feared most by the religious - the theory of evolution. The author even mentions two of the most prominent scientists who are also Christians: Francis Collins, an evangelical; and Ken Miller, a Catholic. However, she says of them:

In answer to Miller, David Klinghoffer warns that Darwinism makes the idea of God’s image in us incomprehensible, something that leads to “moral catastrophe.”

Francis Collins, head of the BioLogos Foundation, claims that the biological world looks exactly like the product of Dar win’s “undirected process,” and that only through faith do we recognize this apparent lack of design as “deceiving.” On this point Collins is refuted by St. Paul in Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

There are two things here I want to point out first. One is the reference to 'moral catastrophe' again. I would think the fact that there are sincere religious believers who also accept evolution would be a sort of 'proof of principle' to people like our author here. Not so.

The other thing I want to point out, and which is related to the first, is the author's use of scripture to 'refute' Francis Collins. Religious fundamentalists can't accept different interpretations of scriptural facts. Many times - and in this instance - they think that merely citing a verse is enough to refute an assertion. It's not unlike those bumper stickers or T-shirts you see that say, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!"

But this leads us to ask: where is the nihilism? Where is the so-called moral catastrophe? I don't know if any practicing scientists are nihilists, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that close to none of them are murderers, rapists, thieves, or saboteurs - nor are they actively encouraging any of this behavior in others. Chances are they're no better or worse than their religious neighbors. So it would seem to me that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that our society is not in the midst of a moral catastrophe, or slouching towards Gomorrah.

What is equally obvious is that religious fundamentalists consider things like homosexuality, gay marriage, perceived socialist tendencies - like universal health-care or taxing the rich more - to be signs of moral catastrophe. But since the term 'moral catastrophe' reeks of hyperbole, let's check the dictionary. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'catastrophe' as: a momentous tragic event ranging from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin.

It would seem to any reasonable observer that our society is clearly not in a state of catastrophe - moral or otherwise (with the exception of the current 'Great Recession' being an instance of extreme misfortune, possibly).

So I propose a new, more appropriate, less histrionic term for what our society is experiencing; what with all the loosening or transformation of traditional social mores:

Moral Evolution.

Was Thomas Jefferson a Christian?

2011-10-02T08:06:00.003-05:00

Aside from the fact that Thomas Jefferson edited out of the New Testament all miracles and suggestions of Jesus' divinity, is it still possible to call him a Christian? Well, certainly not in the Tea-vangelical sense of Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, or other prominent conservative politicians. But it may not be accurate to call him an atheist, at least not in the sense that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are.

Below are some relevant passages of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to John Adams on August 15, 1820. Was Jefferson religious? Was he a Christian? Both sides of the Culture War claim Jefferson as one of their own, but the actual truth of the matter may be a little more complicated than either side would like to admit.

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke...

At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us indeed that `God is a spirit,' but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter.

All heresies being now done away with us, these schismatists are merely atheists, differing from the material Atheist only in their belief that `nothing made something,' and from the material deist who believes that matter alone can operate on matter.

A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

So, based on my reading (and not just of this one letter), it seems Jefferson was religious - in the sense of viewing morality as something sacred, or as a 'natural law' - but it also seems as if he was a pragmatic agnostic.

An interesting, but purely speculative, question would be: if Jefferson were alive today, with all of our scientific advances - before evolution by natural selection, before the discovery of DNA, before particle physics and relativity - would he still be a pragmatic agnostic, or an atheist, or something else entirely?

A Ride in the Existential Death Cab

2011-09-17T07:58:00.003-05:00

I can't say I know much about the band Death Cab for Cutie, other than the fact that the singer is married to one of my crushes, Zooey Deschanel. But a recent article in Christianity Today claims that they are "one of the most coherent and articulate representatives of naturalism on the American music scene today."

I don't know that they get much air play on the Top 40 stations, at least not like artists such as Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Usher, J-Lo, etc. Of the aforementioned artists, the only one that comes close to broaching existential topics would be Lady Gaga - if you can get past the in-your-face fashion statements that tend to distract more than draw one in.

After investigating some of the lyrics from Death Cab for Cutie, I would say I have to agree with the author when he says that "they provide an intelligent challenge to Christians considering the ultimate question of man's purpose and existence." Intelligent, yes; but only in relation to some of the other lyrics produced - for instance, the pure hedonism of Britney Spears singing "If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?" or Usher saying "Keep downin' drinks like there's no tomorrow, there's just right now, now, now." But let's examine Death Cab's insights, vis-à-vis this article.

The article's author lays out his plan, which is to show that the band's efforts

chart a progression through the different manifestations of our culture's naturalism, from romantic despair, to near nihilism, to the rejection of these troubling questions entirely as unanswerable and even dangerous. At the end, with no answers in sight, it is the examined life that is no longer worth living for the naturalist.

The article's author is a sophomore studying English Lit at Bryan College (whose motto is "Christ Above All"); so we can assume that he is about 19 or 20 years of age. So I think we need to take into account this fact, and the fact that he attends a highly-ranked Christian college. His treatment of his subject is thorough and well-analyzed, and his writing is polished; but the two factors noted above will obviously have an influence on his relationship to his subject. But this is true of me as well; I am an atheist who went to a private liberal arts college (though I grew up in an evangelical culture, and even believed myself to be a born-again Christian through most of college).

In brief, the author charts the band's progress first with this

The message of the song (and the album) is that life is short and difficult with no ultimate meaning, but if we can just huddle together, we may find some cure for our loneliness and despair. There is no heaven or hell, just the body heat of another mortal to keep us warm.

and

To put it cynically, love is two dying animals distracting themselves enough from the reality of their condition that they can live out their short years, relatively untroubled. Christianity provides another way, but it is important to realize just how powerful this need for companionship and connection is, even in the absence of any higher deity. Where there are no gods, humans will build them from each other.

But why put it cynically? For several years now I've been meditating on the nature of existence. I've observed the devoutly religious, the moderately religious, the thoughtful secularist, the staunch secularist, and the true hedonist. Whether we like it or not, we humans have an innate desire - dare I say instinct? - to seek out or at least experience our lives as having meaning.

The question that keeps posing itself to me is: for what are we living? Granted, this is neither a new epiphany nor an original thought. But I do mean we; if I could ask everyone what they were living for, what drives them, etc., I would. I find the question - and subsequent answers - fascinating.

Obviously the religious - devout or moderate - are going to answer that the meaning of their lives resides in God's hands; God assigns a meaning to each individual life - or at the very least, the mere fact that they are valued by God is enough. Secularists - particularly secular humanists - are likely going to respond that their lives revolve around other human lives, and, indeed, all of humanity. Some even push the envelope and include all sentient life in their circle of meaning. But these are very general, Ivory Tower-type of terms. People may hit on these when they sit back and reflect over a cup of coffee or tea, but what drives them on a day to day basis? Why live today?

For most people, there are more pressing concerns that, while maybe not immediately identified as constituting the meaning(s) of their lives, occupy most of their time and energy: e.g., raising children, pursuing a career, etc. These people, being so busy with the typical rat race, surely enjoy the fruits of the arts - at least in a hedonistic way, as an escape, a temporary respite from the grind. And there are those, like Death Cab for Cutie, who make art. But we probably have to ask: do they make art to escape or evade the inner desire for meaning, or do they make art to satisfy it?

I contend that those who enjoy art enjoy it for hedonistic reasons: it gives them pleasure; it provides them with an escape, a temporary respite from the question of existence - which is the question of meaning. This question is commonly thought most difficult and pressing for those of us who are secular. I think this is largely correct. For me, having come from a fundamentalist Christian background, the formula runs something like this: liberation => disorientation => despair => nihilism.

Now, I think there are some tangents and waypoints along this path. After extricating oneself or being liberated from one's religious upbringing, there will most likely be a period of disorientation, if not in terms of morality (we won't suddenly start robbing and killing), at least in terms of meaning (if there's no God, what does it all mean? what's it all for?). But depending on when in life this period of disorientation takes place, one can repress or otherwise ignore the problem of meaning, typically by immersing oneself in a more hedonistic lifestyle (and that doesn't necessarily mean the Charlie Sheen lifestyle!). This period could last for years - maybe even for an entire lifetime.

If the disorientation is faced squarely, however, then a creeping despair can take root and spread throughout one's entire life, until nothing gives pleasure - even those things that used to give the most intense and satisfying pleasure. Furthermore, one may come to the conclusion that real values aren't even possible - and that leads one into gaping maw of nihilism. And, of course, nihilism can lead either to suicide or an all-consuming, irreparable hatred of all existence.

And, of course, since this article is in Christianity Today, we have this:

Christianity provides another way, but it is important to realize just how powerful this need for companionship and connection is, even in the absence of any higher deity. Where there are no gods, humans will build them from each other.

Now, this is truer than the author probably realizes, and a bit ironic, too. We secularists obviously think that the Christian God was built out of the human psyche as well. So for us, this is no real insight. And for those of us who are free from the tyrannizing guilt and shame of Christian morality, we have no problem building our own gods from each other. The problem frequently lies in just what those gods should be.

But without any hint of irony, the author says, "but what cruel and fickle gods our relationships make." Cruel and fickle are two words that can describe the Christian God; and it is probably best encapsulated in the Christian's own bromide of "God answers all prayers; it's just that sometimes the answer is No." Sometimes?

Christians don't have an easier time with their relationships either. There are Christian psychologists, Christian marriage counselors and, yes, Christian divorces. Perhaps we can cut the author some slack here, being only 19 or 20 years of age, and not having experienced the world yet.

The author closes with the following thoughts:

It is much easier to assert that there is neither problem nor solution, than to live knowing that a solution might be out there, somewhere. They have given up on the questions themselves and are therefore missing the terrifying but cleansing answers behind them.

As I suggested before, there are different ways to approach the meaning of existence once one has been liberated from a dogmatic morality and world-view. Here the author suggests denial as being the route Death Cab ultimately ends up with; and I would agree with the author that many people in our culture do in fact end up employing "hedonism and naval gazing" as ways to assuage the feeling of existential emptiness and pain.

But the author seems ignorant of, or simply doesn't mention, the depth and breadth of thought that existentialism brings to the realm of aesthetics. The two the come to mind for me, and which happen to be two antipodes, are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Schopenhauer, following along similar lines as Christianity and Buddhism, experienced the world as nothing but suffering, with desire being the cause of this suffering; so just as the Buddhist seeks a pacific Nirvana, and the Christian seeks "blessedness," Schopenhauer sought a similarly tranquil respite through what he perceived as the objectivity or disinterestedness of art, where we lose ourselves in it, and forget our individuality. Or to put it another way: with no individual, there's no individual left to suffer from existence. But this is a more nuanced description of 'ignoring the problem' that Death Cab allegedly does.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, sees nihilism as a necessary transitional stage between a life-denying, dogmatic morality such as Christianity (and even Buddhism - which is life-denying, but not dogmatic) and a Dionysian, affirming, deifying embrace of existence as it is, without subtraction or exception. If one is strong enough to endure and overcome a period of nihilism, one can begin to create for oneself one's own table of values, one's unique individuality, one's own meaning. However - and I also agree with Nietzsche on this - 99% of the population simply isn't strong enough for it.

But how invigorating, how exciting, how dangerous would be the following affirmation of life to those who are strong enough:

"If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-suffcient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed."

How clear and fresh is the air around those words! The person who can utter those words without reservation is that "type of spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence!"

Closed Minds vs. Open Minds

2011-09-14T18:10:00.002-05:00

The flagship blog of the Intelligent Design movement published a post recently claiming that the Christian actually has an open mind, whereas the atheist has a closed mind. Let me address, and attempt to rebut, each claim in turn.

It is interesting that devout/militant atheists, like I once was, seem to have no doubts about their philosophical commitment and worldview.

While I can't speak for all atheists - and I wouldn't use the terms 'devout' or 'militant' to describe myself, either - I can say that I do have doubts about my philosophical commitment and world-view. Once we get beyond the everyday, practical issues of how to live and what to do, there are some interesting and compelling reasons to be skeptical about the naturalistic world-view (and of all world-views in general) - but these are rather esoteric, up-in-the-ivory tower type of considerations.

What I as an atheist am certain about is that the Christian world-view is false. Why am I certain? I come to the issue from the opposite side as this blog's author - I was a born-again Christian turned atheist. Just as this blog post's author says he found the Christian world-view more satisfying, I found the 'atheistic' world-view more satisfying. I could put it a different way: is an Intelligent Designer possible? Yes. Is the Deist god possible? I'm open to the idea, but that hypothesis would need to have some kind of evidence significant enough to overturn the current scientific cosmological paradigm. Does the god of the Abrahamic religions - or the gods of the Hindu religions - exist? Almost certainly not.

My reasons for this conclusion are too many to list in just one blog post. But my point is that I, as an atheist, do not summarily reject all other hypotheses with a closed mind; however, once I have considered the evidence and arguments for a particular world-view (in this case, Christianity), and found them wanting, I can confidently dismiss all subsequent arguments for it unless they provide me with new arguments or evidence to consider. So far, Christians haven't provided sufficient evidence or new arguments to convince me otherwise.

and they will tell you that there is absolutely no question that materialistic processes can explain everything.

This is not my view. There may be some working scientists and philosophers out there who do claim this, but I have doubts that human beings will be able to explain everything. Two majors areas of current dispute are: the nature of human consciousness, and the beginning of our universe (if it even has a beginning). We could say that naturalistic scientists believe that materialistic processes can explain everything in the natural world, but make no claims about a supernatural world, if such a thing exists. But there may be an epistemological limit to what humans can discover, given the fact that we are a part of the natural fabric of things, and don't enjoy an Archimedean perspective from which we may come at these problems from all angles. And as far as figuring out the nature of human consciousness, there are some scientists and philosophers who believe that it is in principle impossible, because we're trying to figure out the brain - using the brain.

I therefore put myself in the camp of legitimate skeptics, as a former mindless Dawkins clone with a bunch of Hitchens, Harris and Matzke thrown in for good measure.

This seems to be an odd thing to say. First, he claims to be a 'legitimate skeptic.' But my experience of Christians who claim to be skeptics - and this comes from my personal experience growing up in an evangelical church, as well as continuing relationships with those I regard as intelligent, well-read Christian acquaintances - aren't nearly skeptical enough.

A Christian skeptic might question the veracity of the biblical account of Christ's death; but once they are shown a quote or two from Josephus, they are satisfied, and they feel bolstered in their faith because they have 'supporting evidence.'

But true skepticism doesn't end with a dogma. This author may have been a skeptic before, but now that he's a Christian, he literally can't be truly skeptical about his faith - or else he will cease to be a Christian. Dogma is dogma - you either believe Christ is the son of God or not. You're either 'saved' or you're not.

Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, spoke about skepticism:

One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin: they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough? Was my will directly opposed to all deception of the senses, and courageous in its defence against fantastic notions?" None of them ever asked these questions, nor to this day do any of the good religious people ask them. They have rather a thirst for things which are contrary to reason, and they don’t want to have too much difficulty in satisfying this thirst, so they experience "miracles" and "regenerations," and hear the voices of angels! But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment.

Making oneself into an experiment is, to me, the ultimate consequence of skepticism. This requires a high tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. My understanding of the Christian world-view - and, again, this is coming from someone who grew up in it, and whose parents are still in it - is that it is characterized by a desire for being and not for becoming; for permanence and not for change. The Christian may be able to tolerate these things on a small scale, on a day to day basis in terms of the inconsequential vicissitudes of their daily life; but the Christian cannot tolerate these things in an ultimate sense - as if life itself were only becoming and not being; only change and not permanence.

So, just as Christians say that the person who commits an atrocious act but claims to be a Christian isn't a true Christian, I have to say that this blog's author isn't a true skeptic - at least not according to my definition.

The really interesting thing is that my liberation from the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris-Matzke nihilistic stupor in which I lived and suffered for so many years was to a great extent the result of my interest in science, mathematics, and engineering.

This quote puzzles me even more. If this blog's author has actually read Dawkins, Harris - and especially Hitchins - he would know that these thinkers are anything but nihilistic, and their mindset is definitely not one of stupor. Maybe this blog's author experienced 'naturalism' as a nihilistic stupor, but that would be his fault, not the 'New Atheists' and not the naturalistic world-view. Maybe this blog's author needs the emotional comfort religion - especially Christianity - provides. Having come from that background myself, and having left that 'certainty' of eternal life after death and a heavenly father who watches over me, I can empathize with the author. Unfortunately, I can't respect it.

It's also interesting to note that, even though the official stance of the Intelligent Design movement is that they refuse to identify the Designer, bloggers for the Intelligent Design movement regularly invoke not just any old Designer, but the God of the Christian Bible. But that's a post for another day.

On Evangelicalism and Militarism

2011-05-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

One of the many things I have trouble wrapping my head around, when it comes to American evangelical Christianity, is the high correlation between America's armed forces and the Christian faith.

Prima facie, this correlation seems to go against everything Christ (and to a lesser extent, all New Testament writers) preached against. Turn the other cheek? Love and pray for your enemies? Judge not, lest ye be judged?

Since I believe Christians are human just like everyone else, I can understand and appreciate their desire for revenge and recompense for atrocities like 9/11. But the Christian claims to be something different, a 'new creation,' and is commanded to distinguish himself from the rest of the world. Jesus certainly did when he refused to fight back against both the Romans and Jews of his time.

But on a certain level I completely understand the Christian's desire to 'serve his country' - especially if he thinks he's serving a Christian country. But there is one issue I think the Christian solider needs to address: collateral damage. It's one thing to be able to identify the enemy who has attacked you and then try to eradicate him or neutralize him with as much force as is necessary. But it's quite another - and non-believers understand this as well - to be able to justify or rationalize collateral damage.

How does the Christian do this? I don't know. How can they? In many times in combat their actions will lead directly to innocent casualties. At a minimum, they give their assent to and are part of an organization (i.e., the military) that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of innocents; in which case, they indirectly contribute to or condone such killing.

It's one thing to take upon oneself the risk of one's own death - "those who take up the sword shall perish by it" - but how does the Christian justify the deaths of innocent villagers in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or the innocent spouses and children of those who are actively fighting us - unless they adopt Osama bin Laden's philosophy of guilt by association? But even that brings us back yet again to the basics: is God the judge of the world, or not? Should the Christian love his enemies, or not?

Should the Christian even serve in the military, or even pledge allegiance to the flag of our nation (Exodus 20:4-5)?

Centurions for God

2011-03-22T17:38:00.002-05:00

Religious Right solider and former Nixon "hatchet man" (he went to federal prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal) Charles Colson is marshaling a force of über-Christians called The Centurions.

I'm fairly familiar with Charles "Chuck" Colson. I read his book, The Body: Being Light in Darkness, which I also made a Christmas present to my mother when I was in college - Colson was and is one of her favorite authors.

I was born into born-again Christianity; fortunately I went through a crisis of faith in college (I read Colson's book and all of C.S. Lewis' books in an attempt to establish a redoubt of my tottering belief) and came out fully "secularized." However, it wasn't until about 6 years after college that I finally self-identified as an atheist. And I remain one.

Chuck Colson wants to establish a movement - or what he views as a counter-movement to the secularization of America - that will spread Religious Right fundamentalism, or at least mitigate what he sees as the lamentable fact that the "inerrancy of the Bible and Jesus’s role as the only path to salvation aren’t being taught — not in schools and not in churches."

Though it may sound like self-flagellation, I try to regularly read Colson's column at Christianity Today; not because I respect him as a thinker or writer, but because he is respected enough by evangelicals country-wide to have his own column in the evangelical movement's flagship publication. In other words, I like to know what the enemy is thinking and doing.

Aside from the obnoxious - but not necessarily controversial - proselytizing and holier-than-thou brow-beating this movement will undoubtedly engender, Colson definitely sticks to the fundamentalist line on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. But, being a former fundamentalist myself (in name, if not in spirit), I have to ask how he and so many other evangelicals can justify the type of activism in which they engage.

This type of evangelical ideology seeks to utilize the force of the State to enforce their morality. They want to legislate their morality. They aren't satisfied with merely attempting to persuade, cajole, or intimidate nonbelievers into becoming believers (or at least having nonbelievers refrain from committing what they consider to be "sins"); they want to make it punishable by law to do these things. If I may put on my armchair psychologist's hat for a moment: they aren't satisfied that nonbelievers will be punished in the next world (and for all of eternity) - they also want nonbelievers punished in this world. Their susceptibility to ressentiment and their lust for vengeance is almost unquenchable - if I may quote myself.

But it's fair to ask them how they arrive at this conclusion. Where in the Bible (specifically the New Testament) does it promote political activism? Where in the Bible does Christ encourage his followers to try to implement laws in order to get the masses to live "Christianly", so to speak? Where in the Bible does Christ exhort his followers to turn the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire?

On the contrary - according to my lights, the New Testament commands the opposite. Christ himself said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And Paul - Jesus' "hatchet man", you might say - said that everyone should be subject to the governing authorities. And what's more, Paul said that whoever rebels against the established authority is really rebelling against God Himself, since God is in control of everything.

But evangelicals want to make same-sex marriage and abortion illegal - they want to use the machinery of the State to satisfy the demands of their idiosyncratic morality. But whatever happened to being in the world, but not of the world? Even if we consider these evangelicals as being of one mind with our Founding Fathers - many of them are Tea Party supporters - same-sex marriage and abortion neither pick their pockets nor break their legs, to put it in a Jeffersonian vernacular. This seems to go against their alleged reverence for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

As a secular person, I obviously consider a secular government preferable and necessary. But evangelicals should as well; after all, freedom of religion and freedom from religion theoretically guarantee that a committed Christian won't have to submit to Sharia law, for example. Do they not realize this? Or do they feel like they have the numbers to ensure they never have to worry about it? In which case they are being somewhat Machiavellian - and therefore not very Christian-like.

Two recent polls have given me some relief from the depressing vision of a political Christianity (and not just a cultural Christianity): this poll indicates that religion may become extinct in at least 9 Western nations. And this survey says that America is becoming less Christian. Personally, I have trouble believing the latter.

But I would like to pose two questions to Pharyngula readers:

1) Is Colson's Centurion movement something we secular people should be worried about?

2) If it is something to be worried about, then how do we counter it?

I'd love to hear some opinions.

The Credulity of Americans is Unquenchable

2011-03-21T11:32:00.005-05:00

An evangelical pastor and his wife are making money off their 11 year-old son's book about his near-death experience. If you think I sound cynical, you're correct; unfortunately, it seems there are far too few Americans who share my skepticism.

But first, a little background about the story: the son, Colton, was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery for a burst appendix. Upon coming to, the boy recounted how "he had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus." He said he even noticed that Jesus' eyes were a sparkly blue. (Now, keep in mind that Jesus was a Jew, and while it's not impossible for him to have blue eyes, the boy's description more closely mirrors the typical Anglophilic portrayal of a long-haired, pasty-white Jesus with a goatee. Also keep in mind that Colton was only about 4 years-old when he had his "vision." Do you think the images of Jesus he had seen up to that point would portray Jesus as a typical Jew of his day, or as an Anglo-Saxon hippie with blue eyes?)

Colton's 163-page book has sold astonishingly well: there are currently more than 1.5 million copies in print, and it is on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks now. Clearly many Americans have a strong need for this type of feel-good rubbish.

What's not clear is whether he actually had a near-death experience, per se - I haven't read the book (I refuse to spend money on it), and this article in the NYT isn't clear; it merely says that he woke up from surgery and claimed he had died. Colton's parents believe him, of course. They believe him so much that they published this book for him. And although Colton's father says he was simply hoping for the publisher to break even, and that he plans on giving away most of the royalties, he is in fact keeping some of the money for "home improvements." Well, there's a nice plus. But as a Christian - and as a pastor - wouldn't that money be better spent for the poor, the homeless, the sick, or other Christian goals?

Now, every parent wants to believe their kid. No parent wants to intentionally belittle and condescend to their child. And, given the parents' religious faith, it's easy to see how they are inclined to credulity.

But isn't it more likely that something else is at work here? I mean, when you become a Christian, you make a commitment to a set of beliefs, a dogma, and the nature of a dogma is that you can't doubt it and believe it at the same time. For example, a Christian can't claim to be a Christian and doubt that Jesus was the son of God, or that he was raised from the dead. That's the essence of being a Christian - at least from an evangelical point of view. And the typical believer can't venture too far into the exegetical disputes over literal versus metaphorical interpretations; the theological ground there is too shaky - the fate of his eternal soul depends on it!

So the temptation to believe what would otherwise be met with a healthy skepticism and gentle patronization (e.g., if Colton woke up and said he died and met Alexander the Great), is so strong as to blind one from the more obvious explanation. The parents, of course, claim that Colton made reference to things that "there's just no way he could have known." The example they give is that the mother had had a miscarriage but never told Colton about it; but Colton had referenced it directly. This is a common refrain among those who have had near-death experiences.

But we know that our brains absorb a lot more stimuli via our senses than our "conscious minds" can register. I don't intend to get into a discussion of consciousness - other than to say that no one really knows how to explain it yet - but there is literature out there documenting research and experiments related to human perception and human memory - but all too few people read this stuff.

And for all you parents out there - how many times have you been surprised at something your child has repeated to you that you were convinced they never could have known? How many times have you heard them parrot something that you swore they couldn't hear or couldn't understand?

What's particularly sad is the effect this experience will have on Colton himself, as well as the effect his book will have on other credulous families with children. For his part, Colton, 7 years later, "now plays the piano and trumpet, is fascinated by Greek mythology, listens to Christian rock and loves Nebraska football." That seems innocuous enough; but listen to what he says about his book: "“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts...I’m happy for that.”

He's happy that people will believe a delusion as long as it makes them feel better. We are breeding generations of children who will gladly accept a lie instead of truth, so long as it makes them feel good. But one day, at some point in their lives, they will have no recourse to any real resilience in times of real crisis; they're used to digesting the superficial bromides and platitudes our culture relishes. They won't be able to digest a truly harrowing physical or psychological experience.

And don't get me started on the further dampening of scientific curiosity and thinking this type of anecdote permits - and almost encourages.

And you know that if Colton were born a Buddhist, he would have seen the Buddha; if he were born a Muslim, he would have seen Muhammad; and if he were born a Hindu, he would have seen Krishna - or any of the other myriad deities in the Indian pantheon.

Stories like this one, especially when presented uncritically in a venue such as The New York Times, makes me truly pessimistic about the future of humankind.

An Atheist's View on Abortion

2011-02-24T17:58:00.005-05:00

On the drive home from work tonight I was behind a pickup truck that had a rather large white sign with red letters that read: "ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN" taped to the inside of his back window. In addition, he had a bumper sticker with a picture of a smiling infant and a Bible verse, Jeremiah 1:5. For those who don't know, this verse reads in part: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." I've seen this before; and one of my colleagues cited this verse as the main reason she attends anti-abortion rallies each year in Washington, D.C. But on bumper stickers - and the mouths of fundamentalists - only this first clause of the sentence is ever cited.

On the face of it, it would seem that the Christian - in her mind - has a relatively strong justification for her position of opposing abortion. However, it's been pointed out by others that, not only is God talking specifically to Jeremiah, but the context refers to Jeremiah's calling as a prophet. The context of the verse has nothing to do with abortion. But I don't want to dwell excessively on this particular fact; most agnostics and even liberal Christians can see that this is a stretch. I'd like to talk more about the philosophical and scientific aspects of abortion.

There is much ambiguity and dispute between various Christian sects regarding the "soul." The first problem is that Christians have no idea what a 'soul' is. What is it made of? How is it attached? What are its mechanisms? As someone who was raised in a fundamentalist church, I would say that the consensus - if it could be said that there is one - is that the soul is immortal but not eternal. That is, the soul is created at conception, and will live forever - either in Heaven or Hell - but it's not eternal, which would imply that it has neither beginning nor end. In most Christian thought, God (or the Trinity) is the only eternal one. In other words, the human soul isn't eternally existing like God, but is created at the moment of conception; but it will also survive the death of the physical body - to spend forever in either Heaven or Hell.

That said, let's consider some practical implications. If - as is implied in Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 5 - God somehow knew us before we were born, what could that possibly mean? How could he know us? We only come to know us gradually throughout childhood, eventually developing a coherent, consistent sense of self. In what sense does God know us? Presumably only half of us is formed - i.e., our genetic blueprint. But what about the 'nurture' side of us? That hasn't been formed yet. That results from our life experiences; and obviously we haven't had any life experiences before we were born.

