The Shallows
And not only why is it deeper, but why is it considered a level of explanation? That’s a serious, literal question. I really don’t understand what it means – to talk of a deeper level of explanation based on unsupported assertions as opposed to a shallower level of explanation based on warranted assertions. How can explanations that float free of any rational epistemic requirements and checks and standards be deeper than those that are constrained by what we are able to figure out about the real world via tested methods? To put it more bluntly, how can explanations that are simply made up be deeper than those that are the result of careful inquiry and investigation? Is that what ‘deeper’ means? Made up? Fantasy based? Inventive?
How, in fact, can explanations of that kind explain at all? How can an explanation that is not tethered to evidence or investigation actually explain?
The whole idea seems to work the same way the idea of ‘alternative’ medicine works. What is alternative medicine alternative to? Medicine that works. Medicine that works, as doctors and medical researchers patiently (and impatiently) point out, is simply medicine. If it works, it works, and doctors will prescribe it. If it works, furthermore, it can be shown to work. If it works, it is possible to produce evidence that it works. Proper, replicable evidence. If it is not possible to produce such evidence, then what reason is there to think the medicine in question does work? So alternative medicine is simply a friendly name for medicine that, as far as has so far been shown, doesn’t work. It is also medicine that does not have to meet any standards or pass any tests – because that’s what non-alternative medicine does. Same with God and religion and deeper levels of ‘explanation.’ Deeper levels of explanation simply means explanation that doesn’t explain. Alternative explanation, one might call it. Homeopathic holistic alternative explanation, that doesn’t explain a damn thing, but simply tells a story. About as deep as the drop of sweat on a gnat’s eyebrow.
I think you found the answer to your question on why the general public considers spiritual knowledge to be “deep” and scientific theories to be “shallow” when you pointed out that the first type of explanation “simply tells a story.” Exactly. Narratives which rely on inner certainties which can’t be demonstrated to outsiders place the focus on the primary importance of the narrator — ourselves — within the very ebb and flow of the entire universe.
Everything happens for a reason in a story. Not just in terms of physical cause and effect, but in social, personal terms. Spiritual explanations allow us to become the main characters in an unfolding plot which lets us in on the REAL purposes behind everything. It’s all a story about us. Wow. Instant meaning.
Science is a search for objective consensus among observers deliberately checked and held in equality; because of this it tends to slap down storytelling, those subjective anecdotes and nonrepeatable experiences which assume the world doesn’t always work the same for everyone. We are special. I suspect that believing that we can simply “look inside” from our privileged position as individuals to sense and discover that the universe is very much like a giant mind — that it works just like our own inner dialogue — makes us feel “deep” because it seems to connect us to the cosmos in the most intimate way possible.
It’s like an argument which tries to show that astrology is “deeper” than astronomy. Why sure, astronomy is fine as far as it goes, but it can’t tell us what the planets and stars have to say about our personalities and daily lives now, can it? Should I go out with that cute boy in my English class? Is it a good idea to start my own business? The science of astronomy simply can’t answer these deep (ie personal) questions. It’s inadequate. For that, we need to turn to astrology. Astrology gives us cosmology with the MEANING intact. After all, wouldn’t it be totally arrogant on our part to think that novas explode and galaxies whirl about for *no reason at all* other than the mindless, purposeless laws of physics — that these sorts of things “just happen?” Surely such a view — one which just leaves us and our important little lives completely out of the picture — is terribly *shallow.*
The funny thing is, the religious folk who can see that this argument is a load of bullocks (who cares if astrology “can answer such questions” if the answers are — according to science — pointless and wrong?) don’t seem to see the same problem when it comes to science and spirituality in general.
“How, in fact, can explanations of that kind explain at all? How can an explanation that is not tethered to evidence or investigation actually explain?”
They can’t. But they make us feel ever so cozy and special, and that’s much more important than truth or accuracy. The whole universe revolves around ME! Sky Daddy will protect me.
How, in fact, can explanations of that kind explain at all? How can an explanation that is not tethered to evidence or investigation actually explain?
That’s the key question, isn’t it. I agree with Sastra’s comment and I’m going to say the same thing a different way. Humans are not “rational animals”, we’re “rationalizing animals”. We don’t automatically look for evidence which disconfirms – aka the scientific method. The first response to any story is to look for something that confirms it. And it’s usually pretty easy to find something that can confirm even a really wild story.
