Awe, Shux
Here is what one might consider another installment of an on-going discussion we’re having here about religion and the way its defenders and supporters and promoters and fans re-define it for purposes of persuasion or coercion. One example is from an article by Paul Davies in an old Atlantic (September 2003) I happened to read the other day: ‘E.T. and God.’ It’s basically about what the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for human religion, but along the way he makes this strange (yet very familiar) comment, after calling the dismissal of religion by the director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research ‘rather naive’:
Though many religious movements have come and gone throughout history, some sort of spirituality seems to be part of human nature. Even atheistic scientists profess to experience what Albert Einstein called a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ when contemplating the awesome majesty of the universe.
Well, what does that ‘though’ mean, for instance? Why is there a ‘though,’ why is there anything surprising or in need of explanation or at least acknowledgement via a ‘though’ in the fact that atheists can profess to experience some sort of emotion, probably awe, at the awesome universe? What is Davies actually saying there? That awe at the universe is the same thing, or the same sort of thing, or more or less the same thing, as believing in a deity? That is surely at least what he’s implying. Though the usual weasel-word, escape-hatch word, ‘spirituality’ appears in the middle to make the implication slightly more fuzzy. But what does spirituality mean then? Just awe at the universe? If so, surely it’s not incompatible with not believing in a deity – is it? Not in my book. I can feel awe at all sorts of things. I never call the feeling ‘spiritual,’ because that’s a word I’m violently allergic to – but I don’t mind calling it the sublime, for example, and at any rate I have some idea what it is. And it does not require belief in an omniscient benevolent omnipotent person who created us for a purpose and is taking care of us. And I think it’s a kind of cheat to pretend that it does, to conflate the two things, to mix them up and imply that they are inseparable.
I get that feeling when contemplating the awesome majesty of my reflection in the mirror…
Cosmic, dude.
I’ve read one of Mr Davies’ books (“Are we Alone”), and that is filled with similar kinds of drivel. (He even brings up the old analogy between the tornado blowing though a hangar and assembling a 747, and the likelyhood of DNA spontaneously arising).
He is often cited as an example “prooving” that science and religion can coexist peacefully as he is a scientist. He strikes me as a better example of compartmentalism and someone who does not think too deeply about their beleifs and whether they contradict other beliefs held by the same person. We all do it to an extent, but I am not sure it should be held as a virtue.
Yes, I thought Davies was one of those ‘we can all get along’ cosmologists. (Steven Weinberg gives them short shrift in his article in Paul Kurtz’ anthology Science and Religion – see In the Library, Favourites, for details.) The Atlantic mentioned that he won the Templeton prize in 1995. Oh, the Templeton prize – what a ridiculous institution that is, and what a lot of drivel it has encouraged. Simon Blackburn wrote a wickedly funny review of a book by one winner a year or two ago.
But that’s just it – this kind of argument always (at least, as far as I can tell) does depend on a few not-thought-about beliefs, a few dodgy terms, a few sly redefinitions, a few unwarranted assumptions, a few good conflations. Even Gould did it. I will never understand why, or how, but he did.
As an offhanded followup to a remark I made a few weeks ago[0] it occurs to me that there’s some sort of crisp demarcation to be made between A) ‘awe in the universe’ sort of religious experiences and B) ‘God speaks to me and tells me how to behave’ sort of religious experiences.
Basically, A has no normative content and B does, and they ought not be conflated. In A perhaps God is giving me some settled feelings of ecstasy[1] and in B God is making some truth-claims about how the world works and how we should behave.[2]
Thus is aesthetic appreciation of the natural world crowbared into legitimization of something entirely different.[3]
-BJK
[0] The one about how one can’t give religion privilege as dealing with things apart from nature if it somehow speaks
[1] Flippantly, like a really good cup of coffee.
[2] And nobody says my coffee should be doing THAT, and it’s ridiculous to use my cup of coffee as in any way legitimizing the normative notions I get after drinking it.
[3] Rather like this business of quarks being prefigured in Vedic scriptures. Surely there’s a name for this kind of move? Not passes-for, but close…?
I’m drinking tea today so I made a mistake. [0] should read:
The one about how one can’t give religion privilege as being apart from nature if it somehow speaks to what actually happens or should happen in the natural world. It’s the ‘if God sticks his hand in the pool then his hand gets wet and the fish may nibble at it’ notion.
