Tag Archives: spirituality

Dueling faiths

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That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion [Update, link no longer good, sorry]:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

— C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingness,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Sigmund’s long goodbye

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Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)

Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.

Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”

I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)

My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.

Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.

I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.

What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph [UPDATE, link no longer good :(], of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:

Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .

Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memory”.

Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”

Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.

Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”

Know in their hearts? LOL

Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:

Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

Excuse me? Scientists may not “blow each other up” literally, but they are all too happy to mine each other’s professional reputations and careers if they feel their assumptions are political power is being threatened. Even when the “controversy” is as mundane as why our muscles get sore when we exercise.

The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.

Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.

“Secular sermons”

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In the New Statesman, John Gray critiques both Wolpert (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast–I blogged about that book yesterday) and Daniel C Dennett, Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon.

From ape to . . . theologist

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At the London Times, John Carey reviews Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert.

Given the growing muscularity of both neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it’s no surprise that some would reduce spirituality to a product of biological evolution. From the article:

Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes.

Carey writes that the book has a chicken/egg conundrum; Wolpert fails to clarify which came first: the “causal thinking” that allowed us to become sophisticated tool-makers, or was it tool-making that led to our forebears selecting for causal thinking? Says Carey, “He can be found saying both things in different places . . .”

But there’s a parallel difficulty that Carey doesn’t call out, but is implied in the sentences that follow the excerpt above:

Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy.

No more divine — or no less?

Believe it

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In a post last December, the Argyleist (named as a featured blog on Technorati last night, which is how I happened to find this post — congrats, Argyleist!) raises the subject of faith:

I’m not necessarily talking about faith in a god specifically, but faith in anything. Believing in something without any real solid proof.

My take on this is that people err when they compartmentalize “faith” as exclusive to religion or spirituality, something that can’t be applied to the compartment that is governed by “proof.” So this morning, Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy put up a post about The Ethical Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, which has a chapter on religion, and writes:

One interesting point he makes in passing is that it turns out that scientists are just attached to their particular theories as religious believers, and in fact, scientists are just as reluctant to surrender their beliefs about science when confronted with contrary evidence as are religious believers.

Exactly.

The simple fact is that “faith” or “belief” is an intimate aspect of our cognitive experience. We like to claim that there are some things that are objectively “true” because they can be experientially proven, but that’s not the case — things we “know” will happen are actually just pretty solid guesses. To use a somewhat absurdist argument: the Earth has circled the sun every day for some 5 billion years. That doesn’t mean our beloved orb will rise daily in the east forever. Granted, it would be a waste of time to plan for a contingency in case the sun fails to make its appearance tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t taking morning on faith.

This all sounds too esoteric to be useful, and when it comes to the sun it probably is, but parse it out in the more intimate workings of our lives and we find it can be useful indeed. Faith “in the substance of things not seen” is the cognitive equivalent of walking, which as Laurie Anderson observed so smartly lo those many years ago is actually an act of falling:

You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
But you’re always falling.
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time.

We can’t make a move without faith, so as I wrote last night, the real question is not “to believe or not to believe” so much as “where does my belief lead me?”