I’m a touch late to this game, but fellow contributor and good friend Chris Dierkes went a few rounds on the old God question and the role that New Atheists like PZ Myers, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the like stand to play in our discussion about the merits of faith and religion. I swore to myself after our last melee of “does God exist?” discussions that I would keep my hat out of this ring, but like Al Pacino, I find myself drawn back in.
I’m giving in on this topic because I’m less interested in talking about whether or not God exists — many of the contributors here have named that discussion as one of their favourites, I myself tend to see it as fairly intractable and, therefore, somewhat dissatisfying — and more about the important function I personally see New Atheists playing in the dynamics of faith and religion.
I should start off by saying that Chris and I share a good deal of meaning around this particular topic, one could say that it forms the basis of our friendship. So in the interests of full disclosure, I will report that I’m with Chris in “Rockland” when it comes to the idea of stages of faith he presented in his last piece. I also happen to buy that this conception of how faith evolves extends to many more facets of human life than just faith, but for the purposes of this post we’ll constrain our focus to it’s functioning in the realm of faith.
As Chris notes,
One of the geniuses of Fowler’s work is a basic trust that humans have a spiritual line of development or intelligence with cross-cultural structural similarities in their patterning regardless of whether they formally believe in God or not. And actually whether or not God exists does not change Fowler’s reconstruction. Even if there is no God, humans continue to develop meaning-making stories and go through sequential orders of faith development. Those patterns tell us something about human maturation–even if not about the Divine (though I obviously think it does the latter as well). Fowler’s work shows that this spiritual-faith dimension of human experience develops from primal forms of religion to magical forms to mythic forms to rational forms of religion to pluralistic forms to more holistic forms. This development can stop at any point and also can develop in a nearly infinite number of surface manifestations but generally show the same basic deep patterning.
All of which is to say (in short, because Chris does an excellent job of unpacking it all in much more nuance at length in his post) that when it comes to the issue of God and religion, how we tend to believe is as looming a question as whether we tend to believe. Which is also to say that, in my humble opinion, there are better and worse ways of believing.
Now when I say “better and worse”, what I really mean to say is different, except that I’m not so much interested in the shying away from a valuation of belief that using a word like “different” seems to imply.
But my muddying the waters by using both phrases is intended to offer the suggestion that different ways (or hows) of believing are just fine, insofar as they fulfill a certain need at a particular stage of development: you wouldn’t expect a five year old to have a Rawlsian conception of justice, but would be perfectly satisfied with a rigid and clunky conception of what is good and what is bad because at that stage in the five year old’s life, just such a conception works for his/her/your purposes.
But as time presses on, you would become decreasingly satisfied with that conception of good and bad as the five year old matures into a ten year old, then a teenager, and then eventually into young and full blown adulthood. Our understanding of things change, develop, and evolve as we do, and conceptions of God and faith are, I am arguing, no different.
So, when I choose to dive headlong into the use of the terms “better” and “worse”, what I’m really valuing here is that process of evolution and development rather than the different “hows” that appear along the spectrum of that movement. A Rawlsian conception of justice is better than a five year old conception of good and bad — it is more sophisticated, better considered, more broadly applicable, and possesses greater explanatory power — but we don’t fault the five year old for having his or her five year old conception of good and bad at the age of five. However, we may well, and indeed I would argue should, blame them for retaining that conception at the age of twenty-five.
Shorter me: evolution and development in our understanding of the world towards greater comprehensiveness, nuance, and complexity is a good thing. Full stop.
That being the case, I correspondingly value the kind of development and evolution that Chris describes in our belief in and conceptions of God. Now, if you’re holding your breath, waiting for me to say that my position is that the majority of people’s faith and belief in God is akin to a five year old’s conception of justice/good and bad, then keep holding your breath because that isn’t what I’m saying. But I am saying that I take many people’s faith and belief in God to stand at the steps of an important fulcrum of modification and transmutation. The gatekeepers of that fulcrum I take to be the New Atheists and I greatly value the work they are doing at that gate.
Now, not everyone is going to, nor, perhaps more importantly, must realize the furthest marker of development in their conception of God and religion. It is a fact that some people will get to, say, a pre-rational place in terms of their belief in and conception of God and that is precisely where they will stay. That is a fact and it is also a right as enshrined in the Constitution, no one has to go through a rigorous critical analysis about their belief in and conception of God.
But, I would argue, they would be better off if they did, precisely because I think doing so brings one to a better (read: more developed) place in terms of that belief and conception. And by my lights, the only people out there who are really challenging people to reconcile their belief in and conception of God to the dominant fulcrum of fully rational thinking are the New Atheists — they don’t often do so in a nice and polite manner, but I think that that they recognize that going around nicely and politely challenging people tends to yield little in the way of fruit.
And while it is true that the New Atheists could perhaps also stand to gear down the snark and condescension in the gadfly ways, on the whole, when I place the New Athesists in the larger schema of the framework I’ve outlined, I can’t but appreciate their efforts because those efforts act as momentum building force towards a greater evolutionary movement when it comes to belief in and conception of God.
