God Outside the Box

Atheists sometimes assert that the world would be a better place if people outgrew religion and it vanished into the dustbin of history.
I say extremely doubtful because I don t know how you would begin to dismantle history in such a way as to make an objective measurement. Nonetheless, atheists seem to know (there s that word again) that religion does more harm than good.

I frequently see claims to this effect on the internet.
I m thinking about this topic after reading the latest exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan in their ongoing debate over God s existence. :
Your determination to have your emotional and spiritual needs met within the tradition of Catholicism has kept you from discovering that there is a mode of spiritual and ethical inquiry that is not contingent upon culture in the way that all religions are.

hellip;
I’m asking you to imagine a world in which children are taught to investigate reality for themselves, not in conformity to the religious dogmatism of their parents, but by the lights of truly honest, fearless inquiry. Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is. hellip;
Rather than pick over the carcass of Christianity (or any other traditional faith) looking for a few, uncontaminated morsels of wisdom, why not take a proper seat at the banquet of human understanding in the present?

hellip; There is new wine (slowly) being poured. Why not catch it with a clean glass?
Sullivan at Harris s use of the passive tense.

The children are taught :
By whom? You? Who is teaching these finally liberated children, and on whose authority?

And where is this discourse they will enter that is contingency-free ? I have never heard or read or engaged in one.
Later, Sullivan presses on in a direction that took me by surprise: he sings the praises of Roman Catholic tradition:
Yes, you will cite the terrible parts of [the Church s] history, parts I have not shied from myself.

But you have missed so much more. hellip;
The more I questioned and asked, the more history and theology I engaged in, the more I used reason to inquire into faith, the more remarkable the achievement of Christianity appeared to me. hellip; I felt blessed to have been given this gift, amazed at my good fortune.

The thought of throwing it away for a clean glass that is itself an illusion seems absurd to me.
Why would I want to forget all of that precious inheritance - the humility of Mary, the foolishness of Peter, the genius of Paul, the candor of Augustine, the genius of Francis, the glory of Chartres cathedral, the haunting music of Tallis, the art of Michelangelo, the ecstasies of Teresa, the rigor of Ignatius, the whole astonishing, ravishing panoply of ancient Christianity that suddenly arrived at my door, in a banal little town in an ordinary family in the grim nights of the 1970s in England?
You want to be contingency-free?

Maybe you need a richer slice of contingency. There is more wisdom, depth, range, glory, nuance and truth in my tradition than can be dreamt of in your rationalism. In answer to your question, why not leave all this behind?

my answer is simply: why on earth would I?
This is not the way I would have responded to Harris. Despite my commitment to theism and to Jesus Christ, I am not much of a church-goer.

The church experience lost its most of its meaning for me a long time ago, I am sad to say.
Nonetheless, I am impressed by Sullivan s appeal to the astonishingly rich inheritance of the Church. I have spent untold hours over many years investigating the historical Jesus.

Thus I understand the power that history can exercise over the heart and mind: how it can inform and enrich present experience.
And who can idly dismiss Sullivan s point when he speaks of the candor of Augustine, the genius of Francis, the glory of Chartres cathedral, the art of Michelangelo, etc.?

Only a very small-minded individual would deny that this is, indeed, an astonishingly rich inheritance.
Does such a rich inheritance prove that God exists? No.

But I wish to address those folks who glibly assume that the world would be a better place without religion. Let s have a full accounting; let s take every debit and every credit into account in our cost/benefit analysis!
Yes, the Church has been responsible for some deplorable evils.

Equally, the Church has been responsible for much great good.
Whether the good outweighs the harm is open to debate. But when Harris refers to Christianity s few, uncontaminated morsels of wisdom he demonstrates appalling ignorance and insularity.

This is part two of my series on philosopher Richard Kearney, who was interviewed on the CBC Radio One program, . The previous installment is .
In this excerpt, Kearney explains the position of his mentor, Paul Ricoeur:
When Ricoeur says, What s the best way to know yourself?

, he says, Well, the shortest route from self to self is through the other.
You may listen to the audio file on esnips, or read the following transcript.
Can you make sense of the use of the term, the other?

I think one has to kind of situate it in the debate of the time which was that mdash; that humanism and existentialism had so glorified the human self that everything was reducible to the human self. So the question then was, how do we get out of this kind of radical subjectivism where everything in the world is kind of a production or a construction of our cognitive processes? mdash; of our consciousness, of our volition.

And one response to this was structuralism, which said, There s no self at all. And it s not at the level of human relations that we should look for this. It s simply in some anonymous, impersonal, mechanical system of linguistic signs.