Of course, if - as many, if not most, theologians believe - God is outside of space and time, and presumably sees 'time' as one big frozen block; i.e., He sees past, present and future as one, then God might know us in the sense of knowing our entire lives - past, present and future. In that sense, God would truly know us before we were born. That's really the only way the Christian could make sense of it. If I'm wrong, then by all means let me know.

Yet this notion, it seems to me, would present all sorts of thorny ethical problems for the believer. The most obvious one - and one theologians have debated for centuries, and still are debating - is the concept of predestination: if God knows the future, then he already knows who will end up in Heaven and who in Hell. Indeed, proponents of this theory even cite the Jeremiah verse in question. And some New Testament verses provide strong support for it as well - see Matthew 22:14 and Ephesians 1:3-5.

But how would a non-believer make sense of the soul? Well, first of all, the non-believer probably doesn't believe in souls. The non-believer probably believes that the soul - or mind - is ultimately the brain, a physical organ. Exactly how the mind is the brain is still up for debate, but the consensus among philosophers and scientists is that material processes give rise to the subjective experience that most people would associate with the 'soul.' But here we need to distinguish between the Christian's 'belief' in an immaterial, categorically different soul, and the atheist's 'belief' that the mind is the brain.

The Christian bases her belief primarily on scripture - i.e., what she believes is a direct revelation of God, the Creator of Souls - and her personal intuition. Non-believers possess that same intuition - which they believe is a product of our evolutionary heritage - but also come to their conclusion that souls don't exist based on evidence from the sciences - primarily neuroscience. Anyone who has taken the time to read books by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazziniga, or V.S. Ramachandran - or even summary articles in popular media venues such as Scientific American and Science Daily - is quickly presented with some difficult and puzzling questions about the nature of the self and consciousness.

Phenomena such as split-brain experiments, anterograde amnesia, bizarre results of various types of brain damage, or even mental illnesses such as schizophrenia all seem to present an intractable problem for the believer in souls, namely, if the soul is separate and independent from the body (and has 'free will'), then why can't the soul overcome these difficulties?

Non-believers believe that the Self (i.e., the mind/brain) develops over time through the genetically-determined growth of the brain as well as the brain's interaction with its physical and social environment. The Self is 'conscious'; that is, it is aware of itself, it has desires, it feels pleasure and pain, as well as all gradations in between these two poles. And this is where a non-believer's view of abortion comes in.

Since the non-believer believes that the Self is the brain, then the non-believer can provide a demarcation between Self and non-Self: the nervous system. Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose a viable nervous system. Without a nervous system, not only are pleasure and pain not felt, but there is no Self to do the feeling. We could say that this is the baseline test for abortion - if you abort something that doesn't have a fully-developed nervous system, then you are not aborting a Self. You are not aborting a person.

I don't believe anyone out there is pro-abortion. Unless you're a psychopath, you value life over non-life, existence over non-existence. Obviously, women aren't getting pregnant merely with the intention of aborting a fetus. So the decision to abort is not a whimsical, capricious, or malicious decision (the potential immaturity and impetuousness of some teenagers notwithstanding). What is usually being weighed here is the strife of an unwanted pregnancy versus bringing a human being into the world. So we should have a method for weighing the needs and desires of the adult human versus the non-existent needs and desires of a potential adult human, assuming he even makes it to adulthood. (He's like the sea turtle hatchling scrambling to get to the ocean before the sea birds get him.)

And this is where I believe the non-believer stands on firmer ground than the believer. The non-believer can present empirical, non-emotional, experience-based evidence in support of a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy that is deemed to be inimical to her life's intentions and plans - and well-being. The non-believer can present the image of an actual person, with a history, with life experiences, with memories, with intimate and complex social relationships, and with a refined capacity for pleasure and pain, versus a non-Self with no memories, no life experiences - and indeed no capacity at all for pleasure and pain. The believer falls back on - what? - 'scripture,' on personal feelings, on intuition?

The truly gray area for the non-believer, in my opinion, is pregnancy terminations beyond this demarcation line. When does a fetus begin to feel pain? Does the nervous system have to be fully-developed? Partially? If so, which parts? Etc. But even if we could say that the nervous system is most likely registering pain, we can't really say for certain that the Self of the fetus is experiencing it - or that there really is a Self there to be experiencing it.

But given the track record of the life sciences, the non-believer can possess a more justified confidence that these things will be sorted out with the development of new technology and new research methods.

God as a Cognitive Prosthesis

2011-02-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

Atheists and believers aren't so different. For both, ideas about how to live their lives in both the short term and long term literally just pop into their heads; but the believer thinks these ideas come from God. But both still have to determine which ones to follow - they both have to use their best judgment. Even though he's God, he's not any clearer than what arises from the subconscious of the atheist.

(My) Atheist Philosophy

2011-02-18T16:10:00.003-05:00

This ain’t your grandfather's atheism - unless his name is Friederich Nietzsche. And it is in this spirit that I am writing this post.

Many nonbelievers have called upon the New Atheists and others to put forth a coherent secular philosophy to counter the prevailing and longstanding theistic hegemony. I can understand and appreciate this desire, especially here in America, where religious conservatives have been emboldened by the aggressive Tea Party movement and the popularity of media personalities like Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

But as someone who has been a naturalist and an atheist for over a decade, who had grown up in an evangelical church and home, and who has kept tabs on the culture wars, I don't believe this will work. Atheists, secularists, nonbelievers - whatever you want to call us - are not a homogeneous group. Near as I can tell, the only thing we have in common is a lack of belief in gods, and specifically the God of the monotheistic religions.

However, I believe there is a wide range of thought on other issues: politics, ethics, economics, culture, etc.; though it might be fair to say that most of us support a classical liberal society, with equal rights, democratic government, etc. And we might even agree on a general moral system, though there is heated debate as to whether we can - or even should - try to discover and promote a rational or objective foundation for it.

But the crux of the issue, though it fades and reappears now and then, is the idea of meaning, or purpose. Ultimately, what many of us are calling for is a way of living without religious belief that counters nihilism. I personally believe that what really turns people off to atheism is fear - fear of letting go; fear of having to decide on life for oneself, of having to attempt answers to profound questions, of being responsible for the character and direction of one's life; in short, the fear of having to ultimately stand alone in the universe and affirm one's life - and all of life - nonetheless. The religious believer is largely relieved of this responsibility; though perhaps you could argue that they aren't really relieved of it, since they still have to 'interpret' what they are given - God isn't so clear as people make him out to be.

Like Nietzsche, I don't deny the arguments of the active nihilist - there is no ultimate meaning or purpose. The universe is indifferent to humans and their desires. But, also like Nietzsche, I believe there are ways to create our own meaning and purpose - or meanings and purposes, if you like. But success in this endeavor presumes a strong nature, a willingness to let go, a desire to revere oneself, and an imaginative, adventurous spirit - to “dance near abysses,” as Nietzsche put it. And here it seems that trying to put together a coherent secular philosophy is bound to fail: everyone is different. We are not all "created equal," though many of us may believe that we should all be considered "equal before the law."

I believe we need to incorporate the spirit of the great scientific (in the broadest sense) thinkers of our species - many ancient Greeks, Galileo, Einstein, etc. - into the character of our greatest modern philosophers and seekers of knowledge. Of course, we're not talking about academic philosophers; we're talking about a way of life, a way of being (Nietzsche called them free spirits). Anyone can be a philosopher in this sense. You could consider yourself to be the artist of your life, pursuing a vision that may be always changing, elusive - but you are nevertheless the artist trying to the best of his ability to capture and honor the reality he experiences.

The New Atheists have been criticized - by proponents and detractors alike - for not having or presenting a full grasp of the philosophical issues in this culture war. They claim that what is presented in New Atheist books like “The Moral Landscape,” “The God Delusion,” and “Breaking the Spell” is a simplistic, watered-down, sophomoric version of the fruits of some of the greatest philosophical thinkers our species has produced. I agree - but not in the way you’d imagine.

I would contend that what the New Atheists offer is not a “simplistic” version, but a “simplified” version: not only have the counter-arguments to and refutations of the most significant “proofs” for the existence of God been done, and done well (there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, in other words), but the majority of the “herd” - as Nietzsche put it - is simply not receptive to dry, academic wrangling over the meaning of words or the forms of definitions. So in this way the New Atheists are merely tailoring their writing to their target audience.

If we need to do anything, we need to leave the true believers behind. It's been my experience that the true believer can't be swayed. Experience shows that, when pressed, the dogmatic ideologue (and I mean any dogma) will only redouble his efforts at maintaining his dogma. There may be those who will be swayed, but they were on the fence anyway: in some reflective hour, reading a book, walking their dog, or riding the subway home, they will quietly admit to themselves that they don't believe. And though they might not publicly disavow belief, at least they won't take it to the ballot box or the latest Tea Party rally.

It seems to me that what we nonbelievers need to do is decide on a general strategy, as opposed to a formal philosophy. What I mean is, do we want to engage believers in order to convert them (or de-convert them, if you will)? I for one don't engage in discussions/debates with believers to convert them; I engage in these discussions to understand why they believe as they do. It's part curiosity, part due diligence - what I learn from these discussions will help me come up with ways to counter the prevailing psycho-religio-moral atmosphere, if I may coin an awkward phrase. That said, it's still a work in progress!

Or are we, at a minimum, interested in keeping believers from legislating their morality - whether on the Federal, State or Local level? As much as I enjoy reading the banter and bickering in the Comments section of blogs like Pharyngula, I believe one-on-one debating is largely ineffective. You will never win (because the opponent will never concede, even if you feel you've won - this isn't chess), and you will most likely not convert, especially if employing ridicule. Don't get me wrong, employing ridicule can be a pleasurable exercise, but it rarely, if ever, accomplishes the goal in mind.

So, what do we think? Given my beliefs about atheism, I know we won't all think alike. But can we come up with an outline of a strategy? Should we? Is there any consensus? Why do we do what we do? Why do we write, blog, debate, protest, etc.?

Nietzsche was primarily an esoteric moralist, notorious for his criticism of democracy and "equal rights." In Beyond Good & Evil, he said:

Are these coming philosophers new friends of "truth"? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be truth for everyman - which has so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. "My judgment is my judgment": no one else is easily entitled to it - that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say to himself.

So where do we go from here? Do we bid each other adieu - so to speak - and part company, each going her own way, choosing and fighting her own battles, creating her own life in isolation like Zarathustra - come what may in the larger politico-cultural arena?

Or - what?

The Teachers of the Purpose of Existence

2011-02-15T17:59:00.003-05:00

Deepak Chopra has an article on CNN's website called Science and spirituality should be friends.

My initial thought was: why? But as I read the article, it made me think of some thoughts by Nietzsche. But before I get into that, I want to point out a few things.

First, he says that interest in organized religion has declined, not because of the "rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith," but because of Charles Darwin's dangerous idea of evolution.

However, I'm tempted to think that it has been the result of the efforts of "noisy atheists" to promote Darwin's essential idea that has resulted in science's ascendancy over traditional religious dogma. After all, Darwin published his idea 150 years ago; atheists since then have promoted it and made it accessible to a wider audience.

Next, Chopra says that the exodus from traditional religion has resulted in people seeking a "spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one's consciousness." I don't mean to nitpick, but isn't all spirituality and religion based on "personal experience"? Does it make sense to talk about spirituality and religion - or anything of human concern, for that matter - without regard to personal experience?

At any rate, he says that scientists have a growing interest in "consciousness." This is undeniably true; the philosopher David Chalmers and scientists like Christof Koch are explicitly pursuing a "science of consciousness."

But Chopra has a much different - and really, unjustifiable - idea about human consciousness. Whereas the former view consciousness as a function of the physical brain, or a property of the universe subject to the same laws of physics as everything else, Chopra postulates consciousness not as an emergent property of the "physical" cosmos but as a near-supernatural entity. He asks, "Was mind also born in the same place outside space and time?" That is a property theists ascribe to God.

Chopra's gripe seems to be that scientists are bogged down in a materialism that "rules science." Well, that is what science is based on. As Tom Clark of the Center for Naturalism says: "Science doesn't presume the natural-supernatural distinction; it generates it by dividing what works from what doesn't."

Then Chopra notes that the "physical building blocks of the universe have gradually vanished; that is, atoms and quarks no longer seem solid at all but are actually clouds of energy, which in turn disappear into the void that seems to be the source of creation." I'm not sure contemporary physicists would characterize the basic building blocks as "clouds" of energy, but you can see where he's going with this. He's attempting a New Age "God of the Gaps" argument: since we don't really know the characteristics of the basic building blocks of the universe, it must be this mysterious, magical thing called "consciousness"!

Chopra then goes on to say that "it is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces that shape creation - not labeling them as God but as the true shapers of reality beyond the space/time continuum." Not among serious scientists it isn't. At least, not in the way Chopra thinks it is. What Chopra is doing is trying to make room for a metaphysically-privileged force/entity called "consciousness." But current research doesn't warrant this overreaching by Chopra. He's filling this alleged gap with his new "god" of "consciousness."

The penultimate fallacy in his article is when he says that "either atoms and molecules are smart, or something makes them smart." Well, not necessarily. It's as if Chopra has never heard of emergence. Or, if he has, he's not mentioning it in order to advance his spiritual agenda.

But the main fallacy is presented at the end of his article: he says that "we are conscious beings who live with purpose and meaning. It seems unlikely that these arose form a random, meaningless universe." Well, yes, we are conscious beings. And of course we desire to live with purpose and meaning. And this gets us to the title of my post. Why do we strive to live with purpose and meaning?

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche starts off with a section called "The Teachers of the Purpose of Existence." In it, he basically claims that "man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists: his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without a faith in reason in life."

Nietzsche claimed that the teachers of the purpose of existence actually "promote the interests of the species" because they promote exactly this faith in life, this image of meaning and purpose, whether or not it's actually true. Nietzsche says this "instinct for the preservation...erupts as reason and as passion of the spirit. Then it is surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all the force at its command to make us forget that at bottom it is instinct, folly, lack of reasons."

This is also obviously true. But human beings can live without ultimate meaning and purpose: I'm living proof. I should say, however, that I distinguish between "ultimate" and "proximate." I have come to the conclusion that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life, but at the same time I create my own meaning and purpose. My meaning and purpose is not preordained by any other being, but is specific to my psycho-physiological constitution.

What I mean by this is that each of us has a different personality; at a minimum, we could say that some of us are more introverted whereas others are more extraverted. Similarly, some of us are more active and energetic than others. And so on. My meaning and purpose in life is determined by my personality and physiology. It has to be right for me.

But my gripe with the Chopras of the world is that they contribute to the overall denigration of science by unjustifiably asserting that science is impotent, and that the things we most care about as humans can be found in a non-human plane, a supernatural or categorically-privileged magisteria. The problem is, if that's the case, then human striving is all for naught because we are striving for something that in principle can't be obtained.

Putting our hopes in other-worldly forces or beings is not only foolish, but downright inimical to life. Creating our own meaning and purpose, and embarking on our own idiosyncratic projects requires that we deal with reality as we experience it, without postulating all sorts of superfluous entities and powers.

Is Atheist Unbelief 'Rational'?

2011-02-14T12:17:00.006-05:00

I just read an article on Christianity Today's website titled Unreasonable Doubt. The main point of the article (which is itself a reaction to the popularity of the so-called "New Atheists") seems to be that those who call themselves atheists do not arrive at their conclusion as a result of a process of rationality; instead, their cognitive functioning is "impaired" by sin, thus causing them to reject the Christian God as a result of poor reasoning and/or emotional reasons.

The article's author begins by citing a few non-believers who have made comments about their not wanting Christianity to be true (in addition, I assume, to their other reasons for being atheists). He quotes a prominent philosopher (Thomas Nagel) as saying, "I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that." But my considered response to this is: so what? Or, What's the point? I don't want the God of the Bible to exist either, but that's because I, like Thomas Jefferson, read his horrific human right's record and recoil in horror. As an aside, I grew up in a born-again Christian home and church; and once I started to dis-believe, if you will, I desperately wanted Christianity to be true: I didn't want to lose my chance for a life after death, or a "big brother God" who is constantly looking out for me and protecting me, or the prospect of seeing my loved ones again after we've all passed on, or to think that I didn't have free will. But I've reached the point in my life now (I'm 39) where it would take a truly extraordinary "miracle" to get me to believe in the Christian God.

But really, what's the point? Even if a person loses his belief in god (not just the Christian God) for psychological or emotional reasons, it doesn't follow that the author's hypothesis is therefore true. The author doesn't cite why the philosopher Thomas Nagel doesn't want God to exist, and an initial Google search by me yielded nothing of relevance. I'm familiar with some of Nagel's work, but mainly his ideas about consciousness (What Is it Like to Be a Bat?). I'll keep looking; but I've already stated my reason why I wouldn't want the Christian God to exist.

The author attempts to bolster his hypothesis by citing the fact that the New Atheists simply rehash traditional arguments against the existence of God. New Atheists offer traditional arguments because they feel they've already been well-argued, so there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. However, the discipline of science continues to offer explanations for gaps previously filled by God; but Christian dogma literally can't change, else it will cease to be Christian. So the New Atheists can offer a simple rehash of past philosophical arguments - which they feel have not been sufficiently refuted by theists to date - and move on to what the scientific method is continually telling us about human nature and Nature in general.

The author says that his suggestion is potentially offensive to unbelievers. I'm an unbeliever, and while I can't say I take offense to it - I understand the limits of human reason and the powerful effects of emotion on our cognitive processes - I have to say that it's just wrong, and needs a rebuttal in the marketplace of ideas.

The author then says, "According to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming." And I say: well, of course! But I can also say that the Qur’an says the evidence for the exploits of Mohammed is overwhelming; or that the Vedas say that the evidence for their explanation for the origin of the world and its gods is overwhelming; or that the Iliad shows that the evidence for the Greek gods is overwhelming; or that...well, you get the picture.

But since the author is a dedicated Christian, I know he doesn't believe any of those other holy books. Why not? Like all serious Christians (or believers of any religion, really), they engage in special pleading: well, my god is the one, true God. But how do they know? Well, their holy book tells them so...and round and round we go. So, while citing scripture will help edify the faithful, it will really do nothing to convince the skeptic.

But then the author gets into the meat of his hypothesis: he quotes the apostle Paul as saying that unbelievers "suppress the truth by their wickedness." In other words, it's a willful disbelief, a not wanting to face the facts of the matter. The author is only partly right when he says that, "obedience and humility lead to insight and understanding." Humility? Yes. Obedience? Just the opposite! Christians have a vested interest in not questioning or doubting God - obedience is exactly what God wants. Obedience says, "Thou shalt - or else!" Humility says, "I believe X, but I could be wrong." Christians can't say, "I believe Christ died for my sins, but I could be wrong." That's the one thing they can't doubt. To doubt this is to exclude oneself from being a Christian.

The believer claims to have a hold on truth, and not just his truth, but Truth with a capital T. His skepticism, his inquiry, has come to an end. His mind is no longer open to alternatives. He is not free to entertain options because he would thereby forfeit his claim to the Truth - which is the perfect word of the Creator, Master and Sustainer of all there is! The believer is now like God, knowing what is good and what is evil. The New Atheists - and those with a scientific mind generally - don't claim to know absolute truth; indeed they don't believe absolute Truth exists. They have only varying degrees of confidence and probability, and they believe that the Christian God probably doesn't exist.

So now we must ask: in light of all this, who is more susceptible to self-deception, the believer who has a vested interest in such concepts (his eternal life depends on it!), or the unbeliever with no vested interest in rejecting these concepts?

To me, the obvious answer is that the believer is more susceptible to the incomparable emotional pressure of eternal damnation if they don't believe. Incidentally, why is belief so important? Why does the Creator, Master and Sustainer of all there is care more that people believe in Him than that we humans treat each other well? At any rate, if a believer truly believes that the fate of his eternal soul hangs in the balance, can he really conduct a dispassionate assessment of the issue?

I want to talk about a couple of other things the author brings up. First, the author cites Paul Johnson's book, "Intellectuals," which purportedly claims that "some of the most celebrated thinkers in the modern period...were moral wrecks." I have not read this book. Actually, I had no idea who Paul Johnson was. But I did a Google search, and I found it interesting that Christopher Hitchens - one of the über-atheists the author criticizes - wrote an article about him. This article speaks for itself - it is very cheeky, as Hitchens himself might say - but here is a blurb from it:

"Johnson has made a career as an especially bilious and persecuting moralizer. His disgraceful book "Intellectuals," a foul-minded assault on the Enlightenment, laid a feverish stress on the private lives of secular and rationalist intellectuals. Rousseau was not only 'vain, egotistical and quarrelsome,' but he 'enjoyed being spanked on his bare bottom.' Ibsen 'would not expose his sexual organ even for the purpose of medical examination.'"

If Hitchens' quotes are accurate, this does not imply to me that these thinkers were "moral wrecks." After all, are they known to have stolen, murdered, or raped? Were they known to have defrauded others? If not, then the author has some very confused ideas about "morality."

Your average atheist is as moral or immoral as your average Christian. Is Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennet a moral wreck? What does it mean to be a moral wreck? Do they steal? Murder? Rape? Defraud? What about the Christian "moral wrecks" - Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, and Kent Hovind? Actually, so far as we know, the former are more moral than the latter - at least according to Christian ethics.

Second, he says that, for those who are not dogmatic in their beliefs, he is open to rational discussion. But isn't the Christian dogmatic? Don't they have to be? Aren't the principles of Christianity "incontrovertibly true" for the Christian? Can the Christian articulate what reason, evidence or argument would make him change his mind? It seems to me that for a believer, "keep an open mind" means "keep your mind open until you except the truth - my truth."

As Nietzsche said in The Gay Science: "Those who feel 'I possess Truth' - how many possessions would they not abandon in order to save this feeling! What would they not throw overboard to stay 'on top' - which means, above the others who lack 'the Truth'!"

Applying the Intellectual Conscience to One Man's "Theology"

2011-01-28T11:15:00.006-05:00

The following explanation of Christianity was taken from here. Its author is a former high school chemistry and physics teacher in my home state of Pennsylvania.

I'm going to ask the questions this seemingly well-educated man should have been asking before he wrote his thesis here. My comments will be in brackets.

"God created man to be His friend. [First, a simple 'why?' We might want to do a little philosophical analysis here: why would an allegedly perfect being - where perfect means 'being complete, lacking nothing' - create something to be his friend? Indeed, a perfect being wouldn't create anything at all.]

God has other friends. The angels, but angels do not have our free will. [How does he know this? How could he possibly know this?]

The Trinity also make good company, but though They have different jobs, The Trinity think exactly alike. They are, after all, one Being. [If they think exactly alike, then why distinguish between them? Why have a "trinity" at all. Has the author never thought of these questions? And, again, how does he know this?]

This friendship, like any other, requires a conscious effort from both parties. God wants man to accept the hand of friendship freely [How does he know this?], which means he can also refuse it.

In short, He had to give man a free will [Philosophers have dealt with the subject for centuries and the consensus is that, even sitting in your armchair, you can tell that a free will in the sense the author requires is logically impossible. Nietzsche noted that a thought comes when 'it' wants, and not when we want it to. More recently, Sam Harris noted that I, as the subject of my experience, cannot know what I will think next or do next until a thought or intention arises. In other words, we literally have no control over our thoughts and actions - in terms of initiating them - and, therefore, no free will in that sense. And in the past 20 years or so, our understanding of how the human brain works, especially when subject to brain damage that can, in some instances, completely change personality, inhibit any intentions by a person, or even cause people to do things they can't refrain from doing - i.e., against their will - has provided empirical evidence that the mind is the brain, which is a physical organ subject to the laws of physics, and therefore subject to cause and effect, and therefore there can be no 'self' outside that chain of cause and effect that can alter that chain without being altered itself.], our tendency to think ourselves in charge, our human pride.

If we accept it, this friendship lasts for eternity, a condition we call heaven. [So, if we agree to be God's friend and flatter Him, he will reward us, otherwise it's eternal torment? Doesn't seem too fair to me.]

If we refuse this hand of friendship, however, because we are immortal [how does he know? Has someone he knows come back from the dead and told him?], we exist forever in a state of isolation we call hell [Hmmm...he seems to be sugar-coating this a bit. I don't think "isolation" is a good translation of "wailing and gnashing of teeth," or swimming in a "lake of fire," do you?]

God also had to do something to show us how much He wanted that friendship and that this friendship was His doing, not ours [So have we been pre-programmed to want a friendship with God? What about free will?].

That something was the voluntary death on the cross of Jesus, One of the Trinity and part of Himself. [But why would God execute someone who didn't do anything wrong, who wasn't guilty? Should we be doing that in our justice system? If I kill someone, should the authorities execute you in my place? And of course the whole atonement is a farce anyway - presumably Jesus is eternal, immortal, perfect, all-powerful and all-knowing - remember, the Trinity thinks exactly alike - then going through 'death' is like us being bitten by a mosquito, or even less. Now, if God ordered Jesus to be permanently stripped of his divinity, and truly become human - in essence only losing 1/3 of the Trinity - then I would consider that a fairer deal to atone for my 'sins'. Literally sacrificing his divine Son for the billions of humans who will have died by the end of the world - when is that again? - would be a good deal. If I have the prospect of an eternity in hell, then so should Jesus. But Jesus never really had that prospect.]

We commit a lot of sins and cannot atone for most of these. For example, suppose you kill someone. How can you ever atone to that man’s family, let alone the victim? Our acceptance of Jesus’ Atonement pays for this sin and worse in God’s eyes. [See my notes on the above paragraph.]

The payment also puts us in God’s debt, which is precisely where He wants us, because God has important jobs and satisfying relationships for everyone who accepts this hand of friendship. [Again, how does he know this? And why is willingly becoming someone's debtor when you become their friend a good thing? And what does being in His debt have to do with having important jobs and friendships? Is that psychologically healthy?]"

Again and again I encounter the same thing: either a lack of critical thinking, or a lack of an intellectual conscience (a conscience behind the conscience), or critical thinking and the rudiments of an intellectual conscience, but a neurotic clinging to the patently implausible and pervasively unhealthy.

Review of "The Moral Landscape"

2011-01-16T16:08:00.013-05:00

I want to review Sam Harris' latest book, The Moral Landscape, in which he attempts to argue "how science can determine values." He wants to show that the traditional and long-entrenched view that the domain of scientific knowledge is limited to merely describing the physical world - and that religion is the sole arbiter of value and meaning - is wrong. He is also arguing that the largely secular notion that morality is all relative is wrong as well.

After reading the book, I read several critical reviews, and they all seem to follow a similar tack. But before I get to that, I want to cite Harris in a rather lengthy response to his critics. In it, he gives a concise summary of his argument:

"Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."

The main criticism of Harris is that he is violating 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume's famous "is/ought" distinction which, briefly stated, means that the discipline of science can tell us where we came from and what we are (for the most part), but this knowledge cannot tell us what we should do. Another way to put it is to say that there is an inviolable distinction between "facts" and "values." As modern philosopher Owen Flanagan says in his book, The Problem of the Soul, "Saying 'This bowl weighs 10 pounds' makes sense, as does saying 'He is dead.' But when we say 'This bowl is beautiful' or 'It is bad that he is dead' - where is the beauty or the badness?"

While most of Harris' critics view him as committing this fallacy, Harris himself claims that he is not "simply claiming that morality is 'fully determined by an objective reality, independent of people's actual values and desires.'" And he acknowledges that a long evolutionary history has made us the type of species we are, with our peculiar physical and psychological values. However, elsewhere in his book he says that a scientific account of human values is not the same as an evolutionary account. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?

Well, first of all, he believes that a Darwinian account of human nature is too narrow a focus for determining what he considers is the standard of value for our species: human well-being. Unfortunately for Harris - and everyone else who has ever thought about it - a tidy definition for something has multifarious and even ambiguous as 'well-being' has proven itself elusive. Nevertheless, Harris says "Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons..."

There are three issues here: one, how do we define 'well-being' or 'flourishing'; two, why does Harris believe science can tell us what human well-being is; and three, why does Harris think science can tell us why we should value well-being?