I get that what I have suggested isn’t the reason d’etre of New Atheism as understood and articulated by the New Atheists themselves, so I would be a fool to feign surprise were they to deride my analysis here. But whether they intend to play a gatekeeper role at a particular stage of development/evolution that centres on the primacy of rational thought, I have a hard time seeing how they in fact don’t by posing the very questions they do. Posing those questions implicitly indicates that they may — however unlikely it might seem to the asker — have acceptable answers.
One step further, whether religious devotees like it or not, the road to greater and greater realizations of God runs straight through the New Atheists’ valley, so at some point, one’s belief in and conception of God will have to be reconciled with purely rational thinking.
What might such a conception look like? Self-serving though it might seem, I’m inclined to use my own conception of God to illustrate the point,
What I take to be the fundamental insight of most Eastern religions is the realization that the world in which exist and work and play is transitory, it is momentary and nothing of any true permanence takes up residence in it. Things arise, stick around for a while, and then they cease to be. At the same time, there is a ground of being or existence upon which all of that gyration is taking place, there is something that those things — humans, animals, ideas, rocks, ice cream cones — arise out of and cease to be into and the point of meditation towards the aim of enlightenment is to anchor our presence in that which is eternal.
I use that graph because, first of all, I would be ill-advised to ascribe the particulars of a belief in God to someone other than myself. Such a belief is, I think, entirely difficult to speak about and even more difficult to pin down with particulars. But the above does a good job of articulating a conception of God that I happen to hold (and, actually, don’t often use the word God to describe, though the words I do use and the word God are pointing to the same thing in my mind) and I happen to think it presents a palatable articulation to a rational conception of the world, which, not coincidentally, has reaulted in a much greater degree of freedom and much reduced — to altogether eradicated — cognitive dissonance in my own life.
What have I essentially called or described God as above? The ground of existence, which, by my lights, is not a controversial statement. We and this world do exist and it is an open question from whence the emergence of this existence came. That kind of questioning lies at the heart of most philosophical inquiry and to place God into the calculus of such an equation is not a new move in the slightest.
The idea of God as the very substance of our own existence dates back my good friend Baruch Spinoza and his conception of God godding. Regardless, one drops the need to anthropomorphize God as a means of relation and opens one’s self up to what I would describe as a more fundamental relationship to not just God, but the world itself.
However, I digress, again the point of this post wasn’t so much to go on about the existence or non-existence of God, it was to acknowledge the important role that the New Atheists play in the evolution of belief in and conception of God. And to get back to that point, I would simply point out that I could not have come to the above conception of and relationship to God without having to spend some significant time with the arguments about belief in God itself and the challenges and ills besetting organized religion.
Those arguments are doubly important because they don’t only stand to offer impetus for evolution in our belief in and conceptions of God, but also a host of other social issues such how to view homosexuality, certain racially based biases that sometimes attend a deeply traditional religious conviction, differences in perspective when it comes to religious faith, conceptions of life itself and the purpose of life, among numerous others.
Myers points to this in his exhortations to give up our religious convictions, but to his mind that is the only option. To mine and Chris’ minds that is one of two options: give up or evolve. That Meyers and other New Atheists have had the courage to put the challenge too people so bluntly tends to ruffle many a feather, but I would rather the question be asked bluntly than not at all. In that sense, anyone committed to the evolution of religious belief owes the New Atheists a debt of gratitude.
Amen!
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{ 29 comments }
6) averted!
Now, while I formulate a more reasoned response (with paragraphs and everything), I’ll merely say that all y’all are the diggity dank (and that I do not say that enough) and ask the following question (which is the obvious follow-up question in these discussions):
Why should I change my life because of this “god” of yours?
Scott,
To summarize, is your thesis that the major spark for introspection, reflection, etc within religious communities coming from not our fellow Believers but instead from outside faith all-together?
I’m an atheist, but whenever I hear Richard Dawkins talk, it makes me want to run, not walk, to the nearest church and dedicate my life to Jesus. Dawkins and his ilk should not be the face of the secular movement if we want to win over the population, my fellow non-believers need to understand this.
Back on point, my greatest joys in life come from intellectual Christians performing all manner of mental contortions to rationalize their beliefs. Judging from the number of concessions the Vatican’s thinkers have made to science, this game won’t hold out for too long. Interestingly, in the face of science, the Buddhists have taken a ‘that’s what we’ve been saying all along’ approach. It might be the only way to survive the 21st century .
Thoughtful post. I tend to agree, except that I hope that people’s ultimate destination is agnosticism rather than a kind of squishy deism.
ps: It’s “Myers”, not “Meyers”.
Jaybird – sorry for the delay.
Francis – merci.
Sorry for the curt answers, I’m behind in my “commenting duties” in this post and elsewhere due to busyness. Hope to get more comments out shortly-ish.
While I agree the New Atheists are snarky and often rude they are coming from a place where just saying you are an atheist has been unacceptable. The way you break out of an oppressive situation is often with energy and in your face confrontation. No one would be talking about atheism if it wasn’t for the force those people are bringing. So when atheists are freely accepted and have a place at the national table or morality then it will time for Myers, Dawkins, etc to move on.
Quickly here,
Jaybird – change your life in what way(s)?