Yes, tea is the primrose path to error and confusion.
Indeed, about the conflation. And not only does A not have any normative content, it’s also perfectly possible without any deity, and perfectly possible without any recourse to miracles or supernatural explanations. A human emotion is just – a human emotion.
A reader sent me a link to one of those arguments about the unlikeliness of it all, the other day. All the conditions that have to be just so in order for there to be something rather than nothing, stars rather than no stars, life rather than none, etc. But as a lot of other people I’ve read point out, one can say that about anything at all. The odds are against every possible state of affairs, there are always trillions and xillions of other possible states of affairs that could be the case instead, so that argument doesn’t really go anywhere.
The hick comes to the big city and immediately gets the lessons in scamology most city kids take in at their mother’s knee.
We enter the universe, knowing the universe, like that hick. And become prey.
To really contemplate self-death can freeze the mind, and here’s some fast-talking charlatan with a bunch of easy answers.
The infinite reach of starry vastness and its consequent parallel in the interior of things…more opportunities for awe and wonder.
And wonder has a color like an apple in a tree.
The proof of God is as easily the proof of not-God, a benevolent paternal immortal could as easily be Zeus or Satan, or some extra-terrestrial with a seriously advanced laptop brimming with killer apps.
But at the same time something’s going on.
What I’m stuck on is that the anthropocentric justifications that emerge from the theists seem identical to the self-permissions of atheists generally.
One version is God gave us the world to do what we will with; the other is that there’s nobody here to stop us from doing whatever we want to it.
People like Davies, with their touch-feely open-mindedness, seem to mask something much less naive or gentle, beneath all that talk about ecumenical affinity and spirituality being “part of human nature”.
“Humanity” is part of human nature, obviously; but less obviously, what exactly is it, to be human? If we have spirits it would seem necessary that we have spiritual qualities or “spirituality”.
What seems to happen is the one side goes all coyly vague, and the other flat denies it exists, when the talk turns to spiritual things.
Yet they both end up in the same car on the same highway going the same direction.
As ever msg, I totally fail to see what point it is that you are making ;-). You clearly have a poetic turn of phrase, and when writing poetry that would be a boon.
However, poetry is not an appropriate way of discussing ideas. The colourful and obscure metaphors sound lovely, but I have no idea what any of them mean. The two or three phrases that said something straight I disagreed with to greater or lesser extents.
Yeah, that’s basically it, msg – what Chris says. I love poetry – for instance I love Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ which says much the same kind of thing you have in mind, I think – I love it without actually literally assenting to it, but still knowing what he means by it. But that’s poetry.
“What seems to happen is the one side goes all coyly vague, and the other flat denies it exists, when the talk turns to spiritual things.”
No. Denying it exists may or may not be the next stage, but the first stage is simply to pin down what on earth people mean by it. That’s what happens when I’m talking about it, at any rate: I point out that it’s an inherently fuzzy, evasive word that means everything and nothing and that that’s exactly why people are so fond of it. Precisely because people can’t say “spirituality” doesn’t exist; it’s too imprecise for that. That’s what’s wrong with woolly imprecise language when discussing ideas: it’s impossible to engage with it.
We’re using a severely limited set of descriptive tools to argue about things that are definitionally unlimited, whether it’s the spiritually-live universe, or the void and its starry naught.
Daniel Dennett’s version of the mind seems the most accurate contemporary image. And at its most basic that image is as vague as the word “spiritual”.
If I had to make my position fit into easy-access language it would be something like:
Criticizing the wish-fantasies and delusional cushioning of the other side may be cathartic, but does it have any real effect outside the local congregation?
–
I feel pretty qualified to engage the murky, on its own ground, I’ll admit to that.
Well, msg, those are just assertions. I disagree that this particular branch of the “non-spiritual camp” is the mirror image of the spiritual camp. Of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I. But all the same, I do say it. I maintain that we are giving arguments here, and making at least some attempt to justify them, rather than relying on “faith” or assertion. So, no, I don’t think you’re correct that it’s all the same thing. I also doubt that you’ll convince anyone else that it is when all you do is assert it.
The automobile.
GM food.
Nuclear weapons.
Mass extinctions of animals, fish, and birds most people are unaware of, because most people live in what amount to virtual environments, where the only real things are artifacts and other human beings, and house pets.