Harris readily admits that there can be competing definitions of human well-being; and further, he admits that these competing definitions can be equally valid - that is, equally moral. These are the many peaks on his 'moral landscape.' To push the analogy a bit further, he sort of argues that there is a baseline of misery that every human being would wish to avoid - we could call this the horizontal base of the landscape. The competing views of human well-being make up the various peaks and, according to Harris, "there will be right and wrong ways to move toward one peak or another."

Harris believes science - specifically neuroscience - can tell us what human well-being consists of. Basically, he says we can identify the neural correlates of human happiness, pleasure and satisfaction, as well as human misery, pain and angst. To me, he seems to be arguing not that morality is an objective property of the universe like the spin, charge and mass of subatomic particles, but that, since we can tie specific actions (and, more importantly, the consequences of those actions) to actual brain states and other physiological facts of human beings, then in that sense they are 'real' or 'objective,' and we can therefore exercise our judgment within and across cultures. He further argues that we are all similarly constituted such that we can, with confidence, say that what's good for one brain is good for another - at least for most things that matter.

But is this really a good argument in support of his claim that science can determine human values? Is there a bait and switch going on here?

In his book "Beyond Good & Evil," Nietzsche said that every philosopher so far has sought - and thought he found - a rational foundation for his philosophy. Harris obviously thinks he has as well. But I think he falls short. Not only can Harris not define human well-being (and as mentioned above, he even admits that some competing definitions are equally valid and moral), he hasn't really given us concrete examples of his 'science' in action - he merely asserts, with confidence (because he is a neuroscientist), that science can determine human values. So, really, he wants us to trust him.

What Harris seems to be doing is arguing for a type of utilitarianism or consequentialism, where the moral worth of an action is based on whether or not it maximizes the apparent well-being of as many people as possible. Harris says on page 28 of his book: "As we come to understand how human beings can best collaborate and thrive in this world, science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people."

But if this is what Harris is arguing for, why did he feel the need to write his book in such a way as he did? Others have argued for the same thing, and more convincingly, in my opinion. Harris cites contemporary philosopher Owen Flanagan as an intellectual ally and pre-print collaborator. But I find Flanagan's account - which is a chapter called 'Ethics as Human Ecology' in his book "The Problem of the Soul" - to be much more convincing and thorough. In fact, I'd take Flanagan's 54 pages over Harris' 191 any day.

The consensus seems to be - and for good reason - that the sciences can certainly inspire and inform our ethical endeavors, but cannot be used as a final, authoritative stamp of approval on a code of morality. I can understand and appreciate Harris' desire to come up with something that combats the smug certainty of religion's centuries-long moral hegemony, as well as the spineless moral relativism of some of our cultural elite (though there are far more of the former than the latter, at least in America). But I came away from Harris' effort feeling like he was preaching to the converted, especially with his chapter titled "Religion." We've heard it from him before, both in "Letter to a Christian Nation" and his much better book "The End of Faith."

Unfortunately, I can't offer a route through the Scylla and Charybdis of our ethical discourse. On the one hand, having divisive figures like Harris come out with books that simply preach to the converted isn't going to reach a wider audience - the people who need to engage in an honest appraisal of the issues aren't even going to pick up the book. On the other hand, philosophical treatises in the manner of Immanuel Kant or David Hume - or even Bertrand Russell - aren't going to convince the man on the street either. Besides, Nietzsche suggested over a hundred years ago that "reasons" don't really work against something like the self-righteous certainty of Christianity, which is so affect-laden to begin with.

But at least efforts are being made, critiques and discussions are happening, and hopefully this will spill out beyond the confines of academia and into the streets of 'the rabble,' as Nietzsche affectionately referred to us!

Morality Lesson: Intentions vs. Consequences

2011-01-02T11:19:00.003-05:00

Most of us, Christian or otherwise, judge the morality of others by their intentions. For example, former president Jimmy Carter (and, more recently, Christine O'Donnell) said that, because he felt lust for other women, he had already committed adultery in his heart, even though he had never acted on it.

Nietzsche, however, claimed that this was not always the case, and that there was a time in human history when the morality of a person was based on the consequences of his actions alone, and not on his intentions. Additionally, he claimed that, in the context of human history as a whole, this was a rather new development, and he claimed that it started with the Israelites. Without getting into an in-depth discussion of Nietzsche's moral philosophy - something that would really warrant a book-length tome - I want to focus on the intention/consequence dichotomy.

Since we here in America are still basking in the fading glow of the holiday season, let's use an example that you could easily encounter on any street in a large city - like Manhattan, for instance: Let's say that John is a man in his 30's who recently lost his job, his home, and his wife - and he has no family to which he could turn for support. He is now living on the streets of Manhattan because no one will hire him - not only is he homeless without access to a shower or clean clothes, but the economy is still in the worst recession in memory.

However, let's say for the sake of argument that all John needs is $1,000 to get him back on his feet and put his life together - enough to give him a fresh start and enable him to find cheap housing so he can clean himself up for a job search, etc. John is walking the streets of Manhattan, soliciting for handouts. It's been tough, because John is a fairly good-looking man, he's relatively young, in good physical shape, and his clothes aren't really that dirty yet (too dirty to get a job, but not dirty enough that someone would think he's destitute) - so people don't believe he's really homeless. They think it's a scam.

And then along comes Frank, a middle-aged, "self-made" entrepreneur whose net worth is counted in the tens of millions. Frank believes he owes nothing to his genetic endowment, society, political organization, or the age in which he lives - he believes everything he has is entirely his own possession and not subject to be taken away by anyone's wish or whim - no one else is entitled to the fruits of his labor. It's cold, so he's wearing a long Armani top coat. In his right pocket is a copy of the Declaration of Independence; in his left pocket is a copy of Atlas Shrugged - abridged version.

As Frank comes upon a melancholy John, he begins to think that this would be an opportunity for him to both increase his feeling of power as well as the sum of pleasurable feelings over disagreeable ones. What I mean is, and what Nietzsche thought was the case, is that "we benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent upon us in some way; we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours."

Basically, you could say that, by being benevolent toward those less fortunate, you raise yourself up in the eyes of others as well as yourself. You are giving out of your abundance. Your cup runneth o'er, etc. In terms of feelings, you might feel good by helping someone. It is a pleasurable state of mind. I've long thought that this is what happens with most people when they help the poor, etc., whether they realize it or not. But in our case, let's assume that Frank is motivated by the former and not the latter.

Frank reads John's sign saying he needs $1,000 to get his life back on track, asks him if this is indeed the case, and, having received a reply in the affirmative, hands over 10 $100 bills to John and continues on his way without saying anything further. John does indeed get his life back on track and all's well that ends well.

There is no dispute that Frank helped John, helped him completely and precisely in the way he needed to be helped. Let's further assume that all of Frank's money was legitimately earned, no one - not even animals - was harmed in the earning of this money. Not only has Frank succeeded in increasing the total sum of "good" in the world (something you could attribute to a form of Utilitarianism), you could also include the pleasurable, or positive, feelings within Frank himself in this sum.

Let's assume that we know Frank's motivation - we know he helped John for selfish reasons. It wasn't simply out of the goodness of his heart, or from "fellow feeling." It wasn't the holiday music being piped out of the store near where John was standing, it wasn't because Frank had seen It's a Wonderful Life the night before, and it wasn't out of respect for any religious doctrine - Frank is an atheist. It was simple self-interest - just like John Galt.

Can we consider Frank to be a moral person? If not, why not?

What is it Like to Be a Dog?

2010-12-30T17:55:00.014-05:00

I am a professional dog trainer. Specifically, I train dogs to guide those who are blind. Each month, the organization I work for teaches up to twenty-four blind students (many of whom have had dog guides before) how to work with and care for their new dog guide. Recently, I had the unfortunate opportunity to pick up a dog from one of my organization's graduates who passed away. The dog was a German shepherd, an intensely loyal breed. The dog and his now-deceased master were together for a little over seven years.

Now, most pet owners who have had a dog for seven years know what it's like to lose a beloved pet that has been part of the family for that long. However, a dog guide is more than just a pet: under Federal law, a dog guide can go anywhere its master can go: they go to the supermarket, the local Starbucks, the bank, the post office, the library, and the workplace. They spend much more time with their master than pet dogs do - nearly twenty-four hours a day. Additionally, dog guides - as near as we can tell - develop a unique sense of responsibility for their master, further deepening the bond between human and canine.

Where am I going with this, you might be thinking? Well, when I brought the deceased graduate's dog back to my organization, and into my kennel, the dog seemed to simply pick up where he left off seven years ago: he merged relatively seamlessly back into the pack - not the same pack he was in seven years ago, but a pack just the same. He played, asserted his dominance, sniffed, drank water from the trough - all the things he did seven years ago with a different group of about twenty dogs.

What about his master? What about the person who fed him and loved him for seven years? What about the bond they shared for seven years, guiding his master everywhere - proud when his master praised him effusively for avoiding a car coming out of a driveway, remorseful when he brushed his master's arm against a parking meter when he was distracted by another dog? The dog shows no sign of depression. He's active - playful, even. He's socializing with other dogs. By all accounts he seems normal.

I am intensely interested in - obsessed with, really - human consciousness. It is probably the most bizarre - and intractable - phenomenon in the natural world. The 17th Century philosopher René Descartes sort of kicked things off, in terms of consciousness studies. He's the guy who said he could doubt pretty much everything about the world except himself - his consciousness. He famously said, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. From this, he basically concluded that there are two kinds of stuff: material stuff, and thinking stuff; or, material and immaterial - body and mind. It's called dualism. Since then, modern science - and neuroscience in particular - has disabused most scientists (and nearly all philosophers) of the notion of dualism. In other words, the mind is the brain: consciousness arises from material brain processes. Serbian-born American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper back in 1974 called, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" Hence the title of my blog post. In this paper, he suggested that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism."

But to step back from the abyss of philosophical inquiry for a moment, consciousness is the thing all of us laypeople are most familiar with (or so we like to think). Each of us has the experience of what it's like to be us; we have a subjective point of view. Additionally, we have thoughts, emotions, and visceral feelings of pain and pleasure. I know what it's like to be me and I assume, based on observations of your actions and the knowledge that you are a human being like me, that you know what it's like to be you. Many times I can guess what you're thinking or feeling based simply on your actions or body language.

But what about a dog? The relationship between humans and dogs goes back, presumably, for thousands of years. That's thousands of years of human beings observing dog behavior. So pet owners - and especially dog trainers - enjoy a level of confidence in determining what a dog is thinking or feeling. Now, modern neuroscience has grown by leaps and bounds in its understanding of how the human brain works, but not so much with the canine brain. However, given an evolutionary understanding of life and some inductive reasoning, as well as millennia of intimate human-canine interaction, humans can be fairly confident in their conclusions about the dog's mental capacities and limitations.

Still - and this might be an obdurate anthropomorphic tendency in me - I find it baffling when a dog like this German shepherd comes back after having lost its master, acting as if nothing has happened. For me, it raises a lot of questions: what is the nature of canine memory? Do past memories intrude into the dog's consciousness the way our memories sometimes do? Does he dream about his master? If he does, does he remember them in his waking state? Is a dog condemned by nature to be stuck in the present?

A more interesting question would be: would it be better or worse if human brains were structured like canine brains, living in an eternal present?

Neuroscientists have been working on - and making steady progress with - what are called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Now, describing the neural correlates of consciousness doesn't yet offer a robust theory of consciousness - and may never, in fact, achieve such a thing, but understanding these neural correlates is a step toward such a theory.

Maybe someday we'll actually know what it's like to be a dog.

A Parable for the Holidays

2010-12-22T10:46:00.004-05:00

Two prehistoric men, Gorbag and Khuzdul, are sitting around the fire at the entrance to their cave, enjoying the bounty of the morning’s hunt.

“This mammoth tenderloin is delicious,” says Gorbag.

“Yes, I agree,” says Khuzdul. “It is a gift from Scrod.”

“What is Scrod?” wonders Gorbag, perplexed.

“He is the Creator and Sustainer of all there is,” responds Khuzdul, solemnly.

“I don’t understand,” says Gorbag.

“Well, he created you, and me, and this mammoth,” says Khuzdul, plainly.

“How do you know this?” asks Gorbag.

“I have seen it in a dream; Scrod spoke to me,” offers Khuzdul.

“In a dream?” asks Gorbag, in an incredulous tone. “You mean those things we see when we sleep?”

“Yes,” replies Khuzdul, “where all things are possible, and the dead live on...”

“The dead live on?” asks Gorbag. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” says Khuzdul, “but dreams show us another world - so there must be a life after death.”

“This is most distressing,” says Gorbag. “All sorts of improbable and even impossible things happen in dreams. For instance, sometimes when I awake, I recall that I was flying high above our cave and the steppe and all the world; yet no matter how hard I try, I cannot make myself fly when I am awake.”

Gorbag pauses for a moment, picks a strand of coarse mammoth hair from between his crooked teeth and turns again to Khuzdul.

“Have you seen this ‘Scrod’ when you are awake?”

“No,” replies Khuzdul. “But I’m sure He exists.”

“So,” says Gorbag, “you can’t tell me Scrod exists as surely as you or me, or your beautiful woman, Shagrat - or even your two offspring, Radbug and Othrod?”

“Well, no, not exactly, but - “

“Then why should I believe you?” asks Gorbag, finally.

“Because I believe in Him,” says Khuzdul, “and you should, too.”

“But if I tell you that there is a a group of suckling boars without their mother just over the hill, you would rightly ask me for proof,” says Gorbag.

“Of course!” says Khuzdul.

“And if I told you that rubbing an otherwise poisonous herb on your sabre-toothed tiger wound would heal you perfectly, you would want to know if it’s worked on others,” says Gorbag, “or more likely, you’d want me to try it first.”

“Absolutely!” replies Khuzdul.

“So if you tell me that you believe in this Scrod, you must first show me that he exists,” says Gorbag.

“Why?” asks Khuzdul, indignantly.

“Now don’t get defensive, Khuzdul, I’m just making sure you’re being reasonable; being unreasonable in this world can get you killed,” says Gorbag. “Lions, tigers, and bears - oh my!”

“But isn’t it enough that I’ve seen Him in my dreams, and that I know He exists?” says Khuzdul, with a hint of desperation.

“But how do you know, Khuzdul?” replies Gorbag.

“Well, uh, I, I mean - I’m not sure. I have very powerful feelings whenever I see Him in my dreams,” says Khuzdul. “I feel that it’s all true.”

“I feel a lot of things, Khuzdul,” says Gorbag, “but rarely, if ever, do any of them amount to knowledge.”

The two men paused for a moment, lost in thought, robotically chewing and gnawing on the connective tissue of their whooly mammoth ribs, the hiss and crackle of the fire a comforting backdrop and counterpoint to the brutish and arduous existence of Mesolithic life.

“Don’t worry, Gorbag,” says Khuzdul, “I’ve managed to convince others of our tribe to follow Scrod, marshaling an impressive contingent.”

“Oh?” says Gorbag.

“Scrod appeared to me in another dream,” says Khuzdul. “Tomorrow we will enter a neighboring tribe’s valley and claim it for our own. It is overflowing with all kinds of animals fit for consumption - boars, goats, deer, mammoths - and fruits, nuts and berries sweet to eat, as well as land and fields meet for great events and festivals.”

“Festivals?” asks Gorbag.

“Yes,” says Khuzdul. “We will celebrate Scrod’s faithfulness and the bounty He will provide. We will thank Him for delivering us from our harsh life and questionable ways.”

“At the expense of a neighboring tribe?” asks Gorbag.

“Thus Scrod wills it,” pronounces Khuzdul.

Of the many feelings Gorbag has had, of the many types of fear he’s felt, for the first time he felt a new fear...

And this fear would not dissipate.

Free Will & Responsibility: A Brief Case Study in (mostly) Layman's Terms

2010-08-30T11:53:00.021-05:00

Johnny stood impatiently at the curb edge, poised to rush across the busy intersection after his best friend, Billy. They had become fast friends after only a few weeks at training camp, and they have been inseparable since. Now Johnny sees Billy receding further into the distance; he knows it would be bad for him to try and cross now - the light is against him - and those cars and trucks are large and noisy.

Johnny is not being physically restrained, he is free to leap into traffic if he wants to. Nor is Johnny mentally deficient in any way. But he's been taught that vehicles are something to avoid, though he doesn't really understand that they can kill him. You can see he's itching to go, that he's mulling over the decision in his head, gauging traffic - should I stay? should I go? - how long do I have to wait?! At just about the point where he can't take it anymore, the light changes in Johnny's favor and he's free to cross. He does so with a mixture of caution and delight that he can now, at last, be able to catch up to his best friend, Billy.

It would seem that Johnny has a genuine choice - to cross the street against traffic (and risk getting killed), or to wait for the light to change and cross safely. It seems to us that his choice is free - he is not being physically held back (though even if he were, he could still make the choice to cross, he just wouldn't physically be able to), and he is not under any psychological compulsion to stay put - he has the same mental capacities as his peers.

So the question is: is his choice really free? To put it a bit differently: does Johnny have free will?

Most of us would answer yes - Johnny has free will, and he can choose equally between two real choices. If he chooses to cross the street against traffic, he could just as well have done otherwise - he could have decided to stay put and wait for the light to change.

But if this scenario seems a bit odd, that's because it is: both Johnny and Billy are dogs being trained to guide the blind and visually impaired. I am an instructor for The Seeing Eye - the oldest existing dog guide organization in the world - and for almost eight years I've been training dogs for guide work and observing dogs in pack-like scenarios (up to 20 dogs at a time) in our kennels.

Each dog is trained for four months, and I work with each dog each day during that time. As a pet owner and dog trainer, it would be easy for me to anthropomorphize my dogs. And as every dog lover knows, dogs even seem to be more human than some humans we know. And they definitely seem to deliberate and make choices, for good or ill.

Now, this case study is most definitely not meant to "prove" that free will doesn't exist (nor is it a lesson in training a dog to be a guide for the blind). I simply want to present, by way of analogy, a different way of looking at the problem of free will. Of course, the first step really should be getting people to even view it as a problem in the first place. It seems to me the vast majority of us take it as axiomatic that we have free will; it seems like the most obvious and most accessible thing about ourselves and our mental processes. Setting aside the more technical - and some would say pointless - philosophical arguments for the time being, what would it actually mean for us to say that our will is "free"?

Well, most people would say that, when confronted with a choice, they are able to deliberate in such a way that they could imagine themselves taking any number of options. For instance, in our example above, let's suppose that Johnny and Billy are human beings. Johnny can imagine himself crossing the street against the light - not without a good bit of anxiety at the thought of getting hit by a car - or he could simply endure the frustration of having to wait for the light to change in order to make a safe crossing. At the moment Johnny is thinking about what to do, he feels he has as much ability to cross as not to cross. It's simply a matter of making a decision to do one or the other, weighing all the factors. Johnny can take the risk of getting injured or killed in order to catch up to his friend, or he can take the risk of not catching up to his friend by deciding to wait until the light changes - who knows, by that time Billy could be long gone.

If someone were to tell us that our thought process in regard to decision-making is like a mathematical formula, or like a computer program with lots of inputs and if/thens, etc., we would surely say that they were mistaken. We are not computers, we don't run like mathematical equations - there's more to us than that. We may strive to have our decision-making run with the precision and accuracy of a computer program or formula, but we can always buck the system and choose whatever we want.

I said I wasn't going to present any philosophical arguments regarding free will; but I will paraphrase a couple dead white males on the topic. A human being can surely do what she wants, but she can't determine what she wants. In other words, each thought has a cause or causes, and each cause has a cause of its own, and so on. In order for me to say that my will is truly "free," there has to be some point along that chain of causes where "I" interject with my own, non-caused cause. Otherwise - theoretically - you can trace that chain of causes back to the point where it no longer makes sense to say that "I" chose anything.

But where does that un-caused "I" come from? Most religiously-oriented people would say that it is our "soul" that chooses. The more secular among us would say that it is our "spirit" or our "consciousness." The religious view of human beings is too common and too obvious to elaborate on. Besides, most people with a Judeo-Christian background don't believe dogs have "souls" per se anyway. The secular view is probably best summed up by what's known as libertarianism - the philosophical position as well as the political position (with a capital "L" - think Reason Magazine, John Stossel, etc.). The current Director of Programs of The Atlas Society, William Thomas, wrote an article for their website back in 2006 titled, "What Is the Objectivist View of Free Will?" I won't go into what is meant by "Objectivist" here, other than to say it gave birth to the Libertarian movement. The article, however, gives voice to the key intellectual underpinnings of libertarian thought. Mr. Thomas says that, "We observe [free will] through introspection, the inward perception of our own conscious processes...our free will resides, most basically, in our ability to direct our conscious attention."

Thomas calls this ability "focus," and the choice to focus is "the choice to think." For now, I will set aside the more philosophical problem of what it could possibly mean for "me" to direct my conscious attention. The question lying in wait for us here is similar to the question on every toddler's lips when confronted with the proposition that God created the universe: who created God? In our case, we would need to ask, "How does the 'me' direct its attention?" or "What causes the 'me' to direct its attention this way or that?" Neither the religious believer nor the libertarian has a clear answer to this question. Ayn Rand (the intellectual architect behind Objectivism and, hence, libertarianism) herself suggested that that is a question for the hard sciences to answer. Ayn Rand died in 1982, and the mind sciences have come a long way since then - but that is most definitely beyond the scope of this case study.

Thomas makes a few points that I believe are applicable to dogs as well as humans. For instance, he writes, "After all, if free will is false, how can anyone choose to change his mind on an issue?" and "Free will is simply a human capacity for action." In my work as a dog trainer - and specifically in training dogs to guide the visually impaired - I am responsible for training dogs to "think." In fact, part of my job is to train dogs to "intelligently disobey" a command if the dog thinks it will lead to danger for itself or its handler. As an example, and without going into too much unnecessary detail, I condition dogs to respect traffic. What I mean by this is that while I can't teach a dog that a car can kill it - indeed, no one really expects dogs to understand the concept of death at all - I can teach dogs to avoid them in certain situations; e.g., when a blind person is trying to cross an intersection.

I see dogs change their mind all the time. I see, on a daily basis, a dog's thought process. I can see by their body language what they are most likely "thinking." Every day I see dogs like Johnny (I don't use the dogs' real names for privacy reasons) deliberate and choose. Of course, since dogs can't speak human language, I have to rely on body language and behavior; but dog guide trainers - and dog trainers in general - are confident in their assessments of dog "thinking" because of literally thousands of years of human-canine coexistence.

But does this mean that dogs have free will? Most people say no. Why? Well, most people say that only humans have free will. But why do most people say this? Well, as I said before, most people believe in some sort of "soul" that is categorically different from what a dog has. And if they don't believe in souls per se, they at least believe that nature has produced humans as the crowning achievement of evolution and has endowed humans with a capacity that the rest of the "animal kingdom" simply doesn't possess.

But Charles Darwin postulated - and the scientific community has overwhelming concluded since then - that the tree of life is more like a bush than a tree, and definitely not like a ladder with humans at the top. Consciousness and free will (if there is such a thing) could certainly have evolved in a different species, and consciousness may have indeed evolved in other creatures - we simply have no current way of knowing this.

Regardless, most people view the difference between dogs and humans as an unbridgeable gap. Based on my experience, I view the difference between dogs and humans as one of degree and not one of kind. Dogs clearly have the capacity to choose between real options, as humans do. Dogs and humans both respond in a similar way to a system of rewards and punishments that condition their respective behaviors. Dogs and humans modulate their behavior in anticipation of these perceived rewards and punishments. In the dog training world, this is known as Operant Conditioning. Animal trainers conceive of two types of conditioning: operant and classical. In classical conditioning, a stimulus elicits an automatic response - think of Pavlov's dogs and their conditioned reflex of salivating at the presentation of a visual or auditory stimulus, instead of just food.

Operant conditioning, on the other hand, is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Subjects "voluntarily" alter their behavior based on the perceived consequences (by contrast, classical conditioning can be thought of as "involuntary" behavior). Our criminal justice system is premised on a similar type of conditioning. And this leads us to the real concern over free will: if we don't have free will, then how can we be moral? William Thomas, along with most Libertarians and almost all religious believers, offers the following lament in his article: "If our actions are not up to us, then we have no moral responsibility for them." But do we need to be concerned with the actual existence of such a faculty as free will, if our society is already set up to modify the behavior - in a moral way - of its constituents?

Thomas ends his article with, "There can be no effective guidance of human action, nor a satisfactory scientific account of human behavior, without taking into account the inescapable fact of free will." Dogs can be effectively guided in their behavior without us believing they have free will, while still believing - and witnessing - their deliberation and choices. If we were to take human free will out of the equation, and view the comedy of existence without that presumption, the comedy of existence would still play out the same: we would see humans modifying their behavior based on the perceived consequences of a system of rewards and punishments, just like dogs.

And I think that free will is far from being an inescapable fact of reality. In fact, when we think about it, its existence if far from being settled, and its importance far from being properly considered.

Which Christianity should rule our "Christian" Nation?

2010-08-29T09:26:00.009-05:00

This weekend in D.C., Glenn Beck gave voice to what used to be a fairly fringe element in our society, but which has been growing in prominence - no doubt in part to leading politicians and media outlets such as Fox News. His rally, called Restoring Honor, emphasized what that not-so-fringe element believes:

"Something beyond imagination is happening," he told participants who packed the National Mall in Washington. "America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness."

Unfortunately for Beck - or for any religious believer - is that no one can really agree on which God is meant. Of course, the Beckites will say it is the Christian god, but even then, which Christian god is meant? Is it Beck's Mormon god? Is it Thomas Jefferson's god?

Thomas Jefferson denied the divinity of Christ and rejected the Old Testament god as "a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." To support Jefferson's view, I offer the following Old Testament verses:

Exodus 21:7 provides guidelines for an Israelite's selling of his daughter into slavery.

1 Samuel 15:2 gives just one of the many disgusting examples of the LORD ordering the murders of women and infants. I don't think I need to state more...

Numbers 31:16 provides probably my favorite Old Testament atrocity. In it, Moses - mouthpiece of God - orders his soldiers to kill all the women but to keep the young virgins for themselves. Aw, what a guy.

Thomas Jefferson seemed to venerate Jesus as a great moral teacher. I disagree. If the sayings attributed to Jesus are accurate (or even true) - and that's a big IF, considering they were written by zealous believers in a pre-literate, superstitious time - they don't seem to show a man of exemplary moral character, and the moral formulation he is arguably most famous for - the Golden Rule - has been present in many cultures not related to Christianity, and even predating it.

Aside from the Old Testament atrocities, maybe we can turn to the Ten Commandments. Should that be the basis for ruling our Nation? Let's see:

1. Have no other gods than God
2. No graven images
3. Don't take the Lord's name in vain
4. Keep the Sabbath holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. Don't murder people
7. Don't commit adultery
8. Don't steal
9. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor
10. Don't covet your neighbor's stuff

OK. So, we should probably discriminate between "guidelines for living/morality," and "law" backed by the force of the State. If we're going to use the Ten Commandments as law, as many people in this country believe should be the case, we already have 3 of them codified: murder, theft, and perjury (which is what I'll assume "bearing false witness" means). For most of the others, I don't believe most people would think it's a good idea to fine or imprison people for making or having statues of other gods and things, nor for being envious of your neighbor's hot wife or plasma flat-screen TV. Likewise for not being able to work on Sunday, not honoring a sexually-abusive father or mother, or sleeping around - although if you enter into a legal contract like marriage, you will most likely be ordered to pay up if you cheat on your spouse.

So maybe the Ten Commandments aren't the best guide for ruling the Nation. Author and atheist Sam Harris wryly notes that the Ten Commandments - written by the hand of the supreme master of the universe himself - is not the most articulate moral document there is. The Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism appears to be a saner, more comprehensive approach to morality than the Ten Commandments - or Christ's teachings. After all, what did Christ - or Christ through Paul - teach?

Matthew 5:18-19 gives us: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven..."

So apparently Jesus is urging us to keep the Old Testament law. I mean, either he means "until heaven and earth pass away," or he doesn't, right? And Matthew 5:27-32 gives us "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

Now, if Christians really believed this is good guidance, then there would be a hell of a lot more one-eyed, one-handed politicans in public service.

To be fair, Jesus also said - in Matthew 22:36-40 - "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

OK. So that's a little better. But what about a Christian's involvement in secular government? Should a Christian be trying to change the Nation's laws at all? Let's see what the apostle Paul says in Romans 13:

"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor."

