Words I wish I had written
Words I wish could be unsaid
Broken promises I want to fix
Lie in empty cards on a dresser
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Matriculation
I was sitting in the anteroom between worlds with my rights parked outside in my car. I might have been waiting for five minutes, maybe even an hour, but it felt like more. It was not the time already spent, wasted sitting on a wooden bench in a glass cocoon, but the uncertainty of the wait ahead. My questions would not be answered but my answers had better please them. You could look at them but they were watching you.
No clocks in here and I wasn’t going to look at my watch. Time was suspended between worlds. The lack of control (my American self might say) or the feeling of being controlled (my Irish self might say) was the killer. One culture used to dominating, the other to being dominated boiled down to the same thing – the lack of autonomy. The rebel demanding answers from behind the glass would probably be moved to the end of the queue; although they would call it a line and probably wouldn’t say anything at all. But they were no more interested in sitting down on a couch and listening to my feelings. It’s all a matter of perspective and mine didn’t count.
A man about my age (early thirties) and his father, at least he looked old enough to be his father (that was a presumption but prejudgments are an unfortunate part of this business), were sitting on a wooden bench across the room from me. I noticed them but made no contact. This was a zone of hushed voices and languages I did not understand. No swapping of stories, no mutual complaints about the service. The customer was never right here. We were in a room surrounded by glass walls like an ATM lobby for after-hours use. At the end of the rectangular room farthest from the door were several service windows. Behind the glass the uniformed agents looked sternly at computer screens, looked you in the eye to see if you were real and looked at your papers to make sure you weren’t fake.
The older man’s head was down. Dressed in what I would call his Sunday best, but of course he would likely use another idiom. Was he trying to make a good impression or was this his customary dress? Those with a birthright to cross did not care so much for impressions. The younger man was speaking to him in upbeat but quiet tones. He was carefully dressed too, jeans and t-shirt in the newest urban style and new sneakers. The designer glasses, conservative hairstyle and the fact that his clothes were not worn too loosely announced that he only dressed like this at the weekend. Was he telling his father not to worry?
Everything was in order: passport, green card (there was a longer more bureaucratic name and it was barely green). You handed your papers over to the hand waiting to receive them. No one had ever asked me to show my papers. After all it is a free country. But if I handed them nothing they’d have to ask. It was easier to spare both of our blushes by being prepared. Could I ask why I had to pull over? No came the answer. Obviously not correct because I had asked. But he was not pleased. You had to watch out for the young guys who didn’t take off their sun glasses. They were watching for other things. I pulled over, my documents exchanged for a piece of yellow paper like a parking ticket with an X marked beside an indecipherable code. I asked where to go, a man without a country.
The older man was called first to the window. There was an order to it all but they weren’t going to tell you. There was no first or last here. The younger man followed but he was told to have a seat. He protested that his father (not all presumption is wide of the mark) did not speak English. He was allowed to approach the glass to interpret.
Citizenship? Irish, not what you were expecting? Quickly mention the green card. You look at me expecting one thing and find something else. They have to be on their toes in their line of work. Looking the part doesn’t get you through the door. Where are you headed? Home. Where’s that? Why the suspicion, it’s five miles over there, with another country so close how could a former-island dweller resist crossing over? How did I obtain my green card? My wife – yes, she’s American. How did I meet her? Do you have that couch handy? You see I met her at a party…I met her over there and followed her over here. He was looking at the screen; I would never know what he was seeing. Then he handed me the yellow piece of paper and told me to pull over.
The two men had returned from the glass interface. The younger man was sitting on the bench with his head in his hands. The older man was stoically erect and speaking in low tones. Was he telling his son that this was the way of things – always, everywhere? The younger man was raising his voice arguing with his father. The older man put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Some people get angry when others lose their cool but the older man seemed to be silently communicating that the only thing was to look them straight in the eye, stand up straight and take it on the chin (or whatever phrase he might use). The son was not giving in. Was he saying that it was different here? The older man just listened with the wisdom that personal experience is always more real than someone else’s story.
There was no one else in the room besides me and the father and son; no one at the window, but still my name was not called. Why not apply for citizenship and avoid all the hassle? My wife’s voice in my ear. I had the passport to enter there but my life was here, or at least a few miles outside of this glass booth. I could maintain the fiction that I lived in limbo between the two countries, committing to neither, oblivious to both. But places change without you or you change without them. Doesn’t really matter, the result is the same and it makes people uncomfortable. An Irishman turning into a yank after a few years across the water. A successful assimilant reluctant to swear the oath. One culture despised the lack of resistance the other distrusted the lack of commitment. Like I said, it’s all a matter of perspective.
The father and son had been called back to the window. The father was standing a little back because his son had taken center stage. There was a small gap at the bottom of the glass window and the son was speaking directly into this small hole designed for the exchange of documents. The window was equipped with a microphone and speaker system so that both sides could hear each other but maybe the son wanted to make a more human connection by sidestepping the technology. Maybe he didn’t think the microphone was capable of conveying his voice to the other side, like those who speak into their tiny cell phones too loudly. He was waving some documents in front of the glass, flipping through the pages. They moved away from the glass and back to the bench. Still not free to leave.