Mike – yes and no. I think that this specific class of non-believers can and in some senses does play an important role in challenging the precepts of believers. Do I think it is the case that they must always and forever be the only ones to do that or that it is logically impossible that said challenges could come from within a community of believers? No, but I do think that challenges — as opposed to introspection and reflection, as you put it — are more likely to come from without than within. I also think that a religious community’s willingness to engage with those challenges/ers can be both healthy for the general discussion at hand, as well as for the community itself and the challengers.
Semra – I think it most useful if proponents of science and religion stop seeing themselves as necessarily engaged in an exercise of mutual exclusivity. But like Obama, I’m not uniter or a divider, I’m a transcender ;)
Francis – thanks, though I have not the arrogance in me to think that I could really grasp or articulate the “ultimate destination” at this point in my life. Check back with me a few lives down the line… or in at least another 30 years.
Greg – fair point, in the piece I don’t begrudge the NAs the ability to be forceful and explicitly praise that they challenge people. But being forceful and challenging and rocking people back on their heels does not necessarily entail snark and rudeness. Which is to say that I think the NAs could be every bit as forceful and challenging, if not perhaps more so, if they dropped the snarky rudeness that sometimes drips from their sword.
What if we don’t want to win over the population? :)
I’m an atheist by force, not by choice. Which is to say that I can’t make myself believe in something I don’t find believable. But I think a communitarian and morally aspirational religion is actually a good thing for a society, so I’m not going to talk anyone out of it.
“change your life in what way(s)?”
How about “at all”?
Scott,
As a corollary i would say that the role of sparking introspection, etc was once occupied simply by competing faiths. Just look at America in the 19th and early 20th centuries when new denominations were popping up on every corner over the slightest of theological differences. There was a very healthy debate taking place within greater Christianity. Now it often feels like all the Chirstian faiths have simply called a truce and accepted their differences mostly as just various colors in a big tent.
Enter the New Atheists, or as i call them, the Evangelical Atheists.
My general problem with these types is not their atheism – after all, atheism is merely the absense of something, and who can get upset about that?
My problem is what they generally believe in, in place of religious faith, which is faith in scientific materialism, objectiveist empirical absolutism, and a complete denial of the power of the subjective consciousness. Often, this is believed in with the same obnoxious smugness one finds in the worst of religious believers.
But I will grant them the fact that plenty of their criticisms of religious belief are true and healthy enough. There’s plenty in religion to be critical of. It’s just all too often a straw man argument aimed at the most delerious and childish of religious views, as if that is what all of religion is about. It’s as if we formed our views on science and technology by critiquing the latest breakthroughs being sold on late night informercials.
If I read you right (and please correct me if I do you injustice) you accept at least some of the criticisms offered by the ‘new atheists’ because they are helpful in forcing a deeper thinking of ones faith.
Where I would critique your approach is at the level of your solution;
“…and the point of meditation towards the aim of enlightenment is to anchor our presence in that which is eternal”
Which is a true enough a description of some strains of Eastern thought, but I suggest insufficient for a variety of reasons for acting as the intellectual bedrock of a faith capable of withstanding the atheist assault;
- the brute truth of the matter is that everything, including the universe itself, is transitory, and that nothing is eternal.
- the effect you seek to produce by re-grounding your faith is to insulate its base assumptions (‘eternal things’ for example) from the rational critiques of religion. This isn’t grappling with Dawkins, etc., so much as it is holding the faith of others up to take the death blow, while insisting your own faith by virtue of its reconstruction is somehow immune.
- a noticeable side-effect is that you would hollow out religion of all its intended cultural traditional meaning and reduce it to mere a hazy spirituality (there is ;something’ there, and I believe in it).
Last but not least, the most effective defense of faith I am aware of is the Wittgensteinian fideism espoused by my own Mother; ‘I believe because I want to believe’. It is a bold admission that faith is not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one, that it is grounded not in ‘eternal things’ but in the deepest needs of the self. It may be anodyne, and non-intellectual, but it is at its heart I think deeply honest.
Cameron,
I won’t speak for Scott, but you should be aware that what he’s talking about above, in relation to eastern religious teachings about “impermanence and permanance” is extremely ancient, and predates any attempt to answer the criticisms of modern atheists. It isn’t a way to somehow hold onto faith in the absence of rational reasons. It’s an attempt to directly investigate the nature of reality itself, not resorting to objective rationalism, but experience itself, and looking for a native ground to experience in the subjective dimension where experience actually comes alive to us.
Now, it’s true that many westerners, becoming doubtful of the Judeo-Christian concepts and practice of faith, have turned to these eastern notions as a way of re-discovering new meanings of faith, but these meanings are not themselves designed for that purpose. They are simply things that some people see to be true, because that is what they were meant to be – expressions of truth. The concept of faith that emerges from these is one of an underlying reality that is already present, not something which only comes after death and in some other place, like heaven. It’s the nature of reality itself, and so “faith” in this respect only means faith in the underlying reality that is always here and now. The general practice, therefore, is simply to surrender to this reality, not merely to believe in something magical about it, but to find out, through conscious, experiential surrender, what it means to be a conscious being alive in the subjective world of awareness itself. That’s not the scientific approach, to be sure, but it’s not one of merely believing in something we can’t ever see or know. Quite the opposite, it relies on the concept of a deeper and more direct form of knowledge that is actually experienced, rather than merely abstractly reasoned out.