Now, this CERTAINLY doesn't sound like the religious right we've known for so long here in America, does it? They claim our authorities are not only corrupt, but sinfully depraved; that we shouldn't even have to pay taxes, etc.

And who can forget this little gem by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14: "...As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."

But what if Islam should gain the ascendency in America? As we've seen with the infamous "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, there are many Christians who don't countenance religious freedom or freedom of assembly for Muslim - how much less for a Muslim-based government!

It could happen. Unfortunately, either could happen...

Facts to Face

2010-08-26T11:17:00.009-05:00

I went to the New Jersey State Fair this summer and saw, among other things, a few religiously-oriented booths. One of them - The Gideons - gave me a tract called, "Facts to Face."

The first verse cited was from the book of Romans - chapter 5, verse 12: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world..."

Strangely enough, it made me think of the evolution-creationism debate. There are those who accept the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection; there are those who reject it out of hand because the Bible tells them so; and there are those who try to find a middle ground where they can accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and still claim to be a true Christian. The current Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland - Francis Collins - is one such person.

Here are a few quotes:

"I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe."

"[Evolution] may seem to us like a slow, inefficient, and even random process, but to God—who's not limited by space or time—it all came together in the blink of an eye. And for us who have been given the gift of intelligence and the ability to appreciate the wonders of the natural world that he created, to have now learned about this evolutionary creative process is a source of awe and wonder. I find these discoveries are completely compatible with everything I know about God through the Scriptures."

The problem, as you may or may not have guessed (and maybe you haven't, because I haven't seen this problem brought up before), is that the whole purpose of Christ is undermined by evolution. How? Think about it - the Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve and that they sinned - and somehow all of humanity, every single person born since, has inherited this sin. Now, there are two obvious problems here: if we can't take the Bible literally in one point, as in the Genesis account (and as Collins wishes to), then how can we take any of the other things in the Bible literally? How do when know when to take something literally and something figuratively? Now, true believers will say that the Holy Spirit or some such thing makes it clear to each individual believer; but you definitely can't tell from the text. Actually, a clear reading of the text would incline one to take it literally. The other problem is this idea of an inheritance of a "sin nature." What is the mechanism by which this nature is inherited? Is it in our genes? Will scientists one day be able to pinpoint the "sin gene"? The Bible doesn't tell us what the mechanism is - it simply says that's how it is.

Getting back to the less obvious problem - the problem of reconciling the Biblical account of creation with the theory of evolution - the apostle Paul, the mouthpiece of Christ, apparently believes that God literally created Adam and that Adam literally sinned. At least that's what Romans 5:12 says. More tellingly, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:22 that "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." Are we to take these verses figuratively? Paul goes on to say that's precisely why Jesus needed to come into the world - to be a guiltless sacrific and atonement for the sins of humanity, as introduced by Adam.

To my knowledge, Jesus himself is curiously silent on the matter. At least, he doesn't mention Adam by name, or the action of original sin itself. But he does reference another biblical-historical figure of dubious standing - Noah. He says in Matthew 24:37-38:

“But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark."

The story of Noah and the flood has it's own insurmountable problems, but Jesus clearly believed he existed and that the flood happened. Why not Adam and Eve?

So it looks like Christians who want to be "true believers" (whatever that means; ask ten believers and you get ten different answers) have a choice to make: to follow Jesus and listen to Paul - based on their alleged, Holy Spirit-inspired, actual words - or give up Christianity altogether and possibly for the first time face the facts of reality.

Spirits in the Time of Cholera

2010-08-24T07:27:00.020-05:00

Does anyone wonder why fantastic stories like spirit-possession, giants roaming the earth, dragons, corpses rising from the dead, and various other phantasmagoria aren't widely disseminated and believed in today's world?

Is it really any wonder that all of these types of stories WERE widely disseminated and believed in a pre-historic (in an organized, methodological sense), pre-scientific time?

A team of medical scientists have just published the first serious epidemiological study on spirit possession - and its link to mental and physical illness - in post-civil war Mozambique.

It has been the epistemological and metaphysical heritage of humanity to explain natural and personal forces of nature in terms of "spirits." All sorts of supernatural beings have been postulated to explain the apparently inexplicable. The operative word here is obviously "apparently." It is my opinion that the greatest achievement of humanity has been the development of the scientific method. What used to be inexplicable has been explained - sometimes at the expense of common sense or intuition (e.g., heliocentrism, evolution via natural selection).

Broadly speaking, science is a "systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories."

Now, as one who maintains a naturalistic world-view (barring enough convincing evidence otherwise), I also maintain that the scientific method evolved along with humanity and is, of course, prone to error. As Nietzsche says in The Gay Science:

"Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It is only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged - as the weakest form of knowledge."

Elsewhere Nietzsche comments on the origin of logic, which is a staple of the scientific method:

"How did logic come into existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished..."

All this being said, almost everyone today agrees that "error" has been phenomenally reduced throughout the history of humanity. We not only have well-understood and demonstrable explanations for those things that made enormous emotional impacts on early humans (e.g., natural forces like thunder, lightning, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.), but also for things that the vast majority of us have neither a need nor desire to understand (e.g., quantum physics, etc.).

As a side note, I have to say thank goodness for the Greeks, at least the pre-socratic thinkers like Anaximander who "made bold inquiries; he questioned the myths, the knowledge of the old, the heavens, and even the gods themselves. He was wholly rational in his approach and his quest was to derive natural explanations for phenomena that previously had been ascribed to the agency of supernatural powers...His account of meteorology constitutes a most innovative proposition. Though only partially correct, it is the first recorded attempt of a scientific explanation of the weather in the history of mankind."

Tribal humans around the world today, still living in a pre-scientific, pre-historical milieu, are still given to supernatural explanations for the events and forces that impact their daily lives. But modern civilization, for the most part, has dispensed with these erroneous but understandable delusions. Most of modern civilization doesn't readily believe stories like a woman turning into a pillar of salt, or a man being swallowed whole by a whale and coming out alive, or a primitive wooden ship filled with two of every "kind" of animal - including, presumably, the dinosaurs - surviving a global, several-month-long deluge.

If only Jews, Christians and Muslims could incorporate a rigorous intellectual conscience into their world-views; then humanity could breathe a little easier, sleep a little more soundly, and feel, along with Nietzsche, that "at long last the horizon appears free to us again...at long last our ships may venture out again...all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again..."

Epistemology, Part II

2010-08-21T07:56:00.012-05:00

In Part I of this blog post, I talked about Donald Miller's - and religious believers in general - utter lack of an intellectual conscience.

There are a few more points I'd like to make that I didn't include in the previous post. Miller says, "Who knows anything anyway?" Miller is the intellectual heir (though certainly not in any rigorous sense) of a long line of philosophers - religious and otherwise - who have argued for skepticism with regard to human knowledge. In its strongest sense, skepticism is the idea that human beings can't truly know anything. Related to this, the skeptic says that we must doubt every alleged instance of knowledge. Unfortunately for the skeptic, asserting that there can be no knowledge is itself a knowledge claim. How does the skeptic know there is no knowledge? Exactly.

Lay skeptics, if you will - like Miller - argue for skepticism because they point out - and rightly so - that human beings are capable of making mistakes and errors. But this is almost too obvious to state. But what the skeptic is trying to argue is that if human beings can't have "certain" knowledge, then there can be no knowledge at all - at least not through the function of human reason. This is where they sneak in the idea of "knowing" through faith, a bastardization of terms if there ever was one. But as they're doing this, they drag in a truckload of additional epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological baggage without providing the requisite justifications for them. For example, they claim faith is a valid source of knowledge (an epistemological claim) because God (a metaphysical/ontological claim) is the source of faith, and God is perfect (another epistemological claim). But when the believer says that we can't really know anything, how can they claim to know anything about the mechanism of faith, or the existence of God, or his characteristics? (Of course, here they usually assert the authority of the bible, but that is a circular argument par excellence: How do you know there is a God? The bible says so. Who wrote the bible? God did. Etc.)

But we don't need complete certainty to claim justification for true beliefs. I don't need to prove for certain that God doesn't exist in order for me to believe (and demonstrate) that it's probable that he doesn't. It would be more difficult for me to demonstrate that the god of the Deists doesn't exist - mainly because "it" doesn't have as many characteristics as the Christian god that are capable of being refuted with logic and sound reasoning. You can think of knowledge as residing along a continuum or spectrum, from possible to probable to certain. As the level of convincing evidence rises, the more certain we are that our belief is true. My problem with a religious believer like Miller is that he claims to have experienced God but cannot - or refuses - to explain the process by which he has had this experience, and how he knows it's real. And it's not that he simply "knows" he has experienced God, he is "certain," and his hubris exceeds that of most scientists in most areas. For example, Miller says things like the following:

"Penny is living proof that Jesus still pursues people."

"[Christian spirituality] cannot be explained, yet it is beautiful and true."

At least a scientist, in his given field, has a significant amount of evidence accumulated in that field, as well as corroborating evidence from other fields as well. Science is a unifying discipline. But let's get back to Penny for a moment. I will quote this anecdote at length because it's worth it.

Remember, Miller claims in the book that “Penny is living proof that Jesus still pursues people.” But we’ll see that Jesus has some highly controversial methods. He had met Penny at Reed also, and they became friends because they were both “ridiculously insecure.” Apparently Penny had an unusual experience while studying in France, where she met one of Miller’s other friends, Nadine. He claims that Penny wanted nothing to do with religion. But her and Nadine hit it off because Nadine was very interested in Penny’s past. As a result of their blossoming friendship, Nadine’s type of Christianity became intriguing to Penny and they would have many conversations about it. Penny started reading the bible with Nadine, and they would eat chocolate and smoke cigarettes together while reading. Then one night, Penny was “pretty drunk and high,” and claimed to have heard God speak to her. He allegedly said, “Penny, I have a better life for you, not only now but forever.”

Now, it seems to me that hearing voices is a rather dubious thing, and typically coincides with a psychotic break with reality. In fact, just pages before, Miller had given Penny’s background and mentioned that her mother was in fact a paranoid schizophrenic now living on the streets of Seattle where she refuses help from anyone. Of course no one can prove that Penny didn’t hear a voice speak to her; and of course no one can prove that it wasn’t God’s voice. I’ve personally been high and drunk at the same time, too, in college, but I’ve never heard voices. It did, however, feel like I was floating on air as I mingled with the other students at the fraternity party. But I digress. Additionally, Penny also mentioned that, a couple of nights later, presumably sober, she got down on her knees and prayed to God. She says she had already come to believe that Jesus was God, though she says she doesn’t know how she came to that conclusion. She says it wasn’t like doing math or anything, she just “knew inside that He was God.” And she asked God to forgive her.

Now, this Penny episode goes back to the issue of intellectual conscience. Not only does Miller believe Penny's story, he cites it as living proof of Jesus' work in the world. The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways, no? A person with an intellectual conscience would chalk that up to hallucination and self-deception. It is almost too ridiculous to even talk about. And there was a time when I would laugh and go about my business; but with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the world, I feel compelled to do my part, however small, to combat irrationality and attempt to bring back a taste for intellectual conscience. The stakes are just getting too high.

In regard to intellectual conscience - or lack thereof - I should note that the mainstream evangelical establishment, as exemplified in the flagship journalistic endeavor of the movement, Christianity Today, had this to say about Miller's book:

"Spirituality combines deep self-examination—;Who am I, and how am I living?—with a call to integrate with the world outside the self. True spirituality is never merely about the self, but about the experience of the self in the world with God.

This true spirituality is what readers respond to in Donald Miller. His essays are personal, yes, but not solipsistic. They may resolve too quickly, but to their credit, they often do so by calling readers to greater sympathy with others, deeper faith in the love of God, and more patience during trials of discipleship. They tell of the self in the interest of community concerns. They are ultra-casual in tone, filled with the clutter of informal conversation. But that very style and tone draws evangelicals who can relate to Miller's story of faith.

Miller's books describe the experience of being evangelical in a manner that echoes the feelings and thoughts of thousands of evangelicals today. And because he is careful not to reject the faith, he helps readers—especially culturally conflicted young evangelicals—recover it. His books encourage a certain amount of Christian navel-gazing, but only long enough to get the fuzz out."

And:

"He is also neither irreverent nor bohemian—at least, not much. But for mainstream evangelicals today, Miller is a bridge to an irreverent, bohemian world. His work is framed with bohemia—a road trip, a pint of beer, an occasional curse word—but filled with explicit longing for Jesus. He never takes on basic Christian tenets or evangelical priorities such as biblical authority and spreading the gospel, but he asks just enough questions, with just enough gravity, to attract readers who have similar reservations about their faith culture. He's a sotto voce critic of evangelicalism, telling anxious audiences that it's okay to question the faith, yet keep it."

It truly makes me wonder if these reviewers actually read the book, the whole book, especially with regard to the Penny anecdote. The first reviewer said spirituality requires deep self-examination. Clearly it's not deep enough.

Also not deep enough is Miller's understanding of other religions, especially Buddhism:

"It never occurred to me that if Christianity was not rational, neither were other religions. There were times I wished I was a Buddhist, that is, I wished I could believe that stuff was true, even though I didn't know exactly what a Buddhist believed. I wondered what it would be like to rub some fat guy's belly and suddenly be overtaken with good thoughts and disciplined actions and a new car."

I'd like to let Nietzsche (in The Antichrist) tell Miller about Buddhism, and how it compares to Christianity:

"I hope that my condemnation of Christianity has not involved me in any injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of adherents: Buddhism. Both belong together as nihilistic religions...but they differ most remarkably...Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity: posing problems objectively and coolly is part of its inheritance, for Buddhism comes after a philosophic movement which spanned centuries. The concept of "God" had long been disposed of when it arrived. Buddhism is the only genuinely positivistic religion in history. This applies even to its theory of knowledge (a strict phenomenalism): it no longer says "struggle against sin" but, duly respectful of reality, "struggle against suffering."

Of course, I doubt very much that Miller would allow himself to read a book called "The Antichrist."

Finally, what most religious believers do, when they can't establish a truly respectful place for their beliefs in the world, is resort to the shelter of faith where no one can touch them. Unfortunately, this provides further confirmation that religious belief eventually comes down to self-deception and wish fulfillment. People who have "deep convictions," as Miller calls them, with regard to religious beliefs, need their convictions. In Miller's own words:

"I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story."

"The truths of the Bible were like magic, like messages from heaven, like codes, enchanting codes that offered power over life, a sort of power that turned sorrow to joy..."

"But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was."

"I never asked to be human."

"It was wonderful because I forgot my problems."

"I need wonder. I know that death is coming."

"I need wonder to explain what is going to happen to me...I need something mysterious to happen after I die. I need to be somewhere else after I die..."

"I need to know that God has things figured out..."

"I need for there to be something bigger than me..."

"I think I realized that if I walked up to His campfire...I think he would tell me what my gifts are and why I have them, and He would give me ideas on how to use them. I think He would explain to me why my father left, and He would point out very clearly all the ways God has taken care of me through the years, all the stuff God protected me from."

There are many more ludicrous things in this book, but I really don't think I have the patience to get through them all. In the final analysis, this book is a sermon to the choir. But it's also a telling testament to the persistent, pervasive and obdurate nature of religious belief, and the foundation and justification it lays for dangerous acts.

Epistemology! Epistemology! Epistemology!

2010-08-15T14:48:00.027-05:00

I'd like to give a review (polemic?) of influential evangelical author and public speaker Donald Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz.

But first, I'd like to lay my ideological cards on the table at the outset: I am an unabashed atheist who has cultivated a strong intellectual conscience, something Donald Miller in general - and religious believers in particular - sorely lack. I am sympathetic to Nietzsche's lament when he wrote back in 1882 in The Gay Science:

"I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this 'great majority.'"

Elsewhere in the same volume Nietzsche states:

"One sort of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind: They have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. 'What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceptions of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?' None of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now. On the contrary, they thirst after things that go against reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. So they experience 'miracles' and 'rebirths' and hear the voices of little angels!"

And as we'll see in Miller's memoir, his book is rife with this kind of intellectual laziness (resistance?). What's more, he and his friends and acquaintances even hear the voice of God! And we'll see how badly Miller himself thirsts after things that oppose reason...

My main gripe with Miller's memoir, and his evangelism, comes down to epistemology. Epistemology can be defined as: "the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind?"

Now, I normally wouldn't be so concerned with a book like this, but this literary effort, and his public speaking, is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst. To make things clear, his purpose in writing this memoir is more than just mere pedestrian voyeurism. As he states on page 239: “I want you to know Jesus too. This book is about the songs my friends and I are singing.” On the next, and final, page, he continues: “If you haven’t done it in a while, pray and talk to Jesus. Ask Him to become real to you....I can’t think of anything better that could happen to you.” With that out of the way, you can understand the stories he relates in this book in their proper context. He wants Christianity to be updated for a modern taste - he wants it to be cool to be a Christian and to love Jesus.

However, this in itself doesn't present any egregious problems; the biggest worry with Miller and his ideological commitment is when he writes, on page 111: "I would die for the gospel because I think it is the only revolutionary idea known to man." Clearly, in theory if not in practice, the radical Muslim element in the world today seeking to combat Western values and implement Sharia law are ideological kin to Miller and his ilk. Of course, he may not be speaking literally. But throughout the book, Miller and his friends claim to literally hear the Vox Dei, and even see Emily Dickinson:

"I would talk to myself sometimes, my voice coming back funny off the walls and the ceiling...I would read the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud and pretend to have conversations with her...and I asked her if she was a lesbian. For the record, she told me she wasn't a lesbian. She was sort of offended by the question, to be honest. Emily Dickinson was the most interesting person I'd ever met. She was lovely, really, sort of quiet like a scared dog, but she engaged fine when she warmed up to me. She was terribly brilliant."

To be honest? Is he really being honest here? Now, to be fair, the excerpt above comes from a time in his life when he was painfully lonely, and he said he was "pretending" to have a conversation with the storied poet. However, what are we to make of something like this:

"I tell you of Emily Dickinson because it reminds me of the first time I thought, perhaps, I had lost my mind in isolation. I know now it was an apparition of loneliness, but I cannot tell you how very real it seemed that evening in Amherst [where Dickinson lived]."

Friends, here is where principles of epistemology come into play, as well as the concept of an intellectual conscience. He claims he knows that his vision of Miss Dickinson was an apparition. How does he know? He doesn't say. We can safely assume, however, that his metaphysical world-view doesn't allow for ghosts - only gods.

But how does he know what he claims to know? That's a matter of epistemology. By what criteria does he judge that the Emily Dickinson apparition was unreal, but that the voice he and his friends hear is the voice of the one true God? That's a matter for intellectual conscience as well. Here's Nietzsche on the subject, speaking to a fictional moralist who claims that his conscience speaks with moral authority:

"Why do you consider this, precisely this, right?

'Because this is what my conscience tells me; and the voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.'

But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such judgment true and infallible? For this faith - is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your conscience? Your judgment 'this is right' has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. 'How did it originate there?' you must ask, and also: 'What is it that impels me to listen to it?' You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer's commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience - in other words, that you feel something to be right - may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you have been told ever since your childhood was right."

I should note here that Miller was raised Southern Baptist. Like Miller, I, too, was born into born-again Christianity, and the better part of my adult life has been characterized by an at-first subconscious and, later, conscious, effort to extricate myself from my religious upbringing. I'm 38 years old; Miller is 39. Somehow the two of us have arrived at diametrically opposed views about the universe in which we live. I attribute this difference to an intellectual conscience; or, in Miller's case - a lack of it.

At this point, I'd like to present a representative sample of Miller and his friends' epistemology and intellectual conscience (or lack of it) in action:

“I could sense very deeply that God wanted a relationship with Laura.”

“I feel like He is after me.”

“I feel as though I need to believe.”

“My dislike for institutions is mostly a feeling, though, not something that can be explained.”

“I could feel that God was answering my prayer so I went.”

“It is the nuttiest youth group you will ever see, but that is what God said to do.”

“I could feel God’s love for him.”

“I knew it was true. I could feel that it was true.”

“I felt like God was saying that if I had faith she would marry me.”

“I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany.”

As you can see from this sample, Miller et al. claim knowledge via feelings. Feelings, sensations, intuitions - all of these may in fact have strong emotional tones to them, but that doesn't qualify them for knowledge. I particularly like the last quote, and it's particularly ironic in that Miller's friend-turned-Christian, Penny, had a mother who was a paranoid schizophrenic. Does Miller not realize that paranoid schizophrenics hear voices and have strong epiphanies? Of course he does. Does he realize that their hallucinations don't correspond to reality? Of course he does. But how does he know that his and his friends' hallucinations are not of the same class? He doesn't.

Miller gives himself away with regard to his attitude toward an intellectual conscience when he writes:

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove that He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove that He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything."

Who knows anything anyway? Is that a reason to simply give up? If you're willing to die for something, as Miller claims he is, don't you owe it to yourself - and to society at large - to NOT give up? Intellectual conscience demands that we "scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment," to quote Nietzsche again. And if you can't come to an adequate resolution or conclusion, then living in a civil society demands that you practice agnosticism!

Refusing to engage an intellectual conscience is irresponsible; refusing to do so while being willing to die for an ideology is outright dangerous.

An Atheist in the Pulpit

2008-04-10T20:11:00.003-05:00

I know I said that I wasn't going to blog about atheism and religion, or atheism versus religion, etc.; but I think it's important to sometimes reflect on the difficult soul-searching that goes on inside the "souls" of those who were raised in some type of religious faith.

As I've recounted elsewhere, I've gone through my own "dark night of the soul." I think those of us atheists who were not raised in a traditionally religious home cannot quite appreciate the unique intellectual and emotional journey of those born into a hegemonic religious milieu.

The following article is from Psychology Today:

Public identity and private belief are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith.

By: Bruce Grierson

James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn't going well. The reverend wasn't suffering from writer's block—in fact, he was crafting quite an elegant parable about "the importance of making our whole lives a prayer." No, the problem was bigger than that. The sermon skated around a private truth that McAllister could no longer deny.

McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. "You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror," he says of his sermons. "But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I'm a fraud."

Months ago, McAllister, who is presented pseudonymously here, took his crisis to the bishop. He'd lost the faith, he explained, and he wanted out.

"Oh you're not quitting," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "You haven't lost your faith."

"Um, yeah I have," McAllister said. "This is for real."

The bishop shook her head. For the church elders, McAllister's revelations simply did not compute.

"They're either in complete denial," he says, "or they're completely comfortable with the idea that they have a pastor who's a fraud, as long as he puts asses in the seats."

McAllister took the issue up with his psychiatrist. "It emerged that she was a devout Christian herself," he says. "To her credit, she tried to be professional." Where she had once begun and ended their sessions with prayer, she stopped when he asked her to. "But I could see she was squirming. You know, she was sitting with a man of the cloth who had lost it. She had problems with that."

To be a clergyman struggling with God in modern times is to reside at the center of a great battle. At a time when the tension between faith and doubt arguably defines the distance between people more than does gender or race or even politics, the Doubting Priest bears witness for the defense and the prosecution. (Mother Teresa's grave spiritual doubt, as revealed last fall in her letters, means one of two things: Either the closest thing to a modern saint was a phony, or her trials actually make her religious life more meaningful, a poignant example of faith not as a certainty but as a required test that leads to a more profound commitment.) The spiritual struggles of ministers and priests and rabbis remind us that, amid encroaching fundamentalism, atheism is also on the rise. The neo-atheist movement is fueled by outspoken academics and intellectuals including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others who bombard the airwaves and bestseller lists with their calls for deconversion. You can now send your kid to an atheist summer camp or get yourself certifiably "de-baptized." (Britain's national Secular Society offers the service: "Liberate yourself from the original mumbo jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had.") There are hundreds of college-campus groups devoted to secular humanism. The Atheist Alliance International reports "so many speaking requests that leaders of national atheist groups can't keep up."

Even amid the neo-atheist din, a clergy member's crisis of faith stands out. The natural order of things is upset when those entrusted with the protection of souls lose the plot. Because the clergy's livelihood and public identity are intimately bound up with their faith, practical considerations can be just as pressing as theological doubt. And the split between private beliefs and public sermons can leave religious leaders feeling deeply inauthentic, a source of psychic stress that most laypeople will never know.

Many soul-searching clergy never leave the church, making the ranks of ordained agnostics and atheists impossible to tally. But the raw numbers aren't much on the minds of clergy actually in the throes of deconversion. Their doubt is as real and immediate as a cloud over the sun. And somewhere in the nest of questions is a simple one: How did this happen?

McAllister had been raised Catholic, then drifted into a 25-year interregnum where he stopped going to church and called himself an atheist. A midlife spiritual restlessness nudged him into chaplaincy training years ago. A second-career minister—for most of his life he was a graphic designer and a fine artist—McAllister approaches the Big Questions more in the manner of a scholar than of a monk. (Even as a Catholic grade-school kid, he recalls, he hungered for real evidence. "Why," he would ask the nuns, "did this stuff all happen so long ago before there were cameras and TVs? Why aren't there prophets and holy people and miracles now?") Frustrated with his denomination but by no means ready to bail out, he picked up Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. He found he "agreed with about 98 percent of it."

He picked up other books in the neo-atheist canon. He read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and then the one-two punch of Christopher Hitchens's mega-bestselling God Is Not Great and his earlier Letter to a Christian Nation. He closed the latter book and found himself saying, aloud, "Amen." He had to face his misgivings. "I realized, it isn't just that I'm hurt by the way I was treated at synod, and it isn't just that the senior pastor that I work with was an asshole. It's that I don't believe in this anymore. And that was terrifying."

McAllister is not just scared for himself. "I know that my parishioners look to me for comfort," he says. "They're coming to the end of their life and they want some assurance that it's all going to be OK. I have sat at the deathbed of people in my congregation and told them what I regard as lies—or fantasies, at least—just to give them comfort. I'm willing to do that up to a point, but not for the rest of my working life."

Then there's the practical dimension. McAllister owes the church $18,000 for his schooling, at the same time as he's trying to put his last son through college. "I'm 56, which isn't a real good age to be pounding the pavement, and I've got a master's of divinity, not the most marketable degree in the world."

Richard Dawkins is convinced that McAllister's situation is common; in fact, he hopes one day to address it through "clergyman-retraining scholarships," set up through his charitable foundation, to "bridge the gap between living a lie and getting a new life," as he puts it.

McAllister's dilemma is familiar to Dan Barker, who coheads the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The group spreads the word about atheism and fights legal battles to keep church and state separate. It is a soft place to land for the doubters who find it. Barker daily receives e-mails and letters from people who are wrestling with issues of faith, and he always writes back promptly and cheerily. E-mails from clergy are a very small part of the mix. But of all the stories he hears, these are the ones that resonate most—because they are his story, too.

Barker was a religious prodigy. Raised attending a charismatic Pentecostal church near Disneyland, he received "the call" at age 15, and wasted no time spreading the good news. He converted his high-school Spanish teacher. He became part of an evangelical team that went door-to-door holding revival meetings. He penned and performed popular Christian jingles.

But after a milestone birthday, number 30, came and went in 1979, Barker found himself agitated. Creatively, he was stalled; he was having trouble working on a Christian musical about a lost lamb, "because," he explains, "my views were changing while I was trying to write it." The restlessness, he determined, was spiritual. "It was as if there was a little knock on my skull and somebody was saying, 'Hello! Anybody home?' I was starving and didn't know it, like when you work hard on a project and forget to eat and don't know you are hungry until you are really hungry."

He began reading widely outside the Christian canon: science magazines, psychology, philosophy. It was the liberal-arts education he never had, and what followed was "a slow but steady migration across the theological spectrum" that took about five years. (Among the deeply faithful, doubt is often first stoked with exposure to the "outside world.")

As he carried on a secret life of secular reading, Barker phased out the fire-and-brimstone sermons. "But even then I felt hypocritical, often hearing myself mouth words about which I was no longer sure, but words that the audience wanted to hear."

The confirmation, as Barker interpreted it, came one night in November, as he lay on a burlap cot in a church in a Mexican border town where he'd come to give a guest sermon. As he peered out at a splash of stars, Barker had a sudden profound sensation that had nothing to do with intellect, the kind of deeply felt moment more commonly associated with finding God than losing Him. He was, Barker understood, utterly alone here.