People believe in astrology because one time their newspaper horoscope said they would have good fortune and then they found a quarter on the sidewalk. Hey, it must work!
The whole idea of testing an explanation by pushing it to the point where it might fail, is so counterintuitive that most people never do get it.
Sastra, that was really deep!
Palliative medicine at the end of life, “works” by acknowledging the inevitability of death.
I don’t know what Davies means by explanation. He’s at some intersection of faith and cosmology that I don’t understand. For many people the more pertinent concept is acceptance. There are things in life that are irreducibly mysterious.
I’m fighting a silly little battle here because neither of us will ever persuade the other. You write “What could be deeper than rationality and the scientific method” and I have to laugh. LOTS of things are deeper than rationality! Love is deeper than sex. Haute cuisine is deeper than getting your recommended daily intake of calories.
Dix: I think what really gets OB’s (and others’) goat is that it is blithely assumed by the faithful that love, beauty, depth, meaning, nuance, grandeur, and the rest, are the strict monopoly of “faith” or “spirituality” and that atheists are miserable, impoverished types who can’t feel anything and are motivated entirely by crassest, crudest aspirations (stuff the gut, bed the babe, crawl up the pecking order, die with the most toys). Then there’s the double standard: the crudest, cruelest mumbo-jumbo is accorded the tenderest respect, while atheists are routinely castigated as stunted little Iagoes raging against God because their mommies and daddies didn’t love them. Not to mention the fact that religion often sanctions the worst abuses and atrocities, for which the faithful never hold it to account. (It’s an unfortunate anomaly, you see, and not at all representative of true religion, while all atheists are Stalinists-in-waiting.)
With all due respect, OB, I think you’re rather too sanguine about the state of ordinary medicine.
Everybody I know with a serious physical illness, who acquired it under the age of 35, has been initially misdiagnosed with depression. (And rather casually, too — no depression inventories.) Every last goddamn one of us. As far as I can tell, if you don’t have an arm hanging off, they give you a handful of Prozac and hope you go away.
My situation may be unusual: I saw an allopath and was prescribed a series of drugs, off-label, which did not work for my condition. It was unsurprising that they did not work, as I later found out: they’d been scientifically proven not to work. But they fed into my doctor’s preconceived notions, and she hadn’t done the reading.
Now I’m seeing a carefully selected naturopath who does keep up on the research, and I’ve got a treatment regimen that is based on scientific evidence. I’ve had a rather astounding recovery. That said, I know plenty of people who’ve gone to naturopathic quacks and been plugged into ridiculous devices that tell them they’re allergic to everything under the sun.
It would be nice if all doctors were uniformly rational and well-informed, and if they restricted themselves to medicine that works. It really would. As far as I can tell, GPs are just uniformly harried.
I liked Sastra’s post too; I hadn’t seen it when I posted last. Religion definitely tells a story, and it definitely entails some self-fulfilling assumptions.
Karl, thanks for the reply. Maybe it’s all a matter of whose ox is being gored. I sometimes go places (mostly on the Web, admittedly) where all religionists are assumed to be self-deluded morons or worse, and none of us is a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King Jr. in waiting.
Sastra, sure, that all makes sense. But I didn’t really ask why the general public thinks spiritual knowledge is deep – I asked the question in general, without a subject, but taking off from Paul Davies and Michael Ruse. They’re supposed to do better than just wanting a story, at least I’d have thought so.
Dix,
“You write “What could be deeper than rationality and the scientific method” and I have to laugh. LOTS of things are deeper than rationality! Love is deeper than sex. Haute cuisine is deeper than getting your recommended daily intake of calories.”
You don’t have to laugh, because I don’t write that. Your quotation marks are deceptive, because they’re not on anything I wrote.
People do keep completely inaccurately paraphrasing what I say and then pouring scorn on their addled version of what I said.
As for love and haute cuisine – that’s a rather vague and metaphoric use of the word ‘deeper’ – which is fine, except it’s not all that helpful in argument. I’m happy to agree that love is deeper than, say, very lukewarm liking, but that doesn’t get us anywhere, because Davies is talking about deep explanation, and explanation is not the same kind of thing as emotion or affection.
C, point taken. But is alternative medicine better at diagnosis? And if it is is that because of the alternative aspect, or because alternative doctors take a lot more time?
I know exactly what you mean, Karl. One response from the faithful towards atheists that I find annoying is their expressions of pity, as though atheists could not possibly lead rich or rewarding lives. Then there are those who feel compelled to tell atheists they are praying for them.