What was the purpose of your trip to Toronto? Business. What kind of business? My own. Did you acquire anything on your trip? A few contacts eager for a free lunch; an empty coffee cup; dozens of emails to be answered; a speeding ticket; a need to use the bathroom as a result of the empty coffee cup. Explicit answers are expected to be tempered by common sense - no, just my belongings. Could I open the trunk? Sure if I can find the button. Thorough – but he seems satisfied. I understand that the price of freedom is toughness at the edges. We go unaware until we push up against them jarring the illusion of autonomy. Still I want to sail on through while they protect me.
The son approached me. He didn’t look directly at me until he was right in front of me, preserving the chance to abort at the last minute.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he opened, well it wasn’t as if I was doing a whole lot sitting there, “my phone is dead,” he looked me in the eye, “my father has forgotten some of his documents,” a slight inhalation of breath, “could I borrow yours to make a call?” He had crossed the border in this no-man’s land between his side of the room and mine. Not that either side belonged to either of us, but that’s the way we do things – this is mine, that is yours.
“Sure,” I answered, “do you know how it works?”
“Yes, I have the same one.” He returned to his father. His father looked across at me and nodded slightly. I mouthed a virtually silent – no problem – which he likely did not understand but could comprehend. The son was speaking excitedly into my phone, clearly relaying the story, then the tone dropped to resignation, persuasion maybe? He handed me back the phone. “Thank you.” I responded that he was welcome and we resumed our places.
My name was called. I walked up to the glass window and stood in front of an agent in his mid-thirties, short-cropped hair, perhaps a pre-emptive strike against the beginnings of a receding hairline. I smiled a little, not too much, you don’t want to appear too eager to make a good impression. He looked at me gruffly and made a jerking movement of his thumb to indicate the agent next to him. “Sorry, should I move over?” No verbal response, just the thumb and then he looked away. I moved over two windows and found myself facing a middle-aged woman with black curly hair. She nodded to me and looked down at the card in her hand, which I assumed was my green card. My phone rang. I looked down with the conditioned response that my various electronic messaging devices have instilled in me. Instant communication demands instant response. The agent was looking at her computer and still had not addressed me. I glanced quickly at the screen and silence the phone. It was a number I didn’t recognize – from overseas, but everywhere was overseas from this little glass island. I realized that the call was for someone in this room but not me.
“Should I let you get that?” The agent asked sarcastically from behind the glass. She did not appreciate my failure to give her my full attention. Part of me wanted to make her wait, show my importance, but I knew I had no such power here.
“Well, you see I think the call is for that guy over there,” the agent raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes, “he needed to borrow a phone…it might be important.” Whether she understood or not she was not indicating.
“Is this your legal resident identification card?” So that was the proper name – bit of a mouthful, but definitely more bureaucratic and imposing. I nodded. The phone was ringing again. “You do understand that this is an international border crossing,” I did indeed, “and that this is serious business?” I responded in the affirmative, knowing that I was not the only one in the room facing this serious business. There are walls built by others to protect us and we build our own walls to protect ourselves from others. If bad things happen on the other side of the wall, they happen to someone else. It’s a shame of course, we wish it was different, but what can we do? But he had crossed the line we had drawn between us and I didn’t push him back. I took my phone out of my pocket and held it up and looked over to the father and son. My message was received and understood. The son came over and took the phone from my hand. He sat back down I turned my attention back towards the agent.
“Do you know that man?”
“No.”
“Why did you give him your phone?”
“He asked.”
“Why did he ask?”
“His wasn’t working.”
The son handed me back my phone. I nodded to accept his thanks. “You know you’re not supposed to do that?” I knew I was supposed to stay on my side if that was what she was asking.
“No, I didn’t.”
“This is you?” She held up my passport so I could see it and tapped on an open page that displayed my picture.” I responded that it was. “Doesn’t look much like you. Please have a seat.” Well we’ve all seen better days. I sat back down on my bench.
The party across from me had become three. Whoever had been summoned using my phone had arrived successfully. There was a quick conference at the window between the father and one of the agents with the son as translator. They walked away from the window smiling. The son put his arm around his father and patted his shoulder - the triumph of youth and optimism over old-world fatalism. The disruption to the journey fading in the rear-view mirror. They’re just doing their job after all.
I was now alone in the room. I began to walk around now that I was liberated from the need to maintain distance. I noticed a yellow piece of paper sitting on the recently abandoned bench. I pulled my personal golden ticket out of my pocket to compare. The same box was marked, the same code of numbers and letters. I put my ticket back in my pocket and dropped the other back on the bench. My name was called. I returned to the window. The agent handed me back my passport and green card.
“You’re free to go.” I thanked her and received an acknowledgement that went perhaps fifty per cent of the way towards a smile. I started my car and headed back to where I belonged, that was not a country and that was O.K.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Songs in the Key of Joy
“Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.” – Salman Rushdie[i]
Those with a poetic bent who cling to the supposed rigidity of scientifically based rationalism have to look for meaning somewhere. In cold world of random causation and non-teleological existence there are many things that somehow escape scientifically satisfactory explanation. For example, our fear of death, our dreams of utopia our nightmares of Armageddon are beyond scientific rationalization.
