I know that Julian Baggini’s latest Guardian piece on the relationship between science and religion — see “Religion’s truce with science can’t hold” – is not, as such, about the new atheism. But since he began his critique of the new atheism in such a pugnacious way (see “The New Atheist Movement is destructive” in the Norwegian freethinker’s magazine Fritanke), where he set out his opposition to the new atheism after saying that their books had nothing new to teach him, so he didn’t bother to read them, it seems worthwhile interpreting what he has to say about the truce between religion and science in this context. As he said in his opening attack on the new atheism:
Not reading The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and The End of Faith is perfectly reasonable. Why on earth would I devote precious reading hours to books which largely tell me what I already believe? These books are surely mainly for agnostics and open-minded believers. In fact, I think atheists who have read these books have more of a responsibility to account for their actions than I do my inaction.
I wonder if he has changed his mind, and has bothered at least to gloss the texts whose attitude towards belief and believers he considered so retrograde that he could say things like this: “The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish.” Let’s complete that paragraph:
The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish. When people think of atheists now, they think about men who look only to science for answers, are dismissive of religion and over-confident in their own rightness. Richard Dawkins, for example, presented a television programme on religion called The Root of all Evil and has as his website slogan “A clear thinking oasis”. Where is the balance and modesty in such rhetoric?
But he hasn’t shown that Dawkins is immodest or over-confident, and since he hadn’t at that point read the book (by his own admission), he was scarcely qualified to say that he is. Add to this the fact that ”The Root of all Evil?” not only had a question mark, but was also a title not chosen by Dawkins himself, and that in the programme Dawkins was, while giving good reasons for thinking that religion was a problem, gentle and respectful towards believers themselves (and far more forbearing that I would have been), if not towards their beliefs; and it might justly seem that Dawkins’ balance and modesty were not so obviously lacking as Baggini suggests; nor should Baggini’s confidence have been bought so cheaply.
So we must now ask whether Baggini hasn’t painted himself into a corner, for now it is he who is telling us that the relationship between science and religion — the truce, as he calls it — simply can’t last. Dawkins was saying this and slightly more five years ago when The God Delusion appeared. There can’t be a truce, said Dawkins, because there is no substantive content in religion with which to negotiate. What does religion say that science must take into consideration? The assumption that religion and science are scrapping over the same things assumes that religion has something that science should take cognisance of and doesn’t. But what could that be?
In the latest in his series of Guardian CiF pieces, which began on the 1st October with “Heathen’s Progress, part one: stalemate,” (which I commented on at the time), entitled, this time, “How not to be a dogmatic fundamentalist,” he suggests that “[i]t’s not how strong our views are, or how vigorously we defend them, but how open we are to others changing our mind,” that really counts. And that may indeed be true, but the question has to be asked, when it is a matter of dispute between science and religion, just what this might mean. After all, religion, with no firm ground upon which to base its beliefs, is, in competition with science, as Baggini himself says, going to lose. As he puts it so plainly — one might even say, dogmatically:
The less comfortable wet fish slapped around the face is that how easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we’re talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab.
And of course that is just what religious believers like Albert Mohler, Denis Alexander, Alister McGrath, and so many others do, which explains why the new atheism has been so withering about religion’s claim to go one better than science, and to answer the why questions, which so often turn out to be lightly camouflaged how questions.
And this, of course, is just the problem, and has been all along. Baggini says, innocently pretending that he hasn’t just dropped a bomb in the middle of the sanctuary:
If it is of a kind that doesn’t attempt to explain the hows of the universe, then it has to be very careful not to make any claims that end up doing just that. Only then can the science v religion debate move on, free from the illusion that it rests on one question with one answer.
However, if one thing has become clear in all the to-and-froing between religion and the new atheism over the last five years or so, it is the fact that religion can’t give up on the hows of the universe, since, from the religious point of view, the hows just are answered in terms of whys. Take the whole idea of evolution and the role that a god might have to play in it. As it stands, there is no room for god at all. The process is self-contained, and functions without cette hypothèse la. We are, it seems, quite clearly, the product of evolutionary forces working on the material sources of heredity over billions of years, right down to our brains and their complexity, and culture and its multiplicity. But this simply won’t do from the point of view of the religious, as Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła made very clear to the Pontifical Institute of Science. There is an ontological leap, he told the assembled scientists, from mere animals to human beings, and at some point God injects into the human DNA the necessary ingredients for the production of souls — a claim which Edward Feser has used (a bit comically) to defuse the problem of polygenism and Original Sin, since God could have chosen a primordial couple to carry these ingredients and thus (faithful to the doctrines of the Council of Trent and Pius XII’s Humani Generis) give rise to a human race burdened by sin, as, we are assured, all humans now living are by descent from this original couple.
However, by saying this kind of thing, by insisting that there must be an intrusion by religion into a realm where only scientific answers count, the pope puts himself off the reservation, and he really says all that the new atheists have been saying all along. There is no room for accommodation here, and if scientists need to be open to having their minds changed, the only thing that should change their minds is more scientific evidence, not obiter dicta by theologians. That is, in claiming to answer why questions, as when John Polkinghorne, in the example that Baggini uses in today’s article, answers the why question of fine tuning “by saying that the life-enabling laws of physics are ‘graciously provided by the creator’,” Baggini is saying that scientists cannot, at this point, simply allow their minds to be open to such prevaricating chatter, since here theologians are trespassing on turf where they don’t belong. There is no room for accommodation here. And, of course, Dawkins and Coyne and Harris and the other new atheists will wholeheartedly agree, but they’d go on to say that they’ve been saying this all along. And they’d also point out, with some justice, that, since this is what they’ve been saying all along, the claim that they are (in that oxymoronic phrase) “fundamentalist atheists” simply has no substance.
The question of revision of belief that Baggini puts at the heart of the debate between religion and science, and between religion and the new atheism, is, in many respects, a non-question. Religious doctrines are, to a great extent, depending, of course, on how spongy your hermeneutics are, fixed, and not open to change. Scientific theories are, to a great extent, depending on the amount of confirming evidence there is, likewise pretty stable, though always open to new evidence — though such evidence would have to be overwhelmingly convincing to undermine established science. But the basis of certainty in each case is entirely different. Jerry Coyne says that theology is making stuff up, and to a large extent that is true. Theology, and religious belief generally, cannot present the kind of evidence that science can. It must refer to subjective experience, on the one hand, with all the difficulty that subjective experience presents for any attempt to establish that it is experience of an objective something. The title of David Hay’s Templeton book, Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, says it all. Where? is the immediate question that springs to mind. The second source for religious conviction, on the other hand, lies in authoritative traditions, and doctrines based upon them. But if you think of this process of forming a tradition and separating essential beliefs from inessential elements, and see this in relation to, say, Mormonism, which is still undergoing such development, it is easy to see how vulnerable this process is to ridicule. The only reason that, say, Catholicism, might be thought to be so much more “objective” and “secure” than Mormonism, is simply that the formative tradition lies in the past, and is no longer subject to close examination. But where it is, as it is by students of early Christianity like Bart Ehrman or Elaine Pagels, or historians like Charles Freeman, the tradition looks just as insecure and arbitrary as Mormonism.