Offered as proof that non-spiritual rationalism serves the same purpose as religion – to justify what is, ultimately, an intrinsic selfishness on the part of the group, the society; a cultural devotion to self-gratification that in an individual would be called sociopathic.
The argument being, I suppose:
What else but a sociopathic intelligence could have produced these conditions and these damaging products?
–
Religion takes its right to dominion from its deity’s command. Do I need citations for that?
Because on it’s face it’s an assertion right?
It’s in the Bible. My assumption is that something so blatantly obvious doesn’t need citation.
The non-spiritual (and by that I’m not accusing you or “here”, really what I’m asking for is an enlightened version of what you have already. Rationalism, only not reason unmoored, but in service to all life, not just contemporary humanity – what we come from as well as what we are) takes its right to dominion from its own assertion of it, and the fact that nothing refutes its claims for that dominion and lives to tell about it.
The contention, again unargued, but again seeming to me so obvious as to not need argument, is that non-spiritual rationalism puts its own congregation in the same place, as far as dominion goes, as far as anthropocentric arrogance goes, as religion does.
Do you want citation for that? Look around.
This seems obvious enough to me that I have a hard time thinking of it as a debatable point.
The unstated but clearly demonstrated allegiance of scientific rationalism is the aggregate selves of its current adherents, and nothing more. That’s an assertion whose premise is, again, so clearly obvious that it seems it should need no documentation.
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I’m not conflating religion and its opposite, anymore than I’d conflate two warring tribes of cannibals.
But they do have a lot in common.
And it’s what they have in common that’s most dangerous to what claims my allegiance.
And my argument is really that these seemingly irresolvable conflicts mask what is, in practice and result, the same modus operandi.
The differences between the two camps are so profound the idea of godless science and fundamentalism being like the right hand and left hand of some hidden demi-urge does seem impossibly absurd, I’ll admit.
But I’m speaking to practice, not theory.
It’s a good thing to insist that arguments be justified, though not all arguments can. And there are unprovable states of something very like knowing that might as well be called faith. And we need both, rational and non-rational, to survive. That’s another assertion I think too obvious to bother proving.
So kind of what I’m ending on here is that there’s a symmetry to this, a higher version of the same duality, the same sameness, a place where rationality and faith operate to the same ends, but it isn’t anthropecentric greed, and it’s the only way through.
msg, I think what you are improperly conflating is rationality and the fallout of (modern) materialism. Also, you seem to be conflating the reasonable with the provable. There are lots of reasonable things that can’t be proven, but that doesn’t mean we take them on faith. It just means we admit they can’t be proved and talk in terms of plausibility within a framework of assumptions, intead of in terms of “absolute truth.”
All OB is asking for is for terms to be defined as clearly as possible when talking about these difficult things. To argue that we ought to allow our terminology to be fuzzy when talking about fuzzy things is to confuse the method with the subject.
I think the only “dominion” that OB is asserting is that, when trying to understand things, clarity and precision are desirable whenever they can be achieved, and that more threatening than false statements are statements that are meaningless because they use (purposefully) ill-defined terms.
I couldn’t have said it more clearly myself – in fact I probably didn’t!
Rationality as an unconflated cognitive process doesn’t exist in a pure state, anywhere, no matter how rigorously it’s sought, except in the dictionary, where we also find this definition of “faith”:
Mental acceptance of the truth or actuality of something.
Since that seems a little too vague yet, we can look further and find:
Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing
and once again, for emphasis:
Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence
Now I may be missing a key element here but it seems that a statement like “…[a] reasonable thing that can’t be proven” is a pretty darn good working definition of an object of non-religious “faith”. Nothing fuzzy about that assertion.
Or is there?
That the word has been colonized by religionists, and thus has a tendency to make anti-religionists antsy, is a problem for those so afflicted, not the rest of us.
When I said “…there are unprovable states of something very like knowing that might as well be called faith…” I meant exactly that acceptance of the unprovable but reasonable, as well as something closer to inspiration, as well as genetic knowledge – the innate, and even something as implausible as the telepathic communion with the living world we’ve had beaten out of us as a price for admission into this end-time carnival of luxury and power.
But that’s fuzzy again, isn’t it?
How about “Xenic logic never gets there”? Meaning the chop-chop-chopping and stack-stack-stacking of pieces of the real will always be only a partial thing.
Still too fuzzy?
Sorry. Try calling it holistic reasoning.
It’s a fuzzy world. In a fuzzy universe.
But I love it just the same.