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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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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The other friend speaks: Guest Post by Nick Thorne

To clarify my argument in response to the last post, my argument isn’t that we’re all Quakers or that Quakerism is some panacea to which we all unwittingly aspire. I wouldn’t call myself a Quaker. My argument is that in modern Britain, across all Christian denominations you find many people who identify with their Church, but don’t buy into it 100%. How many people who were baptised Catholic really believe in papal infallibility? How many Christians today really believe in the virgin birth, the Immaculate Conception and transubstantiation? Some do, but millions don’t. Similarly, there are many who don’t think of themselves as Christian, but who still believe in some form of higher power. In other words, there are many people who have some kind of spiritual belief, but who can’t fully identify with the church they attend or simply don’t go to any church at all. And the Christian denomination which best accommodates this widely held position is the Quakers.

What makes Quakerism so different from other Christian denominations and so distinctive, is its insistence on total equality. One of the key beliefs of George Fox, who founded Quakerism is that “there is that of God in every man”. The Quakers took this literally, arriving at the logical conclusion that there is no more of God in an aristocrat than there is in a peasant. On that basis the Quakers refused to acknowledge people’s titles, famously even the monarchy: they referred to everyone by their first names, something which they were persecuted and imprisoned for. Since their emergence in the 17th century Quakers have pursued this philosophy of egalitarianism in demanding human rights and social welfare. Thomas Paine, who was instrumental in the American Revolution and the philanthropic Rowntree Family who tackled poverty in England were all Quakers.

At the time of the Reformation the Catholic Church forbade its congregations from owning a Bible or reading it themselves on the basis that the priest must be the mediator between God and man. The Protestant Churches put a greater emphasis on education and participation, but none more so than the Quakers. Quaker meetings are not led by a priest at all. 

I am an atheist but have attended two Quaker meetings out of curiosity. A Quaker meeting is meditative and begins in silence, and the silence may continue for the entire duration of the meeting. There is that of God in every man. Therefore anybody can stand up and make a contribution. At the meeting in Brighton, this took place four or five times within the hour. One man brought up the problematic line in the Bible “no one comes to the father but by me”. He observed that he doesn’t want to go to heaven if his Jewish, Islamic and atheist friends can’t join him there. Another brought up the miraculous plane landing on the Hudson River which had happened recently, asserting her view that close encounters with death can be very instructive. Four years on I can still remember what they said. 

Inevitably some contributions are more interesting than others – I found the meeting in York very dull. But because there is no fixed programme, each meeting is different. Unlike any other Christian denomination, at no point do they say the creed. This has a huge impact in making everyone feel welcome. There is no pretence at homogeneity. Nobody is forced to repeat words they don’t understand or believe. Difference of belief isn’t viewed as a problem. Rather than being convinced that their belief is the one and only truth and that everyone else is going to hell, Quakers seem to be more interested in questioning and exploring their own beliefs and those of others further. 

At the end of the meeting everyone stands up and shakes hands. The guy sitting next to me remarked that he hadn’t seen me before, and we began a very open and frank discussion of each other’s beliefs. I was fascinated to hear that he considered himself a Quaker but not necessarily a Christian. He believed in a God but not a Biblical God, Jesus with caveats and not in the Holy Spirit. So Quakerism doesn’t even demand belief in the trinity. Given that only a couple hundred years ago Europe was torn apart by religious wars in which ‘heretics’ were slaughtered for holding the outrageous belief that Jesus paid for his sandals, this is amazing progress. After no other church service have I ever felt able to discuss religion with other members of the congregation. 

Given its openness it is perhaps surprising that Quakerism isn’t more popular. Why is there a Christian Union at Sussex University, which condemns homosexuality in the gay capital of Britain, and no Quaker society? Perhaps the answer is that unlike other sects, the Quakers weren’t trying to convert everyone else. 

As I said I would not call myself a Quaker and wouldn't want to go to a Quaker meeting every week. But if I had to join a Christian denomination I would chose Quakerism and I think you would too.

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‘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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