And this really is the problem with Baggini’s assessment of the new atheism and its relationships with religion. He begins the second installment of his new heathenism series — “How not to be a dogmatic fundamentalist” – with this paragraph:
If there’s one thing guaranteed to irritate a new atheist it’s the accusation of being “militant” or “aggressive”. Unfortunately, it’s an irritant that they can’t avoid. To pluck out just a few examples, Booker prizewinning writer Howard Jacobson has attacked “the new aggressive form of popular atheism” saying it “lacks imagination and, worse still, it lacks curiosity.” Pope Benedict used his recent trip to Britain to condemn “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”. Even atheists are in on the game: philosopher of biology Michael Ruse has regularly criticised “atheistic fundamentalists” for their “nastiness” and “near mystical veneration of the leaders”. Heck, I’ve even described some atheists as “militant” myself.
But what he doesn’t seem to notice, even here, is that by describing the new atheists as militant, Baggini simply misunderstands the relationship. Not because the new atheists make no mistakes, and may sometimes give short shrift to ideas that need to be developed further; but simply because the new atheists are, at heart, scientists naturalists, and insist that, if religious belief is going to provide a solid basis for belief in a scientific age, it must provide evidence. It’s really as simple as that. Some people, like John Haught, accuse the new atheists of scientism, but this is simply a calumny, and undeserved. Science, as Dawkins says, is the only way to find out about the natural world, not the only way to find out about things simplicter. It may not help you find out whether a piece of art is beautiful, or whether a symphony is moving, or whether your wife or your husband really loves you, but for any substantive belief about what there is in the universe, science is going to win hands down, because, as Hawking says, it works. So art, poetry, music, architecture, and all the richness of our cultural lives is never going to be adequately accounted for by science. This is simply something that one has to immerse oneself in in order to benefit from it, as anyone who has seen Jerry Coyne’s pictures of the culinary delights that he has enjoyed in the different places he has visited, from Costa Rica to Boston to St. Petersburg, will understand.
Religion’s claims are much greater than this. Not only are they greater; there is no way to make religious claims without being dogmatic. There’s no evidence that a man such as that described in the gospels ever existed. Perhaps there was an apocalyptic preacher on which the gospel myths are based, but that the gospel Jesus ever existed is very doubtful. Myths develop with surprising rapidity, and when a community begins to gel around a myth, and attracts detractors, the process not only speeds up, but dogmatism and ideas of faithfulness, of false and true faith, of false teaching and teachers and their perfidy, quickly follow, so that insiders and outsiders can be easily identified. Traditions themselves are fragile, and can only be maintained by constant watchfulness, by identifying and extruding doubters and innovators, and reinforcing orthodoxy. Religious systems of thought are almost entirely different from systems of rational thought, like philosophy, say, or science, both of which flourish when they prompt questions and doubts. Religion, by its very nature, is often immune to doubt and question. Since it is not based on evidence, and cannot be falsified by evidence, being open to revision can destroy it. Even liberal Christians have their limits, because they know, within a narrow margin, how much dissent faith can stand before it will implode.
A good example of this is Richard Holloway. Holloway began as a conservative Anglo-Catholic, and ended up as what he calls an “after-religionist.” In an interview with Pat Kane of the Independent, he says this:
And that’s my problem with Christianity. You have to buy original sin as a reality, not as a fertile symbol or metaphor – and only when you do that, can you buy the whole edifice. That really is bad faith, an authoritarianism that no contemporary person can respect. Good faith, in my view, is about throwing things away all the time, not holding on to unjustifiable premises.
But that kind of “good faith” is impossible in the religions, because they are institutional, and because institutional, seekers of power and influence. They cannot sit light to their beliefs, because to do so endangers its believing base, and it is numbers that give religions power. The new atheists are told repeatedly that they don’t understand religious belief, but this is simply a ploy to distract attention from what the religions do.
Theology itself can be daring and doubting, but it cannot touch the believing base of the religions; for if “throwing things away all the time” became the norm, religions would become incoherent and institutional cohesion would be lost. But the cost of such coherence is high. It produces the kind of hanging onto things that repulsed Holloway so much that he had to leave. It happened at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops:
It was nasty, twisted – there were closeted gay groups of priests who were the most vigorous conservatives of all… It made me so bloody angry. I became allergic to meeting with other bishops; it felt like an alien environment. I said to Jeanie [his wife], at 5am one morning, ‘I’ve got to leave.’ And when I decided to retire, I never missed a beat – no railing at the altar, handing God my resignation. It was a deep-down wise decision, and I haven’t missed it for a second.
If the kind of questioning ”theology” that Holloway now indulges in were to become the norm, the churches would simply fly apart from the centrifugal forces of doubt and questioning. And that is why religion will remain dogmatic at its core, and why openness to changing one’s mind is simply not accessible to the religions. It may happen one by one, as religious believers are leached away from religion by the corrosive forces of science and reason, but a religion whose leaders were open to changing their minds in the way that Baggini suggests is necessary in order to avoid fundamentalism would spell the end of religion, because religions have no foundation. They are built on air, and openness to revision would quickly expose this.
Just like “no news is good news,” I tend to be silent where I agree. But I do not want to be silent about this:
It may not help you find out whether a piece of art is beautiful, or whether a symphony is moving
As far as I can tell, this is simply not the case. We can detect physiological correlates pleasurable experiences.
Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre have found chill-causing music to induce increased blood flow in left ventral striatum, dorsomedial midbrain areas, and paralimbic regions, areas associated with euphoria, pleasant emotion, cocaine administration. Zatorre’s wonderful book, the Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, is just revelatory on this subject in multiple ways: infants prefer consonant sounds, chickens prefer dissonance. There is an optimal sensitivity to music paced out over 600ms intervals, there is a semantic overlap in people’s usage of terms like consonant, pleasant, beautiful and euphonious that can be pinned to characteristics of music.
One might reply while science can explain such things, different musics inspire positive physiological responses for different people. This is true: Zatorre and Blood found that chill causing music ranged from folk to classical to techno. I don’t, however, see any reason to think higher-order issues of musical interpretation are in principle beyond the reach of neuroscience.
To me, this is urgent. The Jon Haughts of the world may claim religion presides over aesthetics, and that however far science can go, it cannot inform our sense of beauty. Thus a world with science alone is not alive to the indescribable beauty of the aesthetic world. And atheists will concede the point! But even here, religion does not have any privileged ground to stand on. More atheists need to recognize this.
Neuroscientist Semir Zeki gives the best summary of the point I have yet read:
Art of course, belongs in the subjective world. Yet subjective differences in the creation and appreciation of art must be superimposed on a common neural organization that allows us to communicate about art and through art without the use of the spoken or written word. In his great requiem in marble at St. Peter’s in Rome, Michelangelo invested the lifeless body of Christ with infinite feeling – of pathos, tenderness, and resignation. the feelings aroused by his Pietã are no doubt experienced in different ways, and in varying intensity, by different brains. But the inestimable value of variable subjective experiences should not distract from the fact that, in executing his work, Michelangelo instinctively understood the common visual and emotional organization and workings of the brain. That understanding allowed him to exploit our common visual organization and arouse shared experiences beyond he reach of words.
His statement is worth reading in its entirety.
The error that people make is assuming wrongly that “knowledge” is the unique form of praise for everything. It isn’t. Music can be beautiful, intricate, inspiring, sublime, etc… but it can’t be knowledge because it isn’t even a truth-apt claim. The same goes for art, fiction of every kind, architecture, etc… Accepting this doesn’t degrade those cultural achievements. They aren’t supposed to be truth-apt claims about the world, so their not being knowledge isn’t a demerit. That my bicycle doesn’t make coffee doesn’t make it a bad bicycle. Making coffee isn’t what a bicycle is for.