And I think people felt that that wasn t enough. It didn t explain a need and a sense and a sentiment and an instinct that there s something else out there, beyond the self and beyond the system. And that came to be called, the other.

The term, the other, has most often been used in contemporary talk to refer to other races, whom we oppress by exaggerating their difference: by picturing them as both exotic and menacing. So one speaks of the subject of colonialism as the other.
The usage that Richard Kearney has been describing is a little different.

In philosophy, the other might still refer to a dreaded stranger, but it could also evoke a saving power: the otherness that overcomes our solitude and opens us to nature, community, and perhaps, the divine.
When Ricoeur says, What s the best way to know yourself?, he says, Well, the shortest route from self to self is through the other.

In dialogue with the other person, you come home to yourself eventually.
In conversation with another writer, be it a literary writer, an artist, an historian, you travel through another world. You are de-worlded as you take this detour through the imagination of the other person, the world of the other person.

And you come back to yourself in some sense amplified and enriched by that journey through otherness.
Not as an ego mdash; not as a moi, as Ricoeur put it in French, but as a soi mdash; that you move from myself to oneself. And that movement through the other mdash; from myself, through the other to oneself mdash; as you return to yourself, is an enrichment.

That s why interpretation and imagination are important. And why reason, left to itself, becomes tyranny: if it thinks it already has the truth before it ever goes out on a journey.
For the record, I think this is a profoundly significant insight.

I can tell, when I m in dialogue with someone, whether they have been de-worlded via an encounter with the other mdash; or whether they think they already possess the truth without ever having been on such a journey.
visits the subject of consciousness from time to time. It goes without saying that his position is quite different from mine.

He subscribes to naturalism, and .
I don t suppose that JA s recent post on this topic ( ) was a direct response to me. However, it s worth noting here precisely because it argues a point of view opposite to mine.

The following quotes are from a Steven Pinker article ( ) as quoted on Jewish Atheist s blog. Here s Pinker s thesis statement:
Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain. Scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine not because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.

The post is in three parts. In my view, the argument of the first section is strong, the middle section less so, and the third section quite weak.
1.

On the brain as machine:
Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people s thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.
And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations.

Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party.
The correspondence between electrical activity in a certain part of the brain and the conscious experience of the subject is pretty impressive. The data is still open to interpretation.

Jewish Philosopher s question (Perhaps stimulating a certain area of the brain will simulate seeing a waterfall, does that mean there are no waterfalls?) is a good one.
Still, the data supports the position that there is a 1:1 correspondence between brain function and consciousness — even if I think it falls short of conclusive proof.

2. On the illusion of the self:
The brain rationalizes the outcome [of sensory stimuli and our responses to them] after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. hellip;
The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject s armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms.

If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject s nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.
It s pretty obvious that our brain (and our consciousness, if we assume that the two are discrete) learns to recognize patterns. We quickly scan a room and recognize that object in the corner as a chair, although we have taken in very little information about it.

This is a kind of mental shortcut that makes sense of our environment without demanding thorough attention to every detail at all times.
The examples given are of that sort. I am presented with certain data and I reflexively interpret them a certain way — incorrectly.

It isn t surprising that people do this, because they have practised interpreting data via that shortcut process since earliest childhood. The data are provocative but they don t prove, to my satisfaction, that consciousness is an illusion.
3.

Toward a new morality:
My own [i.e., Pinker s] view is hellip; the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul.

hellip; An understanding of the physiology of consciousness hellip; can force us to recognize the interests of other beings mdash; the core of morality. hellip;
Nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people s sentience becomes ludicrous. hellip; The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
This is a facile argument; nothing more than wishful thinking on Pinker s part.

The fact is, lots of people enjoy inflicting physical and psychological suffering on others. It isn t that they think the suffering isn t real. They just get off on having that kind of absolute power over another human being.

It isn t a failure to understand that other people are sentient — that s making cheap excuses for the unconscionable behaviour of evil people.
I won t insist that belief in a benevolent deity is a better ground for morality than the argument (consciousness = brain function) of Pinker s essay. But I utterly reject the converse argument, that the essay provides a better ground for morality than belief in a benevolent deity.

People are capable of great good, and great evil. It s one of the mysteries of human nature, and our capacity for evil is an intractable problem. No one has devised any solution for it to date — and the argument of this essay certainly doesn t offer one!

(If you re a regular reader of , you ll understand the title of my post.)
As mentioned in the previous post, Andrew Sullivan has been debating theism with Sam Harris. Harris commented on consciousness at one point.

I want to pick up on it in light of recent discussion of consciousness on this blog. He :
The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other.

Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us.

After the initial exchange on beliefnet, Sullivan is posting his half of the dialogue on his blog. He uses Harris s comment on consciousness as a springboard to argue that the scientific method by which we validate truth:
I do not believe hellip; that all truth rests on scientific premises and can be proven by empirical or scientific methods. I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole.

But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:
While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established.

It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us.
So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case.

Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.
It might even include an appreciation of other modes of rational discourse that are not empirical in origin or form.

Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true mdash; and could never be proven true mdash; by the scientific method that is your benchmark.

There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth.

Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.
Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve.

But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.
My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof, you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode.
I appreciate Sullivan s reference to the canons of historical truth, since I have spent a lot of time investigating the question of the historical Jesus.

I can t comment on mathematical proofs, but in my view there s merit in the notion of aesthetic truth too mdash; or at least, an intuitive grasp of truth for which an aesthetic experience may be the catalyst.
I often agree with Sullivan s positions on religion and, to a lesser extent, on politics. I think I m going to have to buy his book (pictured in the previous post).

On beliefnet, Sam Harris is with Andrew Sullivan. Both the content and the tone of the debate remind me of the recent discussions on this blog. Harris and Sullivan respect each other, and they diligently seek common ground, but inevitably they end up talking each other.

The debate gets edgy at times. Sullivan is a moderate Christian. Harris opposes religion of all stripes, and argues that moderate faith is no real improvement on fundamentalism.

(An aside: I m not sure moderate is a fair description of Sullivan s faith, although I understand why Sullivan and Harris are using that description in their dialogue. As a gay Roman Catholic, Sullivan has had some very negative experiences. Moderate cannot equal insubstantial or half-hearted, or Sullivan would have given up on his Church long ago.

But he is a moderate in other respects: e.g., in his admission that the New Testament is the word of fallible human beings, not the infallible word of God.

)
Does moderate Christianity constitute an improvement on fundamentalism? Here are some excerpts mdash; just the parts of the discussion where they debate that issue.
The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling - whether it is Christian, Jewish or Muslim - is not just its willingness to use violence (in the Islamist manifestation).

It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life.
How does one “integrate doubt” into one’s faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights mdash; scientific (“You mean the world isn’t 6000 years old?

Yikes…”), mathematical (“pi doesn’t actually equal 3? All right, so what?”), and moral (“You mean, I shouldn’t beat my slaves?

I can’t even keep slaves? Hmm…”). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously.

hellip;
While religious moderates don’t fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

In many ways, the source of much of today s religious moderation is taking scripture more seriously than the fundamentalists. Take the Catholic scholar Garry Wills. Read his marvelous recent monographs on and and you will see a rational believer poring through the mounds of new historical scholarship to get closer and closer to who Jesus really was, and what Paul was truly trying to express.

For me, the deconstruction of a crude notion of Biblical inerrantism is not a path to a weaker faith but to a stronger one, unafraid of history, of truth, of the past, or the inevitable confusion that the very human followers of a divine intervention created after his death and resurrection. I find in this unsatisfying scriptural mess very human proof of a remarkable event - the most remarkable event, in my view - in the history of humankind.
The Gospels really aren t, to any fair reader, about owning slaves, the age of the planet, or the value of pi.

They are stories about and by a man who preached the love of the force behind the entire universe, and the need to reflect that love in everything we do. Yes, there are contradictions, internal clashes, vagueness, politics, cultural anachronisms, and any number of flaws in a divinely inspired human endeavor. But there is also a voice that can clearly be heard through and above these things: a voice as personal to me as it was to those who heard it in human form.

I have not argued that the book is principally about owning slaves, just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong. The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor and the meek and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument.

They knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest treatise on morality ever written.

Harris voices some of the criticisms that I face because of my awkwardly moderate approach to Christianity. He alleges that a moderate faith is a weak faith; one that doesn t take scripture seriously; one that doesn t do justice either to faith or to reason. I ll let Sullivan s eloquent response stand in for my own.

I also note that they are, indeed, speaking past each other. Sullivan could not be any more clear in acknowledging that there are contradictions, internal clashes, vagueness, politics, cultural anachronisms, and any number of flaws in the New Testament, a divinely inspired but human book. He goes so far as to admit that the accounts of Christ s resurrection are a mess.

Why then does Harris argue that the New Testament gets the ethics of slavery wrong ? I think this is a superficial reading of the New Testament, by the way, typical of someone who reads the text only to find fault with it. But never mind that mdash; why does he think he s scoring points on Sullivan by arguing a position that Sullivan has already conceded?

