Ultimate Whys and Other Lies, on the Uses and Abuses of How.

"The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."

-          Stephen J. Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

On my actual and ideal bookshelves, a good proportion of the biology and science section is taken up by the works of Stephen J. Gould. Primarily a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, he was also something of a renaissance man of science and reason-based letters – a historian of science and a popular essayist, a constructive gadfly of overzealous evolutionism and remorseless critic of ill-informed anti-evolutionism. A wielder of facts to defeat politicized science, and a relentless pointer-outer of great big elephants in our collective cultural rooms. 

As you may have guessed, I’m something of a fan. Paradoxically, that’s why I’m sort of avoiding another of his books that would be perfect fodder for this blog – see the quote at the start of the post. Not having read it, I’m not about to write some kind of pre-emptive review – and when I do read it I’m sure you’ll hear about it here. It’s not about disagreeing with him – I don’t agree with everything I’ve read of his previously and my enjoyment of his work is as much about how he says things as about what he says. As with C.S. Lewis, a worthy disagreement can be more satisfying than an easy consensus. It’s more that I came across this quote while researching a different post, and it seems to me to represent a conversational trope – as lazy as it common as it is oft-repeated - that might actually make me think less of one of my intellectual heroes if it is the argument he’s making.

Science, we are told, deals in the how. Religion, on the other hand, trades in the great and wonderful why. I don’t plan to stamp my feet and demand that science be let into the circle of arbiters of ultimate meaning. Rather, I want to challenge the idea that faith has unique – or any – access to the domain of transcendent meaningfulness. Indeed, on one level I doubt that it has any greater access than any other form of ‘how’.

Science and religion, on one level, are stories – whatever else they may be on other levels. For the supernatural there’s the range from fairy tale to the future history of the End of Days. For science you have the (actually incorrect but usefully didactic) atom-as-solar-system-model, and you have the standard model or quantum electrodynamics . Both are models for events, causal stories where this causes this by way of that. At this level, both kinds of stories are of the ‘how’ variety, but the claim is that one kind – religious stories – can level-up to the ‘why’ by virtue of their claims about transcendent realities and/or entities. But if these things are truly transcendent, aren’t they by necessity beyond the ken of people like you and me? Isn’t this precisely what we mean when we talk about the ‘mysterious ways’ in which god allegedly moves. Or, if you prefer, akin to the buddha’s unanswered questions.

Both kinds of stories make claims about reality beyond the subjective. But even if science and/or religion have a claim on objective truth and ultimate meanings, the only way you and I get to experience that is though our own limited window on the world. It’s like the blind men in a room with an elephant, each being able to touch and know a small part of the Whole. The total creature, the ultimate Why, may exist or it may not. All we know - for sure – is that there many small creators of small, personal stories of what’s happening and what that may mean. Tiny beautiful proximate hows and infinitesimal, idiosyncratic whys. The meaning, and the arbiters moral value, are you and me, and our worldviews conform to that. To argue that a subset of views are special because there’s a special set of rules that applies only to them is delusional and/or disingenuous. You're reading my account of how I think different views fare under the same criteria. What you make of that, necessarily, is down to you.

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When god knocks on your door, how closely to you look at what he’s selling?

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.” ― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

So, you might be forgiven for wondering where a self-avowed atheist gets the presumption that he’s qualified to write about religious experience. Not religious history, nor philosophy, nor the relation of faith and science, but direct honest-to-goodness personal experience of the apparently divine. Never mind that the operating thesis of this blog is that the feelings invoked in religious contexts are a common heritage of human experience, and that there other targets for our feelings of awe, duty and belonging. Never mind that – even if the following weren’t the case – presumption is not something I’m lacking in. No, the reason I feel I have a little something to say on the subject is that I’m no stranger to ‘religious experience’.