How to fill in these gaps without some belief in the transcendent? Ignore them because if they cannot be explained by science they must be meaningless; have faith that some day science will be able to make sense of them; or cheat by attempting to locate the transcendent in literature and the arts while calling it humanism?
Many otherwise thoroughgoing scientific types are seduced by the beauty of the human capacity to create and so pick option three. They assert that we can find deep meaning and revelation in literature and the arts. I think this is cheating because such people deny the possibility of transcendent truth while at the same time yearning for and affirming its existence. That is to say they deny the possibility of the divine but contend that writers and other artists can provide us with transcendent truths about the human condition. This is definitely a case of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but if you believe that humanity is the random result of evolution and that there is no supernatural or divine realm, how can artists discover deep, meaningful truths about our existence? If these artistic revelations are to have any meaning there must be more to life than random chance, otherwise they are just talking rubbish.
Christopher Hitchens, the well-known atheist proselytizer, in his book God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything writes the following to describe his fellow atheists:
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and literature… Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.[ii]
Hitchens goes to great lengths to deny the possibility of the divine but cannot shake the idea that great artists have tapped on occasion transcended the ordinary to touch the human soul. He further writes that he sometimes wonders whether the works of Mozart are man made.[iii] Of course, a thoroughgoing scientific rationalist cannot maintain belief in the existence of the human soul. He or she should have discarded that outdated Platonic, Cartesian dogma long ago. However, Hitchens does not seem to be able to let go of the sense of the greater: that some part of our nature is touched by great art – a soul or whatever you want to call it. I suspect that Hitchens and those like him would be saddened and even devastated if science ultimately managed to reduce our appreciation of great art to electrical impulses in the brain – because then we would be truly soulless.
But, if evolutionary biology and all that it entails is correct, there are no such truths and any claim to the contrary is illusory or as Sartre might have put it a “self-confidence trick.” It seems that we cannot escape our need to find some deeper meaning to our existence. Again we return to the nagging sense that there is a greatness and a majesty to human existence that remains stubbornly hidden. If only we could climb to the top of the mountain, sail just beyond the horizon, we could capture it and live as we were meant to.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Divine Invention
The idea of the divine or God is, if you think clearly about it, a very strange concept. To many contemporary scientifically minded people it is childish and even laughable to believe in God. They contend that the physical material world is all there is. So why invent ghost stories? For example, the prominent atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens contends that as a child it was obvious to him that God did not exist and that the concept of the divine was inherently ridiculous.1
We are sensual creatures. We live by taste, touch, sight and sound but religion demands belief in something that does not come into contact with our physical senses - something we cannot prove. Since we cannot prove the existence of the spiritual realm, anyone who claims to believe in one may just as well be suffering from a delusion. Yet throughout history many people have claimed to believe the same things about an unprovable God. Were they all suffering from a collective delusion?
Well yes and no we would like to answer. We respond that early primitive humans who believed in the supernatural were just doing their best with their paltry knowledge of the universe. On the other hand, modern humans blessed with the depth of contemporary scientific knowledge should know better.
We assume that our less sophisticated ancestors were susceptible to religious beliefs because of their scientific ignorance. Now we have left these primitive beliefs behind and moved on. However, there are a couple of problems with this theory. First, religious belief, perhaps not in the orthodox forms of previous generations, but belief in some sort of spirituality - something more than the physical - is stubbornly persistent even in so-called advanced post-modern societies. Second, when examined in detail, the foundations of the assumption that ancient humans were inevitably drawn to belief in the supernatural are not as certain as some might like to think.
The common materialist (by materialist I mean the theory that there is nothing more than the physical world - no spiritual realm) explanation for the advent of belief in the divine proceeds as follows. Primitive humans found themselves in a big bad world surrounded by things they did not understand - things that could kill them. They were afraid. They were taught that everything they could not understand about the physical world was due to the existence of a spiritual realm that intervened in their everyday material world. As time moved on, gods became more sophisticated and some of their writings were "discovered". Early primitive polytheism became monotheism. So far so good, right? But does this explanation make sense when we look at it more closely?
Did ancient humans who shared our reliance on the physical senses have a spiritual sense that helped them divine the existence of the supernatural? The materialist must of course respond to this question in the negative. To admit that ancient humans had some sort of spiritual sense would lead to questions about what happened to this sense and whether we still have it today. So, the materialist must fall back on the theory that some human or humans invented the divine, but in doing so he or she must be consistent. That is, he or she cannot maintain that modern humans are born rational materialist skeptics but that ancient humans were born irrational spiritual mystics. So, the materialist must wrestle with the following question: why would those who were just as dependent on "I'll believe it when I see it" be so willing to structure their entire lives around the unseen and the untouchable?
Two assumptions underlie the theory that man invented God. First, some human or humans were born into a world without the concept of the supernatural. Second, some early human looked at the physical world (he or she must have been brilliant - a genius even) and came up with the theory that there was an unseen world higher than ours that exercised control over the physical world in some fashion.
