‘I’m a scientist, but I believe in love’ – What’s wrong with this sentence?

“My uncle was a scientist, but he believed that love is real. A kind of natural phenomenon.”

– Cloud Atlas, Megan Sixsmith (Zhu Zhu)

I’ve recently been reading a book – Consilience: The unity of knowledge – by the biologist E.O. Wilson, which I’d like to tell you about. The book is an analysis and re-statement of the enlightenment ideal of the unity, convergence or – in Wilson’s terms – consilience of scientific understanding. The dream was that we might trace the threads of causality across every possible level – from biology, through chemistry to physics. Wilson’s addendum is that we might also extend the methods and insights of the of the ‘hard’ sciences – particularly evolutionary psychology and populations genetics – to inform a cross-pollination between ‘the two cultures’, the natural sciences and the humanities. I don’t agree in all particulars, but contrary to some reviews I’ve read, this isn’t just materialistic triumphalism. I promise this is less a manifesto on how economics, anthropology, political science and philosophy have got it all wrong, and more a extended plea that the entrenched positions of the culture wars and their false dichotomies be put aside, so that a new and unfamiliar intellectual territory might be fruitfully explored by both traditions. I’m a neuroscientist by vocation, and only a philosopher by avocation, but I’ve noticed that people from the other culture tend to view such promises with suspicion. So, just go read the book – if nothing else the prose ain’t half bad.

Purity, by xkcd (http://xkcd.com/435/)

A good book is a good book, sure – but why blog about it here? Firstly, there’s Wilsons southern american christian background and the revelatory impact of being exposed at college to the neo-darwinian synthesis, as well as his frustration with the inability of people he’d known from childhood to see the merit of such a heathen perspective. Secondly, there’s the familiar way he appears to view the similarities between religion and science – both are seen as arising out of the wellspring of the human need for meaning – as well as their differences. While I can see religion as a valid approach to how people might choose to relate to the world and their place in it, for me science trumps religion for certain kinds of questions when you are interested in the world in and of itself – and for very specific reasons. Forgive the long extract, but I couldn’t put it better myself:      

                “There is nothing in science more provocative than a cleanly defined and surprising prediction, and nothing held in higher regard than such a prediction confirmed in detail. To this end, scientists look for four qualities in theory generally and mathematical models in particular.

The first is parsimony: the fewer the units and processes used to account for the phenomenon, the better. Because of the success of parsimony in the physical sciences, we do not today need an imaginary substance called phlogiston to explain the combustion of firewood, or nonexistent ether to fill the void of space.

The second quality is generality: the greater the range of phenomena covered by the model, the more likely it is to be true. In reagent chemistry the periodic table precludes a separate theory for each element and compound. One theory works exactly for all.

Next is consilience. Units and processes of a discipline that conform with solidly verified knowledge in other disciplines have proven consistently superior in theory and practice to units and processes that do not conform. That is why, in every scrap of data from every level of biology, from the chemistry of DNA to the dating of fossils, it has been the case that organic evolution by natural selection beats Creationism. God may exist, He may be delighted with what we are up to on this minor planet, but His fine hand is not needed to explain the biosphere.

And finally, drawing from all of the above virtues, the definitive quality of good theory is predictiveness. Those theories endure that are precise in the predictions they make across many phenomena and whose predictions are easiest to test by observation and experiment.”

- EO Wilson – Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Page 222

Another reason is Wilson’s consilience program – if materialistic science might inform and be informed by contact with the social sciences, might religion as a natural phenomenon then be within the rubric of science? Quite aside from any theoretical or empirical critiques of such a program, I’ve noticed when talking with religiously inclined people from the other other culture, that there’s a general view that some things are precious and better left unexplained or unexamined too closely.  Oddly enough, I don’t think any scientist sees themselves as in the job of removing wonder and magic from the world – or engaged in a war against irreducible complexity.  Rather - for me and at least the scientists I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with - if anything, they feel like they are in the job of increasing it exponentially. I spoke before about how I like the image of all the things that are, have been, will be or might be in the world as facets of a great, gorgeous four-dimensional  crystal. The beauty of a worldview informed by the scientific method lies in how an increase in quantitative knowledge of the many, many facets of my world-crystal provides new levels and unexpected vistas of beauty, elegance, magic and complexity. They are all the more brilliant precisely because they do not necessarily conform to what the human mind might invent for itself.  Indeed, if the perspectives generated by human beings or gods, or both, are so special, why do their own adherents consider them so fragile that a closer look might irrevocably undermine them? 

“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.”