Perhaps, by ‘deeper’, Davies means into the depths of the psyche where the fears and doubts lie.
There is another course of action you could have taken, C du J. You could have carefully selected an allopath who keeps up with the research. I don’t think they are all working on a production line.
You have my sympathy, C du J. Your previous post seemed to indicate that you had become disenchanted with mainstream medicine and so had turned to naturopathy. It now appears that you’ve done the best you could in the circumstances.
How many times have I heard ‘alternative’ medicine zealots accuse ‘western’ (sic) medicine of being ‘narrow-minded’, ‘rigid’ ? Too many. Our ‘conventional’ medicine has come about through endless controlled, peer reviewed scientific enquiry throughout time since the Greeks, striving for continuous improvement in effctiveness and minimising harmful contra-indications, and throwing out old solutions when better ones come along. Whereas, e.g. ‘Ancient Chinese’ remedies, no matter how cool sounding, are exactly that – ancient. No one’s tried to better or improve them since 150 BC or whatever the dumb-ass mythology purports… So who’s being rigid ?
I’ve also noticed how often proponents of alternative medicine attack ‘western’ medicine. Western medicine could be a load of shit, but healing power is not thereby transferred to alternative remedies, there should still be some reason to believe they work.
OB wrote: “Sastra, sure, that all makes sense. But I didn’t really ask why the general public thinks spiritual knowledge is deep – I asked the question in general, without a subject, but taking off from Paul Davies and Michael Ruse. They’re supposed to do better than just wanting a story, at least I’d have thought so.”
OB – Well, I don’t think there is much of a sharp divide between the “general public” and the more sophisticated teleologians when you get down to brass tacks and look at what makes spirituality unique: its basic bottom-line assumptions of animism and anthropomorphism. Mind and its products are primary to all of reality = religion = spirituality.
No matter how esoteric the theology tries to get, at some level religion always seems to translate the universe into a mind-like place where we really, truly feel at home. And this intense kind of feeling is likely to appeal to Premise-Keepers Davies and Ruse just as much as it appeals to Billy-Bob and Moonbeam – and as much as it would appeal to you and me, too, I think, if we were to follow along with our cultures, our common sense, and the grain of our human nature and reject the idea that there is more merit in rationally, painstakingly thinking our way out of it. As Alan Cromer puts it, science is “uncommon sense.” We naturally prefer the personal anecdotes.
I just finished M. D. Faber’s “The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief,” which tries to join modern neurology with neo-Freudian-type explanations for religion. Couple this with with anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained” and Stewart Guthrie’s “Faces in the Clouds” and I think you could form a pretty powerful explanation for why spiritual knowledge is almost always going to be regarded as “deeper” and more easily intuitive than the “shallow,” hard-won empirical knowledge gained by science.
Spiritual narratives place human beings in the center of a dramatic story which feels eerily familiar on a very deep level because our brains evolved and our minds formed through relationships to others – not only other people in the social group of our group-dwelling species, but our own primary caretaker, the mother. Infancy begins with repeated instances of asking and receiving from a powerful Other, someone who was affectively joined with us in a symbiotic unity we no longer directly remember.
I suspect this is why religion is embedded in virtually every culture: it fits right into the way our brains work. It makes sense. It’s natural. We learn the particular doctrines, sure — but they are all more or less variations on the same theme.
Our pasts, evolutionary and personal, are hidden from us, however, and so we pick up specific spiritual beliefs as if we’re only being reminded of what we already understand: a Person resides at the foundation of everything. Aha! We KNEW it!
That “aha!” moment is very powerful and seductive. It feels like insight. It feels like coming home. And it IS coming home – not to Spirit or God, but to our own mind-brain and how the self formed. I suspect that looking for scientifically deeper explanations – REAL explanations – only ends up feeling anticlimactic for most people.
I suspect this is why religion is embedded in virtually every culture: it fits right into the way our brains work. It makes sense. It’s natural. We learn the particular doctrines, sure — but they are all more or less variations on the same theme.
– Sastra
Although there does seem to be plenty of substantial variation. I am told that Theravada Buddhists do not believe in God or in gods. I am also told that Jews do not generally believe in an afterlife. And so on. One would think that belief in both a human-like deity and one’s own survival of bodily death would be ‘natural’ to humans. But it appears that for many, even among the religious, these things are optional. So it may be that there is hope that the human race as a whole can eventually escape the chains of superstition.