This discovery or invention of the supernatural resulted from one of two motives. The first potential motive was the desire to explain the unknown in the light of unsophisticated scientific knowledge - the Einsteinian motive. If the inventor of the divine was driven but the Einsteinian motive, his or her goal was to help other humans understand the physical world better. The second potential motive was to invent God to gain control and power over others - the Machiavellian motive. If the inventor of the divine was animated by the Machiavellian motive he or she determined that if he or she told everyone there was a God in the sky who will punish them if they do wrong things he or she could control behavior and gain immense power. These are assumptions because of course we cannot travel back in time and find "believer zero" - the first human to invent the divine.
But the invention of the supernatural was a huge paradigm shift. Why didn't the first person that heard the God explanation laugh and call the inventor a fool? If the divine was invented by some ancient genius whose name has been lost (of course the inventor would want to keep the fact that the supernatural was a human invention quiet) then others around him or her had no concept of the divine. Is it not more likely than not in such a scenario that people the inventor told about the divine, who were just as sense dependent as we are today, would have found the concept of non-physical beings ridiculous and wondered whether the inventor was delusional?
If you object that it wasn't the invention of one particular person at a particular time because it was an idea common to all humans, the materialist explanation is in trouble. If someone did not invent the divine were humans born with a conception of the supernatural? If that is true, the supernatural was not invented and did not evolve over time into the religions we find today. Because if the idea of the supernatural is a concept that humans are born with, the materialist explanation for the supernatural is wrong and we must ask whether this spiritual sense persists today.
Similarly, if you object that it occurred to many at the same time this does not solve your problem either. Each of these discoverers would be subject to individual ridicule just as if there were one believer zero. Anyway, if we accept the theory that the first believers were primitive scientists positing the existence of the supernatural to explain the natural, it is more likely that there was a believer zero than not. Scientific breakthroughs are made by individual scientific geniuses like Newton and Einstein - they do not occur simultaneously to many different people. The same would hold true for the power-hungry Machiavellian genius inventing God to seize power. It is more likely that there was one originator of this idea. Moreover, if belief in the supernatural as an explanation for the physical world occurred to many people at the same time, or was obvious to many people, it has more of the character of divine message, which of course is thoroughly unscientific.
Believer zero looked at the world and concluded that it was governed by supernatural forces. Surely this was the greatest leap of human faith that has ever been attempted. But it appears natural to us that our ancient ancestors made this leap. Why? It goes back to our concept that there must be more to life than this. Our longing for utopia, our fear of death, the wonder of nature, the terror of doomsday, all point the way. Why did the ancients gaze at the sky and see heaven?
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. 2
This is not the argument from design. This is the claim that standing on a cold day when the deep blue of the sky is lit by the blinding winter sun or the full moon of mid-summer magically reveals the nocturnal world in a new light we cannot escape our smallness and the immensity of it all. At these moments we experience the transcendent, be it oneness with the universe, belief in God as creator, belief in ourselves as gods. We feel there must be something more. Lost in such reverie it is hard to maintain that we are experiencing the result of winning the cosmic lottery.
Shifting Scientific Grounds
There is a fundamental human need to explain everything because otherwise we feel scared and out of control. We cannot truly accept that everything is random chaos because we are wired to look for an overarching cause or theory to explain the world to us.
Today, we are still faced by an often hostile physical world that we cannot control replete with mysteries we cannot explain. Those who have abandoned God as an out-of-date hypothesis employ the same sort of thinking as the ancient scientists animated by the Einsteinian motive. Even though there is much about our world that contemporary science, no matter how sophisticated, cannot explain (take for example the persistence of many horrible diseases), we profess complete faith that the solution to the mysteries of the universe lies in that direction. Scientists would argue that we have abandoned the simple hypotheses of our primitive ancestors for shiny modern scientific ones. But is the motive the same, to throw all of our unanswered questions into one catch-all bucket - to take care of the inexplicable in one foul swoop?
Many people are convinced of the truth of the theory that God is man-made because they believe that science has proved it to be so. And if something has been conclusively proven true by empirical science, who am I to argue? But, if you believe that science has proved that God is man-made it is important that you have a firm grip on what science is and is not. It may seem ridiculous to some readers to question science because science is based on fact - seeing is believing. And if this were the scientific paradigm exclusively used to evaluate such theories I would agree with those readers. However, the philosophical basis of science that some thinkers have proposed may surprise some.
What is presented as science has shifted over time from pure empirical research to something more pliable. If you consider science to consist solely of information that can be empirically verified, what I will call the enlightenment version, there are many facets of our world that will fall outside of its scope.