Scott, your second to last paragraph:
“Those arguments are doubly important because they don’t only stand to offer impetus for evolution in our belief in and conceptions of God, but also a host of other social issues such how to view homosexuality, certain racially based biases that sometimes attend a deeply traditional religious conviction, differences in perspective when it comes to religious faith, conceptions of life itself and the purpose of life, among numerous others.”
I know no one paragraph or post can cover all the objectives evils perpetrated in the name of God by religion, so I only want to add to homosexual and racial discrimination gender discrimination.
Folks, thanks for the follow up comments. My free time is nil as I’m closing a deal on a first home purchase with person I’m marrying in 22 days and with whom I’m moving an apartment we’ve lived in for two years two days later.
Which is to say I’m really busy and knee deep in boxes as we speak and turning out new material is getting challenging, let alone being active in the comments. But I will endeavour to get some responses up. I’m sort of moving through recent posts and commenting on the most recent questions/suggestions/arguments in each.
Thanks much.
Moving sucks, but moving into your first house should lessen the pain just a nanobit.
conradg said: “The general practice, therefore, is simply to surrender to this reality, not merely to believe in something magical about it, but to find out, through conscious, experiential surrender, what it means to be a conscious being alive in the subjective world of awareness itself. That’s not the scientific approach, to be sure, but it’s not one of merely believing in something we can’t ever see or know. Quite the opposite, it relies on the concept of a deeper and more direct form of knowledge that is actually experienced, rather than merely abstractly reasoned out.”
- And this is where you lose me completely. The ‘deeper more direct form of knowledge’ strikes me as a grab bag for whatever subjective beliefs you wish to plug in to it, be it; the soul, reincarnation, gaia, gnosticism, pantheism, what have you.
Nor do I find notions that this ‘deeper form of knowledge’ is any way similar to our more basic concept of knowledge (typically asserted as ‘justified true belief’), as it asserts only the most minimal justification (I looked deep within myself), and no empirical reason to believe it is true.
“- And this is where you lose me completely. The ‘deeper more direct form of knowledge’ strikes me as a grab bag for whatever subjective beliefs you wish to plug in to it, be it; the soul, reincarnation, gaia, gnosticism, pantheism, what have you.”
You are confusing subjective beliefs about the objective world, with subjective truths about the subjective world. The eastern, more mystical path (and that includes much of original Christianity, as in Jesus’s famous injunction that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within”) is not oriented towards the objective world, or finding the scientific “reality” of that world. If that is how you judge it, and find it lacking, that only means you haven’t understood what it is about.
Even the doctrine of reincarnation is not intended to be an objective truth about the manifest world. It’s a metaphysical claim, that our subjective being, our soul, consciousness, is something that exists in itself, as a ground of being, and that it associates itself with the body, and even many bodies in serial succession. It’s a point of view that affirms the priority of the subjective dimension, rather than the objective material dimension.
Now, you are of course free to say all that is rubbish, and only the objective material world is real. But then again, you’d have to show me that there really is an objective material world that is real, apart from our subjective observation of it, and I don’t think you can do that. Do you even know what the material world is? I don’t think so. As Buddha said, it’s only a mental concept.
conradg said: “Now, you are of course free to say all that is rubbish…”
- You read my mind.
conradg:”… and only the objective material world is real. But then again, you’d have to show me that there really is an objective material world that is real, apart from our subjective observation of it, and I don’t think you can do that.”
- Seeing that conradg is trapped in the solipsistic worldview of Bishop Berkely, thus (punches the internet version of conradg in the arm) I refute thee.
conradg said: Do you even know what the material world is? I don’t think so. As Buddha said, it’s only a mental concept.”
Fascinating that you would accuse me of not having an understanding of what the material world is while insisting in the same breath that it is an entirely mental construct.
Which, of course, it clearly isn’t. If all reality were a purely subjective or mental matter then measurements of objective reality (like say all of science) wouldn’t be effective or progressive – yet they are.
Cameron,
If I punch you in a virtual arm, have I really punched you?
The fact is, whatever conclusions you come to about the material world, our only experience of it is in our own subjective consciousness. Our minds do indeed “construct” the world. The fact that the measurements we take agree means nothing more than that we exist in the same virtual reality. I’m sure measurements taken on Second Life or World of Warcraft will agree as well. That doesn’t ensure that they are of a “real world”.
My avatar can punch your avatar, and you can punch back, it still doesn’t prove either one is “real”. I can kick virtual rocks in our virtual world, like Johnson, and it doesn’t refute Berkeley. Solipsism, like quantum mechanics, might be very annoying, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
And calling something rubbish doesn’t make it so. The view that subjective consciousness is primary goes back thousands of years to the roots of civilization, and beyond that even. It’s the most normal view of life that there is. The abstractions of scientific materialism require just that – vast conceptual abstractions. Everyone else knows that their subjective experience of life is more important than the abstract notions of science. It’s where we actually live and experience this life. Science is a secondary tool to help us get about in this virtual reality we experience.
conradg said: The fact is, whatever conclusions you come to about the material world, our only experience of it is in our own subjective consciousness. Our minds do indeed “construct” the world. The fact that the measurements we take agree means nothing more than that we exist in the same virtual reality.