I’m not saying I’ve had experience of religion, in the sense of attending ‘church’ and engaging in ritual, although I have that to. I mean a particular, arresting event that on first sight is difficult to process except in the context in which it presents itself: divinely, religiously, miraculously – whatever. Don’t worry - this isn’t a confession of regular visions of messiahood or anything. It’s a story of the kind of Weird Shit I’ve mentioned before, but that happened to me personally and on which I’ve spent a lot of thought. As I’ve said, while it would be wrong to say I was raised Buddhist I was raised around it, and there have been times when that kind of faith has been more appealing. Once upon one of these periods, in an instructional context at a Buddhist centre I decided I couldn’t follow the in-depth notes about a particular technique, so I decided to meditate and just do the visualisations being suggested. After a while, I found myself in what one might call, for the frustrating lack of a better term, an ‘altered state of perception’. The most superficial aspect, and most easily describable, is that all my sensations of touch – the feel of my clothes, the weight of my body, the feeling of a paper clip in my hand – were experienced as something akin to ‘pins and needles’. Paresthesia, if you will. Harder to explain is the sense in which I feel I could ‘see’ the thinness of the phenomenal world, like the screen of a shadow-puppet show. By ‘see’ I don’t mean to romanticise a new intellectual perspective. But nor do I mean the phenomena was merely, or even really, visual either. Enough to say, the experience – not unpleasant while it was occurring – knocked for me for six after I came back to earth, and had me mulling it over for quite some time. 

It might not sound like much, but I can’t stress the lasting effect it had on me. But then, if that’s the case, you might ask why this supposedly religious experience was not also a conversion experience. Certainly, at the time, the pull of more worldly delights was a strong disincentive. But, over the longer term, I have other reasons for viewing this experience as formative, but not definitive in terms of the way I see the world. My academic training provides me with plenty of science babble to nicely box this experience in such a way that I wouldn’t need to think more deeply about its implications – hypnosis, suggestion, hallucination. Such are the terms that safe ‘scepticism’ is usually couched in. That not why the reason you don’t see me in red robes today.

I recently listened to this podcast , ‘A sceptics guide to the mind’, which I heartily recommend. In summary, the guest speaker makes the observation that while feeling and sensations – happiness, recalling a memory, feeling certain – occur in our conscious minds (and/or brains); the process by which they come about isn’t available to us. When you construct a sentence in your native tongue, the words spring to mind and you don’t have to piece a sentence together piecemeal selecting a verb here, a preposition there. When you pick up a cup, the subjective you doesn’t compute the force, the velocity, the geometries required. It just happens. The speaker’s interesting point is that this is also true of feelings of certainty. I may have a sensation of unassailable logical certainty in regards to a proposition, but the certainty is a sensation of mine – produced by a process I have no access to – not a feature of the proposition.

It seems to me something similar hold for the feeling of religious awe, of the numinous, of divine presence. They are a feature of us, whether or not they’re an appropriate reaction to something or someone out there. We, in our heads, don’t know how they arise - we don’t have access to the process that brings them about. So lights, trumpets and warm cuddly feelings aside, one still has to decide for oneself what view of the world makes sense for – or of - them. In the marketplace of ideas, even when the ads are overwhelming, you still have to haggle. 

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Weird Shit and Mere Atheism: how C.S. Lewis made me write this blog

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for C S Lewis. 

As a communicator of personal Christian experience and as an apologist for Christian doctrine, not to mention as a novelist, I can’t recommend his work highly enough. It was probably in relation to his ‘spiritual autobiography’ Surprised by Joy that the nugget of intention around which this blog has taken shape first coalesced. It drove home to me that the interesting thing about religion, once one has a sense of what one thinks about the Big Issues, is less an accounting of the philosophical angels on the argumentative pinhead and more the subjective and personal meaning of religion. The Screwtape Letters and A Pilgrim’s Regress are eminently readable accounts of what Christianity isn’t, and drew my attention to where - in my own catalogue of visceral reactions and philosophical biases – my modes of thought diverged from those of a potential Believer. Mere Christianity, Lewis’s attempt to lay out the basic doctrinal points of view shared by most Christian denominations, illuminated the common ground I was surprised to find I had with much of what was said. It also helped mark the exact point at which I’m apparently able to go no further: the part of each section that could be read ‘…therefore Christianity’. It’s in this spirit of frank appreciation of commonalties and differences – where neither is unduly emphasised or dismissed – I’d like to discuss my most recent C.S. Lewis reading, by disagreeing with one of his points of departure and positing a commonality he probably wouldn’t admit.            

