For our purposes as human beings the mind is the center of everything. It governs our experience of our bodies, it retains and composes the inner narrative of our lives, it absorbs the givens of family, culture and education, it orders the data of our senses into a coherent and continuous report on the physical world, it gives us a capacity for moral and ethical judgment, it enables us to understand our needs and interests and to act on them. All this is made endlessly complex by the ability of the mind to interfere with, or to shape, its own workings, which is pathology at worst and our precious autonomy at best.
If the mind did only these things it would be remarkable enough. But it also speculates. It casts great nets of hypothesis over the world of its perceptions and retrieves what it can in the way of understanding of that world, its catch in any case depending on the strength of the net or the fineness of it, or its being cast in a good place. Over the millennia the mind has accumulated an impressive hoard of actual knowledge, and of grounds for new speculations. It is a sort of Crusoe, contriving comfort and utility from whatever comes to hand on this rocky island Earth, making itself a little bit at home and feeling stranded all the same.
My metaphor breaks down because Crusoe knew where he came from and who he was. He could account for his isolation, his unlikeness to everything that existed around him. The oldest lore we have are attempts to propose an answer to these questions for the species, epics that place humankind in a cosmos that is not alien to them, however marginal or precarious their place in it. The ancient gods were violent, sly, fickle, negligent, easy to offend and difficult to mollify. They were all too human, in fact. And they were the earliest answers to the great old questions. Why do we exist, why do we suffer, and why must we die? More tolerable, pagan antiquity suggests, to ascribe our sorrows to capriciousness or outright malice than to dull, cold accident.
How sound is the intuition, which seems as definitively human as culture itself, that our anomalous mind is, at the most essential level, not our difference from the cosmos but our singular likeness to it, our bond with it? We have an extraordinary gift for making the physical universe intelligible to ourselves. This is established beyond any doubt. We know from experience that we can know a great deal about the material properties of things, and so we have lost the sense that, when the movements of the stars were first noted and the abstractions of geometry were first pondered, only intuition could have suggested that knowledge wonderful in kind and scale would be opened by tentatives like these. Yet the ancients seem to have had this intuition. The aura of wonder that fills antiquity, Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek, reflects above all a sense of the magical character of knowing. The mysterious human mind was the alembic then, as it is for us now.
In any case, we have on one hand the persisting intuitive sense that the universe is not alien to us, that our existence is not accidental and our complexity and brilliance are not simply unaccountable extravagances on the part of evolution. On the other hand we have the conviction, also no doubt intuitive to the degree that it is strongly held, that we are indeed creatures of accident, alone with our brilliance unless accident has come up with like creatures elsewhere.
The debate is said to be between science and religion. It would be more accurate to call the contending sides atheism and faith, since neither science nor religion in any classic sense is represented in the present struggle. Whatever the terms we use we can still say that our civilization has been and is engaged in a controversy about the ultimate nature of reality. If we step back a little, I think we should be able to put our wrangling factionalisms aside for a moment and see this as a profound and moving thing, a singularly human thing. To my mind we are the heroes of Creation if only because we think to pose such questions.
This is as close as I come to allowing myself a theological "proof." I don't claim to know what it means to say that we are made in the image of God, but I profoundly and instinctively believe it and all that it implies. Therefore it appalls me that some people who call themselves Christian are willing to hate and insult and deprive other human beings, and even carry guns so they will be ready to kill one or two of them on short notice. And it appalls me that people who claim for their views the authority of science routinely and arbitrarily insist on a brutally reductionist notion of what a human being is, what the human mind is, that justifies as inevitable every sort of meagerness and rapacity. As is so often the case when controversy turns bilious, the two sides have entirely too much in common.
We have demonstrated again and again a terrible freedom to do ourselves catastrophic harm. It is critically important now that we remember our dignity and our worth. We must recover respect for what we are. Science and religion, history, literature and the arts, even our abused and beleaguered politics, all can help us do this if we will only let them.
Michael Graziano: Is Spirituality a Byproduct of Evolution?
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Therefore it appalls me that some people who call themselves Christian are willing to hate and insult and deprive other human beings, and even carry guns so they will be ready to kill one or two of them on short notice. And it appalls me that people who claim for their views the authority of science routinely and arbitrarily insist on a brutally reductionist notion of what a human being is, what the human mind is, that justifies as inevitable every sort of meagerness and rapacity.