- Using your Berkely-ian logic;
All experiences of other people are reducible to sense events, and
All sense events are reducible to your subjective mental events,
Therefore, there are no other people, just your personal mental events.
Congratulations dude, you have successfully proved there are no other people and that you and your bong are all that matter in the universe. You bong, therefore you are.
You have also deftly demonstrated why nobody should take seriously your propositions about the importance of eternal subjective mental events.
Gee, if you’re going to do all my thinking for me, it’s sounds like you think you’re the only person in the world!
You neglect other ways of thinking about this. Such as, that there is a ground of conscious being, of which we and everyone else and the material world itself is a manifestation. On the level of the individual, we seem to be separate beings, but like mushrooms sprouting from the ground, we are actually manifestations of a deeper, connective tissue, the mycelium. Thus, we can’t see our real roots by looking outward, but by examining the depths of our subjective origins, which are “underground” so to speak, in the unconscious.
Of course, ingesting certain kinds of mushrooms might help you see this mycelial reality more clearly.
And really, all you’ve demonstrated is that you can’t think except very narrowly and shallowly, and are certain there’s only one valid way of looking at these things, which surprisingly enough turns out to be your way. What are the odds?
I should add that Scott’s description of the impermanence/permanence notion of reality is founded in the simple observation that everything around us changes, coming and going, and is obviously impermanent, whereas our own awareness remains unbroken. The body changes, growing and falling apart, and yet we feel oursevles to be the same person, even though all the cells of our youth have died and been replaced. This is because our awareness has remained constant and unchanging. So the tradition evolved that this subjective conscious awareness, in its purity, is the only true reality, and everything else is, the whole world we see around us as a field of objects, like images on a movie screen, merely a projection from an inner source.
Now, you can keep ridiculing these ideas, and this conversation will come to a rather quick end, or you can try to actually engage these ideas, and see if you can understand them. Right now you sound like a religious fundamentalist who is utterly ignorant of science, telling me how the earth is only 6,000 years old, and any other idea is ridiculous. Your ability to smirk and scorn me is directly proportional to your ignorance of these traditions of subjective inquiry.
conradg, I think Cameron fairly demonstrated in his last comment who in this thread is to be taken seriously. A solid effort to have a good faith discussion your part, friend, but, to quote a fishing term, I think it’s time to cut bait. Why don’t you and I go smoke from our bongs and giggle about “eternity” or some such thing.
conradg; You neglect other ways of thinking about this. Such as, that there is a ground of conscious being, of which we and everyone else and the material world itself is a manifestation.
- I also neglected Zoroastrianism, Mormonism and ‘it’s turtles all the way down’, for much the same reason I dismiss your ‘we are all the mushrooms of god’ hypothesis.
To be clear, I am not denying that people of all stripes have ‘religious experiences’, I think that it is empircally true that they do. The brain, when stressed will produce all sorts of hallucinations and other mental effects. Christian ecstatics will dance until they go into delerium, Buddhists will go through rigorous bouts of denial of food/water/contact, sensory deprivation, drugs, alcohol, dehydration, etc. all can produce these effects.
Importantly though, these events are subjective to individuals own cultural background. Mormons simply don’t hallucinate about Shiva dancing, any more than Zoroastrians have visions of Quetzalcoatl.
So while it is clear the event is objectively real, the subjective experience clearly isn’t. The pantheists, Islamic clerics, Jewish mystics, and Holy Rollers simply can’t all be right.
conradg: Of course, ingesting certain kinds of mushrooms might help you see this mycelial reality more clearly.
- Been there, done that, wore the psilocybin t-shirt, but good trips make bad religion.
conradg: And really, all you’ve demonstrated is that you can’t think except very narrowly and shallowly, and are certain there’s only one valid way of looking at these things, which surprisingly enough turns out to be your way. What are the odds?
- Pretty good given the casually solipsistic alternatives you’ve presented. And has their ever been a more devastating retort than ‘how dare you think you are right’? I mean, really?
conradg: The body changes, growing and falling apart, and yet we feel oursevles to be the same person, even though all the cells of our youth have died and been replaced.
- Dennet offers the best response to this I can think of, but I’ll offer my own off the cuff. Do you really feel the same as you did when you were two years old? Or fifteen? Isn’t it clear that you actually aren’t the same person at all? That you look different, act different, think about sex differently, prefer different foods, bedtimes, entertainments, etc.? The appearance of continuity is just that, an ‘appearance’. But lets restrict ourselves for the moment to the Cartesian consciousness you are so enamored of, does it really seem to be ‘eternal’? There was a time before it existed, is it so hard to conceive of a time when it won’t?
conradg: This is because our awareness has remained constant and unchanging. So the tradition evolved that this subjective conscious awareness, in its purity, is the only true reality, and everything else is, the whole world we see around us as a field of objects, like images on a movie screen, merely a projection from an inner source.
- And then along came Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’, Freud’s theories, neuroscience, etc., and today we recognize that the ‘mind’ is an epiphenomenal product of the brain – it simply is what the brain does. Sure this view lacks the charm of those ancient theories of self formulated prior to the invention of toilet paper, but the truth isn’t always sexy.
conradg: Your ability to smirk and scorn me is directly proportional to your ignorance of these traditions of subjective inquiry.