The basic methodology of science, evidence based on observation and theorizing, is the only means of knowing anything, period.* (Eric, claiming science only provides knowledge of the natural world strikes me as misleading given that the natural world is all that there is.) I also fail to understand why we can’t “account” for art, music, architecture, etc… scientifically. We can observe and theorize about such cultural objects. Art, music, fiction and architecture aren’t truth-apt claims, but we can make truth-apt claims about those cultural products. I’m willing to embrace the epithet “scientism”, at least if it is understood as a claim about sources of knowledge and not as a claim that science is the only worthwhile human activity. Given that the latter claim is held by absolutely no one, it’s little more than a pathetic straw man.
* Leaving aside mathematics, which philosophers of mathematics still need to sort out before I’m willing to say anything on the matter.
And when, exactly, was this “truce” declared? Who were the parties to this “truce”? Where was this “truce” signed? What are the terms of the “truce”? And who is violating those terms?
Nonsense. Utter and complete fictional made-up nonsense.
There not now nor ever has been a “truce” between science and religion. Not for the least reason that science and religion are concepts, not people. Science isn’t even a concept; it’s a methodology for sorting out data about the natural world. Religion is a framework for people to feel superior to others and to provide them emotional cover by lying to them about death.
The only thing that has happened is that religion has less power than it used to, so it cannot enforce teaching anti-scientific nonsense. Once they stopped burning people at the stake for claiming the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, it was all downhill for religion.
JosefJohann,
You are certainly right that we can study the cognitive effects of music on humans. I’m not attributing this confusion to you, but I wouldn’t want a reader to get the impression though that cognitive musicology is the only sort of science that can be done on music. There is more to musicology than just cognitive musicology. Historical musicology, music theory and every other part of musicology are scientific studies of music. In every case though, knowledge about music derives from the basic methodology of science, observation and theorizing.
There can’t be a truce, said Dawkins, because there is no substantive content in religion with which to negotiate. What does religion say that science must take into consideration? The assumption that religion and science are scrapping over the same things assumes that religion has something that science should take cognizance of and doesn’t. But what could that be?
Largely agree with your post – a very cogent summary. But interesting that Dawkins would say that, given his acknowledgement that the Bible contains “passages of outstanding literary merit”; that it is a “major source book for literary culture”; his listing of two pages of valuable metaphors and images from there; and his observation that “ignorance of the Bible is bound to impoverish one’s appreciation of English literature”.
And somewhat inconsistent with your own portrayal of some useful imagery and metaphors. Which I would call a more or less perfect case of religion and science “scrapping” over a perspective on the nature and source of consciousness – something that Dawkins himself said was the “most profound mystery facing modern biology”. Though, of course, science is going to be providing the most answers to “how”, but religion may still have a few contributions to the question of “why” – as long as it can get off the dime of literalism – very much of an open question I would say.
But maybe it is really a case of how much each side adds to their respective pans on the scales. Seems that any stories that rely heavily on supernatural causation and supernatural entities – for neither of which is there the least shred of evidence – have to be considered as either delusion, if not psychosis, or metaphor and rejected or accepted on that basis – one needs, I think, to insist that the religious take their pick – no substitutions.
Baggini is saying that scientists cannot, at this point, simply allow their minds to be open to such prevaricating chatter
You’re being too charitable. To call a spade a shovel, outright lying B.S. I have probably quoted this here before but it seems so “paradigmatic” and apropos it seems justified to do so again. It’s from a review by P.B. Medawar of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man:
Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.
There is, of course, Robert Trivers’ recent book, which I think you and/or Jerry Coyne have commented on, to indicate that such behaviour is not unique to the religious, although they seem to have developed the idea to a fine art.
If the kind of questioning ”theology” that Holloway now indulges in were to become the norm, the churches would simply fly apart from the centrifugal forces of doubt and questioning.
May his tribe increase.
Why does not Bagganni follow his own suggestion? He calls some “the fluffy brigade” and so how is that taking them seriously? How is that being charitable to what they’re saying?
“However, if one thing has become clear in all the to-and-froing between religion and the new atheism over the last five years or so, it is the fact that religion can’t give up on the hows of the universe, since, from the religious point of view, the hows just are answered in terms of whys.”
+1
“the new atheists are, at heart, scientists, and insist that, if religious belief is going to provide a solid basis for belief in a scientific age, it must provide evidence.”
I would amend that to “the new atheists are, at heart, naturalists,” with the rest the same. Some new atheists are not scientists (though all are pro-science, or “scientistic,” I think) – Hitchens for example.
Steersman,
What does religion have to contribute to a “why” question about consciousness? For that matter, what is this talk of “how” and “why” supposed to mean? “How” and “Why” are both calls for causal explanations. The only difference is that “how” points to a event and asks for a clearer explanation of the mechanism by which that event occurs. “Why” points to an e event an asks for the causes that preceded the event. Some causes are the beliefs and desires of agents, but that doesn’t make beliefs and desires different in any important way from other causes. The problem with religion is that it wants to presume an agential cause, God, where we have no evidence of such a cause. So, where exactly is religion going to make a contribution to any explanation of anything, let alone consciousness? By looking to scripture? By making up supernatural entities to act as miraculous causes? Religion simply has nothing whatsoever to contribute to anything about understanding consciousness.
Daniel Lafave (#9),
Religion simply has nothing whatsoever to contribute to anything about understanding consciousness.
I tend to be highly skeptical of categorical statements, almost as a matter of course.
So, where exactly is religion going to make a contribution to any explanation of anything, let alone consciousness? By looking to scripture? By making up supernatural entities to act as miraculous causes?
I made reference to Eric’s earlier post where he notes, relative to the myth of Adam and Eve, that:
… the story tells us about ourselves, and how, through consciousness, we became aware of our situation in the world, how awareness grew that we can make good and bad choices, and that choices have consequences. The story of Cain and Abel … is an allegory of the gift and curse of consciousness.
And I explicitly asserted that any contributions that religion might make are only possible if “it can get off the dime of literalism”.
Ever read, perchance, Dawkins’ The God Delusion? He discusses “the Binker phenomenon of childhood [friends which] may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults”. And he also discusses a theory by the American psychologist Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Quoting a relevant sentence or two from Dawkins:
Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue between the ‘self’ and another internal protagonist inside the head. Nowadays we understand that both ‘voices’ are our own – or if we don’t we are treated as mentally ill. …. The ‘breakdown of the bicameral’ mind was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. [pgs 392-393]
Seems to me that only by understanding the processes by which consciousness develops, or becomes pathological, and what benefits it provides from an evolutionary perspective, can we hope to attenuate or compensate for the worst aspects or utilize the best of them. And given the value that many – including Dawkins and Joseph Campbell and Sir James Frazier and Eric, among a great many others – place on mythology (de-literalized religion)and its relevance to those processes, it seems unwise to be categorically rejecting all religious perspectives on the phenomenon.
A fine analysis, Eric.
I’d endorse josefjohann’s comments about music (pace Daniel’s remarks), and would recommend Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music as a “budget” alternative to Zatorre’s book.
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Ophelia (#8) You’re right. Done.
