Holy bookclub, Batman: The Gods of Fish and Men

Some recommended reading this time. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Excerpt from Heaven, by Rupert Brooke.

 

I came across the poem ‘Heaven’, from which the above is an excerpt, in a book I’m reading at the moment, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. The title alludes to another book I’ve mentioned before: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Both are collections of the respective authors’ contributions to the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology – the knowledge of god accessible not by revelation but by experience and reason. In 1901 James used his lectures to argue for the role of science in the study of religion, and set out his vision of what that might mean. Sagan - an astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence – used his lectures in 1985 to set out why he felt the proper exercise of scepticism does not preclude a sense of the sacred in our approach to the universe, but why human religions, such as they are, fail to capture it. Awe and wonder - says Sagan - are the only proper reactions to the majesty of creation, all the more so if we take modern ideas about its scale and complexity seriously. Indeed, it’s precisely the appreciation of this scale that makes earthly religions seem so parochial – for all the swarming diversity of human religious forms, they do not represent the full set of logically possible types of gods, beings and forces. Rather, they seem to speak to a much smaller set of conspicuously human concerns. Hence the poem: from a neutral perspective, would the anthropocentrism of our revealed religions appear all that different from the poem's fishy theology?

Sceptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. - Carl Sagan

Another book I’ve read recently – Religion Explained , by anthropologist Pascal Boyer – also draws lessons from the ways in which human religion varies and the ways in which it seems to embody common concerns. He starts by outlining why religion unto itself is a phenomenon demanding an explanation, as a peculiar form of human behaviour and not just a specific manifestation of general cultural activity. He also set out why he thinks the common garden explanations typically proposed – religion as Existential Consolation, as Primitive Science, as Failure of Proper Thinking and so on – fail to do the job: no one of them accounts for the all the actual ways and manners in which religion is practiced. His proposal is that religious ideas and ritual activate a specific set of evolved psychological tendencies – that facilitates their general plausibility to mankind – in combination with specific violations of the expectations of those systems, explaining the endless interest such ideas engender. That’s a little lacking in detail I know, but I don’t want to get drawn into the detail here and the argument is set out in entertaining psychological and anthropological detail well worth the read even if you don’t buy his perspective. I’m not personally sure he succeeds in providing an explanation of religion in isolation. What I want to draw out here is the sense in which its easy to point to religious or spiritual feeling when you see it, but much harder to separate it off as a proper category all unto itself.

 “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” - Carl Sagan

One domain in which people sometimes seek to maintain a thick and fast division between science and religion is ethics – insomuch as the latter is meant to be a proper source while he former is not. I’m all for appropriate wariness as regards the naturalistic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) – deriving an ought from an is – but another of my recent reads has got me thinking about the ethics embedded in the practice of and motivation to do science. Its fiction this time, Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson. Among other things, it’s an exploration of the ideals embedded in science – the perfectibility or at least improvability of knowledge, the attempt to view things from outside of a human-centric perspective – and the treaty-model of Antartica as a ‘scientific resource’ as basis for our relationship with the natural world at large. It - along with the author’s excellent Mars Trilogy – is a compelling attempt to feel a way between humanity’s right to make use of the natural order to feed and sustain itself, and our duty as custodians to the very otherness and awe that we can all rightly agree is the only response to creation.

Carina Nebula

  “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

 

NOTE: I recently came across this website (for which there also a .co.uk version too), which I can recommend if you are thinking of looking for any of these titles: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/. They “…collect and sell books online to donate books and fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than 8 million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.”

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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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Not a manifesto (Flashback Episode)

I’ve had several people ask me - online and off – about my motivation in writing this blog. In the very first post, I set out the vision I had, but as the blog and my notions of what I might put in it have evolved, you might be forgiven for noting some dissonance with that initial idea.  Three months might be too early for a retrospective, but I’d like to address how I’m thinking about the blog at the moment. 

Why a blog on religion written by an atheist? The proximate cause of me picking up my digital pen and getting the blog up and running was, basically, a surplus of time and a pile of ideas I had been kicking around for some time. Fortunately for my pocket if not my diary, that surplus of time resolved itself in the form of a new job in a new city. Upside: new connections, new input, new ideas. Downside: My original notion of attending religious institutions somewhat incognito is not forgotten, but has been complicated somewhat by new demands on my time and a language which I barely speak (as yet). I still intend for this to be a big part of the blog and I’m looking into ways of making that work, but that – as much as the rest of the project – is very much a work in progress. 

My larger motivation, as you might have gathered, is more fractured creature. I’ve had several comments to the effect of ‘are you saying atheists have a lot to learn from religion?’. I’m not dismissing the possibility that either group might have something to learn from the other – at least not wholesale. That said, the idea that that there is necessarily something the one can teach the other, or that the direction of travel of knowledge is one-way, is definitely not a perspective from which I write. 

I’m not advocating spiritualised atheism. I’m not advocating atheised faith. Nor am I making what I see as the ‘soft’ agnostic cop-out: that either – or any – point of view is equally valid or parsimonious. As you may have detected, I learn towards a ‘naturalistic’ point of view. I don’t personally require a supernatural, transcendent element in my worldview to make me aware of the numinous, or to get me through the day. For me, those things come from other sources. 

Insofar as I’m saying anything – and not just publicly mulling things over -  it’s that I find it interesting that what I see as common motivations – giving meaning to the human condition and investigsting its elements – lead to seemingly different answers. The examination of those differences and similarities is what interests me, and how they trace similar, parallel or completely tangential paths through different areas of human discourse – philosophy, politics, literature and personalities.  I’m also very interested in how individuals process their faith or lack of it. ‘Atheist’ probably fails to capture the range of views held by the people that might shelter beneath such a rubric, just as I doubt ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ captures the myriad views of people involved in those or other faiths.  

There’s also some small measure of frustration with the way discussions about these topics revolve endlessly around in the same hollow orbits we’re all familiar with. The creationist demands you accept his ‘evidence’, accept the terms of his model. Eager ‘skeptix’ faithfully battle on behalf of a science they don’t understand either, doing a disfavour to the very thing they claim to be defending. I personally think that scepticism, properly applied to all comers, favours some form of the scientific method as the best approach to understanding the world on its own terms. I would place severe caveats on what it possible to do with it. I don’t think any current canon of facts is definitive or ‘proven’ – they’re merely the best models we have at any given time and are never immune from retraction or modification. But I still think it’s the best tool we have. On the other hand - in terms of  whatever mystic or moral manner we may decide to relate to the world in - science can inform, but it can’t make value judgements – whatever Sam Harris says. That’s not because of some failing in science, or because religions are the only alternative, or even because science has no place turning its squinty eye on religiously cherished ideals. It’s just that the method itself, at its most effective, is valueless. I’ll leave you to decide how to interpret the last word of the previous sentence.

I’m sick of having the same debate, particularly when there are more interesting areas of disagreement and parity when we look in places outside the usual dialogue. I’m hoping I can point to a few I think I’ve found. I’m hoping to have a discussion too, so please - comment away, post to the facebook group, email me and send in your guest posts. 

Thanks for reading!   

Beliefs, by xkcd. http://xkcd.com/154/

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