- Don’t confuse my dismissal of them as inadequate with ignorance. I suggested earlier that you were using ‘deeper more direct form of knowledge’ as a grab bag you could stuff all sorts of beliefs into in the hope it would insulate them from reasonable scrutiny, and I think it is clear from your comments since (god’s little mycelium, solipsism, et al) that this is the case. As for as your being insulted that I mock you, lets remember that you were defending Bishop Berkley. I mean, seriously. Please.
Scott – sorry, got your request to cut bait after I composed my post. My bad. I have no interest in being a troll.
Cameron,
First, I don’t think you’re a troll. You’re at least trying to deal with the issues.
Second, I hope you’re aware that I am not speaking from Bishop Berkeley’s writings, but from what is generally called “sanatana dharma”, the general doctrine that Vedanta and Buddhism are derived from. But one can also see similar views in religious traditions around the world, from Christianity to Taosim to Shamanism. The notion that the world is arising in consciousness is not original to Berkeley, and it isn’t even developed very well by him, nor is it even a serious part of the western secular intellectual tradition. So much the worse for that tradition, in my view.
“I also neglected Zoroastrianism, Mormonism and ‘it’s turtles all the way down’, for much the same reason I dismiss your ‘we are all the mushrooms of god’ hypothesis. “
Well, none of those traditions are based on the notion that there is an underlying unified reality of consciousenss from which we all spring, so I don’t see why they would be relevant.
Religious experiences differ widely in content, depending on cultural symolism, but there are many common patterns that are strikingly similar. A simple example would be the teaching in Vedanta that “Om” is considered a primal sound of deep religious significance to be repeated frequently. In the Christian tradition, “Amen” is used widely in rituals with a similar significance. The use of “mantric” prayer is nearly universal in various traditions, again. The descriptions of various lights, visions, energies in the body, all of this has definite correlations which can be seen in widely separate traditions, even if the symbols used for them differ. Yes, Christians dance themselves into ecstasy, and so do Sufis, Hindus, and American Indians. Fasting is also nearly universal in all these traditions. The similarities in these traditions around the world are much more prevalent than the superficial differences.
The fact that Sufis don’t see Shiva dancing is not material to the notion that consciousness has an underlying unity manifesting through infinite forms. In fact, that is the very idea you are trying to call ridiculous, and yet citing examples that support it. The notion of the universal Self is of one Person, with an infinite number of “faces”. The doctrines of Vedanta are dependent on this view, and it is why Hinduism, for example, is both monistic (one reality) and yet also polytheistic (many Gods). In their view, all Gods, even all points of view, even science itself, is one of the many faces and viewpoints of the universal Self, which is formless and faceless, bit manifests as the entire universe, and everyone in it, and all possible points of view therefore. This produces an inclusive, universal view rather than an exclusive one.
“So while it is clear the event is objectively real, the subjective experience clearly isn’t. The pantheists, Islamic clerics, Jewish mystics, and Holy Rollers simply can’t all be right. “
You are assuming that for the experience to be real, it must manifest in only one way. And yet in science, mass and energy can manifest in all kinds of ways, governed by the same underlying reality of laws and principles. This is like suggesting that television can’t be real if there is more than one channel to watch. It’s a fatally narrow dogmatism that makes no sense. The essential “technology” of mysticism allows a virtually infinite variety of form and expression, and the logic of it is not, inherently, different from that of scientific theory, though in a totally different direction. In other words, yes, they can all be right, to a degree at least, if one strips away the superficial matters, and examine the underlying experiences being described, and organize them hierarchically and structurally. Think of DNA. Salamanders and humans and birds all have DNA, the same basic structure, just arranged differently, to account for all the variations in form and function.
And by the way, I was joking about the mushrooms. On the other hand, I’ve done them a couple of times myself, and have had a very different experience than you, but that’s probably because I’d done years of mystical practice beforehand.
“Pretty good given the casually solipsistic alternatives you’ve presented. And has their ever been a more devastating retort than ‘how dare you think you are right’? I mean, really? “
It’s one thing to think you’re right when you know what you’re talking about, but you haven’t given any indication that you are at all familiar with these modes of thought, much less seriously inspected any of these traditions, or the whole mode of religious experience itself. If I clearly knew nothing about science, and starting talking about the age of rocks as less important than “the rock of ages”, would you really think that I could just dare to think I’m right, and expect you to respect it? Similarly, I’m not impressed about you “daring to think you are right” when you don’t care enough to educate yourself about the subject matter.
“Do you really feel the same as you did when you were two years old? Or fifteen? Isn’t it clear that you actually aren’t the same person at all?”
This doesn’t really address what I’m talking about, which is the persistence of awareness itself in an unbroken fashiion. Of course I feel myself to be different in various ways – all those ways which change over time, that I already mentioned. By awareness itself, observing all of this, hasn’t changed. It doesn’t change when I’m sober, it didn’t change when I took mushrooms or LSD. In fact, one of the most interesting experiences to me in trying those kinds of drugs was how at a fundamental level, it didn’t actually change me at all. I was aware of all these strange goings on in my brain, but my awareness itself was unchanged. And that’s true of aging also. The deeper question, then, is who is this subjective awareness? Who am I really, beyond what changes and passes, at the core of my own subjective awareness? That’s the kind of question, and the kind of investigation, that I’m talking about, not the superficial identification with what happens to be appearing in the moment, either in my brain or outside it.