"For my whole life there had been this giant eyeball looking at me, this god, this holy spirit, this church history, and this Bible. And not only everything I did but everything I thought was being judged: Was God pleased? I realized that that wasn't there anymore. It occurred to me, 'I own these thoughts. Nobody knows what I'm thinking right now. There's no fear of hell, no fear of judgment, I don't have to be right or wrong, I can just be me.'" It felt as if charges had been dropped for a crime for which he had been falsely accused. It was exhilarating and frightening all at once. "When you're ready to jump out of an airplane to skydive, you can be terrified but excited at the same time," he says. "There's a point where you go, all right, let's do this."

Says Barker: "we surveyed our members some years ago, asking them: "If you were raised religious, why did you change your mind?" There was no one answer. Some people gave social reasons: the way the church treats women. Some people gave reasons like, 'the fear of hell—I just couldn't live with that.' But the answer people gave more often than any other was that it was intellectual: Religion eventually just did not make sense."

Looking back, Tom Reed, a former Roman Catholic priest from Mississippi, can pretty clearly identify his own moment of truth. It followed a quick succession of historical events: the 1968 Vatican statement upholding opposition to birth control and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The two events finished off Reed's faith in the church and his faith in God.

For Reed, deconversion was almost as quick and binary as the flick of a switch. At a certain point, he says, "it was suddenly clear that the courageous thing to do was to just admit that this is all made up.

"I remember waking up one day saying, I'm going to practice being an atheist, just move through the day with that in mind. It had become a part of my being, the idea that God was ultimately responsible for everything that was happening. Now I proceeded from the assumption that there was no God in the picture."

It sounds like a coolly rational process, a Jesuitical internal debate tipping forward into certainty. It wasn't. "It was scary as hell," Reed says. "I realized, 'I'm not going to see my mother and father again.' " The sense of cold finality, the impression that one's prayers are just so many tennis balls served into the ocean: Such existential issues are a big part of anybody's crisis of faith. But for religious leaders, the stakes are raised even further, for faith is no longer a private matter.

"As a clergyman your livelihood is not just a job—it's a whole theological system that you'd better be on board with," says Dick Hewetson, a former Episcopal minister from Minnesota who left the church to do secular work and soon called himself an atheist.

"It hit me during those last couple of years in the pulpit that everything coming out of my mouth was being taken as gospel," he says. "I began to think, This is crazy. If I tell these people something, they believe me. Remember Jonestown? People asked, How could that happen? Well, I know how. I wasn't the Jim Jones type, and my people weren't the Jonestown type. But I was the shepherd and they were the sheep, for sure."

Charles Templeton, the late Canadian evangelist-turned-journalist, argued that a disjunction between what clergymen say publicly and what they believe privately is so common that serious cognitive dissonance comes with the territory. "Most intelligent clergymen preach to the right of their theology," Templeton wrote in his memoir Farewell to God. "They are more conservative in the pulpit than they are in private conversation or when counseling a parishioner."

What eventually happens, as it did for James McAllister, is that sermons become cooler and less dogmatic. The clergyman, stated Templeton, "is likely to settle for what might best be described as an altruistic, do-goodest Christian philosophy."

Krista Wren [name changed], who never became a minister only because doors were quietly closed in front of her, tells a tale of spiritual disaffection with an ironic twist. A minister's wife from Atlanta and "a flailing Christian for 23 years," Wren worked with her husband on Pat Robertson's ministry before leaving to do missionary work in Africa. She thought of herself as a missionary; unfortunately for her, no one else did. At one fund-raising meeting prior to the couple's African departure, three dozen people gathered around her husband, Tom [name changed], and one said a prayer: "God, anoint Tom to bring forth your word with power! Let him see miracles as he prays for the people of Africa. May he lead many to Christ as you empower his words... " Then the crowd gathered around her. She held her breath in anticipation. "And Dear God," a woman's voice said, "please give Krista creative ways to do laundry." It was a decisive moment and in a way a portent of the end. "Maybe I've not gotten past it because it sums up the mind of many churches and even so many scriptures," Wren wrote in a recent e-mail to Dan Barker, with whom she had been corresponding. "Men do great things for God—and women wash their shorts."

Wren is currently a hairsbreadth away from throwing it all over the side and coming out as an atheist.

But here is the twist: Her husband became a pastor only because, many years ago, she converted him. ("And with a great deal of effort.") Now she's heading back across the bridge the other way. She is virtually certain he won't make the trip with her. What is certain is that their marriage will be tested. Her disaffection is a subject so delicate she handles it with tongs.

"I'm hesitant to say too much, but the things that I have said have caused him to look as though his dog just died. When he learned I was corresponding with Dan—he looked over my shoulder in the middle of an e-mail—the color drained from his face. He shook his head and said, as he walked out of the room, 'This is just sad.' Well, part of me thinks it's sad, and part of me thinks it's about damn time."

Barker's own marriage did not survive his spiritual U-turn. (His wife, who remains faithful, remarried a Baptist minister.) And their four children?

"We both agreed that the children should never have to be in a position where they had to choose sides." One son has announced that he doesn't believe in God. One daughter "was going to a Unitarian church for a while, and I think she might be a nominal believer." A second daughter "has been a New Agey believer for a while." The third daughter is patently, traditionally religious. Barker seems pleased by the way the kids landed all across the spectrum of belief/disbelief, pixels in a snapshot of free will. Religious conversion is often explained in part as an effort to relieve the tension of uncertainty ("If the decision could be made conscious," psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote, "I think it would be as if that person said to himself or herself, 'I am willing to do anything—anything—in order to liberate myself from this chaos.'") But letting faith go, in the end, can bring relief, too.

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

In Dan Barker's journey from fundamentalism to atheism, there were two stages of disillusionment. First came the loss of faith in the religion (that is, the loss of faith in the literal word), and then came the loss of faith in faith itself.

"The first step is hardest," he says. "Because as a fundamentalist, there is no middle ground.

"I remember a pastor telling me that he had a couple of congregants who didn't believe in the historical truth of Adam and Eve. They thought that Adam and Eve were a metaphor. I was shocked. I thought, 'How can you even let them be in your church? If parts of the Bible can be allegorized, then anything goes!'

"But I made the leap: OK, the fact that I disagree with these Christians should not be grounds for disfellowshipping them. That was a hard thing for me to do. But once I did it, the later flying leaps that I made were easier to take, psychologically, because I'd already admitted some gray."

A number of the clergy who have contacted Barker tell of a similar spiritual arc. It's as if a kind of psychological algorithm begins to work, with the shedding of illusions proceeding in inevitable, sequential steps, until an outdated belief is pitched with last night's coffee grounds. We wake up, if we're lucky: case closed.

And yet it is not so simple as that. Carlton Pearson is an example of a clergyman whose spiritual about-face need not end up where neo-atheists say it should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Pearson, then a Pentecostal bishop, was among the most prominent and beloved fundamentalist preachers in the American South, heading up a megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a loyal congregation 5,000 strong.

But something happened to Pearson as he and his church nosed toward the millennium. He stopped believing in hell and sin and the literal interpretation of the scriptures.

He was eating dinner in front of the TV with his baby daughter. On the news, Peter Jennings was revisiting Rwanda, investigating the fallout from that country's civil war. The scene was nightmarish: tiny infants, flies in their eyes and hair red from malnutrition groping at the empty breasts of their skeletal mothers. Carlton looked over at his own plump-faced child, then back at the TV. These African kids would soon be gone. Gone where? According to his own formal belief system, they were bound for hell. Somebody, he thought, needs to preach the gospel to these kids right now. To save them.

And then another thought formed. "You think I'm sucking them into hell? Carlton, look. They're already there." This, he thought, is where the pain comes from, all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We do it to each other, and to ourselves. "I saw emergency rooms and divorce courts and jails," Pearson recalls. "For the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of hell."

It was a very different Carlton Pearson who returned to the pulpit. A lot of things he had been preaching, he told his congregation, were wrong. The central premise of their faith, the idea, "as my dad used to put it, that 'You gonna be cookin,' but you ain't never gonna get done!' " was bogus. There is no eternal damnation.

Almost all of the flock abandoned Pearson, who was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops.

Like Dan Barker, Carlton Pearson made a big leap away from literalism. And that leap set a chain-reaction of new perceptions: He became much less judgmental, more receptive to people and ideas he had dismissed or discounted. Unlike Barker's leap, Pearson's did not land him in a godless place. Throughout his trials the transmission signal of the divine, a felt thing, an inarticulable but absolutely bet-the-farm certainty persisted.

And so instead of abandoning God he invented a new theology that he calls the "gospel of inclusion," and he hung out a new shingle for a church he calls New Dimensions. It's a theology that gives everyone, not just avowed Christians, hope of salvation—and spares everyone the eternal fire of hell.

"I believe the logic of God is inerrant," he says. "I don't believe that the letter is. The logic of God would be love; the letter of God would be law." That Pearson is nominally a Christian seems almost a trivial point. After he was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops, the Unitarian Church of Christ opened its arms to him; and since it preached an inclusiveness he appreciated, the denomination seemed as good a place as any to hang his hat.

The Unitarian Church is a haven for many an atheist and agnostic, offering the comforting ritual (hymns are often rewritten with nontheistic lyrics) and esprit de corps of religion, without the dogma. Suzanne Paul, a minister to the New Hope Unitarian Universalist congregation in the suburbs of Detroit, was raised Roman Catholic, but could not stop questioning the "logic" of the Bible, and concluded that she was an atheist at age 20. She became involved in humanistic Judaism through her husband and finally found a niche in New Hope, where she leads holiday celebrations she sorely missed. "We celebrate Passover, Easter, Yom Kippur, asking, 'What can we learn from this holiday?' Yom Kippur, for example, is about forgiveness and atonement. We are naturally social animals and like to be with like-minded people. I enjoy the community aspect of religion but not the theistic end of it."

It took Suzanne some three decades to openly declare herself an atheist. "I recognized early that you can clear a room if you say you're an atheist. I prefer to identify myself as a humanist."

Pearson, too, has struggled with when and how to characterize his beliefs. "I don't always say this publicly but I'm starting to feel more free to do so: I don't necessarily believe in a god, or the God; I just believe in God."

Since his new direction, Pearson's fortunes have plummeted. Only about a hundred people hear him preach on Sundays at 1 p.m. because they have to wait until the Episcopalians finish their service. "We're in a foster-care program," he says.

And when people approach him and say, "Bishop Pearson, I'm losing my faith," he now has a better answer.

"We spend our lives impersonating who we think others want us to be," he says. "And we end up as living impostors. So, when someone comes to me and tells me they're losing their faith, I congratulate them. You're starting to embrace your own thinking self—the essential, immutable, immortal self— as opposed to the accidental criminal you have been made to think you are."

Doubt, for Carlton Pearson, isn't a sign that one's faith is evaporating; it's just a sign that it's going underground and changing.

And so there emerges, in the literature of spiritual self-transformation, a kind of parallel canon between the religious conversions and the Dawkins-style deconversions. It is the idea of the full circle, or the nun-turned-religious scholar Karen Armstrong's so-called "spiral staircase," wherein we eventually come back around to our old spiritual position, but at a higher level, from which we see a wider landscape.

It's the story of the young Carl Jung. Growing up in Geneva, he watched his parson father become tormented by religious doubt. This made him reject conventional religious practice, but it sharpened his sense of the importance of some sort of personal spiritual quest, which he regarded as the main issue in the life of everyone over 35.

The desertion of priests and nuns from the Catholic church since the 1960s seems to be the story of an en masse loss of faith. "But it can also be seen as a strengthening of faith," says John Portmann, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who is working on a book on "cultural Catholicism." (By far the most-cited reason for leaving was unrelated to God: It was church policy on celibacy and marriage.) "If some semblance of faith can persist in spite of all [the church's missteps and scandals], you know your faith is real, you weren't in it for the trappings of the church or the comfort of the rituals."

Dan Barker has now been an atheist longer than he was a believer, and he is at peace with his decision. But for the more recent deconverts, some struggles remain. Perhaps chief among them is finding a substitute for the very real consolations that faith provided. When you've lost God, how do you fill the void?

"That's what I'm wrestling with now," says James McAllister. "I don't have anyone to talk to in my heart. The prayers I used to say, I simply don't bother anymore. I obviously regard prayer to be silly, even. But it was a comforting place that I could go. I've let that go. And there is a void. And hopefully it can be replaced just by appreciating being alive."

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008
Last Reviewed 2 Apr 2008
Article ID: 4493

Interlude: Thirty-four Thousand Feet Above Sea Level

2008-01-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

The early morning sunlight, the severely angular light, makes of the web of thread-like gossamer rivers below silvery veins, as if the earth were one colossal chunk of ore.

This place is something to return to, secretly and alone, to plunder with one's hands or with one's heart.

Digesting Naturalism

2008-01-12T10:38:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven't been posting here for a while; or only sporadically. I've grown increasingly weary from reading and trying to address the almost daily incursions into public discourse and governmental policy (both national and local) by the Evangelical Religious Right.

Additionally, I've become bored with the Ping-Pong match between the pejoratively-named "New Atheists" and their scores of detractors. I've written about this numerous times before, so I will just briefly reiterate my thoughts on the matter.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens have been derided for their disrespectful and caustic tone; for their allegedly incomplete scholarship as regards contemporary theistic arguments; for their alleged advocacy of a fascist-like pogrom to rid the country of anyone professing religious belief of any kind; and for their alleged tarnishing of the good, and more temperate, name of atheism.

But the main goal of these New Atheists, as I read them, is to rid public discourse of the taboo against ridiculing the ridiculous; a subsidiary goal is to rid public discourse of the taboo against atheism as such. Of course, reasonable people will debate whether or not their approach to this secondary goal is the right one or not.

But what I see as the underlying motif in this campaign, as well as the more temperate tomes of thinkers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, is the project of de-deifying nature and, more importantly, re-naturalizing human beings.

I think the project of de-deifying nature has been almost entirely completed thanks to the blossoming of the sciences since the early 19th Century. The project of re-naturalizing human beings has also made great strides ever since the "Decade of the Brain" in the 1990's, and the steadily increasing maturation of the disciplines falling under the umbrella of neuroscience.

But there a few major obstacles to overcome before a naturalistic world-view can become widespread. These may prove insurmountable. Chief among these is the idea that human beings do not have a soul, much less a "self" that is an actual entity that comprises the kernel of personal identity. What I mean by that is what Siddhartha Gautama claimed 2,500 years ago: there is no self.

The other big one is the notion of free will - that human beings possess a power to contravene the law of universal causality. Or, as libertarian William Thomas puts it:

In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control.

But there are good philosophical arguments against this view, as well as an increasing body of scientific evidence in opposition to it. The only legitimate argument in defense of it, in my view, is that from personal experience: we all feel as if we have free will. But as Spinoza noted a long time ago, "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire."

A more general and over-arching resistance to the re-naturalization of human beings is the displacement of our perceived importance in the Universe: we are not a loving and omnipotent god's creation; we may not even be alone in the Universe; and we are not even the apogee of the evolutionary process.

So instead of spending my time railing against the incursions of the Evangelical Religious Right and their self-proclaimed "moral majority"; or against scientifically illiterate school boards and Presidential candidates; or trying to secure a place at the table of public discourse for atheism; I will spend my time and energy trying to persuade us human beings of the need for re-naturalizing ourselves. As regarding the former activities, I will speak my mind at the ballot box.

My template for this process of re-naturalization will be what was the central concern of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever people think they know of Nietzsche's ideas, they are probably misinformed - and his ideas misrepresented. Granted, Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand, and I am indebted to the writings and correspondence of British philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson for his accessible exegesis of Nietzsche's corpus; but I will continue the attempt to render Nietzsche's prescient ideas in a more modern vernacular. My next post will attempt just that, as concisely and as cogently as I can.

Tags:

naturalism, Nietzsche

New Year's Resolution

2008-01-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish for myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year - what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in all things. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

- Friedrich Nietzsche from The Gay Science (1882)

Technorati tags:

New Year's Resolution, naturalism, Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I forgot how beautiful the Earth is...

2007-12-15T11:03:00.000-05:00

As someone with a naturalistic view of existence and the world, it surprises me to find how little I spend appreciating the actual world. Sure, you can philosophize until it comes out your ear holes, but what good is all that if you never take the time to see the world? And I don't just mean going outside for a walk or hiking on a local trail. I mean actually seeing more of the world than what's within an easy traveling distance.

Two weeks ago I had to fly out to Los Angeles from where I live in New Jersey. I suppose I was fortunate, because as we climbed to almost 40,000 ft we enjoyed clear skies for almost the entire flight. The first thing that struck me was how immense the Earth is. Sure, you can quote numbers and measures and statistics about the dimensions of the Earth, but until you are put in a place where you can experience its vastness - at least as much as possible - you don't get the same feelings of wonder and awe.

As we left the Northeast - which I've seen from a plane hundreds of times before - we flew over the bread basket of our country, the Great Plains. From that altitude, you can see areas that are sparsely populated, interspersed with the bricolage of tilled and farmed land - a patchwork quilt of muted, earthy colors. From this perspective you could also see the multiplicity of communal arrangements: from hamlet to village to town to city.

But the real interesting geography came into view as we left the Plains States for the Rocky Mountain States. First the long, sloping foothills come into view - a steady, calm overture gradually rising to a crescendo of the forbidding abruptness of a colossal mountain fortress, so massive that one is compelled to think it must conceal and guard the most precious treasure in its labyrinthine keep. My favorite mountain peak has to be the Grand Tetons of Wyoming:

Leaving the seemingly unbroken chain of rocky mountains threading their way up into the far north, we come upon a series of smaller massifs, with the distance between them growing larger and larger. Many of them have stopped short of thrusting above the timberline, and their sparsely forested peaks merge more gingerly into more densely forested foothills.

But soon the irregular fringe of forested expanse gives way to an interlude of the dimpled, the wrinkled, and the jagged, before giving way to the more desolate sweep of the deserts. We see variegated mesas, some small and discreet, others that stretch almost out of sight, leaving the impression of a gigantic, petrified wave frozen in place, eternally on the brink of tipping but never crashing down upon its uninhabited shore. Before long you are startled by the feathered fractals sporadically spread over the sandstone - rivers that have cut channels through the uniform, parched wasteland of earth, which the unflagging wind has brushed and softened.

One last gift before we enter the gates of civilization again is the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona:

Again, one could be impressed by the measures and dimensions: nearly 4,000 feet wide and over 500 feet deep, it was created by a 150 foot-wide meteorite traveling at an approximate speed of 29,000 m.p.h.! Seeing it from 40,000 feet in the sky was impressive, but I can only imagine how impressive it would have been to stand at its rim; and how doubly impressive it would have been if I had seen it from a plane and stood at its rim...

While all these terrestrial and extraterrestrial phenomena bear the twin aspects of exhilaration and fear, the humanly-created possesses a similar grandeur. As we leave the vast blanket of desert and descend over the last few massifs before the vaster expanse of the open sea, we again encounter sprawling humanity filling every corner and cranny of the spacious valley. But it's not merely the virus-like fecundity of our species that astonishes, but the works of our minds and our hands - the freeways, tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers. We are the most relentlessly and restlessly creative animal on earth, for good or ill.

But it seems to have fallen to our lot to attempt the increasingly mutually exclusive goals of both flourishing and sustaining life - all life.

Technorati tags:

naturalism, religious naturalism, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Barringer Meteorite Crater, Grand Tetons

He once was dead; now He is risen

2007-12-14T07:55:00.000-05:00

The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.

Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event - and these initial consequences . . . are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Before I get into my discussion, I want to clarify a few things. First, Nietzsche wrote this in 1882, so this idea that "God is dead" is certainly not new. Second, when Nietzsche says that the Christian god is dead, he means it metaphorically; he means to say that the Christian value system - which up to that point enjoyed an unparalleled hegemony over Europe - was no longer tenable to many. Third - and in case any unread Religious Right party member, or member of the Moral Majority, find their way to this blog - the word "gay" in Nietzsche's lexicon meant "joyous" and not "homosexual." Of course, that shouldn't need to be said...

Despite what many people think of Nietzsche - that is, that he was a life-denying nihilist - he in fact argued for a heretofore unimagined affirmation of life, this life, and not some after-worldly life. I think this misunderstanding comes from not reading Nietzsche's works, and simply relying on what "they" say about him and his philosophy.

He viewed Christian morality as life-denying or life-negating (incidentally, he viewed Buddhism the same way). He believed Christianity taught hatred for the body, for the earth, for anything that was not directed toward the other-worldly paradise of Heaven. In this sense was Nietzsche an "immoralist." But perhaps here a word should be said about the difference between morality and religious culture.

Alonzo Fyfe of the Atheist Ethicist wrote an insightful post about this difference:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Fyfe goes on to give some examples:

We can easily classify the prescriptions against murder, rape, child abuse, slavery, assault, theft, lying, ‘bearing false witness’, breaking promises or contracts, recklessness, negligence, and similar kinds of actions as prescriptions that the agent will have to take with him as he goes into society.

We can just as easily identify a set of prescriptions that an agent can leave behind – where the fact that one religion may require these types of actions while another does not is of little social consequence. These prescriptions include what to eat or drink, when to eat or drink, where to live (the concept of ‘homeland’), when to pray, how to pray, to whom one is to pray, which scripture to read, when to work (or not work), what to wear. These are the prescriptions that I will put in the category of ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that the members of a religion may not impose on others.

Bearing in mind the difference between morality and religious culture, we can return to Nietzsche for a moment. Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand and interpret, mainly because he didn't write as a systematic philosopher, and his writing style was more stylistic than stodgy and academic.

Although it's not possible to distill Nietzsche's thought into a single aphorism, perhaps the best we can do for our present purpose is University of Warwick philosophy professor Keith Ansell Pearson's description:

There is no longer any ‘true world’ to be faithful to and to aspire to, that is, no realm of pure being that would give us permanence, bliss, peace, unity, harmony, etc. Rather we are to affirm terrestrial life – becoming, change, multiplicity, plurality – as our only life and in all its complexity and difficulty.

Nietzsche thinks that through naturalism – what he calls the task of translating the human being back into nature – we will, in fact, enrich and potentially expand our conceptions of the possibilities of human existence. To do this he thinks we must be brave, honest, and patient: the free spirit must learn, he says, the value of keeping its energy and enthusiasm in bounds.

But it's not my aim in this post to dissect and present Nietzsche's philosophy. My goal in this post is to talk about how the Christian god (or equally the Muslim or Jewish god) has been "dying" for the past century or so, only to begin to be restored to good health in the past quarter of this century - at least in America.

The most consistent resuscitation attempts have been to sneak creationism/Intelligent Design into our public school systems; federal funding for faith-based programs; and the idea, even among Democrats, that only a "person of faith" - by which they mean a person of Christian or Jewish faith - can lead this country. But perhaps the most ambitious and, arguably, the most ominous attempt is the resolution that passed in the House of Representatives: "Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith."

I say "ominous" because, as cited in the resolution itself, there are 225,000,000 Christians in this country. That's a lot of Christians, given the fact that our current population is approximately 300,000,000. I'm not sure who they include in their number, but let's assume that 75% of the 300 million are both Christian and members of our electorate. Recent polls have suggested that 90% of Americans are Christian, so I imagine 75% is conservative. I could certainly be wrong.

But if 90% of the population is Christian, and 75% are entitled to vote, and since politicians for national office must necessarily pander to constituencies in order to even get elected, what would happen if this were to become the basis for a Constitutional amendment? Everyone knows there are many people who would love to see a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (a prescription of "religious culture", as the Atheist Ethicist would note).

I mean, who doesn't love Christmas? I'm an atheist, and I love Christmastime. But I enjoy a secular Christmas. I enjoy the gathering of friends and family, the good food and drink, the snow - even the holiday songs (with a few exceptions). Only a true Scrooge could be against it. At least that's what would most likely prevail as "public opinion."

But our government's religious neutrality is exactly what has kept the peace within our country and what has allowed us to flourish. I imagine Christians are confident and emboldened when they hear that 90% of the country is Christian, and that the House of Representatives resolves to express "continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide." These words, "continued support," are disquietingly vague. Just as Congress has abused the somewhat ambiguous "General Welfare" clause of the U.S. Constitution, a Christian Congress would almost certainly abuse a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution making Christianity the State religion, should it become law. Then the 1st Amendment would certainly be tragically superseded by the "Christian Nation" clause.

Perhaps we need to add this development to Naomi Wolf's article "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps," from her forthcoming book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.

Technorati tags:

Nietzsche, Keith Ansell Pearson, House Resolution, Christmas, Christian faith, God is dead, importance of Christmas, importance of the Christian Faith

Mitt Romney

2007-12-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

I'm just going to let Mitt Romney's hypocrisy speak for itself. All quotes below are from his speech. Italics mine.

"Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to
America's greatness: our religious liberty."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be
rejected because of his faith."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one
religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were
reserved only for faiths with which we agree. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a
revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about
the equality of all..."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but
as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are
guaranteed the free exercise of our religion."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"...we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome
our nation's symphony of faith. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

Technorati tags:

Mitt Romney, religious freedom

The Fundamentals of Intelligent Design

2007-11-03T06:48:00.000-05:00

The main point of my previous post "Fundamentalism in Science Education?" was to argue that Intelligent Design shouldn't be taught in science classes because it's not science. It seems to me that Intelligent Design points to gaps in our current understanding of biological complexity, attempts to argue that the mechanism in question is too complex to have arisen through natural processes, and therefore must be the work of an Intelligent Designer. But proponents of Intelligent Design, at least in their public promotion strategy, claim not to know who or what the designer is. However, as I noted in my last post, Intelligent Design is the more publicly palatable incarnation of creationism, though not in the Biblically literal sense.

It seems to me that for Intelligent Design to be science, it must then ask the questions of who or what the designer is, and how this designer in fact designed the mechanisms in question. Despite this lack of investigative posture that is a hallmark of science, the most credentialed and most persistent advocate of Intelligent Design in biology would be Lehigh University's Michael Behe, who has written the relatively popular books Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Not only have many of Behe's claims been addressed by others, such as biologists Ken Miller of Brown University and Paul R. Gross (currently of the University of Virginia), but Behe's own testimony in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case is evidence that Intelligent Design is not science and, indeed, that it is a Trojan Horse presumably for getting public school children to be open to the possibility that God - specifically the Christian God - is the designer of the Universe. Here are some samples of Behe's testimony:

"Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God."

"Contrary to Professor Behe’s assertions with respect to these few biochemical systems among the myriad existing in nature, however, Dr. Miller presented evidence, based upon peer-reviewed studies, that they are not in fact irreducibly complex."

In response to my post criticizing Discovery Institute's article "Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education", Michael Egnor rightly claims that, since science limits itself to studying what is natural, hypothetical supernatural things like God and Heaven aren't the proper purview of methodological naturalism. However, if one makes the claim that God (or Heaven) exists, we would assume that evidence is forthcoming; after all, everyone has reasons for believing certain propositions. Reasons can be based on strong evidence or weak evidence. Strong evidence is characterized by widely accessible, possibly even repeatable, instances, or even first-hand accounts. Weak evidence would be of the type of anecdotes, of unreliable second or third-hand accounts.

While it's true that methodological naturalism has no bearing on the actual truth, or the actual ontological status of things like God or Heaven (or ghosts), it does have a bearing on the plausibility of such things. While it is certainly possible that such things exist - anything is possible (except things like square circles), the evidence for the existence of such things is of the weak variety, and reduces the plausibility of such things to much less than possible. If we assume - for the sake of argument - that the philosophical arguments for and against the supernatural (primarily God) cancel each other out, then it would seem to me that the evidence for the existence of such things as God and Heaven is derived from ancient "sacred" texts and personal feelings and intuitions, as well as the anecdotal testimony of individual believers.