In the early twentieth century a group of philosophers called logical positivists took the position that statements that could not be empirically verified were meaningless.3 This meant that ethical statements and statements about art and beauty were relegated to the status of nonsense. These kinds of ideas, moral and aesthetic, are not easily subsumed under the rubric of enlightenment science. To bring such concepts under the scientific umbrella they must be either explained by reducing them in some way to elements that can be empirically verified or science itself must be reworked to fit these ideas in. Because many things that we consider to be fundamental human characteristics, or part of what it is to be human, are not capable of reduction to empirically verifiable terms, the latter course has been adopted by many thinkers. This has entailed a fundamental rethinking of what many of us have been taught to consider science. Thinkers like Richard Rorty and W.V. Quine contended that science does not provide us with objective truths about the world but instead pragmatic descriptions of our world, which are true only in the sense that they are useful to further the goal of the scientist. Rorty wrote:
Some philosophers have remained faithful to the Enlightenment and have continued to identify themselves with the cause of science...they insist that natural science discovers truth rather than makes it...Other philosophers, realizing that the world as it is described by the physical sciences teaches no moral lessons, offers no spiritual comfort, have concluded that science is no more than the handmaiden of technology.4
This viewpoint holds that there are no absolute truths out there waiting for brilliant scientific minds to discover them. Instead truth is made. It does not matter whether a particular scientific theory is true in an absolute sense so long as it helps us describe the world in some way.
...great scientists invent descriptions of the world which are useful for purposes of predicting and controlling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent other descriptions of it for other purposes. But there is no sense in which any of these descriptions is an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself...the very idea of such a representation as pointless.5
In other words, science does not present us with objective truths about the world around us any more than a poet does. This is a pragmatic theory of truth. That is, if it works for you, it's true for you. So science is true if it furthers the scientist's theory.
W.V. Quine, in his influential paper, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, also embraced a pragmatic picture of science. He rejected the principle that factual statements were only meaningful if they could be verified by experience. He argued that science is only affected by experience at the edges. He described science as a field touched at the edges by experience but whose internal beliefs are not true because they correspond with experience by because they agree with each other. Therefore, beliefs in the center of the field can conflict with experience and still be held to be true. Quine even suggested that if beliefs at the edge conflicted with experience we could change logical laws so they would be true. For Quine the existence of physical objects was no more objectively true than the gods of Homer but subjectively or pragmatically true because physical objects provide a more useful description of the world than Homer's gods. He wrote:
...total science is like a field of force whose boundaries are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field...But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience...Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws.6
Quine is putting the desire to believe what he wants to be true, or more charitably what he thinks is useful, above having scientific statements correspond to objective truth. In other words, he is privileging pragmatism over objectivity. This approach was taken by Rorty, Quine and those like them because they realize that if science reveals objective truths about the physical world, there is the possibility of objective truth in other areas of human experience such as morality. The objective truths of empirical science are located in the physical world. But other objective truths, for example objective moral truths, are not so easily tied to the physical world. The potential solution to the problem of where such truths come from is that these truths transcend the physical world because they are metaphysical or spiritual in nature.
The presentation of the theory that God is a human creation as a scientific theory is a great example of the shift from objectivity to pragmatism in scientific theory. This theory is not capable of empirical proof. Of course I will concede that it cannot be empirically disproved either. What is undeniable is that we have a sense of the supernatural - where that comes from is for each person to decide. But it is not enlightenment science to pretend that the theory that man created God is on the same scientific truth level as the discovery of DNA. But this frequently occurs. Why is this done?
Perhaps because traditional natural science with its underlying bedrock of empirical verification has made many amazing leaps since the enlightenment but has also shown how many gaps are still left - ethical, artistic, political, etc. These gaps, I believe provide us with an unshakable sense that there is something more to this world than the merely physical, aspects of it that cannot be explained by traditional enlightenment science. Moreover, the recognition of the existence of these gaps leads to the contemplation of the spiritual. So those opposed to metaphysical or spiritual reflections needed to find another way to fill these gaps. Thus less emphasis was put on empirical verifiability and plausible theories that were essentially unprovable in the traditional empirical natural science fashion have gained currency because they give us "useful" descriptions of the world. However, if you unmoor science from empirical verifiability it becomes subjective and so someone has to decide whether a particular theory provides a useful description of the world. As humans our biases inevitably come into play. So the decider, faced with two theories, both equally incapable of empirical proof, one of which squares with his or her biases and one of which does not, will choose the theory which confirms what they already thought.
As there is an overwhelming first principle belief in the post-modern western academy that there is no metaphysical or spiritual element to the universe, it is inevitable that scientific theories that favor this bias will be given prominence.
A clarification is probably unnecessary, but to stave off the charge of anti-science that will no doubt be leveled at me, let me make the following clear. I have no quarrel with science. I am not going to declare that the world is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. Empirically based science has made many amazing discoveries that have given us great insights into the world around us and that have improved human life beyond our wildest expectations. Such science is a noble pursuit.
Instead I am disputing the placing of subjective unprovable theories on the same level as the discoveries of such giants as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. I am protesting the presentation of subjective pragmatic truths as objective scientific gospel truth. I have nothing against those who like Rorty and Quine admit the subjectivity of the science they are affirming, and in the case of Rorty at least, openly acknowledge that they would like to promote pragmatic truths that further their personal political and social goals. The problem is that when it comes to conjecture about the origin of the spiritual instinct many thinkers are content for the public to view such statements in the light of the enlightenment version of science taught at school.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? We have seen that the theory that man invented God has many problems when the underlying assumptions are given a thorough examination. It is also clear that many who live in the contemporary post-God world still believe there is a spiritual element to our world. There may not be the common acceptance of orthodox Christianity, but spirituality in many forms, any of which entail belief in non-physical entities, thrive in the contemporary scientific post-modern world. Further, the common perception that God has been proved not to exist by science must be abandoned.