“And then along came Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’, Freud’s theories, neuroscience, etc., and today we recognize that the ‘mind’ is an epiphenomenal product of the brain – it simply is what the brain does.”
That’s the way you see this subjective awareness, but it’s not how I see it, after years of investigating it. I don’t disrespect the traditions you speak of, but I don’t bow to them either. There is no scientific recognition that subjective awareness is an epiphenomenal product of the brain. That’s a belief on your and some other people’s part, an extropolation from neuroscience, but not in any way actually supported by any scientific findings themselves. In a very basic way, it simply makes no sense that it could be – science itself depends upon the subjective observer to make the observations science draws its conclusions from. It can’t actually inspect the observer itself, not objectively. It requires a subjective method of investigation to directly inspect the subjective observer.
“Don’t confuse my dismissal of them as inadequate with ignorance. I suggested earlier that you were using ‘deeper more direct form of knowledge’ as a grab bag you could stuff all sorts of beliefs into in the hope it would insulate them from reasonable scrutiny, and I think it is clear from your comments since (god’s little mycelium, solipsism, et al) that this is the case. “
Well, we differ on that as well. I am not trying to reinforce mere beliefs, but the process of subjective investigation itself, which produces mysticism and all kinds of spiritual and religious traditions and viewpoints. And, of course, art, literature, myth, symbolism, love, devotion, beauty, and truth, as actually experienced by human beings, rather than merely abstractly reasoned. Reducing all of that to mere biological neuroscience is, I think, a terrible error in logic and human reasoning. It’s the abdication of our actual position as conscious observers, pretending that our subjectivity can ever be reduced to any object we observe, even our own brains.
And look, I’m not insulted that you mock me. It’s much worse than that. It bores me. It makes me think less of you, rather than making me feel bad about myself. I’m waiting to see some spark of real life in you, rather than you just boringly parotting the standard talking points of Dennet, Dawkins, and their like. Put downs are boring, dude. Show me something real.
Scott,
You may be right, but I have plenty of patience, and Cameron might prove to have more mettle than you give him credit for. But in either case, I’d be more than happy to take you up on your offer. I’ll even bring some bodacious Humboldt homegrown for the occasion. If Cameron likes, he can come too.
conradg said: “The fact that Sufis don’t see Shiva dancing is not material to the notion that consciousness has an underlying unity manifesting through infinite forms….”
- Which means I think that you missed my point – or I explained it poorly. I agree that there is an underlying sameness to the nature of religious experiences, but where you see this as the manifestation of a god with a thousand faces (or what have you), I see it more properly as based in our common biology. Where you look for a multifaceted mysticism, I look for the underlying objective reality.
A good example is the ‘light/tunnel’ experience of the dying. I have no doubt that this experience (along with accompanying euphoria, etc.) is ‘real’ to the person having it. I also have no doubt that this experience is the direct result of a brain dying and is not the transcendence of our intangible souls to the spirit realm where they will be feted with 72 virgins.
I had said earlier: “So while it is clear the event is objectively real, the subjective experience clearly isn’t. The pantheists, Islamic clerics, Jewish mystics, and Holy Rollers simply can’t all be right. “
and conradg replied: “You are assuming that for the experience to be real, it must manifest in only one way.
- Actually what I am saying is that the mystic experiences of those I list above are mutually exclusive. The Islamist (a monotheist) is simply not going to have a vision that is polytheistic, the Jewish mystic is not going to have a mystical experience of Joseph Smith – etc. The respective ‘truths’ about their subjective experiences negate each other, until we are left with…their common biology. Yes their are traditions that see this multiplicity of experience as evidence of a mystical pluralism – but I see this as ‘doubling down’ on the bet of mysticism (Competing mysticisms? No problem, they are all equally right!) rather than admitting the parsimonious thing to do is simply reject it.
conradg: And yet in science, mass and energy can manifest in all kinds of ways, governed by the same underlying reality of laws and principles. This is like suggesting that television can’t be real if there is more than one channel to watch. It’s a fatally narrow dogmatism that makes no sense.”
- To be fair, I don’t believe in any reality that doesn’t correspond with physical materialism. I don’t believe in elves, ghosts, mysticism, gnosticism, spirits, mediums, reincarnation, that Britany Spears can sing, the soul, prayer, or any of the Gods of history and religion. They all fall into a class of ‘irrational’ beliefs for me. Now you may say this is ‘narrow’ and ‘dogmatic’, but I am quite willing to believe in these things if they could be demonstrated to correspond to physical materialism (I submit that if I were a ‘dogmatic’ I wouldn’t offer this qualification).
For example, scientific evidence of telepathic communication under controlled circumstances would (at the least) convince me to investigate it further with more rigorous testing and suspend my blanket disregard until further results were in.
But absent evidence there seems no reason to prefer one set of these irrational beliefs (say Gnosticism) over another (say psychokinesis) as they are both equally removed from real world testing.