Steersman,
To the extent that someone can fabricate an interpretation of the myth of Adam and Eve that has it metaphorically express some true claim, how does it tell us anything that we didn’t know before? For that matter, how would we know whether what the myth’s alleged content is true or not without independently looking to the evidence? So quite frankly, the idea that myths provide knowledge is quite ludicrous. Lots of Native American tribes have myths that claims that they are autochthonous. When we look to the evidence though, we find out that Native Americans traveled over the Bering Strait landbridge. Even if the myth is taken to be partly figurative, to the extent that the myth makes a claim at all, it is simply false. We can always give those myths an even more metaphorical interpretation that makes them true, but then we are just fitting the myth to facts that we have already independently determined. Even if religion “gets off the dime of literalism”, it simply has nothing to contribute. This is one case where a categorical statement is warranted.
I have no idea how you think that the stuff you quote about Jaynes supports mythology having a role in knowledge about consciousness. It’s a complete non sequitur. Mythology isn’t the place to look for understanding consciousness. Cognitive science and neurobiology is.
I don’t think you need to make that substitution, Ophelia: Saying that the new atheists are, at heart, scientists is not the same as saying that the new atheists are scientists. (And many new atheists are non-scientists; it’s just the well-known advocates who tend to be!) Being pro-science or “scientistic” is what being a scientist at heart means.
If you wanted to substitute “naturalists” anyway, you could say just, “the new atheists are naturalists”. (Although I still shy from that term unqualified by “philosophical”, as it means “an expert in or student of natural history” to so many people. David Attenborough might, therefore, be described as a naturalist naturalist!)
Jerry Coyne often says “science, broadly defined” to indicate that the same naturalistic empirical methodology extends to fields of study and “ways of knowing” beyond the bounds of university science faculties. So, any proponent of that methodology may be a “scientist, broadly defined”.
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Oh. Too late.
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I seem to keep contributing tangential comments… but this one seems to bear on the New Atheist ‘meme’ and the relationship between religion and science (including rationality).
Sam Harris (who I find interesting although I don’t always agree with what he says) argued back in 2007 (http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-problem-with-atheism/) that atheists should not be so quick to self-identify as this provided a neat label for believers to tag and therefore find easier to disregard.
I think it is far easier for believers to defend their opinions against another social group such as ‘Atheists’ or ‘scientists(/scientism)’ than to deal with reasoned arguments. If you proudly say that you are an Atheist, or New Atheist, all the religious hear is those uppity people shouting and screaming in the Atheist Ghetto they have willingly walked into. They know how to deal (emotionally) with people like that.
Harris argues that the non-believers should merely challenge religious privilege and preconceptions through rationality. I applaud the idea but see that it fails to provide the ‘post religious’ community spirit that people still want.
It’s a puzzle, but I for one will not march into a ghetto provided by the religious. They’ll have to deal with me in the general population.
Ant Allen,
You and Eric are quite right that the New Atheists are scientists at heart, or practitioners of “science, broadly defined” as Jerry Coyne put it well. Ophelia is also right that they are naturalists because being a naturalist (of a methodological variety and also a provisional metaphysical variety) is part of being a scientist at heart. It’s also a matter of having a empiricist attitude that says that evidence is ultimately what matters. There is nothing particularly “new” about atheists having a scientific orientation, but it does set them apart from atheists like Nietzsche who didn’t share that perspective.
Many of the people who criticize the New Atheists are really criticizing that scientific orientation, not their atheism. You can see that in the criticisms of the New Atheists by atheists like Terry Eagleton or Jacques Berlinerblau (and countless others). These are people who don’t have that scientific orientation, and their criticism of the New Atheists are part of the opposition to science that is prevalent across the humanities (outside philosophy).
DiscoveredJ,
“I applaud the idea but see that it fails to provide the ‘post religious’ community spirit that people still want.”
This claim that atheism doesn’t fulfill this supposed hunger that people have to sit, stand, and kneel once a week just doesn’t hold water. If people are really yearning for “community spirit”, why do so few religious people in the US belong to or attend churches? It seems like as a society we’re really not that into it. Other Western societies are even less into it. When I was young and my parents still attended church, they did it more out of the belief that it was something they should do, not something that they wanted to do or had a yearning to do. People have to start realizing that religion promotes the myth that we all want to meet once a week for church and that to not do so is abnormal.
Daniel —
Oh, Ophelia said new atheists were “naturalists, at heart” & I was only making the point that the “at heart” was superfluous: the new atheists (and I agree that “new” is misleading, but Eric doesn’t seem comfortable with “gnu”!) are (philosophical) naturalists through and through.
I think there’s also a distinction between new atheists and other atheists that, as naturalists, new atheists are as equally dismissive of other kinds of supernatural and pseudoscientific woo, such as spiritualism and homeopathy, as they are to religion — in principle, as well as because they are personally and socially harmful.
Your comments about the hostility towards new atheists’ being a hostility towards a science-oriented worldview are insightful.
Folks are making similar comments over at Jerry’s blog (sorry, website):
— Dan L.
Uh… hold on… That’s you isn’t it? (See, I’m “Ant Allan” pretty much everywhere on the web! No confusion there… unless it’s misspelled…)
Anyway, I completely agree!
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The community spirit I referred to does not necessarily involve religious worship, but as a generalisation people do seem to want to satisfy a hunger for ‘belonging’. People may fulfil this in several ways, and usually several ways at once. Political party membership, Golf Club membership, more informal groups like ‘my extended family’, ‘my street, ‘people who use Macs’.
The big selling point for religions in the past were not only getting a ‘get out of hell’ card, but also the soothing rituals and ceremonies that confirm that the world was stable and predictable.
Even though a minority of ‘believers’ in the UK actually practice worship, and most are CHINOS (CHristians In Name Only), there is still a strong preference to get married in Church. Mind you, I think this preference is fading now that people can get married in any place that has a licence (castles, stately homes, supermarkets (true!)). But the ceremonies are still important.
I just wonder if Atheism is a ‘club’ to join.
Daniel Lafave (#13),
To the extent that someone can fabricate an interpretation of the myth of Adam and Eve that has it metaphorically express some true claim, how does it tell us anything that we didn’t know before?
Given the historical prevalence of that myth one might argue with some justification that what we knew before was, in part at least, due to that prior “metaphorically true claim”.
For that matter, how would we know whether what the myth’s alleged content is true or not without independently looking to the evidence?
Looks like you’re putting the cart before the horse. Seems to me that the value of metaphor is in suggesting or presenting a perspective or an analysis of – an analogy for – a certain set of phenomena. For example, in the case of Adam and Eve, it is, as Eric suggests, an illustration that “through consciousness … we can make good and bad choices, and that choices have consequences”. And the evidence is manifested in recognizing the fact that, yes, it is entirely true that consciousness entails choices and choices have consequences. Seems that in general mythology is, at least ideally and potentially, sort of a short form, a mnemonic, a set of Coles’ Notes, that provides meaning and context and a frame of reference. Not to mention being reflections of the machinery of the mind.
We can always give those myths an even more metaphorical interpretation that makes them true, but then we are just fitting the myth to facts that we have already independently determined.
Again, it seems that some or many of those facts which you claim are “independently determined” in fact derive from the ancient myths in the first place. Richard Tarnas, in his The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, notes that Socrates and company had a “view of the cosmos as an ordered expression of primordial essences or transcendent first principles … and archetypes”. But “in the pre-philosophical Greek mind, these archetypal principles took the form of mythic personifications such as Eros, Chaos, Heaven and Earth (Ouranos and Gaia) ….” The horse was the mythology which evolved into more tractable and rational and powerful principles; not that the principles sprang from the foreheads of Bacon and Newton and Hume fully fleshed.