In Miracles Lewis lays out the argument that one must first address whether miracles can occur on logical grounds before one can decide upon the historicity of a specific claim of miraculous events. He proposes, probably with some justice, that a reading of bible history in particular with the unexamined bias that miracles necessarily cannot happen is a form of begging the question (LINK: wiki on begging the question). So far, so good. Weird Shit certainly seems to happen, and the mental gymnastics exhibited by some who reflexively try to shoe-horn it into currently known categories of ‘natural’ phenomena can seem rather unconvincing. Of course, the God hypothesis doesn’t get points just because another hypothesis has a few failings. Its merit lies in its ability to better explain events, and my only quibble thus far is that in this sense it doesn’t do much better in regards to many types of Weird Shit. You may have heard the tale that one of the candidate miracles in the canonization proceedings of St. Thomas Aquinas was the ‘miraculous’ transformation of pilchards to herrings in his mouth while ill in bed. Trying to corroborate this though, I had about as much luck as this guy.  Regardless of its authenticity as a feature of the saint’s canonization, the story serves well enough for my point. Is the magical transformation of fish any more revealing about the ultimate nature of the world in the context of a beneficent god than it is in the context of a godless worldview?

Lewis makes a distinction between ‘Naturalists’ and ‘Supernaturalists’. The former, by his definition, believe that explanations of events are possible within the ‘system’ of the Universe, while the latter believe and rely on some transcendent ‘ground’ outside of the system. He is credited with the first formulation of the ‘Argument from Reason’, which uses this naturalist/supernaturalist distinction in relation to our rationality and thought processes to outline a supposed inconsistency in ‘Naturalism’. If - as is supposed of other phenomena - our thoughts are ‘merely’ physical and find their causes within the system, then the argument is that they are in some sense arbitrary and cannot be trusted as a means for reaching ‘reasonable’ conclusions. A quote from J.B.S. Haldane is used to elucidate the argument:

"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

Here we reach my point of departure with Lewis – but not in terms of arguing the validity (not the same thing as veracity) of his conclusion in regards to naturalism. Rather, I suggest that – as with the general issue of miracles – supernaturalism fails to fare much better than naturalism when considered in the light of the same argument. If we poor mortals - trapped within the system - are to rely upon a transcendent entity outside of the system to ground our conclusions, we have no way of knowing if the correspondence between our reasoning and the truth is any less arbitrary than is alleged of Naturalism. Lewis, as a Christian, posits a benevolent god who surely wouldn’t deceive us. While one is free to posit the existence of such a god, there is no logical reason within the argument to suppose that any transcendent, extra-universal superbeing has the same qualities attributed to the gods of the bible. Thus, we are left with the same quandary – can we rely on our own modes of thought as a way of revealing reliable information about the world?  

I think that both the religious and the non-religious have to answer this question in the same way. We can’t know for sure that our reasoning reveals the truth to us, but in the absence of a better tool, and in order to get anywhere, we all have to assume that it is at least partially up to the job. I wouldn’t call myself an atheist if I felt all points of view were equally true – even supposing (which I don’t) that they were equally valid. But credit where credit is due. We all have to suppose that the patterns we observe in phenomena have causes, and by exercising our reason we can reveal something about those patterns. We may disagree about the object and the rules of the game, but we each have to admit the right of our opponents to participate.   

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