As I mentioned previously (twice) the notion that there are ‘special ways of knowing’ strikes me as a holding bag for the irrational beliefs of ones choice, typcially with the intention of separating them from sceptical rational inquiry.
I prefer ‘the actual way of knowing’ which requires the existence of an objective reality, testability, falsifiability and the like.
conradg: The essential “technology” of mysticism allows a virtually infinite variety of form and expression, and the logic of it is not, inherently, different from that of scientific theory, though in a totally different direction. In other words, yes, they can all be right, to a degree at least, if one strips away the superficial matters, and examine the underlying experiences being described, and organize them hierarchically and structurally. Think of DNA. Salamanders and humans and birds all have DNA, the same basic structure, just arranged differently, to account for all the variations in form and function.
- This strikes me as trainspotting for mystics. The collection of trivial differences and information in search of a mystical pattern that is at best miss-attributed (to our innate biology), or worse (at least for the trainspotter), not there at all.
I said: “Do you really feel the same as you did when you were two years old? Or fifteen? Isn’t it clear that you actually aren’t the same person at all?”
conradg: This doesn’t really address what I’m talking about, which is the persistence of awareness itself in an unbroken fashion.
- Except your awareness is neither persistent, nor unbroken. Sleep much? Ever lose focus for a second? Driven some place without a memory as to how you got there?
As an analogy consider the boat that is replaced plank by plank over time with a different wood, and with slight modifications to its structure. Viewing the boat for any snapshot at a particular time and comparing it to another recent snapshot wouldn’t show much if any discernible difference, but comparing the first snapshot with the last will show two completely different boats. Our consciousness is the same, it starts out with us as infants, and gradually changes and morphs over time till we perish (hopefully) in our dottage – with a completely different consciousness than the one we were born with. Our most basic experience with consciousness is that it is both changing and finite.
conradg: There is no scientific recognition that subjective awareness is an epiphenomenal product of the brain. That’s a belief on your and some other people’s part, an extrapolation from neuroscience, but not in any way actually supported by any scientific findings themselves.
- On the contrary, I think the evidence is considered definitive. Minds simply are the product of our brains. Damage the brain (say with a severe blow, or less permanently with a dose of LSD) and you can witness the direct effects on the mind from the inside! But if you are looking for subjective evidence of this, try hitting your head with an ice-pick aiming for the parietal lobe of the left hemisphere. If you do it in just the right way (and don’t kill yourself in the process) you’ll damage the speech center of your brain – and the result is your mind will work differently (albeit extremely poorly) in that regard moving forward. I have always wondered how the Cartesian dualist would react to that experiment, so I eagerly await to hear what your subjective results on the matter conclude.
conradg: In a very basic way, it simply makes no sense that it could be – science itself depends upon the subjective observer to make the observations science draws its conclusions from. It can’t actually inspect the observer itself, not objectively. It requires a subjective method of investigation to directly inspect the subjective observer.
- Unless of course the subjective observer observes a subject other than himself. For example it is not uncommon in brain surgery to have the subject remain conscious for the procedure, and to see what subjective results obtain from stimulating different areas of the brain. Does the subject’s speech slur? Do they express a peculiar experience? (I taste a ham sandwich, being one of my favourites), etc.
Further, any alternative suggestion that the mind is something other than the brain in operation will have to provide an explanation for exactly how a supposedly ‘mental’ event – one not located in the physical world – nevertheless manages to have both causes (electrical stimuli) and effects (I taste the best ham sandwich ever!) in the physical world.
conradg: I am not trying to reinforce mere beliefs, but the process of subjective investigation itself, which produces mysticism and all kinds of spiritual and religious traditions and viewpoints.
- I’m more concerned with what the what, why, and how, things actually are than what ancient theosophers and mystics felt or intuited they might be like.
conradg: “It’s one thing to think you’re right when you know what you’re talking about, but you haven’t given any indication that you are at all familiar with these modes of thought, much less seriously inspected any of these traditions, or the whole mode of religious experience itself. If I clearly knew nothing about science, and starting talking about the age of rocks as less important than “the rock of ages”, would you really think that I could just dare to think I’m right, and expect you to respect it? Similarly, I’m not impressed about you “daring to think you are right” when you don’t care enough to educate yourself about the subject matter.”
- Democritus was just as right about his atheism in pre-Christian Athens as Hitchens is in post-Christian New York. Democritus didn’t need to experience Mormonisn in order to know it was false, anymore than Hitchens needs to explore Zoroastrianism to know that it is. Spirit talk of the kind you engage in is nothing new (as you yourself note), but the truth about mysticism is that there is ‘no there’ there. It is the exercise of spinning ones intellectual wheels in place and triumphantly claiming there is movement. You can dress it up with the physical ecstasy of exhaustion, or dehydration, or drug taking, etc, but it is navel gazing that is ultimately empty. That isn’t to say it can’t be fun, or emotionally moving, or even profoundly disturbing, but it isn’t a ‘special kind of knowledge’, it’s merely a special kind of cognitive mistake.
Scott: Humboldt as in Humboldt Sk.?
I live in Lethbridge, so a personal visit isn’t out of the question….
;-)
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