I have no idea how you think that the stuff you quote about Jaynes supports mythology having a role in knowledge about consciousness. It’s a complete non sequitur.
I sort of realized after posting that I had missed a bar, a beat, a note or two – metaphorically speaking. I haven’t read anything of Jaynes himself, only the brief discussion by Dawkins and a few Wikipedia notes. But it seems his argument is that “gods were hallucinated voices, speaking inside people’s heads … [that] such gods evolved from memories of dead kings, who still, in a manner of speaking, retained control over their subjects via imagined voices in their heads”. The process was not unique to the Semitic cultures of four thousand years ago, but to virtually all cultures over our entire history and, because of that, the common threads in those mythologies are reflections of the processes of by which consciousness develops – Binker – and has developed – Adam and Eve.
Mythology isn’t the place to look for understanding consciousness. Cognitive science and neurobiology is.
Will certainly agree that those fields play a central role – as does, I think, the cognitive science of religion. But I note that in the case of the latter:
Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious memes by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Seems to me that various religious myths – suitably de-literalized – would come in under the heading of “religious memes” and that they have some relevance to understanding consciousness – our “cognitive capacities”.
Ant (#14), that’s a fair point, about “scientists at heart” v “naturalists through and through”. But I think I’ll stick with ‘naturalists’, because it makes an important point. AC Grayling says, and I think, rightly, that we should be using the term ‘naturalist’ instead of ‘atheist,’ since the latter gives a hostage to theism, and ‘naturalism’ is a positive philosophy which, while it excludes theism, and gives it close attention, does so because it is a problem, a philosophical and a social problem, but also because it is a natural phenomenon. It is, as Hitchens repeats over and over in his book god is not Great, a human creation, and a very primitive phenomenon at that, while it deserves close scientific attention, is also part of the warp and woof of most societies: it’s literature, it’s architecture, it’s art, music, social order, and so much else. Naturalism is, in this respect, a multidisciplinary pursuit.
Well, I certainly don’t disagree with Anthony here! This is my Twitter bio:
No mention of atheism there!
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I wonder if we’ll ever come up with a satisfactory name.
Atheist– It makes no sense to me to identify myself by what I don’t believe. In any case it identifies as someone apart which isn’t helpful if we’re trying to persuade.
Naturalist– To non-philosophers, which is most people, it brings to mind David Attenborough. Or maybe one of those weirdoes who goes around naked.
Scientist– Someone in a lab coat
Humanist– Sounds like someone who worships humans. It reinforces the impression that theists have that we are arrogant.
Bright– Ugh!
I usually just use my name.
Well, as I noted above, David is naturalist as well as a naturalist. In a what’s-your-religion context, say, “I’m a naturalist, just like David Attenborough.” See how long it takes for people to figure it out… Of course, many people won’t, but that could be to your advantage, derailing a goddist’s evangelising, say.
What, you mean those skyclad wiccans?
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*David is a</b< naturalist
Oops… HTML fail.
“But I think I’ll stick with ‘naturalists’, because it makes an important point. AC Grayling says, and I think, rightly, that we should be using the term ‘naturalist’ instead of ‘atheist,’ since the latter gives a hostage to theism, and ‘naturalism’ is a positive philosophy which, while it excludes theism, and gives it close attention, does so because it is a problem, a philosophical and a social problem, but also because it is a natural phenomenon.”
Naturalism is not such a coherent philosophy (For example I doubt anyone actually follows Kai Nielsen’s theoretical philosophy). If it is confined to natural science, then it doesn’t describe what atheists are doing by arguing against religion. It is also inadequate as a methodology in the social sciences.
New atheism seems to be atheism with a greater amount of self-confidence, a kind of self-righteous atheism where atheists not only think their position is true thanks to science, but also morally right thanks to liberal democratic values. However, it’s not in my opinion a philosophy at all, but rather a moral criticism of religion, based on our current cultural ideals of morality such as democracy, human rights, equality and freedom.
What might potentially cripple our criticism is failure to understand ourselves and our limitations. I think we’ve moved too far away from scepticism to a kind of moral certainty, which has no such foundations other than the culture we’re living in. Ironically, Christians and accommodationists are making exactly the same moral argument against new atheists, because they perceive us as dogmatic and authoritarian.
I think a return to scepticism is the wisest thing for us to do, and I think that is what Baggini is in his own confused way trying to suggest. Scepticism has a kind of built in tolerance not only for absurdities but also for immoralities. That is the positive way of building communities, rather than a negative way of building a communities.
Egbert (#28). I’m not sure I see the point of this:
No, that’s true, as a philosophy, philosophical naturalism is open-ended. But then you wouldn’t want an orthodoxy, would you? Science is open-ended too. Nor do I see the point of saying that philosophical naturalism is inadequate as a methodology in the social sciences. On the face of it philosophical naturalism is not a methodology, though if the social sciences began suggesting occult causes, we’d begin to question not only the philosophy but the mental stability of the social scientist in question.
Which leads me on naturally to something said by josefjohann:
Quoting, I think, from Semir Zeki. I think it is just false that “Michelangelo instinctively understood the common visual and emotional organization and workings of the brain.” Michaelangelo may have understood what produced responses of pleasure from observing works of art, but he understood, not even instinctively, the organisation and working of the brain. It’s just like religious experiences. They take nuns and put them in MRI machines, then they produce something they call the brain correlates of religious experience. First of all, not being privy to the nuns’ experiences, how do they know that they’re not having erotic fantansies? Second, in what way does this help us to understand either religious experience, in the nuns’ case, or beauty, in Michaelangelo’s? How does it help us understand the beauty of a poem or the pathos of a tragedy?
Both religious experience, and aesthetic pleasure are parts of the natural world. It may be possible to explain why the brain works in the way it does to produce the experiences we have, but it doesn’t follow that those experiences are explained or accounted for in terms of such brain processes. The experiences themselves are, in a sense, sui generis. A cognitive scientist might be able to tell me what is going on in my brain when I am in love, but the scientist can’t even begin to explain what being in love is like. Both the brain chemistry and the experience are parts of the natural world, and even though correlative, are distinct. The problem with Baggini’s position, though, is that he wants to suggest that religions can be thought about at the same level, so that scientists or philosophical naturalists should be as open to have their minds changed by what the religious say as they are to evidence provided by their own fields of research or experiment or observation of the natural world. And this is just wrong. I’m quite prepared to accept that some religious have experiences which seem to be of other realms of consciousness, even of other worlds or dimensions of reality. But the emphasis is on seeming. Nothing that a religious person can say should change the mind of a philosophical naturalist unless they provide evidence for suggesting that other realms of consciousness or dimensions of being really exist. And so far they have not done so. Their best chance was with near death experiences, but these are adequately explained by what happens in a dying brain (which doesn’t quite die).
This means that secpticism of the Sextus Empiricus variety is not really an option. It’s not an option for science, because we know so much more now than Sextus Empiricus did, and he was wrong even when he wrote, because the speculations of Democritus, for example, were vital clues as to how the world could be understood. But Sextus Empiricus was right to think that it is best to reserve judgement even about such things until we have the evidence. And we might have had the evidence much sooner if Christianity hadn’t interposed itself, and closed the philosophical schools. The reason for scepticism is not to reserve judgement, but to reserve judgement until evidence is available, and the speculation provides the framework of a research project. And this is what is so wrong with Baggini’s idea about how not to be a fundamentalist, which assumes that religion and science are on all fours so far as evidence is concerned. They aren’t, and that’s why he was wrong to attack the new atheism so relentlessly.