Atheists can t get past their beloved straw man: Christians are necessarily inerrantists, and innerrancy is indefensible. The second statement arguably is true; the first statement manifestly isn t.
I m going to follow up tomorrow with an excerpt from Sullivan s blog, in which he maintains that the scientific method is not the only road to truth.

Winston Churchill was describing the when he said,
It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
But those words are also an apt description of human consciousness.
Of the three perplexities singled out by , I am least informed about this one.

(I m not very knowledgeable about any of the three, but consciousness least of all.)
I m not alone in my ignorance: even the best and brightest minds are groping in darkness. Consider the following comments from an between Phillip Adams and Paul Davies, a physicist and author:
Phillip: Paul, I am aware that almost every branch of science seems to be attacking the problem of consciousness – there’s a profusion of books and theories coming out.

But where are you physicists?
Paul: Floundering around, I think! There are some scientists who think that consciousness is such a problem it is best defined away.

Let’s sweep it under the carpet, they say. Let’s make out that the conscious self doesn’t really exist, that we only imagine it – we merely hallucinate our own existence. Then the problems go away.

hellip;
So there is a strong temptation to try and define the problem away, to say that the human body or the human brain is just a very complicated machine, doing what all machines do, which is slavishly complying with the laws of physics. In that case, if you knew enough about what’s going on in my head you could predict precisely what I’m going to do. Any notion of there being a self in my head here, a self which has a certain will, wanting to move an arm, and so on, just disappears.

I am reduced to a very complicated machine. hellip;
[But] I think we have to take consciousness seriously, in spite of the fact that many scientists would like to do away with it.
Davies makes the point, perhaps obvious, that consciousness is very intimately connected with the brain:
Phillip: With Alzheimer’s disease we often observe the person’s physicality, even some vestige of personality traits, but the self gradually evaporates.

Paul: So it would appear. It’s quite clear that consciousness – selfhood – and mental activity in general, are very intimately connected with the electrochemical activity of the brain. hellip;
From the scientific point of view consciousness is associated with complexity, and the brain is an exceedingly complex system.

In my opinion, consciousness emerges when matter and energy are organised to a certain level of complexity. So it is entirely possible, although I don’t know the answer to this, that human beings are unique in having the required level of complexity for full self-awareness to emerge.
I find this reference to complexity very interesting.

The naturalist model looks like this:

We don t know where matter/energy came from. But we believe that if you organize molecules with sufficient complexity, inanimate matter comes to life.

We don t know how matter ever reached a stage of sufficiently complex organization that it could live.

But we further believe that if you increase the complexity even more, consciousness spontaneously emerges.

Alternatively, maybe consciousness doesn t exist and self is an illusion. Frankly, that hypothesis solves a lot of problems, from the perspective of physics!

When you get down to brass tacks, we don t see how consciousness can be accounted for in our system.

Why is consciousness such a problem for physicists?
From the physicist’s point of view the mystery is this: I think thoughts, I have ideas, emotions, impressions, sensations – mental activity – and I can respond to this mental activity in a very obvious way, just by moving parts of my body.

So, for example, if I would like to raise my arm to wave away a fly hellip; my arm obligingly goes up.
Now, how can thoughts do that? How can the desire ‘I would like to raise my arm’ be turned into the physical activity of the arm moving?

hellip; To put it in the most blunt form, how can thoughts move matter?
This is a necessary belief of the theist, that an immaterial entity can cause effects in the material realm. Nonetheless, Davies remains committed to a naturalist worldview.

In his opinion, consciousness is solely a function of matter and complexity:
It’s perfectly clear to me that if consciousness is associated with a physical process of some sort – swirling electrical patterns, say – as exemplified in complex brain activity, then we could in principle build a system that would be conscious. It’s quite obvious, for example, that if we could map your body and brain to a sufficient level of detail and build a replica over here then we would have something that is conscious. We can imagine rebuilding or duplicating Phillip Adams atom by atom, ending up with a conscious person.

It’s very important to realise that every atom in your body – imagine plucking a carbon atom out of your brain, for example – is identical to a carbon atom in a lump of wood, or a carbon atom in the sun, or whatever. Carbon atoms are all precisely identical, so there is nothing special about the stuff of which you are made. It is the way that stuff is put together that is the key to producing life and consciousness.

It is the complex organisation of the matter that gives rise to consciousness, not the actual material of which you are made.
Or perhaps the dualists are right, there is a ghost in the machine .
Throughout this series of posts, I ve kept my claims modest.

Here I only want to emphasize how speculative the whole naturalist system is.
Never mind certainty: are there adequate grounds for confidence here? It looks like nothing more than a house of cards to me.