 - EO Wilson - Consilience The Unity of Knowledge, Page 67

Martin Rees’ cosmological ouroborus. Another pretty metaphor combining the mythical snake that eternally eats its own tale, and (to my mind) the cross-fertilization of knowledge at one scale of magnitiude that feeds back and informs that at other levels. Somewhere in the middle of the scale, you find humans. 

  

NOTE: please don’t be derailed by my use of ‘materialistic’ a couple of times in this post – I mean something philosophically specific, not the favouring of material things or a niave belief in the actual, material, really real existence of the world as we conceive it. I didn’t get into it here because its grist for the blogging mill – watch this space for a post on this subject in the hopefully not-to-distant future.

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Buddhists are bad enough, George. But now we’re all Quakers…

"Why should any man have power over any other man's faith, seeing Christ Himself is the author of it?" - George Fox

So, my other friend also has a theory. Basically we’re all Quakers 

Apparently one of the central doctrines of Quakerism is the ‘priesthood of all believers’, whereby the traditional clergy is disavowed and the direct experience of god is emphasised. While actually depending on when, where and which set of Quakers you are talking about, the denomination’s famed tolerance dissenting belief is sufficient that it can accommodate a non-theist component without too much trouble. My friend’s argument is that the belief in a more-or-less undefined ‘something’, resistance to doctrine, emphasis on ‘social gospel’, a sense of opposition to the established mainstream churches and a nuanced or even critical approach to the interpretation of biblical texts and history characterise not just Quakers. The idea is that there's also a large component of people who aren’t especially religious in the traditional sense but who nonetheless might describe themselves as ‘christian’. The British Humanist Association obviously think so too, considering their census campaign which urges that, “If you are not religious, for God’s sake say so”. I think there’s some mileage in their argument - that if people tick ‘Christian’ out of a sense of habit or familial loyalty, the census is compromised in terms of its ability to reflect social attitudes. Recent census figures, discussed in an earlier post, tend to back them up when one compares them with 2001 data. 

And that’s not even counting the Jedi Knights. 

I’ve emphasised before that the point of view of this blog is that the way individuals relate to and practise their beliefs is more interesting than debating the cultural, historical, philosophical or institutional baggage of the religions those individuals identify with. However, the differences among those forms of baggage and between them as well as the personal experience of religion is an interesting topic in itself. I was raised around a form of Tibetan Buddhism, and while it’s inaccurate to say I am Buddhist, or that I was raised as a Buddhist, it is the religion that I’ve had the most opportunity to observe up close in terms of its practice and its adherents here in the West. Thus, when discussing the history versus the ideas versus the perception of a religious institutions, the extremely good press that Buddhism has with people who are normally very critical when it comes to religious institutions comes is impossible to ignore. The journalist Micheal Parenti provides a helpfully referenced antidote to what he sees as the woefully under-informed idealisation of Tibetan Buddhism in particular and historical revisionism rampant in wide-eyed, western followers and fellow-travellers. The charge sheet includes a litany that will be familiar in the context of religion-bashing but not normally associated with Buddhism – terrorism,  religious violence and wars, shady dealings with the CIA and other naughty people, pogroms, institutionalised child abuse as well as  theologically-sanctioned feudalism, indentured servitude, theft, torture, rape and a notable lack of compassion for the common serf. Gladly, Parenti acknowledges the dangers associated with a recent wish to downgrade the ‘goody’ status of Tibetans as a side-effect of the well-intentioned wish to compensate for the knee-jerk characterisation of China as a yellow peril ‘baddy’. Obviously, both peoples and the organisations associated with them are more complex – the point is that the devil is in the details and the niave idealisation or demonization of huge swathes of humanity does nobody justice. 

Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

-James 2:17 - The Bible, New King James Version

I can’t help but wonder what a similar reading of the history, institutions, personages and doctrines of atheism – insomuch as they might be considered representative of your common garden atheist – might look like? One the one hand you might have the Galilean martyr of truth, embattled with a blind and brutal church. On the other, you might have the short-sighted nuclear scientist or the suspect eugenicist. Or even just the controversy-courting soldier of the culture wars. Given that the arena I am most motivated to fly my atheist flag is politics, it probably isn’t surprising that I share the Bright Network’s concern that people should see that atheists can be positively engaged in ‘matters of civic importance’. To some extent, I agree with Richard Dawkins that it might send a powerful message for atheists in prominent and respected positions to ‘out’ themselves and show that we aren’t all so bad – even electable.

 

I suppose that the best end to this post is the starting point of this blog – individuals are more complex and interesting than any generalising lens could account for. It’s not the club you belong to, but how and who you are.  

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