Are you contradicting yourself, Eric?
Now:
I think that there is something more to this. Yes, new atheism does embrace a moral criticism of religion, but it is critical not only because (some) religions don’t reflect our current cultural ideals of morality – such as democracy, human rights, equality and freedom – but also (and more importantly, I think) because that objectionable religious morality often stems from, or is claimed to stem from, scripture and dogma that embody ostensibly revealed knowledge from supposed supernatural sources, which are contrary to a naturalistic philosophy.
It’s not just that we think religion is morally wrong, but that it’s wrong for reasons that are themselves wrong.
So, it is not so much that atheists have a moral certainty (and that’s not true given some of the disputes within the new atheist community about, say, feminism and torture) but that atheists are certain (to the degree that we are certain that no theistic god exists) that religious moral certainty has no foundation.
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Oh, I just realised. That last para. is just an erroneous copy of what Egbert said, isn’t it? Not your words at all, Eric.
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No, Ant, it’s not from Egbert, it’s the same quotation from Zeki used earlier. I must have done ctrl v twice and not noticed. I’ll delete the second instance so it won’t confuse others either.
Eric,
I really hope I haven’t taken too much of your time this saturday, but thanks again for such a long response. I hope you understand what I’m trying to say, however poorly I try to put across my point of view, because it’s why I think we’re going wrong.
Let me first make the point that I am a naturalist, up to a point. I see naturalism as limited to the realm of objectivity and facts and what can be observed. I also think that given its sceptical origins, that naturalism is about explainations and not about truths. It quiet wrong of naturalism to think it can tell us truths in the non-factual psychological realm of subjective experience and human creativity. I think naturalism continues to push against those limits, giving us some great insights into how the brain functions, but that wall from fact to consciousness, from explaination to truth is still unsurmountable, without changing what current scientific naturalism is about. I think that accommodationists have been saying something similar, but in a very confused way. Although the case of NOMA was made mistakenly byconfusing religion with morality (religion has nothing to do with morality any more than science), there is still a very real divide between the objective and subjective. I think it is that divide where atheists like John Gray and Julian Baggini begin to criticise new atheism.
Now our arguments against religion are not about naturalism, but about reason. That falls into the realm of words, critical thinking and truth, but that still means that we refer to objectivity, facts and explanations form positive claims, while we use reason and logic to expose the fallacies made by the religious. In that respect, atheists have won against religion, because believers mistakenly tried to make religion as part of the realm of reason. That represents the limited victory of old atheism.
All good so far, but the problem is again with our values, our morals and our politics. Trying to use naturalism into these areas has very practical and theoretical limitations. We instead turn to arguments that are normally political or ethical, such as humanism, liberalism, and so on. Most of us are not only naturalists but also liberals (in some form) or humanists, but they’re two separate areas that we confuse and think are the same world view. We also forget that we’re making arguments in the realm of words and truths, and not doing theoretical science or field work.
This–in my humble opinion–is generating a kind of self-deception among atheists who think they’re being reasonable in areas that fall outside of scientific analysis. They think that somehow fundamentally, their morality and politics is scientific, natural and universal, holding a kind of objective certainty because their feelings are natural.
That is a summary of why I’m honestly sceptical about naturalistic explanations that extend from human creativity. To illustrate my point, a Boeing 747 is part of the natural world as it’s made of atoms, but it is also artificial. Its man-made but since man is part of nature so too is what humans make, and therefore we can use naturalistic explanations for why we fly in Boeing 747s. Perhaps this absurd example can show that we can indeed create naturalistic explanations for Boeing 747s but are they true? How can we test such explanations empirically if they spring from the imagination? We can’t, and since such explanations are untestable, we should like good empiricists, reject them.suspend judgment.
I think you’re right about Baggini’s confusing mistake of trying to bring religion into the realm of reason or naturalism, if that’s what he’s truly saying. I think that he’s so confused that he doesn’t know what he’s saying, he just wants everyone to be more tolerant, even if he falls into his own intolerant trap. Religion can’t win when it comes to reason and truth, but religion is not about reason and truth, it’s about meaning and purpose. Believers have fallen into the trap of self-deception, because they’re trying to rationalize their own irrationality. Atheists are in danger of falling into a similar trap by trying to rationalize their moral and political opinions using science or naturalism.
There is a difference between knowing and understandings as well as a difference beteween knowing and truth. We can know many things, but many of those things are deceptions, lies and subjective. Naturalism is not about truth but about explanation or understanding, and is therefore perfectly compatible with the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. That is why scientific scepticism and methodological naturalism should be seen as the same thing.
Again, apologies for taking up so much of your time, but I see this as a potential point of failure if atheists continue on with this overconfidence in naturalism.
Ant Allan,
What we normally do is deconstruct or criticize religious claims to authority. In that respect, we’re also very successful. It’s our own authority that I am questioning here.
Apologies for the spelling and grammatical errors in my comment.
Egbert, don’t worry about taking up my time. If I haven’t got the time you won’t hear from me, that’s all.
I find it difficult to make the distinction that you do between the empirical and the realm to which you think the idea of truth applies. I think we do find out truths by means of the empirical confirmations of science. It is true that the earth orbits the sun, for example, true (after consulting the periodic table) that hydrogen atoms have 1 proton, carbon atoms have 6 and Oxygen atoms have 8. So truth does not only advert to “words, critical thinking and truth”, if this is supposed to be independent of what we can come to know about the natural empirical world. When Jerry Coyne writes a book entitled Why Evolution is True he’s not making a mistake; he’s giving us reasons for believing that evolution by natural selection is the way that live on earth has evolved, that is, for believing this to be true.
Nor am I prepared to shunt consciousness or human creativity into a non-natural realm. Take for example, your own example:
It would, I think, be better to call 747s artifactual rather than artificial. 747s are human artifacts, just as arrowheads, pots and pans and drills are. Asking whether 747s are true may not make sense, but we can say a lot of true things about 747s, and why they are built the way they are, and why, being built that way, it is true that they will fly. But if we couldn’t imagine new things, or new ways of understanding the way things work, we wouldn’t be able to fly at all, and if consciousness is not part of the natural world, then what is it? I acknowledge the difficulty of saying what consciousness is — Sam Harris has a new article about consciousness: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness/ — but it seems pretty clear that it is a part of the natural world.
You say, that
But explanations are either true or false about the natural world. An explanation about why 747′s fly would include things like the shape of the wings, the weight, the power and thrust of the engines, the amount of lift created, etc. We should not suspend judgement about such things, for this is what enables us to change the world. We understand the world by coming to know what is true about the world. How precisely would understanding without knowledge of something or things that are true work?
I guess I’m just confused over the way you are using language, and why you are using it in that particular way.
My problem with Baggini, by the way, has to do with the fact that he doesn’t seem able to acknowledge that religion isn’t a naturalistic way of knowing, and yet he hasn’t really given us any reason to think that it is a way of knowing at all.
I’m unhappy with the use of the word ‘truth’ without definition. There is a huge risk that it becomes a grab bag of ‘stuff science can’t explain’.
I’m also unhappy with the phrase ‘non-factual psychological realm of subjective experience.’ I’m pretty sure my subjective experiences are factual – even if they can’t currently be explained by science, or may be delusional. I fear you are tiptoeing around the ‘other ways of knowing’ assertion.