True, empirical science cannot make sense of God, but neither can it deal with art, love or politics. Essentially there are realms of human existence where we must authentically choose the answers for ourselves instead of pretending that the test has already been taken for us.
1. Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2007; 2-4.
2. Holy Bible. Cambridge University Press. Genesis 19 v. 1-3. Authorized King James Version.
3. See, for example, A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Dover Publications, 1952.
4. Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989; 3-4.
5. Ibid; 4.
6. W.V. Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Epistemology - Contemporary Readings, Routledge, 2002; 189-90.
We are sensual creatures. We live by taste, touch, sight and sound but religion demands belief in something that does not come into contact with our physical senses - something we cannot prove. Since we cannot prove the existence of the spiritual realm, anyone who claims to believe in one may just as well be suffering from a delusion. Yet throughout history many people have claimed to believe the same things about an unprovable God. Were they all suffering from a collective delusion?
Well yes and no we would like to answer. We respond that early primitive humans who believed in the supernatural were just doing their best with their paltry knowledge of the universe. On the other hand, modern humans blessed with the depth of contemporary scientific knowledge should know better.
We assume that our less sophisticated ancestors were susceptible to religious beliefs because of their scientific ignorance. Now we have left these primitive beliefs behind and moved on. However, there are a couple of problems with this theory. First, religious belief, perhaps not in the orthodox forms of previous generations, but belief in some sort of spirituality - something more than the physical - is stubbornly persistent even in so-called advanced post-modern societies. Second, when examined in detail, the foundations of the assumption that ancient humans were inevitably drawn to belief in the supernatural are not as certain as some might like to think.
The common materialist (by materialist I mean the theory that there is nothing more than the physical world - no spiritual realm) explanation for the advent of belief in the divine proceeds as follows. Primitive humans found themselves in a big bad world surrounded by things they did not understand - things that could kill them. They were afraid. They were taught that everything they could not understand about the physical world was due to the existence of a spiritual realm that intervened in their everyday material world. As time moved on, gods became more sophisticated and some of their writings were "discovered". Early primitive polytheism became monotheism. So far so good, right? But does this explanation make sense when we look at it more closely?
Did ancient humans who shared our reliance on the physical senses have a spiritual sense that helped them divine the existence of the supernatural? The materialist must of course respond to this question in the negative. To admit that ancient humans had some sort of spiritual sense would lead to questions about what happened to this sense and whether we still have it today. So, the materialist must fall back on the theory that some human or humans invented the divine, but in doing so he or she must be consistent. That is, he or she cannot maintain that modern humans are born rational materialist skeptics but that ancient humans were born irrational spiritual mystics. So, the materialist must wrestle with the following question: why would those who were just as dependent on "I'll believe it when I see it" be so willing to structure their entire lives around the unseen and the untouchable?
Two assumptions underlie the theory that man invented God. First, some human or humans were born into a world without the concept of the supernatural. Second, some early human looked at the physical world (he or she must have been brilliant - a genius even) and came up with the theory that there was an unseen world higher than ours that exercised control over the physical world in some fashion.
This discovery or invention of the supernatural resulted from one of two motives. The first potential motive was the desire to explain the unknown in the light of unsophisticated scientific knowledge - the Einsteinian motive. If the inventor of the divine was driven but the Einsteinian motive, his or her goal was to help other humans understand the physical world better. The second potential motive was to invent God to gain control and power over others - the Machiavellian motive. If the inventor of the divine was animated by the Machiavellian motive he or she determined that if he or she told everyone there was a God in the sky who will punish them if they do wrong things he or she could control behavior and gain immense power. These are assumptions because of course we cannot travel back in time and find "believer zero" - the first human to invent the divine.
But the invention of the supernatural was a huge paradigm shift. Why didn't the first person that heard the God explanation laugh and call the inventor a fool? If the divine was invented by some ancient genius whose name has been lost (of course the inventor would want to keep the fact that the supernatural was a human invention quiet) then others around him or her had no concept of the divine. Is it not more likely than not in such a scenario that people the inventor told about the divine, who were just as sense dependent as we are today, would have found the concept of non-physical beings ridiculous and wondered whether the inventor was delusional?
If you object that it wasn't the invention of one particular person at a particular time because it was an idea common to all humans, the materialist explanation is in trouble. If someone did not invent the divine were humans born with a conception of the supernatural? If that is true, the supernatural was not invented and did not evolve over time into the religions we find today. Because if the idea of the supernatural is a concept that humans are born with, the materialist explanation for the supernatural is wrong and we must ask whether this spiritual sense persists today.