So a layperson outside the discipline of science would weigh the evidence for the existence of such things. Naturally (no pun intended), if our hypothetical layperson asks the believer in such things for evidence, she will use her critical thinking - which she uses in her "everyday" life - to evaluate such evidence. If a Deist - whose God created the Universe but doesn't intervene in it - makes the claim that his God exists, our layperson would probably claim agnosticism with regard to such a being (though technically that would be atheism, since she would lack a belief in such a God). However, if a Theist claims that there is a personal God who takes an active interest in the lives of human beings, intervenes in the natural world to effect certain types of outcomes, then there should be evidence for such things in the natural world. In addition to her own personal experience, feelings and intuition, our critical thinking layperson will of course look to the relevant scientific disciplines to evaluate the plausibility of the veracity of such evidence, including the reliability of her own personal experiences, feelings and intuitions, as well as any scientific evidence supporting the claims of ancient, purportedly "sacred", texts.

As regards the philosophical "evidence" for all things supernatural, Egnor states that the claim that there is no epistemology for knowing the supernatural is akin to the assertion that "two and a half [millennia] of Western philosophy don't exist." The branch of philosophy known as epistemology is a rather thorny subject. If we regard it broadly as the investigation into what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion, the many philosophers Egnor cites (Kant, Plato, Descartes, Plantinga, Aquinas, etc.) undoubtedly all have their opinions on these matters, and their writings are attempts to justify their positions. One is either convinced by their arguments or one isn't. But one brings to bear one's own intelligence and one's evaluation of corroborating or contradicting evidence in determining if one is convinced. So one utilizes internal as well as external evidence when doing this. The external evidence would be the findings of our best science, because our best science has an incomparable tack record of success in providing knowledge of the world in which we live and believe (or disbelieve) certain propositions that affect that world.

On the one hand Egnor argues that the scientific method (i.e., methodological naturalism) properly "hews to evidence, not philosophical dogma" and that the supernatural is not the proper purview of science; but on the other hand he seems to lament the fact that "atheistic" scientists - particularly Darwinists - employ a philosophical constraint on their discipline. Oddly, he shows how a forerunner of the scientific method like Kepler - a devout Christian - discarded the philosophical dogma of his time in order to accurately explain the workings of the Universe - by adhering to his own philosophical dogma that the Christian God created the world according to a humanly intelligible plan! So Egnor seems to be arguing that Kepler's Christian philosophical assumptions led to a successful scientific discovery, but that "philosophical constraints on the interpretation of data are inconsistent with the scientific method."

If Kepler had been a Deist - where a first cause God creates an intelligible Universe but doesn't intervene in it thereafter - there wouldn't be much difference between that and the philosophical assumption of methodological naturalism; namely, that the observable phenomena of nature are best explained by reference to natural causes. In the words of geology professor Steven D. Schafersman, methodological naturalism is:

...the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it … science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success ... but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is.

One more point of contention: Egnor claims that philosophical reflection on the data is consistent with the scientific method, but then calls the claim that philosophical naturalism is true a "bizarre inference," claiming that science has revealed that the universe was created out of nothing, that the properties of the Universe are fine-tuned to allow the existence of life, and that DNA has been shown to be too much like computer software that creates "intricate nanotechnology."

With regards to cosmology, science has not definitively revealed that the Universe was created out of nothing; at worst they say they don't know, and at best they attempt to formulate hypotheses that can be tested in order to discover the origin of the Universe. In terms of the alleged fine-tuning of the fundamental principles of the Universe being preset to ensure that sentient life will emerge, the most obvious answer is that if they principles didn't happen to be what they are, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Some thinkers aren't satisfied with this answer, however, and cite the improbability of a Universe coming into existence with principles that do allow for such life to emerge. But simply acknowledging that the Universe appears to have been fine-tuned for life to emerge does not mean that one has to conclude exclusively that a supernatural God did it. It is just as probable that we are living inside a simulation (à la The Matrix) created by an advanced extraterrestrial form of intelligent life than a supernatural God who is somehow mysteriously outside of nature. There's as much "evidence" for that as there is for a creator God. And in terms of DNA being an irreducibly complex computer program that appears to have been designed as is, it should be noted that scientists are actively working on discovering the evolution of DNA. The RNA World Hypothesis is one such attempt. They are not throwing up their hands and saying, "God did it." That's not science.

Egnor ends his piece with the following:

Here’s the atheist interpretation of this scientific evidence: atheism is the only permissible explanation. Atheists are entitled to their opinion, but they have no business teaching students that atheist fundamentalism defines the limits of science.

I'm an atheist, but I am not an atheist who brings his interpretation to the scientific evidence; I am an atheist largely because of the scientific evidence. As Egnor himself says, "philosophical reflection on the data" is consistent with the scientific method. I don't think that atheism is the only permissible explanation, but I do think it's the most likely. There seems to be an overwhelming preponderance of evidence for the truth of (metaphysical) naturalism, and a paucity of evidence for the Christian God specifically, and the supernatural generally.

Science educators are not teaching atheist fundamentalism to students; on the contrary, they are presenting the overwhelming evidence for the veracity of such things as evolution by natural selection as opposed to the scant (and mostly refuted) evidence for Intelligent Design.

If there was overwhelming evidence for Intelligent Design, it should be taught. But then that would necessarily "naturalize" God - I mean the Intelligent Designer...

Technorati tags:

Intelligent Design, methodological naturalism, philosophical naturalsim, atheism, Michael Egnor

Fundamentalism in Science Education?

2007-10-26T08:07:00.000-05:00

The Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, has published an article titled "Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education" on its Evolution: News & Views website.

The article criticizes SUNY professor Massimo Pigliucci - who has PhDs in genetics, botany and philosophy - and who wrote an essay titled "The Evolution-Creation Wars" for the McGill Journal for Education.

Here is the abstract for the essay:

The creation-evolution “controversy” has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

The Evolution: News & Views article was written by Michael Egnor, a colleague of Dr. Pigliucci's at SUNY. Egnor takes issue with several of Pigliucci's assertions and characterizations in his essay, namely: the conflation of Creationism with Intelligent Design; and that a better science education is a "tonic against belief in Heaven"; the conflation of philosophical naturalism with methodological naturalism. Additionally, Egnor claims that it is misleading for Pigliucci to claim that there is no controversy over the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Allow me to address these issues in turn:

First, I actually agree with Egnor that "Creationism" and "Intelligent design" are ostensibly different things; however, the history behind the Intelligent Design movement puts the lie to the prima facie difference between the two.

The seeds of the Intelligent Design movement have been shown to be found in the Supreme Court case of Edwards vs. Aguillard (1987), where the Court ruled

that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools whenever evolution was taught was unconstitutional, because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion. At the same time, however, it held that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."

One of the textbooks the creationism advocates proposed to be used was Of Pandas and People, which was originally published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, whose original purpose was "promoting and publishing textbooks presenting a Christian perspective." The defeat in the Edwards vs. Aguillard case led the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement - who are also the leaders of The Discovery Institute - to substitute the references to creationism and creation science with Intelligent Design. As noted in the more recent court case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District (2005):

As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge:

(1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID;

(2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and

(3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content .... The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision."

As if that wasn't enough to indict the Intelligent Design movement, there is the infamous Wedge strategy, the goal of which is

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.

To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

So for Egnor to claim that "Intelligent design isn’t a religious belief" is the height of disingenuousness; an accusation he himself levels at Pigliucci.

Additionally, he claims that Pigliucci's assertion that a better science education would dissuade people of a belief in Heaven is "jaw-dropping." What is jaw-dropping is the fact that many adults (75% according to Pigliucci) still cling to a childhood notion of Heaven as a physical place. Egnor laments the fact that not only are scientists not investigating Heaven, but that it would be impossible for them to do so because the "natural world is the only domain to which science appertains." But if Egnor is a scientist, and if he claims that Heaven and the existence of an afterlife are not investigable by the methods of science, then how would anyone know that there is a Heaven?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The onus is on those who make an assertion. If someone says, "Heaven exists", it's only fair to ask, "What is your evidence?" It is not incumbent upon the scientists to go around disproving every outrageous claim. Egnor wonders how science could possibly prove the non-existence of things that are outside of nature. But since theists like Egnor make claims about things that purportedly exist outside of nature, a better question would be, "How can you prove the existence of things outside of nature?" An even better question would be, "Why would you want to teach such things to young people in a science class?"

I should also point out that, contrary to Egnor, what Pigliucci recommends as a "tonic" to unsupported beliefs about the world is not science education per se, but critical thinking. As Pigliucci notes in his essay:

The most revealing thing was that most of the non-science students in the survey (those with a lower belief in the paranormal) were in fact philosophy or psychology majors, who actually take courses on the scientific method and critical thinking.

Could it be that it's not just the amount of education (scientific or otherwise) that matters, but the way in which that education is administered?

He goes on to answer "yes" and then gives his reasons why.

Regarding Egnor's claim that Pigliucci is muddling the distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism, philosopher Barbara Forrest wrote a paper titled "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection", in which she writes:

In response to the charge that methodological naturalism in science logically requires the a priori adoption of a naturalistic metaphysics, I examine the question whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical naturalism. I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion, given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.

In contrast, Egnor writes:

In point of fact, Dr. Pigliucci proposes to teach students philosophical naturalism veiled in scientific naturalism. His purpose is ideological....Fundamentalists of all stripes can't seem to keep their religious views out of science. Dr. Pigliucci — a professor of philosophy as well as of evolutionary biology — knows the difference between atheism and science. His choice not to be forthright about the difference is emblematic of the fundamentalist approach — the Darwinist approach — to science education.

But the simple fact is that Intelligent design is not science, and thus shouldn't be taught in science classes. Egnor further claims that there is a controversy over Intelligent Design:

The real controversy— and it is a raging controversy— is about intelligent design. Intelligent design is the scientific theory that there is evidence for intelligent agency in some aspects of biology, for example in the genetic code and in the intricate molecular machines inside cells.

Scientists who support intelligent design are a very small fraction of scientists, at least a small fraction of biologists. Yet the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinism is a scientific controversy.

But there is no controversy - certainly not a "raging" one; and he even admits that only a very small fraction of scientists support it. The controversy is all in the imagination of the supporters of Intelligent Design. In the scientific community - those who "do" science - there is no controversy. As philosopher Daniel C. Dennett sums it up:

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Dennett also addresses the issue of whether or not Intelligent Design is science, so I'll end this post with a few more comments from him:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

But we do know who the designer might be, thanks to their strategy outlined in the Wedge document noted at the beginning of this post: it's the Judeo-Christian God.

The Trojan Horse is alive and well, unfortunately.

Technorati tags:

Intelligent Design, Evolution, Darwinism, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Egnor, The Discovery Institute, Teach the Controversy

Euthyphro who?

2007-10-20T07:14:00.000-05:00

Does God choose what is morally good because it is good, or is "morally good" whatever God says it is?

I think many non-academic Christian apologists tend to underestimate the power of this simple question. Either that, or they don't understand it, or simply refuse to acknowledge its force. Granted, there are several permutations of the basic argument, but the central thrust remains the same: God is not required for morality.

Why? Because if God chooses what is morally good because it's good, then what is morally good is something separate from God; and if what is morally good is whatever God says it is, then morality is completely arbitrary. For instance, God could have chosen genocide as a moral good. In fact, a sample from the Christian Old Testament might well support the claim that God is in fact evil:

After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses' aide:"Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Great Sea on the west. No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life.

When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai. But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the LORD had instructed Joshua.

[Emphasis mine]

We can agree with Thomas Jefferson that the God of the Old Testament is indeed "a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust" - to say the least.

The church in which I grew up - in the tradition of the Plymouth Brethren - held what is called a dispensationalist view of the Bible. Basically, this is the view that says God is indeed immutable, but has chosen to deal with his people in different ways at different times. In other words, the God of the Old Testament needed to act in these barbaric ways - or to have his "chosen people" act in these barbaric ways - because it was necessary and fitting for such a people to be worthy of the land the Lord promised them. It's a fancy rationalization for saying that we cannot understand God's ways, so we better not question them.

But unless we are sociopaths, we rightly feel a nauseous abhorrence toward these acts of genocide. We felt that way about Adolf Hitler; we felt that way about Saddam Hussein. We see it today in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has either morphed from a religious conflict into a political one, or is a muddled mixture of religion and politics.

The impetus for this blog post came from a recent article in American Thinker, titled, "About Evil." The author attempts to defuse what is probably the most damning indictment of the Christian conception of God: the "problem of evil." I prefer to call it the "problem of suffering" because the word "evil" is, to me, a theological concept without any real meaning. The problem of suffering can be summed up thusly: if a personal God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then how can there be suffering in the world? Either God knows about it but is powerless to stop it, in which case he can't be omnipotent; or God doesn't know about it, in which case he is not omniscient; or God knows about it and could put a stop to it, but doesn't care to, in which case he is not omnibenevolent.

The article's author writes:

Then, when saying that we cannot believe in God because of the existence of evil, we accept a contradiction. If God doesn't exist, how can we label a position evil with credibility?

I think he's sidestepping the issue here. We don't need God to tell us that we suffer, that some things make us unhappy or cause us pain. These are facts of existence; it doesn't matter what we label them. And when the author writes that "for a standard to judge what is good and evil, it must be both outside and above them," this certainly applies to the concept of God as well. We judge God's actions as good or evil based on some standard other than God himself. We judge that it is wrong to kill "twelve thousand men and women" in a single day.

I think Christians would need to answer for the reprehensible moral behavior of their Old Testament God before they can claim that he is the standard for morality.

Instead of wasting time try to explain away the embarrassing bits of a 3,000 year-old compilation of dubious moral reasoning, I think we should get on with the very real task of figuring out how to live with each other in the here and now.

Technorati tags:

Selwyn Duke, Christian ethics, Euthyphro

On Militant Atheists

2007-10-07T10:20:00.001-05:00

One thing you have to say about the New Atheists is that they certainly have stirred the pot of public debate.

Yet another op/ed article - this one from The Los Angeles Times - again criticizes Dawkins, Harris, et al. The unambiguous title of the article is "Militant atheists are wrong," and its author attempts to show that such polemics against faith-based religion not only "[attack] our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves," but also "[attack] our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all." Furthermore, the author claims that this assault on religious belief "amounts to an attack on the human imagination."

First of all I'd like to say that it is patently false to claim that to attack irrational faith is to demolish or even hinder our ability to create value and meaning for ourselves. Has he never read the Existentialists? I don't feel I need to spend much time on this objection, because it seems I keep writing the same thing over and over again at this blog regarding just such a notion.

I'd like to move on to some of the author's increasingly more bizarre claims:

For the imagination is what embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness.

Yes, the imagination is that (seemingly) uniquely human capacity to form new ideas, images or concepts that do not necessarily exist in the 'outside' world; but that is not necessarily so. Philosophers and scientists have, since time immemorial, used 'thought experiments' to imagine all sorts of things. From Einstein's famous 'chasing the light beam' thought experiment to the Philosopher's Zombie, the human imagination has been recruited to imagine things that don't exist in reality, yet are still able to be tested and provide insight into real problems that lead to real solutions. The late American poet Wallace Stevens once said: "To be at the end of reality is not to be at the beginning of imagination, but to be at the end of both." It's true we can imagine all sorts of things that don't exist - from pink unicorns to Harry Potter's Dementors - but the human imagination is oftentimes eminently useful, and practically so.

Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it is absurd. That sentiment -- either a corruption or a paraphrase of the saying of an early church father -- is the essence of religious belief. By taking a leap of faith in God, you create value out of nothingness. The more difficult it is to believe, the stronger the faith that flies in the face of absurdity. Your willingness to stake your life on the possibility of an impossibility makes a fact out of a fantasy.

I would agree with the author that credo quia absurdum est is in fact the essence of religious belief; but I don't believe that this is a good thing, or even a psychologically healthy thing. And of course I strongly disagree that by believing in God one creates value out of nothingness. What value has one created? I assume one could just as easily create the same type of value by believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

He's also correct to say that one's willingness to stake one's life on the impossibility of a belief does in fact create a fact out of fantasy. One need look no further than the 19 hijackers of 9/11. I'm sure they're enjoying their 72 virgins as we speak.

You don't have to be a religious person to cherish the idea of faith in the absurd. When artists have an unverifiable, unprovable inspiration, and then seek to convey it in words or images, they take a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.

Comparing the concept of religious faith to artistic inspiration is itself absurd. An artist has faith - that is, trust or hope - in the fruit of inspiration and, indeed, in the existence of inspiration itself, but it is not at all akin to religious faith, where belief in something is maintained without evidence or even in the teeth of contradictory evidence. He's comparing apples to oranges here. The religious believer and the creative artist may both experience vertigo, but the artist's vertigo is not likely to knock down skyscrapers full of innocent people.

The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things.

I think the author's trying to have his cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, he says that faith is about believing something because it's absurd; while on the other hand he says that this is a very ordinary thing, comparing it to falling in love and treating people as you would want them to treat you. Now, I might be going out on a limb here, but I doubt most people would consider absurd such things as love, truth, beauty and goodness. And conflating inestimable with impossible seems to be the source of his confusion. In fact, there is an inestimable difference between what is impossible and what is only inestimable: the former doesn't exist; the latter is merely beyond comprehension.

Technorati tags:

militant atheism, faith

An Atheist's Answer to the Morality Question

2007-10-07T09:04:00.001-05:00

A freshman at Silliman College of Yale University recently penned an opinion article titled, "Anti-theists avoid morality question."

The freshman, Bryce Taylor, despite his talented writing, displays a naive understanding not only of what the New Atheists such as Dawkins and Harris are trying to accomplish with their books, but also an ignorance of the rich and diverse moral discussions taking place (and which have always taken place) within the non-believing community at large.

Sam Harris is primarily attacking irrational faith, and Dawkins is attempting to 'raise consciousness', as he puts it, of the delusional nature of faith-based religion. Neither of them spend a lot of time on arguments against the existence of God, and merely provide an overview or summary of arguments that have been better put many times before. They are not trying to reinvent the wheel, but are attempting to make cracks in the heretofore respectable façade of religious belief; and, further, that belief in God does not provide an objective foundation for morality either. Taylor is setting up these glaringly visible and outspoken atheists as straw men.

Getting to the question of morality, he writes:

Of course, Christians and other theists have raised the objection that naturalistic materialism — the notion that only the physical world exists — can provide no foundation for morality. That’s not to say that naturalists cannot behave morally, but merely that they can have no real and consistent reason for behaving morally. As this has been a long-standing and widespread objection to naturalism, it would seem only reasonable to expect atheists to devote careful attention to the question of morality.

First of all, as Plato demonstrated centuries ago - and centuries before the Christian religion - God cannot be the foundation for morality without morality becoming something completely arbitrary. Does God value what is morally good, or is moral goodness whatever God says it is? If it's the former, then morality is independent of God; if it's the latter, then moral goodness is arbitrary. God could have chosen torture as a moral 'good.' In fact, that may even be the case, given the predilections of the God of the Old Testament.

Secondly, atheistic naturalists have devoted a considerable amount of time and effort into formulating a naturalistic morality. In fact, ever since Darwin published his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, naturalists have attempted to discover or at least construct and defend a naturalistic morality.

The main problem with trying to ground a naturalistic morality is encapsulated in the dictum, you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'; that is to say, science (the epistemological basis for naturalism) only tells us what is - it is descriptive - whereas moral reasoning attempts to tell us what we ought to do - it is prescriptive. There is no logical way to get to what ought to be by simply describing what is. However, one of the most thorough (and most recent) attempts at promulgating a naturalistic morality can be found in Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul. He devotes an entire chapter to the problem: "Ethics as Human Ecology."

Flanagan acknowledges the challenge:

What is the rational basis for our urges for meaning and goodness? Isn't naturalism required to say that human life in fact has no real meaning and that morality, at least as it is commonly understood, makes no sense?

The naturalist must provide an answer to these questions and quell the associated fears.

The problem for the naturalist is to offer a way of thinking about value, meaning, and worth - moral and nonmoral - that has substance and objectivity.

Flanagan then goes on to describe his conception of a naturalistic morality as a form of ecology:

And ecology is the science that studies how living systems relate to each other and to their environment, and so is the relevant analogy.

Ethics, as I conceive it, is systematic inquiry into the conditions (of the world, of individual persons, and of groups of persons) that permit humans to flourish.

Observations of humans over history discovers flourishing to be their aim, and living meaningfully and morally to be conditions of doing so.

What makes such inquiry empirical is that it starts from an understanding of human nature as revealed by evolutionary biology, mind science, sociology, anthropology and history. So the first reason why it is helpful to conceive of ethics as empirical is that it allows us to use actual observation, rather than revealed and traditional wisdom, to determine what outcomes are most reasonably judged good.

So, needless to say, naturalistic materialists have given considerable thought to secular ethics.

Taylor concludes:

Ultimately, there are two fundamental questions about morality: Is it real, and if so, where does it come from?

Thus, most naturalists, including those mentioned above, would reply in the affirmative. The problem then becomes the second question: Where does this morality come from?

Until they argue convincingly for a naturalistic foundation for morality, anti-theists like Dawkins and Harris would do best to admit with Ivan Karamazov that “there is no virtue if there is no immortality” — or, more to the point, there is no morality if there is no God.

Yes, the naturalistic materialist will answer that morality is real, but it is not independent of human nature. Additionally, the naturalistic materialist will say that, wherever morality comes from, it most certainly doesn't come from God - Plato's Euthyphro's dilemma and a random selection of Old Testament passages can attest to that.

I'm sorry that Taylor remains unconvinced of a naturalistic foundation for morality. I strongly recommend that he read Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul, as well as the prolific writings of Alonzo Fyfe over at the Atheist Ethicist blog.

But since he is only a freshman, and since he appears to be an intelligent and thoughtful young man, I sincerely hope that for at least the next three years his mind remains open to the very real possibility of having and living a moral life without God or gods.

Technorati tags:

naturalism, atheism, materialism, morality

Humanist Recognition

2007-10-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

Back in September, Brandeis University in Massachusetts officially opened its first Humanist chapter.

As the University's community newspaper reported:

Humanism is a secular ethical philosophy. It endorses a universal morality without a basis in religion and includes such sub-categories as atheists and agnostics.

[Joyce ] Wang '10 says, “I feel that the idea of a secular existence is really powerful. It’s very life-affirming and meaningful to me, but Humanism, especially as it relates to atheists and agnostics, tends to have a fairly negative public image. It's important for communities to know that just because we are secular doesn't mean that we're immoral.”

Wang emphasized the importance of a secular community, saying, “Brandeis is a place that prides itself in celebrating religious diversity, but before Brandeis Humanists, there was no organization devoted to a specifically secular way of life. I think it's important that we offer that alternative point of view, and that we're able to provide a welcoming community for those students who do not happen to participate in religious life.”

I applaud the students' efforts at organizing such a chapter and promoting a realistic vision for how human beings can achieve an authentic flourishing life as physical, completely embodied animals, as well as affirming that human beings are indeed capable of living a less fragmented and meaningful life without recourse to other-worldly gods or motivations.

Technorati tags:

Humanism, Brandeis University

Atheism vs. Religion

2007-10-07T06:57:00.000-05:00

Via Friendly Atheist, I found these two 'advertisements', if you will, and I thought it was a humorous yet accurate example of why atheists will never de-convert true believers, and why true believers will never convert atheists.

To be fair, I would probably change the word 'Religion' in the above picture to 'Western Religion' or 'Monotheistic Religion.' I say this because even though I am an atheist, I have an affinity for those Eastern religions whose impetus was the fact of human suffering and whose goal was liberation from that suffering; whereas Western, monotheistic religions have as their impetus alleged revelation from the Creator of the universe; and instead of attempting to alleviate human suffering in the here-and-now, the goal is to convert-or-suffer for eternity. Indeed, suffering - and even death - in this world virtually guarantees entry into, and happiness within, the 'next world.'

Additionally, I would note that the so-called 'New Atheists' aren't necessarily attempting to disprove religious claims, but instead are trying to secure a well-deserved seat at the table of public and political discourse.

Technorati tags:

atheism, religion

Deepak's Black Box of Wishful Thinking

2007-10-06T07:46:00.001-05:00

Deepak Chopra has a blog post over at The Huffington Post titled, "Genes and the Black Box." In it, he describes a recent study by UCLA researchers on the relation between genes and loneliness. Although he doesn't cite his source, I assume he's talking about this study:

Loneliness is gene deep, its molecular signature is reflected in the lonely person's DNA. This was the conclusion of a new US study by scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and other US academic centres.

Scientists already know that social environments affect health. People who are lonely and socially isolated die earlier.

Cole and the other researchers found that changes in the way immune cells express their genes were directly linked to the "subjective experience of social distance".

Now I'm no geneticist - nor, to my knowledge, is Deepak - but he wonders how "a mental perception ("I am lonely") can trigger genes into becoming active." He contends that it's so much of a mystery that it's comparable to an inscrutable black box:

What they are confronting is close to a classic "black box experiment." Something is put into the box, an unknown object, and the purpose of the experiment is to guess what it is. The only way to find out is by tapping on the box, weighing it, listening to the object as you rattle it around.

He does, however, acknowledge that modern neuroscience has developed ever more sophisticated methods - such as fMRI and PET scans - methods for tracking the activity of the brain, activity which includes such things as thoughts and emotions. But he goes on to speculate that, since we haven't (yet) explained everything down to the last detail, that this leaves open perhaps the greatest mystery of all: the mystery of human free will and human choice:

The best news is that this mystery exists at all since strict materialists push the dogma that genes are controllers of the body and of behavior, which covertly deprives us of free will and choices.

I'd like to point out that how something in the environment - in this case social isolation - affects the physical processes of the brain needn't be a mystery, even if that 'something' is a subjective experience. If I happen across the mangled, lifeless body of a dead fawn on my early morning walk to work and feel a twinge of nausea, I don't think there is any mystery as to why my subjective experience of the premature and violent death of a young animal caused a physical reaction in me.

While it may be true that we aren't able to trace the complete line of causation as it relates to how a subjective experience affects something physical like genes, that's not to say that we won't some day be able to; and it's no reason to therefore assume that this gap in our understanding should be filled with something for which there is little or no evidence. It's akin to intelligent design proponents claiming that since there is a gap in our understanding of how a certain complex component of biology could have been produced by natural selection, it must therefore have been the product of an intelligent designer.

If there is a gap in understanding, it is certainly helpful - if not essential - to speculate; but when there is no reason to favor one hypothesis over another, quietism would be the proper attitude until further information becomes available.

Chopra does come close to this attitude at the conclusion of his post:

For the moment, genes represent the most fascinating black box experiment in all of science, and when the box is opened some day in the future, a new synthesis of free will and determinism is bound to emerge.

But there is already a philosophical synthesis of free will and determinism, and it's known as compatibilism:

Do we have free will? It depends what you mean by the word 'free'. According to compatibilists, we do have free will. They propound a sense of the word 'free' according to which free will is compatible with determinism, even though determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does because everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before.

They believe that to have free will, to be a free agent, to be free in choice and action, is simply to be free from constraints of certain sorts. Freedom is a matter of not being physically or psychologically forced or compelled to do what one does. Your character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set may be entirely determined by events for which you are in no way responsible (by your genetic inheritance, upbringing, subsequent experience, and so on). But you do not have to be in control of any of these things in order to have compatibilist freedom. They do not constrain or compel you, because compatibilist freedom is just a matter of being able to choose and act in the way one prefers or thinks best given how one is. As its name declares, it is compatible with determinism. It is compatible with determinism even though it follows from determinism that every aspect of your character, and everything you will ever do, was already inevitable before you were born.

So we don't need to indulge in wild speculations, such as the one made by the character of Ben on the TV show LOST:

Ben: I can show you things. Things I know you want to see very badly. Let me put it so you'll understand. Picture a box. You know something about boxes, don't you, John? What if I told you that somewhere on this island, there's a very large box... and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it, when you opened that box, there it would be. What would you say about that, John?

Technorati tags:

Deepak Chopra, free will, determinism

What if...

2007-10-06T06:33:00.000-05:00

...some night a demon were to approach you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

"This life as you now live it, and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider in this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it..."

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him:

"You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!"

This little thought experiment comes from 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he dubbed it the idea of eternal recurrence.

I suppose it has little to do with naturalism; but on the other hand, if this is truly the only life we have, if there is no heaven or hell or other type of afterlife, would you welcome such a proposition?

It's not a choice between living a heavenly life and repeating this current life over and over. It's more of a choice between living one's own unique life with all its pleasures and pains - and complete annihilation, the complete cessation of existence.

I think it cuts right to the heart of what it means to be a human being. It was the 20th Century French philosopher Albert Camus who said in one of his essays that "judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

I think it reminds us to reflect on our lives and to remember those "tremendous moments", especially when life is going less than optimally.