If I were to ask you ‘what is it like to bend your elbow?’ you would probably struggle to answer except by demonstration. Yet the fact of bending your elbow is observable by science, and the anatomy and biochemistry comparatively well understood. How is this any difference from asking ‘what is it like to feel happy?’ except that the brain processes are far from being well understood at the moment?
Egbert,
Naturalists are constantly told that we will never be able to naturalize ethics, consciousness, semantics, mathematics and normativity generally. People even seem to take offense at the idea that we would even try to do so. Why? It strikes me as parallel to intelligent design in biology. It’s the strategy of giving up. The relevant question is why so many people want us to give up. Who has an interest in such defeatism?
Further, you seem to use the term “true” in a utterly idiosyncratic way. I suggest you take a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia article, or even just go back to using the term in the way that English speakers generally do.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/
If an explanation of how a 747 came out wasn’t true, it wouldn’t be an explanation. Of course, as Eric points out as well, 747s can’t be true. They aren’t truth-bearers.
Eric, I feel that Daniel Dennet won the argument on sui generis characteristics of subjectivity (or lack thereof) back when he wrote Consciousness Explained. For me, the main takeaway was that philosophers mistake failures of imagination for insights into necessity, and pre-emptively draw up limits to explanatory power of science.
It may be hard to imagine that brain scans can tell me anything important about my own subjectivity. But when I learn that my brain hears, in the violin, the same expressiveness it hears in a human voice, I’ve learned something about myself and my relationship to the music. Of course Bach did not do brain scans on anyone before writing Air on A G String. But did he know a listener might hear the sorrowful voice of a friend, or a mother? I do not doubt this. His genius, as well as that of Michelangelo, consisted in seeing connections now reflected by our best understanding of biology.
Similarly, when I’m banging my head to the endlessly repetitiveness rhythms of my favorite metal band Isis, it widens my relationship with the music to know my cerebellum (which regulates motor function) is at that moment furiously active in rhythm processing, and that it has massive connections to the amygdala which is tasked with remembering emotional events. And that the cerebellum is the most primal reptilian part of our brain.
It may be hard to imagine how we might separate out legitimate experiences of religious euphoria (if any) from erotic fantasies. But, presumably we’d do science on this the same way we do science on other things: with attention to detail, with control subjects, with creativity. Attending to the specifics of subjective reports, and the details of brain activity, we can compare what the nuns feel to actual sexual fantasy, explicitly tested for in other subjects, or actual experiences of euphoria from atheists. Do you think we would not tease out differences? Or do you think that, having failed to spot differences, this in itself wouldn’t be positively interesting as opposed to neutral? We could find that experiences explode into a dozen or a thousand different categories, or that they are the same.
On correlations: it appears to me the history of science with respect to any phenomenon, is a history of encroaching correlations that eventually infiltrate the phenomenon itself. When this happens, they are no longer correlations but simply a description of what the phenomenon is. Why should it be the case that we can map out the physiological basis for chills in response to music, as Zatorre and Blood have, but not the higher-order circuitry that preferentially responds to qualitative aspects of music to induce those chills? Where exactly is it, in the interpretation of art, that science isn’t supposed to be able to get to?
We suffer from an impoverished language that rarely ever does justice to our euphorias, or religious experiences. This I think, together with the fact of our being drenched in 2000 years of human culture where the only attempts at language-making with respect to aesthetics and euphorias have come from people wholly ignorant of brains, has constrained our intuition and our ability to form hypotheses that might relate these experiences to the objective world (i.e. to brains). Even since the scientific revolution brain science has only just come of age, or maybe hasn’t even.
The history of religious (and philosophical!) retreat in the face of scientific explanation has not finished, and atheists are wrong to concede the point with respect to aesthetics. It’s not that we would wipe out art (a misguided fear that I think is not unlike religious fear of losing their humanity if they become atheists) but that we would come to greater understanding of ourselves. Feynman said it like this: “It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.”
Thank you Josef for this detail. Clearly, I didn’t mean to slight the use of brain scans, or what they might tell us — though I do tend to be sceptical, as you can see. My own experience of religion suggests that religious experiences are so diverse, and can in fact have an erotic dimension, as much mystical tradition demonstrates, that it would be very difficult to distinguish, even subjectively, sometimes, the religious from the erotic, let alone by means of brain scans. And of course, if one has not noticed that some musical instruments, and some musical expressions mimic the human voice, as well as other natural sounds, then it is hard to think that one has taken music seriously at all.
As for conceding the point about aesthetics, I don’t see this as a problem for atheists. Religious experience is perfectly natural, of that I have no doubt. The problem is that it is tied up with supposed knowledge of another world. The sense of beauty is an entirely natural ability. To suppose that it can be reduced to brain states seems to me to be preposterous, and is not conceding a thing. I don’t really believe there is a substitute for folk psychology, and conscious awareness, and I’m not at all sure what it would mean to suggest that there is.
At this point, in his latest article, Sam Harris seems to agree — http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness/. This may be a matter of philosophical dispute, and it may be that science will yet perfect a science of beauty, though I doubt it. We differ so much in what we see as beautiful that it is hard to think that we will ever be able to detect a particular brain state that answers to subjective experiences of beauty. But why should this be a problem for atheists? Atheists deny the existence of gods, not of beauty, noblity, sublimity, oceanic feeling states, or even mystical states. In this sense, the sense in which it is believed that all that is valuable in human life can be reduced to physico-chemical states, what is often termed “scientism” is, it seems to me, rightly thought to be unacceptably reductive and dehumanising. That consciousness is, in some sense, emergent upon physico-chemical processes, I have no doubt whatever.
We spend far too much time obsessing with “physico-chemical processes”, and not nearly enough about the information systems that are layered upon them. A single-celled organism is a self-replicating information system, using physico-chemical processes to survive and reproduce. Multicellular organisms are assemblies of such information systems, which also use physico-chemical mechanisms to communicate and coordinate their activities.
If we strip away the “woo” of dualism, it seems to me that explaining consciousness as an aspect of brain function is no more mysterious than explaining how a daffodil works! In both cases, we’re dealing with complex, multilayered distributed systems, and so we should not expect that the task is (a) simple or (b) easily expressed in human languages which evolved for a different set of purposes.
I found the Sam Harris piece to which you referred deeply frustrating because of his failures of imaginations in these areas. I expect better from a soi-disant neuroscientist.
Eric,
Thanks for the link to Harris’s article. Although I find his certainty about consciousness astonishingly overly confident. I think Dr Dean Burnett’s guest article at the Telegraph shows some interesting honesty among scientists:
“First things first: ‘Mind’ in scientific terms has no universally accepted definition, so the majority of behavioural and neurological studies simply ignore it as a factor altogether.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100111114/guest-post-baroness-greenfield-junk-neuroscience-and-the-danger-of-video-games/
I think perhaps this debate will continue somehow.
I was disappointed in Sam Harris’ take on consciousness. Despite his views on so many other things he writes as if ‘consciousness’ has a separate existence from the natural world. This may be a reasonable view (not mine) but he offers no argument except his own incredulity.
I wonder if his early experiences with psychedelic drugs, and now meditation, have been so compelling that he has put consciousness on a pedestal? Perhaps I am too quick to ask such a question, but it is strange that a sceptic and neuroscientist should shy at the prospect of ‘natural’ consciousness. It must be the philosophy.