Similarly, if you object that it occurred to many at the same time this does not solve your problem either. Each of these discoverers would be subject to individual ridicule just as if there were one believer zero. Anyway, if we accept the theory that the first believers were primitive scientists positing the existence of the supernatural to explain the natural, it is more likely that there was a believer zero than not. Scientific breakthroughs are made by individual scientific geniuses like Newton and Einstein - they do not occur simultaneously to many different people. The same would hold true for the power-hungry Machiavellian genius inventing God to seize power. It is more likely that there was one originator of this idea. Moreover, if belief in the supernatural as an explanation for the physical world occurred to many people at the same time, or was obvious to many people, it has more of the character of divine message, which of course is thoroughly unscientific.
Believer zero looked at the world and concluded that it was governed by supernatural forces. Surely this was the greatest leap of human faith that has ever been attempted. But it appears natural to us that our ancient ancestors made this leap. Why? It goes back to our concept that there must be more to life than this. Our longing for utopia, our fear of death, the wonder of nature, the terror of doomsday, all point the way. Why did the ancients gaze at the sky and see heaven?
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. 2
This is not the argument from design. This is the claim that standing on a cold day when the deep blue of the sky is lit by the blinding winter sun or the full moon of mid-summer magically reveals the nocturnal world in a new light we cannot escape our smallness and the immensity of it all. At these moments we experience the transcendent, be it oneness with the universe, belief in God as creator, belief in ourselves as gods. We feel there must be something more. Lost in such reverie it is hard to maintain that we are experiencing the result of winning the cosmic lottery.
Shifting Scientific Grounds
There is a fundamental human need to explain everything because otherwise we feel scared and out of control. We cannot truly accept that everything is random chaos because we are wired to look for an overarching cause or theory to explain the world to us.
Today, we are still faced by an often hostile physical world that we cannot control replete with mysteries we cannot explain. Those who have abandoned God as an out-of-date hypothesis employ the same sort of thinking as the ancient scientists animated by the Einsteinian motive. Even though there is much about our world that contemporary science, no matter how sophisticated, cannot explain (take for example the persistence of many horrible diseases), we profess complete faith that the solution to the mysteries of the universe lies in that direction. Scientists would argue that we have abandoned the simple hypotheses of our primitive ancestors for shiny modern scientific ones. But is the motive the same, to throw all of our unanswered questions into one catch-all bucket - to take care of the inexplicable in one foul swoop?
Many people are convinced of the truth of the theory that God is man-made because they believe that science has proved it to be so. And if something has been conclusively proven true by empirical science, who am I to argue? But, if you believe that science has proved that God is man-made it is important that you have a firm grip on what science is and is not. It may seem ridiculous to some readers to question science because science is based on fact - seeing is believing. And if this were the scientific paradigm exclusively used to evaluate such theories I would agree with those readers. However, the philosophical basis of science that some thinkers have proposed may surprise some.
What is presented as science has shifted over time from pure empirical research to something more pliable. If you consider science to consist solely of information that can be empirically verified, what I will call the enlightenment version, there are many facets of our world that will fall outside of its scope.
In the early twentieth century a group of philosophers called logical positivists took the position that statements that could not be empirically verified were meaningless.3 This meant that ethical statements and statements about art and beauty were relegated to the status of nonsense. These kinds of ideas, moral and aesthetic, are not easily subsumed under the rubric of enlightenment science. To bring such concepts under the scientific umbrella they must be either explained by reducing them in some way to elements that can be empirically verified or science itself must be reworked to fit these ideas in. Because many things that we consider to be fundamental human characteristics, or part of what it is to be human, are not capable of reduction to empirically verifiable terms, the latter course has been adopted by many thinkers. This has entailed a fundamental rethinking of what many of us have been taught to consider science. Thinkers like Richard Rorty and W.V. Quine contended that science does not provide us with objective truths about the world but instead pragmatic descriptions of our world, which are true only in the sense that they are useful to further the goal of the scientist. Rorty wrote:
Some philosophers have remained faithful to the Enlightenment and have continued to identify themselves with the cause of science...they insist that natural science discovers truth rather than makes it...Other philosophers, realizing that the world as it is described by the physical sciences teaches no moral lessons, offers no spiritual comfort, have concluded that science is no more than the handmaiden of technology.4
This viewpoint holds that there are no absolute truths out there waiting for brilliant scientific minds to discover them. Instead truth is made. It does not matter whether a particular scientific theory is true in an absolute sense so long as it helps us describe the world in some way.
...great scientists invent descriptions of the world which are useful for purposes of predicting and controlling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent other descriptions of it for other purposes. But there is no sense in which any of these descriptions is an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself...the very idea of such a representation as pointless.5
In other words, science does not present us with objective truths about the world around us any more than a poet does. This is a pragmatic theory of truth. That is, if it works for you, it's true for you. So science is true if it furthers the scientist's theory.