Now if only the mass of mankind would become Theravada Jews, we’d be on the road to recovery.
Well, maybe; maybe not.;)
I usually try to make my definitions of religion/spirituality as broad as possible (but no broader) — because I think Brian’s right. There aren’t many elements common to all spiritual views (and depending on how open your definition is, “religion” can even morph right into “life philosophy” – which I try not to do, because that just gets muddy and confusing.) Anthropologists like Boyer take great pains pointing out that not all religions have a belief in God or an afterlife, for example.
Thus my own attempt to be inclusive and define religion as a stance which more or less holds that mind and/or the products of mind (such as Good and Evil; happiness and suffering; intention and purpose; harmony and love, etc.) are in some way foundational to the universe: there are spiritual essences which exist above the material, but which can mysteriously act upon them. Everything is connected through some sort of pre-established attunement of mind with matter, and the universe is ultimately moral — Personhood is a *cosmic* quality.
This appears to distinguish bare-bones basic spirituality from what isn’t spiritual, which a definition ought to aim at. All forms of animism and anthropomorphism would fall in, as would (I hope) the more nebulous, transcendent Eastern metaphysical systems. It’s not easy.
As far as I can tell, then, even Theravada Buddhism and Judaism both endorse the central importance of mind to the cosmos. The former may lack the usual parent-god figure, but (except in the most secularized versions) it still deals with concepts like karma and soul, where our acts and intentions are thought to imprint themselves onto the fabric of reality through an interconnected network of meaning, and we must all live our lives over and over again till we lose self and join in disembodied enlightened harmony with the compassionate nature of the universe. Or something like that.
And the latter, of course, still has the Parent-god of the Bible, which can only be taken as high-level metaphor so far or else we’ve only got Humanistic Judaism – atheism with an ethnic flourish.
Deep, very deep…
But the trouble with all that is, what does it have to do with this particular discussion? Which is about theism, and how belief in God can or cannot provide a deeper level of explanation. It’s a fairly narrow question, so inclusiveness about defining religion seems to be another subject entirely.
I am also told that Jews do not generally believe in an afterlife – Brian T. Urmann
Not strictly true. Traditional Judaism does have the concept of an afterlife – however, it is not generally given much prominence, and Judaism tends to concentrate on living a good life in this world.
One slight quibble though. I don’t think we should say things like ‘Jews believe’ etc. when talking about a tradition. Modern Jews, like everyone else, believe in all sorts of things – Marxism, secular liberalism, sometimes even Buddhism (seriously!). This isn’t just nit-picking. We are all familiar with statements such as ‘the Hopi believe x’ where x is some fanciful creation myth. Do they? All of them? The truth is probably that most of them believe the same commonsense (or not) things that everyone else does, and the statement that they believe this or that myth is intended to bolster the image of unanimity and the power of conservative leaderships. Better to say ‘there is a traditional Hopi story that x’. After all, how many nominal Christians actually believe in the virgin birth?
By the way, this is my first post on this site, though I have been reading it with great pleasure and interest for some time.
OB wrote: But the trouble with all that is, what does it have to do with this particular discussion? Which is about theism, and how belief in God can or cannot provide a deeper level of explanation. It’s a fairly narrow question, so inclusiveness about defining religion seems to be another subject entirely.
The point I was trying to make was that any explanation which connects a person significantly to the very nature of the universe is going to be more satisfactory and feel “deeper” than one which does not. And if what defines spirituality per se is the basic assumption that the rest of the universe outside of us is similar to the part of the universe that is us, then spiritual explanations which involve God also deeply involve us.
They draw into the structure of a brain which was shaped in the species through relationships, and which was formed in the individual through a primary relationship which made no distinction between self and omnipotent other. We know nothing as intimately as we know ourselves. God explanations are therefore *intimate* explanations which make us feel as if we’re being reminded of what we already knew on some mysterious, deeper level.
The “explanatory value” rests in the fact that the explanation gives us back what we value. It’s not so much an explanation as a reassurance. “Aha! Ok.”
Astrology brings our values into the cosmos, too. So here’s a question I would like to ask Davies: does astrology provide a “deeper explanation” than astronomy? And does the answer to that question depend in any way on whether astrology is actually true or not? Should it matter?
Ah, I see, Sastra. Makes sense.
Welcome, Harry! Happy first post.
Harry and Sastra,
Thank you for your very informative corrections and explanations. They are much appreciated.