Egbert,
The term “mind” has no real use in science, but mental states and processes are referred to all over the cognitive sciences. Behaviorism and Eliminative Materialism haven’t ruled the roost for some decades now. But the term “mind” doesn’t have any great use in cognitive sciences because the old-fashioned conception of the “mind” as one unitary place where mentation took place has been thoroughly debunked. As such, It’s much better to say that people have mental properties but leave “minds” out of it. Of course, token mental states just are physical states of our brains, so there’s no problem for naturalism in that.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/
Certainly agree that ‘atheist’ is a bit of a problematic term, particularly when it ‘entrails’, er, entails a statement, a belief, that there are no gods – which seems almost as dogmatic as that of a theist who insists that there is at least one (his), particularly given that many if not most atheists seem to self-describe as skeptics. While an anthropomorphic god seems very highly improbable given the literally tens of thousands of such gods which mankind has worshipped over the millennia, that definition hardly seems exhaustive – panentheistic or panpsychic versions for examples. And even the “Last Thursdayist” god is not categorically disprovable – or so the argument seems to go. It would appear that proving that any given set is empty – even assuming that it can be adequately defined – is decidedly a “non-trivial” problem – as the recent proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem would suggest.
But while I think both Grayling and Baggini are correct in emphasizing the “naturalism” as opposed to the “atheism” as a more important standard to carry into battle against the “god-heathens”, I still think it is incomplete, at least that promoted by Baggini:
While I certainly agree that, as he implies, “supernatural” is really an oxymoron, an incoherent concept – if a god exists then surely one would think that would be the most natural thing in the universe, or outside of it for that matter. But his rejection there – and in his recent Guardian article – of purpose and agency seems highly problematic. While “ultimate purpose” and “ultimate agency” is certainly debatable, to deny that purpose and agency exists would seem to fly in the face of the very existence of consciousness itself – which Descartes and Harris contend is, in Harris’ words, “… the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.”
Which then raises the question of where that phenomenon of agency, of consciousness derives from. And, as Harris suggests, emergence might be a reasonable starting point, but it is still “incomprehensible” as to how that might manifest consciousness and what level of complexity is necessary for it to appear. Which might reasonably lead to the question of just how far down the scale of being, of existence, of matter, does that process, that principle, extend? If it is all the way to bottom – consciousness all the way down (panpsychism) – then it would seem not too far fetched to talk of “ultimate purpose” and “ultimate agency”.
And, speaking of strange bedfellows, that is not too far removed from Feser’s perspective:
Though the fly-in-the-ointment there is Feser’s fellow-traveler Dembski who insists, highlighting the monster in with the bathwater and the baby, that “Christ [is] the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation”.
Because Harris does not define conciousness very well he leaves open the door for consciousness to be real, but the feeling of being conscious to be an illusion. A bit if a stretch perhaps, but since Harris appears to confuse awareness, self-awareness, consciousness and self consciousness is it a surprise?
I rather favour the idea of ‘naturalism’ myself as it shifts the centre of the worldview away from merely the existence of god(s). Having said that, Naturalists may hold that there are no gods, or may hold that the supernatural is outside the concerns of Naturalism.
I agree that Naturalists would not expect there to be Ultimate Purpose or Agency; I favour talking about local purpose and local agency which we know to exist through naturalistic observation. Is consciousness involved in local purpose and agency? I believe so, but so is unconscious/subconscious cognition. Which makes me think that consciousness is a gradually emergent property and that Harris, by asking at what level of complexity consciousness might appear, is actually asking the wrong sort of question..
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DiscoveredJoys (#45),
Having said that, Naturalists may hold that there are no gods, or may hold that the supernatural is outside the concerns of Naturalism.
Would logical contradictions be outside the concerns or realm of logic? Would seem to justify naturalists similarly viewing and rejecting supernaturalism – in all its various forms – as being equally illogical and incoherent.
Because Harris does not define consciousness very well he leaves open the door for consciousness to be real, but the feeling of being conscious to be an illusion.
Not sure that I follow that. He would seem to be arguing that consciousness and that feeling, along with other attributes, are synonymous:
I favour talking about local purpose and local agency which we know to exist through naturalistic observation. Is consciousness involved in local purpose and agency? I believe so …
Likewise. You might be interested in this article on Behavior, Purpose and Teleology by Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow, several of the progenitors of the science of cybernetics, which notes that:
While there are a great many practical applications of that restricted view, it would seem that that “cause subsequent in time to a given effect” lies at the heart of our perceptions and awareness of the future – if we wish to have bread on the table tomorrow then we know that we must plant wheat today – and of consciousness itself. And that element, that perception, seems the most problematic and least explainable by current physics – which opens the door to speculation, idle or not.
Maybe the brain is some biochemical system of some faster-than-light neutrinos captured in some 11-dimensional emergent Möbius strip or Klein bottle that permits or allows some very limited influence of the future on the present and which thereby manifests itself as consciousness. As Shakespeare noted, with characteristic intuition and insight, “there’s more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy”. And to which J.B.S. Haldane, whom Dawkins quoted with some substantial concurrence, added his own uniquely British colloquial interpretation: “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
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Steersman,
I see your point, and it’s one I agree with, but it is a matter of fact there are people who claim to be naturalists but also don’t reject the possibility of a non-interacting supernatural ‘world’. They do live without regard to that possibility though.
Thanks for the link by the way; I’ll have a quiet read and digest it properly. I think we already agree about ‘purpose’.
As for your last paragraph – I’m not certain what you are trying to say. Although it makes me seem desperately boring, I feel uncomfortable with the ‘there must be mysteries’ way of speaking. It often becomes a glorification of ‘nature and the unknown’ and woo is only a small step further on. I apologise if your intent was to merely state that there are things we don’t know yet, and things we can never know, for this is obviously true, but I don’t concede that ‘therefore there is magic’.
DiscoveredJoys (#47),
Deists for example? Francis Collins? Karl Giberson? Still seems to me that that outlook is inconsistent at best – if such a “non-interacting world” exists then it would still seem to qualify as natural even if it is, by the stated definition, not something that has any measurable influence on this one. The “multi-verse” concept might entail a reasonable or plausible example.
I think your assessment there is essentially correct: my intent was, largely, to state that “there are things we don’t know yet and [probably] things we can never know”. I’m equally uncomfortable with the “there must be mysteries” outlook, the “mystery mongering” that Sagan talked of (echoing Heraclitus, so the phenomenon has been around for a while, “quantum flapdoodle” and “quantum mysticism” being only the latest versions), and I am certainly not trying to insist that “therefore there is magic”.
But there’s definitely a narrow path there which is awfully easy to fall off of, even for atheists – at least for those who have a tendency to become “true believers” in the dogma and lose their grip on the thread of skepticism that presumably started them down that road to begin with. For one of several examples, you might want to take a look at Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics wherein he notes:
And for another, I ran across this from the Wikipedia article on Simon Conway Morris with which I find myself in some degree of sympathy:
Though to be fair to Dawkins at least who would appear to acknowledge that “narrow path”, reject any hint of “therefore there is magic”, and provide some support for my point, there is this in his conclusion of The God Delusion:
But that process – that search for The Final, Grand Unified Theory, and the like – is a curious phenomenon in its own right. It reminds me of the recent book – haven’t read it yet myself – titled Hiding in the Mirror by the physicist Lawrence Krauss. But it suggests to me that what he has in mind is that we have yet to realize that we are in fact looking into a mirror and failing to see in the infinitude of reflections that what is “hidden” there in plain sight and colouring everything else we see is the plain fact of our consciousness – quite possibly an irreducible datum or fact of the universe.
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