Christian guns, reductionism? What is she talking about? How does her meandering and vague view of mind have anything to do with her unsupported conclusions here at the end?
I think what she is saying that the two sides are engaged in a pissing contest; and not a very becoming one.
I agree that I don't find her comments extremely elucidating, but I do love the way she writes.
We make some aspects of the physical universe intelligible to ourselves, other aspects we miss entirely, and can only be slightly comprehended through obscure equations and analogy: sadly Aristotle was wrong, the essence of things is not their anthropocentric appearance/state of being, and out intuition can't figure out the universe of us: it doesn't even give us a solid foundation to start.
We experience a linear, Euclidean world, yet the world is neither Euclidean nor linear.
ex. "we can know certain truths we can know"
"Which is why an intuition of the existence of our transcendent value and objective morals, which both views fit the way the world actually is, points to a supreme being."
Seems kind of Palinesque, in a word.
In fact if you read some of Richard Dawkins' or other writings you can see many examples of how amazingly sub-optimal things like the human eye are. The "design" is such that no human engineer would ever do it that way (e.g., the blind spot every eye has) but the fact that they were not designed from scratch but rather evolved from much simpler organs over millions of years.
http://www.explorationfilms.com/exploration-films-incredible-creatures-3.html
Instead of that nonsense, I would encourage you to use your local library to find a book about evolution by someone who actually understands how evolution works. Jobe Martin obviously does not.
Religions are the oldest human institutions in existence. Any institution's primary goal--above all others--is self preservation. When secularists shine the bright light of reason on the darkness of religious ignorance, religious organizations, feeling threatened, push back hard, often violently. We see this in battlegrounds like Dover, PA and the Texas Board of Education. We see this in the fight over gay and women's rights, especially in the Muslim world. These are the fights that matter, not the internal conflict between reason and faith every human experiences, nor the centuries old debate over the nature of reality.
All institutions divide the world into 'us versus them', none so starkly as religion. Religious organizations amass staggering wealth but don't produce any tangible goods. By definition they aren't accountable to their members, or especially to outsiders, and have no other purpose than to wage war on their enemies. This unending battle (against EVIL!) informs their every action.
Robinson wrote, "Therefore it appalls me that some people who call themselves Christian are willing to hate and insult and deprive other human beings, and even carry guns so they will be ready to kill one or two of them on short notice." While it may be appalling, it should surprise no one. Religions are perfect fighting machines; they truly are the real weapons of mass destruction.
I don't think everyone experiences it. I haven't felt it since I was twelve years old or so, when reason won for me. And I was raised to be Christian.
"Robinson wrote, 'Therefore it appalls me that some people who call themselves Christian are willing to hate and insult and deprive other human beings, and even carry guns so they will be ready to kill one or two of them on short notice.' While it may be appalling, it should surprise no one."
I agree with you there. That passage by Robinson reminds me of "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" Robinson has made some big stacks of cash from the religion which appalls her so.
It's definitely unfair to our super fun labels to simply call everyone agnostic, I eventually concluded. After all, though doubts may recur from time to time people are obviously predominantly on one side or the other, or choose the middle as an agnostic.
Regardless, I like that you are a very well-reasoned person who challenges atheists as well as the theists here.
On a side note, I don't think it is unreasonable to believe in God. Many brilliant minds over the past 2500 years have done so. They believed in many different kinds of gods, at times, but the brilliance of such men as Socrates or Aquinas cannot be denied. There is possibly an argument too for men like Spinoza or Einstein, who both still seem to err more towards theism than atheism; and simply see the major religions as having relatively primitive views of God. Regardless, I think it is unfair to assume that reason must act against faith. Often, when people of faith have a crisis thereof, they use reason to substantiate it.
And I'd like to add: it seems like the religious moderates in this Religious and Science forum, including many of the authors like Robinson, fancy themselves as not participating in the battle but rather as peacemakers. In the battle you described, of religion fighting for its self preservation against atheism, the religious moderates absolutely are participating in the battle and are doing so on the side of religion. Many of the articles are mere attempts to rationalize or advocate for religion as if to make it scientifically reasonable, thereby providing cover for religion. They pretend to want to bring religion and science together when they are really interested in defending the side of religion (whether or not they realize it). To a large extent this Religion and Science section is trying to cover up and dismiss the fact that the New Atheists have shined the bright light of reason onto the darkness of religion.
It would be even more accurate to call the contending sides atheism and theism, since one can have faith in many things but not believe in God.
-Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.-