What would you answer?

'Average Atheist' is a Straw Man

2007-09-24T18:39:00.001-05:00

Last week there was an Op/Ed letter titled "Naive atheists note: it's all in your genes", posted on one of Ireland's online news magazines, Independent.ie.

The letter claims to characterize the "average atheist" as naive, thinking that all religion is bad and that there is no downside to atheism. What the author has set up is an easily vanquished straw man. There is no such thing as an "average atheist," there is just a continuum of people without belief in gods, but with varying opinions of specific religions and religion in general.

The author begins with the idea that atheists hold the 'conceit' that the concept of God can be eliminated from the mind of human beings forever, and that this would constitute the supreme good for humanity. Speaking as a representative of the atheist community, I have to say that very few atheists hold this view. It may be true that we wish that purely faith-based, irrational religion would be eradicated, but we don't believe this will happen any time soon, if ever. Additionally, we know that much bad (I won't call it 'evil') can be done by both believers and non-believers, so a world full of atheists does not guarantee any kind of moral Utopia. But it's true that many, if not most, atheists view religion as a "source of superstition, prejudice and irrationality." Is the idea of sacrificial atonement not superstitious? Was the practice and condonation of slavery by the antebellum Southern states of America not based on prejudice - and justified by recourse to scripture? Is it rational to believe that the sin of one man somehow accrues to all men, as if there were an 'original sin' gene?

The author also claims that the average atheist believes that any good that religion does is merely accidental, and that non-believers could do even better. We don't believe that the good done by religious believers is accidental; on the contrary, we believe that believers do good because they operate on humanist principles and rightly reject the obviously abhorrent morality of the Bible - especially the Old Testament. What they do is not accidental; it is merely cherry-picking the good parts.

One of the most offensive things the author says - or at least insinuates - is the following:

But the fact is that the forces of anti-religion are almost always led by atheists and, in living memory, they have used the utmost force to try and apply a final solution to religion.

If by 'final solution' he is obliquely referring to Hitler's holocaust, then he has a woefully naive understanding of Hitler's motivations. I don't think any atheists would be wearing this fashionable belt buckle:

The translation is: "God with Us." And there is more evidence for Hitler's connection to religion, and to Christianity in particular.

The author also makes a muddle of a couple of other issues: he says that it logically follows that one has to give up the idea of free will and objective morality if one gives up belief in God. It does not logically follow that if one gives up belief in God then one has to stop believing in free will. In fact, there are arguments that suggest that if such a God as the Judeo-Christian Bible exists, then humans don't have free will anyway. But there are other reasons, completely divorced from the concept of God, for giving up the idea of free will. I touched on some of these in a recent post.

In terms of giving up the idea of an objective morality, one can argue, as Plato did in his Euthyphro dilemma, that God cannot be the source of objective morality anyway. English philosopher Julian Baggini sums it up nicely for us:

Where then does this morality come from? It is tempting to say that moral law has its own lawgiver and judiciary. But the same questions that were asked about the law can be asked about the moral law: what is it that guarantees moral laws are indeed moral? It must be because the moral law-enactors and enforcers are acting within the confines of morality. But this then makes morality prior to any moral legislature or judiciary. To put it another way, the only thing that can show a lawgiver is moral is that their laws conform to a moral standard which is independent of the moral lawgiver. So if the lawgiver is God, God's laws will only be moral if they conform to moral principles which are independent of God.

Plato made this point extremely clearly in a dialogue called Euthypryo, after which the following dilemma was named. Plato's protagonist Socrates posed the question, do the gods choose what is good because it is good, or is the good good because the gods choose it? If the first option is true, that shows that the good is independent of the gods (or in a monotheistic faith, God). Good just is good and that is precisely why a good God will always choose it. But if the second option is true, then that makes the very idea of what is good arbitrary. If it is God's choosing something alone that makes it good, then what is there to stop God choosing torture, for instance, and thus making it good? This is of course absurd, but the reason why it is absurd is that we believe that torture is wrong and that is why God would never choose it. To recognize this, however, is to recognize that we do not need God to determine right and wrong. Torture is not wrong just because God does not choose it.

To my mind, the Euthypryo dilemma is a very powerful argument against the idea that God is required for morality. Indeed, it goes further and shows that God cannot be the source of morality without morality becoming something arbitrary.

In terms of an atheist's view of objective morality, I can only speak for myself, and make the reasonable assumption that most thorough-going atheists don't believe there is an objective morality independent of human nature. I'll refer readers to my post "Is there a Moral Law?"

Not only does the author have a very naive view of atheists but of human nature as well. He sets up the extreme form of reductionism as another easily vanquished straw man. He thinks that if the idea of God is given up, then everything that makes us human is gone, and he doesn't understand how human genes can build a brain that is flexible enough to respond to an ever-changing physical and social environment.

When you ditch belief in God you are left with the idea that matter and energy are all that exist. Everything you do is the result of your genes reacting with the environment.

It is true that matter and energy are all that exist, but this view is not a logical consequence of ditching belief in God. A human being is fully embedded in the web of causal interaction which acts on all beings and objects in nature. Human beings are natural objects, made out of the same 'stuff' as everything else in the universe and so are subject to the same natural laws. But tracing all of the causal connections that go to make up a human being - all her thoughts, beliefs and actions - is something that is currently (and perhaps forever) beyond our mental capabilities. Human thought and action is a complex result of both internal and external forces. It has been said that the human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, each with hundreds of connections to neighboring neurons; and while we may be able to describe the causal activity of a single neuron, describing the causal activity of trillions of connections is not something we are able to do. But given the magnitude and complexity of the 'circuitry' of the brain, it's not difficult to see that this could potentially give rise to a near-infinite repertoire of human behavior and action.

The author then ends with a final stroke of arrogance:

Naive Atheists, such as the ones who write to this paper, seem blissfully unaware of the demands atheism makes of them, of the sort of beliefs they must surrender once they give up belief in God.

Now they know better.

If you want to consider me to be representative of an 'average atheist', then you would have to realize that I am neither naive nor blissfully unaware of the demands my atheism places on me. I don't know what type of atheists write into the author's paper, but it would seem to me that most people who call themselves atheists have given considerable thought to their atheism, and the consequences of calling themselves atheists, given the current climate (at least in the States) where the very term 'atheist' has become a pejorative.

This author's article is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Technorati tags:

naive atheists, atheism, naturalism, free will, determinism, morality

The Carousel of the Free Will Debate

2007-09-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

The Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation interested in brain science, is sponsoring a debate called "Seeking Free Will in Our Brains", pitting a neurologist against a psychiatrist.

It's probably not surprising that the neurologist, Mark Hallett, allies with the side of the debate that claims the human feeling of free will is an illusion of some sort. He presents the standard view that since the 'mind is what the brain does', and since the brain is a physical organ, then there is no such thing as free will - or that at least the feeling of free will is an illusion, albeit a powerful one.

The psychiatrist, Paul R. McHugh, on the other hand, questions whether or not he (or anyone) should be carrying the burden of proof when they claim that they have free will. He says:

First: the project seemed rhetorically backward. Should I be carrying the burden of proof here? The conscious mind and all the mental experiences tied to freedom of the will—choosing, deciding, hoping, deliberating, fearing, and cooperating with others—seem as self-evident as the five senses. No one asks us to prove them “real,” especially before hearing evidence that would claim they are not.

I have a significant amount of sympathy for people who are still tied to the idea of free will, especially since it seems so counter-intuitive to deny it. But there have been many things in the history of human thought that have been counter-intuitive yet have been shown to be undoubtedly true: the earth is indeed not flat, nor does the sun revolve around the earth; the appearance of design in the biological world can be accomplished by the natural process of evolution; we don't actually 'see' colors or 'hear' sounds, but our brains translate wavelengths of light and vibrations of air into color and sound, respectively.

McHugh goes on to differentiate between two types of patients with whom he typically works - those whose mental difficulties arise from what he calls 'material' causes such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and schizophrenia; and those who apparently aren't as organically compromised, one might say, such as anorexics, addicts and what he calls the 'demoralized.' He claims that these patients can provide 'reasons' for their mental distress, and although he claims he's not denying that the brain is involved, he claims they are (presumably moral) agents "responding to the distressing differences between what they want and what life delivers", and that they do, in fact, possess freedom of the will - it's just misused:

Come see these patients where choices are the problem and where they defend their choices with arguments that frustrate their recovery. Freedom they have in abundance; it’s wisdom they lack.

Additionally, he cautions against an overly optimistic view of the ability of science to solve all mysteries to our collective satisfaction:

Certain philosophers and some of their neuroscience students reject this naturalistic defense of freedom by noting that it rests on descriptions of mental experiences. But, say they, brain material produces all mental phenomena, including consciousness and its expressions. These psychological “effects” emerge from the complex, mechanistic, causal apparatus that is the brain. Therefore, like all “effects” in nature, they must be lawfully determined by their “causes.” What people do—and believe they choose to do—is inexorably determined by brain conditions present and past. A new predestination is born, as all psychological freedom, sensed or supposed, is illusionary.

On hearing this argument (and some form of it is far from original or even contemporary, given that Spinoza argued in similar ways), I’m struck by how it is built on presumptions rather than on a body of fact or neuroscientific discovery. Its champions presume that eventually, given the steady progress that they anticipate, neuroscientists will know all about the brain and see how mental productions are like all other productions of the body. This argument dismisses as simply a matter of the moment our present vast ignorance of just how the brain relates to mental phenomena.

It is undoubtedly true that we do not have a mature science of consciousness, or even a mature science of the brain in general; but we have made great strides in the last two decades, and this fuels much of the optimism. But the argument, and the presumptions about which he speaks, (particularly the reference to Spinoza), does not have to be new or a posteriori to be legitimate or carry force. If the quote from Spinoza to which he refers is that "men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire," it seems undoubtedly true. Or, as Nietzsche put it:

The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway...the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

Despite the typical Nietzschean flamboyance and hyperbole, he makes a good point; i.e., true freedom of the will would involve something that is apparently impossible - to be the cause of oneself in the most essential way. One can understand this sitting in one's armchair, as they say, so one needn't perform experiments or take observations to do so. It can be considered a priori as opposed to a posteriori.

McHugh goes on to compare the difference between what we know about how the kidney produces urine to how the brain produces conscious mental life: it's not just that we lack the facts of the matter, but that we seem to lack any conception about how the brain produces consciousness.

I think he draws an important distinction here. There are many theorists today working on the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how can purely physical processes of the brain give rise to subjective experiences? Why does there have to be subjective experiences at all? He correctly says that while we may have correlations between the physiology of neurons and brain systems and certain conscious experiences (what researchers in the field call the Neural Correlates of Consciousness), we have not been able to show that certain activity in certain areas of the brain are the conscious parts, you might say. We have not been able to find a consciousness module or a set of consciousness neurons. But from this McHugh then concludes that any such hope that we will amounts to 'fantasy,' and that investigators into this type of phenomenon "work happily away within the idiom of their successes, while ignoring issues that may demand reasoning with new idioms carrying new implications."

First of all, if a scientist threw up her arms and said that it's all fantasy, her PhD wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on. That's not science. When science faces a seemingly intractable problem, the solution isn't to quit but to say "I don't know" for the moment and keep working on the problem, thinking up new hypotheses to be tested, revising and tweaking old hypotheses, or simply waiting until new and advanced technology provides additional leverage for working on the problem. In Sue Blackmore's eminently readable book, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, she writes:

The confusion [regarding the 'hard problem' of consciousness] we have reached is deep and serious, and I suspect it reveals fundamental flaws in the way we normally think about consciousness. Perhaps we need to throw out the most basic assumptions and start all over again.

I want to quote McHugh's final remarks on the matter, and then address the points he makes in them.

I look for the time when neuroscientists will turn to explain how the material world can evoke these wonderful characteristics of human beings and will abandon any thought of them as illusionary.

Freedom is an expression of reasoning by subjects who realize that their choices determine what they make of themselves and are ready to accept the responsibility for what they fashion. To think otherwise is to give oneself over to predestination.

Ultimately in a choice between freedom and predestination, I’m for freedom and the proposition it entails—that we’re responsible for making the world what it is. Indeed, this proposition organizes and justifies the therapies that psychiatrists direct.

In regard to the nature of the term 'illusion' - according to the Dictionary on my Macbook here, an illusion is "a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses." So we needn't worry about using the term 'illusion' when describing free will, because it doesn't mean that the phenomenon of free will doesn't exist, just that it isn't what we think it is.

I agree with him that freedom is the expression of reasoning and deliberation by subjects who are aware that their decisions determine (to some extent) who they are, and that they feel a sense of responsibility for their decisions and choices. In saying this, he comes close to the position philosophers call 'compatibilism': free will is possible in a deterministic world, but they define 'free' very specifically. To a compatibilist, free will is the recognition that human beings are complex subjects who deliberate and act in the world, and that to be free is to perform actions voluntarily based on one's own reasons. You are free of constraints, coercion, and psychological compulsion to do what you desire to do. But as Spinoza (and others) said, we are not free to determine what we desire - we are ignorant of the causes which led us to desire thus, and therefore are not free to decide what we desire.

I don't wish to denigrate the practice of psychiatry or psychotherapy; I think that they are valid ways to alter unwanted behavior. However, if the mental distress one is feeling is a result of something that can best be 'cured' by pharmaceutical intervention, then it would be advisable to use it. And I know there is some intermingling of psychotherapy and drug therapy, especially in regard to mood disorders such as depression.

But even though behavior is fully caused - fully determined - that doesn't mean that behavior can't be changed. Certain types of psychotherapy, or even life events in general, can alter our behavior, sometimes in significant ways. Our best science tells us that our genes have produced a brain that is flexible and sensitive to the environment, which includes both human and non-human interaction. So I don't believe that the justification for McHugh's profession is lost if we are fully caused, natural animals - human animals. Indeed, in some respects his profession is more justified because we are animals whose behavior can be modified by such methods.

Finally, I would like to note that just because we cannot yet fully explain something such as consciousness or free will, it doesn't mean that therefore the idea that we do have free will is the default position. It just means we have more work to do.

Technorati tags:

free will, determinism, naturalism, The Dana Foundation, Mark Hallett, Paul R. McHugh

The New Humanism

2007-09-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

In a previous post I referenced Edge.org publisher, John Brockman, and his 2003 book The New Humanists: Science at the Edge.

In Brockman's own essay, which opens the book, he describes what he calls the "third culture"; the first culture being the intellectuals of the humanities, and the second culture being the scientists of the "hard" sciences. The third culture, as Brockman describes it, "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

He claims that the "arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture."

The type of humanism to which Brockman refers is actually the specific academic disciplines of literature, history, philosophy/religion, visual and performing arts - commonly referred to as "academia." The type of humanism I address here in this blog is more a broad group of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical philosophies that appeal to the unique and universal human qualities. But I want to talk a little bit about Brockman's thesis before discussing the type of humanism I countenance, and how it may or may not relate to Brockman's articulation of humanism.

Brockman's speculation is an interesting intellectual indulgence in and of itself. He claims that in the Renaissance era (approximately the 15th Century) of human history, the word "humanism" was part of one intellectual whole which encompassed both the humanities and the sciences (think Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.). But he feels that the 20th Century regressed somewhat:

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world - of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art - the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum - and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

I was an undergraduate from 1990 to 1994 at a small liberal arts college. My major was accounting and my minor was philosophy. My declared major in the beginning was computer science (or whatever it was called at my school), but I quickly dropped that when it became too abstract for my own tastes. But I do remember taking calculus and an introductory biology course; I don't remember much science beyond that - unless you include some of the 'softer' math like economics, statistics, and financial equations that were part of an education in accounting. Most of my curriculum was occupied with courses in literature, history, art history, psychology and philosophy. So I guess his claim appears somewhat reasonable, at least from my academic experience.

Brockman goes on to claim:

There are encouraging signs that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics - a whole panoply of humanist concerns - need to take the sciences into account.

I personally think this is a good development. Brockman's unspoken assumption is that these people have a naturalistic view of the world, because they are using the methodology of science to explore their respective disciplines. In keeping with Brockman's vision of his Edge Foundation's project where the participants are "key thinkers in various fields...who are arguing with each other, learning from each other," he is not without his detractors, even within his own volume here:

John Horgan: If you essay was meant to provoke, it obviously succeeded. But it really works more as a kind of Nike ad for science than a serious analysis of science's relation to the humanities or culture as a whole...If people would rather read about Virginia Woolf's sex life - or watch Friends, for that matter - than wrestle with A Brief History of Time or The Origins of Order, I don't think they should have to feel like second class citizens.

Timothy Taylor: One has to confront the tricky problem that popular science often either preaches to the converted or, when it strays into more "humanistic" domains, makes an unwitting ass of itself....A real victory for science would consist not in sweeping away other aspects of existence, such as religion (not that it has any hope of doing so) but in respectfully deepening understanding of what it is to live and die as a human being and observing the universe from that perspective.

Marc D. Hauser: I read "The New Humanists" with interest, but actually think you have painted a caricature of both scientists and humanists...I am often shocked and appalled by scientists who have never read some of the classics of literature, who know little about history, who continue to ignore insights from philosophy. The finger can be pointed both ways.

And that's just a sample. The thing I like most about Brockman's project is precisely this kind of argument and debate. That's how progress gets made, ultimately. This is in stark contrast to the discourse that takes place within religious circles - at least within fundamentalist religious circles. I'm not comfortable speaking about more liberal religious thinkers, about whose discourse I know very little.

But I want to say a final word about what I would call the new "humanism." To me, the term "humanism" could first of all be characterized by a naturalistic world-view, which itself is built on the methodology of science: i.e., evidence-based empiricism. Additionally, it would eschew supernatural theories about nature and human nature in its attempts to address human as well as planetary concerns. By human concerns, I mean both pressing concerns such as poverty, war, and public policy; and more secondary concerns like meaning and purpose. It would encompass the humanities as a way of enriching and exploring the human experience, and it would utilize the scientific mindset to provide a springboard for further exploration in the humanities.

As Brockman indicates, many of the thinkers in his book come from a diversity of backgrounds, from both the 'humanities' and the 'sciences'; but the common thread in all of them is the naturalistic world-view. They look for natural explanations of phenomena, believing (rightly, in my opinion) that supernatural explanations are really explanatory dead ends: non sequitur deus ex machinas, if you will.

So while on this blog I promote and the world-view known as Naturalism, I sometimes wonder if there is a better term to describe it. The problem with the term 'naturalist' is that it, like so much in the English language, admits of several connotations: it could designate someone who is a student of the natural history of life; or someone who practices naturalism in art or literature; or someone who adopts philosophical naturalism - which would be the case with me. As I've noted in previous posts, and as Brockman's book shows, even the term 'humanist' can signify different domains. Even one of Brockman's essay detractors (Chris Anderson) highlights this problem when he says:

Are you sure you want to use the term "humanist" as a banner to unite under? [Richard] Dawkins's preferred banner of "atheist" has its own problems. If the goal is to reference Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, how about "Renaissance thinker"? Actually this would be a great forum for you to canvas alternatives. "Rationalist"? "Universalist"? There's a lot of historical baggage whichever way you turn.

Of course, there is also the term "Bright." Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett describes it as:

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic — and life after death.

The term "bright" is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group — which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before — could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help. Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.

So it's not just a term, it's a movement. As an ethical atheist in today's America, I am sympathetic to the idea of a movement to gain a seat at the table of political and social discourse; but the term, as Dennett hints, is not without its controversy. I like the idea of coming up with a single umbrella term to unite the diversity of which Dennett speaks for political reasons, but I'm not convinced that the term 'bright' will accomplish this.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism had a good discussion of this concern at his blog Memeing Naturalism:

...those who are naturalists in all but name might consider coming out as such (although the countersuggestible among them likely won’t). Atheists, secular humanists, skeptics and freethinkers are basically naturalistic in their worldview; a science-based, rational, empirical naturalism is their philosophical lodestone, even if it isn’t always explicit. Naturalism simply names the worldview that holds the world is of a piece, not divided into the natural vs. the supernatural, and naturalists are simply those that subscribe to naturalism.

But again, do we really need another ism, in this case naturalism? Well, if it’s an accurate, convenient label for what you believe on careful consideration to be the case, make use of it. Not to name your worldview, after all, leaves it at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of belief, what Susan Blackmore would call the “meme-o-sphere.”

Technorati tags:

humanism, naturalism, atheism

Is there a Moral Law?

2007-09-21T17:19:00.001-05:00

There seem to be two divergent trends in the world these days, at least in the realm of human nature; namely, the ever accumulating body of evidence from the sciences that humans are not so unique as we like to think, and a resurgence of the traditional religious assertion that human beings are categorically different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The main point of contention is human morality. Is it something that has evolved and has its beginnings in non-human primates, and possibly even certain non-primate animals? Or is it something implanted in us by God or some other intelligence at work in the universe?

One might ask what the significance of the debate is. Isn't this type of discussion merely the realm of pocket-protector-wearing scientists and bespectacled philosophers? Well, no. Opinions and beliefs about human morality invariably find their way into public policy. The increasing sophistication and precision of medical technology brings to the forefront heretofore unimagined ethical dilemmas; an increasingly visible and vocal homosexual populace challenges traditional human relationships; and the full-blown threat of terrorism and clash of ideologies makes us address cultural relativism.

By far the dominant view in America is that human morality is not only categorically different from anything that could be called morality in animals, but that God is the embodiment of, or the gold standard for, Morality with a capital 'M'. In other words, there is an objective Morality to which all human beings are bound; there is an independent standard by which we are able to judge right and wrong, good and evil. And this God is the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.

A consequence of this view is that we can therefore legitimately judge the actions of others, whether privately or publicly, and rebuke them with the sanction of Divine authority. Of course this has implications for public policy, as anyone who has access to a TV or a newspaper can plainly see.

But here we run into a problem: not everyone, even within the Judeo-Christian milieu, has the exact same ideas of what is right and what is wrong. It seems we can all agree that things like murder, rape, and theft are immoral and ought not to be done regardless of religious belief, or even no religious belief, if only for the reason that prescriptions against those things make civil society possible.

Alonzo Fyfe over at the Atheist Ethicist blog draws the distinction between morality and what he calls religious culture:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Prescriptions against things like murder, rape, and theft fall within the realm of morality, whereas things like what types of food or what types of consensual relationships are permissible fall within the realm of religious culture. I think many if not most Americans would be up in arms if they were forbidden to eat beef, pork or shellfish. On the other hand, our civil society would undoubtedly collapse into chaos if murder were legalized.

Of course, I'm stating the obvious here.

Many Christian laypeople as well as clergy turn to Christian apologist C.S. Lewis because he argued that human beings are intuitively aware of a standard of behavior to which they feel justified in holding their fellow human beings. He calls this the Law of Human Nature, or the Law of Right and Wrong. He claims that all humans possess this innate knowledge, even if they don't regularly follow it.

As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

Lewis anticipates the objection that what he's really talking about is the "herd instinct":

Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what if feels like to be prompted by instinct...it means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way...But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

He goes on to say that there may be two instincts, or impulses: a desire to help, and a desire to not help; but that there is a third thing involved, and this third thing is characterized by a feeling of 'ought': one ought to help even if one doesn't want to. Lewis wrote this in the mid-1940's; our concept of a herd instinct - or even instincts in general - has since been refined to a degree unimagined by Lewis.

Philosopher Tamler Sommers recently interviewed primatologist Frans de Waal for The Believer magazine. From Sommers' introduction to the interview:

Until recently, biologists thought such complex behavior—behavior with an undeniable moral dimension—was exclusive to human beings. As much as anyone in the world, the primatologist Frans de Waal is responsible for changing this perception....de Waal has illustrated the uncanny similarities between human beings and our primate relatives. De Waal has not restricted himself to descriptions of behavior, however. He is famous for his willingness to enter into the largely taboo world of animal emotions, where research is routinely dismissed as “anthropomorphizing.” The result is an impressive array of evidence suggesting that we are not the only species to have moral feelings.

It is significant to note that serious studies of chimpanzee behavior did not take place until the 1970's, well after Lewis' informal treatise on Christianity; indeed, well after his death in 1963. But Lewis' engaging exposition is widely considered by many Christians to be a watertight case for the truth of Christianity, as well as for the truth of an objective standard of morality.

Secular moral philosophers throughout the ages have likewise attempted to discover an objective morality. They relied mainly on the power of human reason (or Reason with a capital 'R') to discover such a standard. However, the 18th Century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume argued convincingly that the proper domain of human reason covers things like mathematics and logic, while knowledge of the way things are in the world is derived from the senses. But neither of these methods can provide us with any set of principles for proper conduct. Morality thus falls under the domain of preference, and reason is then employed to justify our preferences. As Hume famously said: Reason is the servant of the passions.

But more on that in a minute.

Frans de Waal's work seems to indicate that the seeds of morality lie within our animal lineage:

BLVR: Much of your work recently has been aimed at correcting another misconception—that morality is exclusively a human invention, something that evolved long after we split from other apes. Do you think apes and bonobos are moral species? Do they exhibit moral behavior?

FDW: Well, I usually don’t call it moral behavior. I tend to call it building blocks or prerequisites for morality. I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.

BLVR: Meanwhile, your most recent book, Primates and Philosophers, attacks the view that human beings aren’t really moral, never mind nonhumans. You argue against the view that human morality is a thin veneer, a kind of cultural overlay or hypocritical mask covering our deeply selfish animal nature. You see this as fundamentally misguided because of the connection between our morality and animal emotions.

FDW: The interesting thing about my position is that it’s really the old Darwinian position: human morality is an outflow of primate sociality. That’s how Darwin saw it—it’s an outgrowth of the social instincts. It’s a moral sentimentalism—the view that emotions drive morality. In the last thirty years, people have abandoned that view. They all take this position that evolution could never have produced morality, because evolution produces only selfish, nasty, aggressive individuals. And obviously human morality is a way of going beyond that. But if you read Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, it’s very obvious that Darwin himself did not agree with this view at all.

Now this of course doesn't prove or even imply that there is an objective standard of morality independent of human nature. And neither does this understanding of human and animal behavior resemble the 'herd instinct' Lewis speaks of. Under de Waal's view, it's perfectly reasonable that something as complex as moral behavior could be thought of as an instinct (or a confluence of instincts); thus there's no need to posit a 'third thing' independent of natural human instincts.

Now getting back to the 'Reason is the servant of the passions' bit. Tamler Sommers also interviewed social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who argues for what he calls the 'social intuitionist model' of morality, where we intuitively judge human thought and behavior first, and then attempt to justify our judgment with reasons. He further argues that we engage in providing reasons not to appeal to an objective standard of morality, but to convince others of the rightness of our judgment.

BLVR: I want to talk about the philosophical implications of your model for a moment. In particular, I thought the social intuitionist model makes plausible the claim that there is no such thing as objective moral truth, even though human beings believe that some of their moral judgments are objectively true.

JH: If anybody thinks that moral truths are going to be facts about the universe, that any rational creature on any planet would be bound by, then no such facts exist. I think that moral truths are like truths about beauty, truths about comedy. Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus—apparati—that we happen to have. So moral facts emerge out of who we are in interaction with the people in our culture.

One of my favorite quotes is from Max Weber: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.” So I think that with morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy, but that’s true about money; that’s true about music; that’s true about most of the things that we care about.

So what de Waal and Haidt are saying has been misinterpreted as an objective Moral Law is really a predisposition of our nature as social animals, fueled by powerful intuitions which themselves are a result of emotions born of that same social interaction.

In other words, there is a Moral Law - but it is not objective and it is not independent of animal human nature.

Technorati tags:

morality, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Thoughts on Moral Psychology & Religion

2007-09-16T10:34:00.001-05:00

For anyone not familiar with the online magazine Edge, I highly recommend it. There you will find the most stimulating, thought-provoking, and controversial ideas by some of the best thinking minds out there. The Edge Foundation describes itself as:

Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.

The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.

The founder of The Edge Foundation, John Brockman, also edited and published The New Humanists: Science at the Edge, with essays by such humanist/naturalist thinkers as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett.

Edge is currently running an essay by Jonathan Haidt titled "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion." Haidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia who studies the relationship between morality and emotion, and how that relationship varies across cultures.