W.V. Quine, in his influential paper, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, also embraced a pragmatic picture of science. He rejected the principle that factual statements were only meaningful if they could be verified by experience. He argued that science is only affected by experience at the edges. He described science as a field touched at the edges by experience but whose internal beliefs are not true because they correspond with experience by because they agree with each other. Therefore, beliefs in the center of the field can conflict with experience and still be held to be true. Quine even suggested that if beliefs at the edge conflicted with experience we could change logical laws so they would be true. For Quine the existence of physical objects was no more objectively true than the gods of Homer but subjectively or pragmatically true because physical objects provide a more useful description of the world than Homer's gods. He wrote:
...total science is like a field of force whose boundaries are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field...But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience...Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws.6
Quine is putting the desire to believe what he wants to be true, or more charitably what he thinks is useful, above having scientific statements correspond to objective truth. In other words, he is privileging pragmatism over objectivity. This approach was taken by Rorty, Quine and those like them because they realize that if science reveals objective truths about the physical world, there is the possibility of objective truth in other areas of human experience such as morality. The objective truths of empirical science are located in the physical world. But other objective truths, for example objective moral truths, are not so easily tied to the physical world. The potential solution to the problem of where such truths come from is that these truths transcend the physical world because they are metaphysical or spiritual in nature.
The presentation of the theory that God is a human creation as a scientific theory is a great example of the shift from objectivity to pragmatism in scientific theory. This theory is not capable of empirical proof. Of course I will concede that it cannot be empirically disproved either. What is undeniable is that we have a sense of the supernatural - where that comes from is for each person to decide. But it is not enlightenment science to pretend that the theory that man created God is on the same scientific truth level as the discovery of DNA. But this frequently occurs. Why is this done?
Perhaps because traditional natural science with its underlying bedrock of empirical verification has made many amazing leaps since the enlightenment but has also shown how many gaps are still left - ethical, artistic, political, etc. These gaps, I believe provide us with an unshakable sense that there is something more to this world than the merely physical, aspects of it that cannot be explained by traditional enlightenment science. Moreover, the recognition of the existence of these gaps leads to the contemplation of the spiritual. So those opposed to metaphysical or spiritual reflections needed to find another way to fill these gaps. Thus less emphasis was put on empirical verifiability and plausible theories that were essentially unprovable in the traditional empirical natural science fashion have gained currency because they give us "useful" descriptions of the world. However, if you unmoor science from empirical verifiability it becomes subjective and so someone has to decide whether a particular theory provides a useful description of the world. As humans our biases inevitably come into play. So the decider, faced with two theories, both equally incapable of empirical proof, one of which squares with his or her biases and one of which does not, will choose the theory which confirms what they already thought.
As there is an overwhelming first principle belief in the post-modern western academy that there is no metaphysical or spiritual element to the universe, it is inevitable that scientific theories that favor this bias will be given prominence.
A clarification is probably unnecessary, but to stave off the charge of anti-science that will no doubt be leveled at me, let me make the following clear. I have no quarrel with science. I am not going to declare that the world is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. Empirically based science has made many amazing discoveries that have given us great insights into the world around us and that have improved human life beyond our wildest expectations. Such science is a noble pursuit.
Instead I am disputing the placing of subjective unprovable theories on the same level as the discoveries of such giants as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. I am protesting the presentation of subjective pragmatic truths as objective scientific gospel truth. I have nothing against those who like Rorty and Quine admit the subjectivity of the science they are affirming, and in the case of Rorty at least, openly acknowledge that they would like to promote pragmatic truths that further their personal political and social goals. The problem is that when it comes to conjecture about the origin of the spiritual instinct many thinkers are content for the public to view such statements in the light of the enlightenment version of science taught at school.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? We have seen that the theory that man invented God has many problems when the underlying assumptions are given a thorough examination. It is also clear that many who live in the contemporary post-God world still believe there is a spiritual element to our world. There may not be the common acceptance of orthodox Christianity, but spirituality in many forms, any of which entail belief in non-physical entities, thrive in the contemporary scientific post-modern world. Further, the common perception that God has been proved not to exist by science must be abandoned.
True, empirical science cannot make sense of God, but neither can it deal with art, love or politics. Essentially there are realms of human existence where we must authentically choose the answers for ourselves instead of pretending that the test has already been taken for us.
1. Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2007; 2-4.
2. Holy Bible. Cambridge University Press. Genesis 19 v. 1-3. Authorized King James Version.
3. See, for example, A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Dover Publications, 1952.
4. Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989; 3-4.
5. Ibid; 4.
6. W.V. Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Epistemology - Contemporary Readings, Routledge, 2002; 189-90.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tide
Sea and sand constantly revising
A vacant beach on a sail-less day
I watch from a distance
The hope of others wash away
I draw a line against the peerless tide
Etchings that cannot stay
I dance a jig of hopeless pride
I am nothing. I will go away
Bodies of metal, horses and men
Lost on a discovered shore
Comings and goings - now and then
Until the eye can see no more
But still the ebb and flow remain
A vacant beach on a sail-less day
I watch from a distance
The hope of others wash away
I draw a line against the peerless tide
Etchings that cannot stay
I dance a jig of hopeless pride
I am nothing. I will go away
Bodies of metal, horses and men
Lost on a discovered shore
Comings and goings - now and then
Until the eye can see no more
But still the ebb and flow remain
Friday, December 10, 2010
Breaking
An angry man
In an empty car
Screaming at the radio
A broken umbrella
Fighting in the snow
Comedy or tragedy?
Depends who's watching.
In an empty car
Screaming at the radio
A broken umbrella
Fighting in the snow
Comedy or tragedy?
Depends who's watching.
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