The relationship between moral reasoning, or even reasoning in general, and emotion is an interesting and little studied one; but one that was explored somewhat in-depth by one of my favorite authors, Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Damasio examines the extraordinary case of Phineas Gage, the 19th Century railroad construction worker whose ability to feel emotion was irretrievably altered after a tamping iron explosively entered his skull, damaging his brain. While Gage's intelligence remained intact, his ability to make rational decisions was severely impaired.

After providing a nice summary of the relation between emotion and moral reasoning, Haidt provides a distillation of his thinking on moral psychology with this definition:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Haidt goes on to describe what he considers to be the two main types of moral societies: the contractual society and the beehive society.

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.

The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media.

Haidt argues (correctly, in my opinion) that the contractual approach is favored by secular liberals while the beehive approach is advocated by cultural conservatives. He further claims that, speaking as a secular liberal himself, contractual societies offer the best paradigm for living peacefully in an increasingly pluralistic world.

It would have been nice if he would have stopped there; but then he goes on to join the fray surrounding the controversial and pejoratively named "New Atheists" with his final point:

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it's impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.

Haidt admits that the data from which the conclusions about the correlation between religiosity and charitable behavior (as well as enhanced personal health) are complex; but he additionally claims that one can't look to the New Atheists for ways to improve the overall wellbeing of society, or for a program to increase human flourishing, because the New Atheists are biased in their assessment of religion, religious societies, and religious believers.

Being an atheist myself (New, Old - whatever) - and having been raised in a Born-Again church and household - I would concede that my assessment of religion is biased; but it is biased because, for the better part of my life, I've thought critically about not only my religion but the idea of religion in general, and I've come to the conclusion that religion - at least fundamentalist religion - is not only absurd but potentially harmful both psychologically and societally.

But I actually agree with him to some extent; as I've argued before, I consider the term "atheism" to be merely the lack of belief in God or gods, but that the evidential basis for atheism is naturalism. The world-view known as naturalism can provide ways to improve human society and enhance human flourishing. Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism lays out the personal and social consequences of naturalism here.

But since some might (wrongly) identify the term 'naturalism' with a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest type of outlook, perhaps it's best to paraphrase Sartre and say that naturalism is a humanism, where humanism is defined as

a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

Technorati tags:

moral psychology, religion, naturalism, humanism, atheism

On the Relation Between Humanism and Naturalism

2007-09-15T05:39:00.003-05:00

I've been out of blogging mode lately, due partly to traveling for work and partly for personal reasons like my best friend's wedding. There has actually been a lot to blog about over the past few weeks, so I'd like to get started with an article that appeared in The Washington Post's "On Faith" section. The title of the article is "The Rabbi Who Believed in Good." I thought I would start with this article in light of the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, occurring this past week.

The article eulogizes Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, "the greatest American religious leader you never heard of" as they put it. He was the founder of the international movement of Humanistic Judaism, and had been called, whether pejoratively or not, "the atheist rabbi."

But perhaps I should say a word here about the term "Humanism." Humanism is a term that subsumes many different philosophies. But for the sake of simplicity, let's just say there are two main categories of Humanism: secular Humanism and religious Humanism. Now before you think the term religious Humanism is an oxymoron, you should know that a religious Humanist, while still considering herself an adherent of some type of religion, still believes in the dignity and worth of all human beings, and may even appeal to universal human qualities, such as rationality, in defending certain ethical stances.

Rabbi Wine viewed Judaism as a culture rather than a religion, and asserted that he could take pride in his culture while at the same time affirming the equality of all human beings as part of a Humanist world-view. I've known many such culturally Jewish people who practice the ceremonies and rituals in an effort to maintain that cultural identity, and based on my interactions with them, I would certainly call them Humanists, religious or otherwise.

In terms of the relation between Humanism and Naturalism, the world-view I espouse here in this blog, the article presents a reasonable summary of the similarity between Humanism and Naturalism as well as most naturalists' goal in promoting our world-view:

Yet the movement [Rabbi] Sherwin founded and the career he pioneered...was never against god but rather sought, beyond god, to create a humanist community, led by humanist professionals, for the benefit of all human beings....and now that best-selling books on atheism by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have shown millions what Humanists do not believe in, let those of us who happen to be freethinkers follow Sherwin's example and build a positive alternative to traditional religion. Let us build communities, organizations, and families that do good for ourselves and others, based on the Humanist ethic of reason, compassion and creativity.

The Center for Naturalism employs the mantra "Connection-Compassion-Control," to indicate the essence of naturalism as it applies to human lives:

Connection: Everything we are and do is completely connected to the rest of the world. Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us. Each of us is an unfolding, natural process, and every aspect of that process is caused, and is a cause itself. We are therefore entirely at home in the physical universe.

Compassion: Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I. We would have been the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life.

Control: Understanding how we are caused to behave as we do gives us increased powers of prediction and control. Instead of supposing people can simply will themselves to be otherwise, we concentrate our energies on creating the conditions which promote constructive personal and social change. The ethics of compassion is matched by a practical efficacy based in scientific knowledge.

While on the face of it one would think that Humanism and Naturalism are synonymous, I would argue that naturalism is the implicit philosophical basis for naturalism.

And whether Humanist or Naturalist, we seek to provide a positive, life-affirming alternative to faith-based religious world-views for which there is no compelling evidence, and which sometimes have far-reaching detrimental effects due in part to their ubiquity.

Technorati tags:

Humanism, Naturalism

What is Atheism?

2007-09-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

British writer and philosopher Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction gives an excellent overview of the possibility of having meaning, purpose and morality without God or religion. An online summary of his chapter on "Atheist Ethics" can be found here. However, there is one clarification I would make to his excellent book.

Baggini defines atheism as "the belief that there is no God or gods." He goes on to say:

My aim in this book is to provide a positive case for atheism, one that is not simply about rubbishing religious belief.

But even though he goes on to provide distinctions between atheism, naturalism, and physicalism, he presents atheism as a positive belief system, which I think is misleading.

He describes physicalism as the claim that "the only things that exist are material objects." He admits this view of the world is rather crude, in the sense of lacking nuance, and that a more palatable definition would be that "only the objects of the physical sciences - physics, chemistry, and biology - exist. " He does eventually get to the real crux of the matter when he claims that many atheists' atheism is motivated by their conviction of the truth of naturalism, broadly taken to mean that there is only one, unified, natural world, and that there is no evidence for anything supernatural.

He further says that "atheism is essentially a form of naturalism and so its main evidential base is the evidence for naturalism." He then goes on to talk about the types of evidence: strong evidence, which is the kind that is generally observable and independently verifiable; and weak evidence, which is typically of the anecdotal kind.

But with all of the controversial press surrounding the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and the understandable (albeit mistaken) claims of 'atheist fundamentalism' or 'atheist dogmatism', I think it's much better to be clear about, and emphasize the importance of, atheism's link to naturalism.

I like to define atheism in its more etymological sense: a lack of belief in God or gods. That's all. It makes no positive claims; it expresses no beliefs. I call myself an atheist, but I always explain that my atheism is a result of my naturalism.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism, in his book Encountering Naturalism, describes naturalism this way:

In a nutshell, the naturalism I'll present holds that there is a single, natural, physical world in which we are completely included. There isn't a separate supernatural or immaterial realm and there's nothing supernatural or immaterial about us.

Naturalism takes science, and more broadly a rational, evidence-based empiricism, as the most reliable means for discovering what exists. If we stick with science, the world is united in our understanding, not divided into the natural versus the supernatural.

And as Baggini says in his book:

So the evidence for atheism is to be found in the fact that there is a plethora of evidence for the truth of naturalism and an absence of evidence for anything else. 'Anything else' of course includes God, but it also includes goblins, hobbits, and truly everlasting gobstoppers. There is nothing special about God in this sense. God just happens to be one of the things atheists don't believe in, it just happens to be the thing that, for historical reasons, gave them their name.

But here I just want to say a brief word about the straw man of what many pejoratively call Scientism - the belief that science can explain or know everything there is to explain or know about ourselves, our world and our universe, or that science is the final and only authority in matters extending beyond its scope: philosophy, ethics, religion, etc. The pejorative nature of the term arises from what many mistakenly perceive as the discipline of science's claims of 'proof.' Baggini addresses this in his book:

...absolute proofs are not available for the vast majority of our beliefs, but that a lack of such proof is no grounds for the suspension of belief. This is because where we have a lack of absolute proof we can still have overwhelming evidence or one explanation which is far superior to the alternatives.

Or to paraphrase arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion: what matters is not whether the existence of God is provable (it isn't), but whether or not the existence of God is probable. And this is where naturalists say that, based on the evidence our best disciplines of science provide us, the existence of God - or indeed anything supernatural - is highly improbable.

So while science can never definitively prove that there is no God - or anything supernatural - it has a lot to say about whether or not belief in God or the supernatural is justified. As a naturalist, naturally I say that belief in God or the supernatural is not justified. And that's why I prefer to present the evidence for naturalism with the hope that reasonable people will be persuaded by the preponderance of that evidence and the reliability of the scientific methodology from which that evidence is derived.

And that's why I think that knocking people over the head with the God-doesn't-exist hammer won't do much good.

Technorati tags:

atheism, naturalism, New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens

Have Scientists Found the Brain's Free Will Center?

2007-08-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

One of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' ancillary websites, healthfinder.gov, recently published an article on the latest neuroscience research titled, "Scientists Spot Brain's 'Free Will' Center." The article begins:

If you've ever been of "two minds" about doing something, a new study may explain why.

Scientists say one part of the brain is responsible for initiating action, while a totally separate area is in charge of not taking that action.

This newly identified region, involved in an aspect of self-control, may change conceptions of human free will, the researchers said. It could also explain the basis of impulsive as well as reluctant behavior, they added.

Given the recent spate of neuroscientific research that strongly suggests humans do not possess a capacity for contra-causal 'free will', no doubt some will find solace in the apparent conclusion at which this article arrives. Additionally, those of a more traditional monotheistic bent will seize upon this tidbit of research as evidence or justification for the necessity of their belief in free will. An essential tenet - possibly the central tenet - of monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam is that human possess the freedom to choose to obey God or not - or even to believe in God or not; and that this capacity for insubordination warrants an eternity of punishment. Tom Gilson of The Thinking Christian blog writes:

And it couldn't say [there's no such thing as free will]; not without jumping off to all kinds of unwarranted conclusions (of course, that didn't stop those other three newspapers from doing the same). The research said that there appear to be separate centers in the brain, one for planning and doing things, the other for deciding not to do them. One for action, one for inhibition. Somewhere, we make decisions. That somewhere remains scientifically unidentified. I predict it will remain that way.

Yes, the research purports to show that there is a center in the brain for initiating action and one for refraining from action. We know that different modules in the brain are responsible for different things. And, yes, we also know that somewhere in all that muddle decisions get made. The research can't say there's no free will; but, equally, it can't say there is. However, it (along with most other research in this area) strongly suggests that human beings do not possess contra-causal free will.

There's no doubt human beings make decisions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those are 'free' decisions. The most widely accepted, if inchoate or at least not fully thought out, view is that there is a little 'me' inside my brain who receives all the sensory information from my body and makes free decisions based on that information. This little 'me' is free to choose and decide in whatever way it pleases. But this concept cries out for an explanation of what makes the little 'me' in there decide the way it does? What determines how it chooses? There must be reasons for its choices, no? If there are no reasons, then its decisions would be completely arbitrary. Clearly our decisions do not seem arbitrary. We all claim to have reasons for our actions, for our decisions.

So what we end up with is a sort of Russian doll type of infinite regress: an infinite series of little 'me's' each providing the reasons for the previous 'me's' actions. At some point, in order for mini-me's actions to be free in the sense most of us generally, and religious believers in particular require, there must be a break in this chain, an insertion of a free element to the decision making process - a chink through which a god might slink, if you will. Because that's what we would have to be: each of us would have to be a Prime Mover, a first cause of ourselves. But does the idea of being a first cause of ourselves even make sense? I say no.

For me, and for those who call themselves naturalists, the debate over free will is, well, over. The more interesting part of the article relates to the consequences of being able to identify the area of the brain responsible for our inhibitory capacities. As the article states:

This study and others like it are really in their infancy, Miranda pointed out. That's important to remember, since the findings could one day have legal and other implications.

"This kind of data could have implications for legal definitions of 'diminished capacity,' " he explained. "There's a potential for informing legal definitions of mental illness and things like that."

"Much of our society is based on the concept of not only free will but also 'free won't,' the inhibition of response," Masur explained. "The difference between us as intelligent ordered social creatures and the society that would run amok is the ability to inhibit our responses, the ability to take control if a situation calls for it, to stop acting in a particular way . . . Maybe down the line somebody can develop a drug or hormone or transmitter system that targets that particular area of brain which strengthens the ability to negate responses which are too impulsive."

Aside from Masur's eerily Brave New World-ish suggestion, the implications for our criminal justice system could be significant. Our current criminal justice system is a retributivist one where we mete out 'just desserts' to those we deem are fully responsible (and not mentally compromised) for their actions. But a naturalistic understanding of ourselves says that we are fully natural, fully-caused creatures who aren't ultimately responsible for creating themselves, for good or ill.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism, in an email exchange with journalist Issac Bailey, draws out the implications of a naturalistic view of criminal justice which is relevant in light of this new research about 'free won't':

Bailey: People such as Stephen Stanko, who was convicted of murder and sexual assault, don't deserve the death penalty because they are a product of their environment and genetic makeup. I asked Clark: Why do you believe Stanko had no control over his actions?

Clark : Stanko had no control over his genetic endowment and his upbringing, the combination of which gradually created his character and propensities for criminal behavior. But I think it's incorrect to say Stanko had no control over what he did. After all, he wasn't completely insane. Had a police officer been present, he wouldn't have committed his crimes. Rather, it's that his capacity for conforming his conduct to the law - what we mean by self-control in this context - was severely compromised by various causal factors having to do with his genetics and upbringing. He lacked enough impulse control, plus had other dysfunctional, antisocial characteristics, for this horrific behavior to occur.

Bailey : I believe things such as genetics and the environment influence behavior but doesn't cause them, meaning it might be harder for someone like Stanko to resist the urge to commit violence but he can choose to resist nonetheless.

Clark : It's important to see that the extent of one’s capacity to resist violent urges can only be judged by one's actual behavior. It's not a matter of having this capacity and just choosing not to exercise it out of one's own uncaused free will. To say that it's harder for Stanko to exercise control is just to say that his capacity for control is severely compromised, compared to our (normal) capacity; so he behaved criminally, while we do not. All this could be fully explained if we knew enough about his genetics and life history. If you believe that “things such as genetics and the environment influence behavior but doesn't cause them,” then you believe, as do most people, that there is this third thing, this uncaused free will independent of genetics and environment, that does cause behavior. But then you have to explain where that will comes from, and why it chooses the way it does. If you can't answer those questions, you're appealing to a mystery, and if you do answer those questions, you'll see that it all ultimately boils down to environment and heredity as they create the person. There's nothing besides these that figure in causal explanations, according to science.

The significance of all this for the death penalty, of course, is that if you suppose Stanko has free will, and just chose not to refrain from killing, then he deserves to die since he's a self-made monster in some sense. But if we take the causal story of his character and behavior seriously, we can't suppose that he could have done otherwise.

Bailey : Given that view, what, exactly, should be done with the Stankos of the world, given the crimes they commit?

Clark: If, as I believe, we should be creating a less punitive, less dangerous society, then we want to reinforce nonviolent models of behavior and make inmates better, not worse. Right now, the death penalty and many prisons model the worst sort of behavior imaginable - killings, rape, isolation, degradation - and thus further damage inmates, many of whom will eventually be released, helping to perpetuate the sort of society that's causing crime in the first place. Once we drop the free-will-based, retributive justification for punishment, there are still valid objectives of criminal justice, including public safety, deterrence, rehabilitation, community restoration, and victim restitution.

Technorati tags:

free will, naturalism, criminal justice

What Does a Naturalist Believe? Part V

2007-08-22T07:52:00.001-05:00

In a time when the debate between religious believers and secular non-believers seems to be growing towards a fever pitch, I find myself drawn more and more to the task of expounding on the positive aspects of the world-view known as naturalism.

I call it a fever pitch because recent books penned by unabashed atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have brought to the forefront of public discourse a heretofore taboo dialogue regarding the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief. Even CNN has been running a series ominously titled "God's Warriors". The series began last night with a look at so-called Jewish warriors; and over the next two nights they will be examining Christian warriors and Muslim warriors, respectively.

I watched last night's episode, and I should say that it does a good job of at least bringing to the public's attention the type of thinking that is behind the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; however, I think the show spent too much time on an Olympics-style "up close and personal" type of format. They delved more deeply into the specific circumstances of certain individuals and families, and not deeply enough into the underlying ideological and political beliefs driving the conflict. I imagine that the next two episodes will be more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a needful program, but I'm just indulging in a little Monday morning quarterbacking.

The criticism leveled at Dawkins, Harris, et. al., is that their approach is acerbic and divisive - and even somewhat evangelical, in its own way - and that ridiculing believers will only serve to strengthen their already impregnable redoubt of belief. I have leveled this same criticism; but I also believe that it is a necessary evil, so to speak. I think it's true that ridicule will almost never disabuse a true believer of her beliefs, however ridiculous those beliefs may be. But, at bottom, I consider the pejoratively-called New Atheists' effort to be a necessary opening salvo in exposing the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief in America. I believe it's been a long time coming, and if the implicit gag order regarding religious belief which has held sway over public discourse for so long has to be repealed through acerbic vitriol, then so be it.

Having outgrown a fundamentalist - though not particularly evangelical - church into a completely secular, naturalistic view of the world, I know how intellectually and emotionally arduous it can be to break free of a cultural and familial shibboleth such as religious belief - especially monotheistic belief with it's claim to absolute truth and the adherent's unqualified obedience.

My goal in this post is not to delineate the differences between religious faith and evidence-based empiricism and rationality (i.e., the endeavor of science). I intend to deal with the most salient and relevant issue facing someone who lacks belief in the supernatural: the most difficult thing to overcome, and the most persistent criticism leveled at non-believers, is the idea that existence is meaningless and empty without a belief in God.

In this regard, I'd like to use the 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a sort of foil. I've always found Schopenhauer to be one of the more straightforward philosophers - which is unusual for 'professional' philosophers of his time, especially the German philosophers. Additionally, I am sympathetic to his affinity for the Upanishadic and Buddhist philosophies of India, which he rightly regarded as springing from a desire to understand and eradicate human suffering, despite their dubious metaphysical musings. Schopenhauer himself indulged in some specious metaphysical musings, especially in his work The World as Will and Representation. I think he had many things right, but there are some things, at least in my opinion as a metaphysical naturalist, that he had wrong.

But I want to focus on his thoughts about existence - human and otherwise. One of his essays was titled "The Emptiness of Existence"; and despite its seemingly nihilistic tone, it is difficult for a naturalist to argue with his most basic conclusions:

This emptiness finds its expression in the whole form of existence, in the infiniteness of Time and Space as opposed to the finiteness of the individual in both; in the flitting present as the only manner of real existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constantly Becoming without Being; in continually wishing without being satisfied; in an incessant thwarting of one’s efforts, which go to make up life, until victory is won. Time, and the transitoriness of all things, are merely the form under which the will to live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, has revealed to Time the futility of its efforts. Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.

Aside from his claim that the "will to live" is imperishable, his assessment is nearly identical to the Buddha's original diagnosis of human existence. When Schopenhauer talks about the Will as being the "thing-in-itself", he means to say that the Will is the ultimate reality, and that a human being is a temporary manifestation of this Will; but by doing so, he also imputes purpose or intention to it, something which we naturalists understand doesn't exist in nature as such: nature simply is, and it has no ultimate purpose. Humans have purposes, but that's not the same thing as saying that nature as a whole has a purpose.

But, as with the Buddha, he notes that existence is characterized by both incessant change and the automatic, ineradicable arising of innumerable desires. This is undoubtedly true. What we call the 'present moment' is so infinitesimally short - for example, as soon as a word is spoken, as soon as the sound waves enter our ear and are registered in the brain, it already belongs to the past. Sure, we remember words that have been spoken, and strings of words we call sentences, but they exist only in our memory - they no longer belong to this thing we call the present:

What has been exists no more; and exists just as little as that which has never been. But everything that exists has been in the next moment. Hence something belonging to the present, however unimportant it may be, is superior to something important belonging to the past; this is because the former is a reality and related to the latter as something is to nothing.

I like his idea that, from a human perspective, the present moment is 'superior' to something belonging to the past or to the future. Humanity, generally speaking, has always been concerned with living in the moment; carpe diem and all that. Indeed, it is the primary imperative of Zen Buddhism. We've all been admonished that dwelling on or bemoaning the past is a waste of time at best and downright unhealthy at worst; and that pining for an uncertain or indeterminate future is a similar misuse of valuable time. Our choices, our actions - the things that create our future - exist only in the present moment. By 'future', I mean the circumstances in which we eventually find ourselves, the way points along our lives - and not necessarily our personalities or characters; though clearly our choices and actions contribute to them.

So we naturalists learn not to harp on about the past, or to get caught up in the many machinations related to future concerns. Of course, this is easier said than done. For many, if not most, this is a Herculean task. Some may eventually succeed in this endeavor, while some may never get it. And of course most of us are everywhere along the spectrum. But naturalists don't worry about past 'sins' or the fate of their soul after death because naturalists don't believe in sin or souls or life after death. To a naturalist, these concepts don't refer to any reality.

As we delve further into the psyche of Schopenhauer, he begins to get more and more pessimistic:

In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change, where everything hurries on, flies, and is maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present and is now at an end.

Again, it is undoubtedly true that life is characterized by constant change, and that human beings continually strive for happiness; but it is disingenuous to say that no one is never happy. It's true that if all one is concerned with is superficial happiness - enjoying a good meal, having a good romp in the sack, a delicious piece of chocolate or a fine wine - then of course as soon as those desires are satisfied new ones arise and the wheel rolls on. And not everyone attains the same type of happiness, or finds happiness in the same objects or pursuits.

But can happiness be an abiding state of being, as opposed to a temporary state of mind? Here's where I think a religious believer and a secular non-believer cross paths. Both recognize that human beings can be characterized as fountains of desires; that this constant 'chasing after the wind' keeps one in a more or less continual state of agitation or perturbation; and that both seek to position themselves in relation to desires such that these desires lose their force. I would argue that they both aspire to be in the position Susan Blackmore describes:

The same is so for all desires. I want another helping of chocolate pudding. In fact there either will or won't be enough left for me. The desire will or won't be gratified. When it happens one way or the other I will go on paying attention either to the full tummy, yucky with chocolate or to the slightly emptier one with only one helping. Either way will be fine. The funny thing about paying attention is how everything really seems to be fine whether the desires are fulfilled or not.

Gradually this approach to desires transforms them. They don't go away but they stop driving you. It is as though, simply by paying attention, they lose their force. And you don't feel less alive but more so.

To most Westerners, this state of being seems almost impossible to attain. It is very Zen-like or Taoist in its approach. The goal is not to live without desire - that may very well be impossible - but to live in a right relation to one's desires such that one is not torn apart by them. Since it is impossible for human beings to quell the fountain from which desires spring, we must compose ourselves in such a way that we stand in an endurable relation to our desires.

The naturalist sees that all of existence - all human thought and activity, all of nature, from the subatomic to the cosmic - is in a state of flux. We understand that the satisfaction of simple desires leads to the craving for more and complicated desires, and that the course of one's life is largely determined by the nature of the desires one pursues - professionally, personally and spiritually.

There are many spiritual practices designed to accomplish this, from the simple yet difficult practice of Zen or the Taoist 'going with the flow', to more elaborate disciplines. Even the monotheistic religions essentially teach their adherents to channel their desires onto one object: God himself.

So while all naturalists share the common conviction that nature is all there is - there is nothing supernatural about existence - they employ different methods for achieving abiding happiness. Many attempt to lessen the force of desire, to be less driven by it; there may be some who capitulate and give themselves over to their desires, to be possessed by them; and there may be some who see this whole endeavor as pointless or impossible and try not to think about it too much.

But whatever their attitude toward desire, they understand and accept - though they might not be happy about - the fact that there is no recourse to any supernatural being or power or force in the universe to which they can appeal or entreat, and in the end they are thrown back on their own existence, their own resources, and must navigate their own way in the world.

But that is not a bad thing; and it is ultimately not all that different for the believer in the supernatural.

Technorati tags:

naturalism, God's Warriors

Blue Planet

2007-08-19T20:59:00.001-05:00

If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend that you watch the Discovery Channel's series "Blue Planet" - and if you have HDTV, it's even better.

The reason I'm writing about it on this blog is because the footage captures the essence of what is known as religious naturalism: the elicitation by Nature of such emotions and feelings as awe, wonder and admiration.

No doubt theists will see the hand of God in all of this; but those of us without belief in the super-natural have no need to invoke any gods to appreciate what is best conveyed by the words of Charles Darwin:

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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Blue Planet, naturalism, religious naturalism

Embracing Existence

2007-08-17T08:32:00.001-05:00

I've been publishing a series of posts here at this blog about what naturalists believe; yet these posts are very general in nature and reflect, presumably, what most thorough-going naturalists believe; or at least what beliefs they would need to hold to call themselves naturalists.

But in this post I want to get a little more personal and talk briefly about how I live with my naturalistic world-view.

I have to say that arriving at this world-view, while a gradual process, was nevertheless somewhat akin to Neo waking up to the real world in The Matrix, sans pod of goo:

There was a certain terror, a certain anxiety or panic, in relinquishing my former world-view, even if that world-view had already begun to fade from my awareness. But aside from the pain of this renunciation, there was the acknowledgment of the fact that I couldn't go back to my former way of thinking about the world.

In addition to my own private journal-writing throughout this period, which I am reluctant to share here, there are many other poems, song lyrics, and essays written by others that express both the vicissitudes and the vagaries of my own path. These are some of the writings which have inspired me, frightened me, edified me, and sustained me:

Dull is the armor, cold is the day.
Hard was the journey, dark was the way. (1)

Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not; so we never meet. (2)

By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of soul - an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence... (3)

All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature, but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor. (4)

But the man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, sees how some forces of Nature work upon other forces of Nature, and becomes not their slave. (4)

[Zen master's] emphasis was on awakening in the midst of everyday life and they made it clear that they saw everyday life not only as the way to enlightenment, but as enlightenment itself. (5)

The absolute tranquility is the present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight. (6)

Gradually this approach to desires transforms them. They don't go away but they stop driving you. It is as though, simply by paying attention, they lose their force. And you don't feel less alive but more so. (7)

Paying attention circumvents all this. It is done right now. It is not planned for the future or referred to anywhere else. It is paying attention right now to whatever right now is. That is all. Any transformation that occurs takes care of itself. This is why it is so terrifying for there truly is nothing to hang onto. There is only this present and it is already gone. However, paradoxically, it is also the way to losing fear. With practice at paying attention comes the confidence that there is always a now to attend to. All pasts and futures are mental constructions. If I think about them they become thoughts in attention. If I don't they do not exist. When all present moments are bearable, when there are no obstructions to thought because I have learned to pay attention to everything, then there really need be no fear. Any "now" that the world throws at me will be fine. (7)

You must become an ignorant man again,
and see the sun again with an ignorant eye. (8)

Tranquil, let one treasure it,
as that from which he came forth,
as that into which he will be dissolved,
as that in which he breathes. (4)

Notes:

(1) Robert Plant
(2) Epicurus
(3) Jerry Ruhl
(4) Bhagavad-Gita
(5) The Tao of Physics
(6) Hui-neng
(7) Susan Blackmore
(8) Wallace Stevens

Destiny: Chance or Choice?

2007-08-16T16:43:00.000-05:00

Recently I drove past a quasi-religious organization called Religious Science - one that touts itself as a center for 'practical spirituality' - and on their marquee was written the aphorism, "Destiny is not chance - it's a choice."

I actually like it; though I doubt when they wrote it they had in mind what I had in mind. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine they equate choice with free will.

What I have in mind is more along the lines of what I wrote about in my previous post: we create our own future - our own Destiny, if you will - by the choices we make. But those choices aren't free choices, in the sense of being outside the causal chain.

Or, as the Dhammapada puts it:

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.

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naturalism, destiny, Dhammapada