The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

A nice column by David Brooks

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

I think Brooks is right that the debate will be between theology and "spirituality." It's been popular for a while for people to describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

What Brooks hasn't realized is that spirituality is also a subjective experience; it takes place in one's mind and doesn't necessarily imply anything about the world. "[Feeling] the existence of the sacred," as Brooks put it, doesn't imply the existence of "the sacred," just the ability to have certain feelings.

The realization that these feelings are not necessarily connected to any particular religion is progress—at least in my opinion.

But distinguishing between subjective experience and external reality is—also in my opinion—the real truth of Buddhism. It's also the fundamental truth of science.

Francis Collins, again

I haven't posted in a while, but this Pew Research interview with Francis Collins presents a good opportunity.

For Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, scientific knowledge complements rather than contradicts belief in God. In his 2006 bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins argues that advances in science present 'an opportunity for worship,' rather than a catalyst for doubt. Recently, the Pew Forum interviewed Dr. Collins about his views on science and religion.

For the most part, I'll just present Collins' answers unless there is some ambiguity.

If you see God as the creator of the universe – in all of its amazing complexity, diversity and awesome beauty – then science, which is, of course, a means of exploring nature, also becomes a means of exploring God’s creative abilities. And so, for me, as a scientist who is also a religious believer, research activities that look like science can also be thought of as opportunities to worship.

As I've said a number of times previously, the most sympathetic interpretation I have found for religious faith — other than dismissing it as an unconscious externalization of subjective experience — is that the subject matter of religion is outside empirical determination and is therefore not relevant to the material world. This seems to be more or less Collins' position, although I doubt that he would put it that way. This first answer suggests this position, namely that science explores nature and since God created nature, i.e., the universe, science explores "God's creative abilities." It doesn't seem to matter in any real sense whether "God created the universe" has any real meaning or truth value. Science certainly explores nature. The rest is outside of the realm in which we can say what the sentence means.

One can look at Genesis 1-2, for instance, and see that there is not just one but two stories of the creation of humanity, and those stories do not quite agree with each other. That alone ought to be reason enough to argue that the literal interpretation of every verse, in isolation from the rest of the Bible, can’t really be correct. Otherwise, the Bible is contradicting itself. …

If Augustine, who was one of the most thoughtful, original thinkers about biblical interpretation that we’ve ever had, was unable to figure out what Genesis meant 1,600 years ago, why should we today insist that we know what it means.

This is another subject I've written about. How should one do religious epistemology, i.e., how does one decide which statements to believe. Collins acknowledges that there is a problem, and he doesn't have an answer. But that doesn't seem to bother him. If I were confronted with a doctrine that included a number of self-contradictory statements, along with other statements that contradicted current ethical principles or empirical evidence, I would be bothered — or at least concerned about finding some approach to deciding which statements to believe. So I don't understand why being in such a situation doesn't bother Collins. But that seems to be the religious answer to everything. The less sense something makes, the more it confirms the mystery.

If God has any meaning at all, God is at least in part outside of nature (unless you’re a pantheist). Science is limited in that its tools are only appropriate for the exploration of nature. Science can therefore certainly never discount the possibility of something outside of nature. To do so is a category error, basically using the wrong tools to ask the question.

This brings us back to the first point: belief in God is outside science. But since science investigates everything which is within human experience, belief in God refers to something which is outside human experience. If that's the case, it doesn't matter whether one believes or not since we are unable to experience what belief is about. To my mind, that's a good definition of either fiction or meaninglessness.

Belief is so complicated

An article in the New York Times discusses Mormonism and Romney. The primary focus is on how the rest of the country treats Mormonism. It's worth reading. But I want to comment on how religious beliefs seem to make life so much more complex than it need be. And I don't mean complex in the sense of richness but complex in the sense of unnecessarily and overly complicated.

Faced with the allegation that they do not believe in the same God as ordinary Protestants, or that their beliefs are not truly Christian, Mormons find themselves in an extraordinarily awkward position.

This reminds me of the recent story that the Malaysian government objected to the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims when referring to non-Islamic gods. They claim that Allah refers to the god of Islam and not to the Christian god. Christians and Muslims all claim to believe not only in "one God" but in the same "one God." Yet at least some of them want to restrict a word to be used as a reference to their "one God" and not to the other "one God," who is presumably the same as their own "one God." Do they really worry about keeping it straight?

Romney has felt the need to minimize the centrality of Mormon scripture by saying that he reads the Gideon Bible when he is alone in his hotel room on the campaign trail.

The formulation may be seen as a clever hedge: to the ordinary Protestant listener, it sounds as if Romney is saying that he reads the same Bible that they do. To the Mormon insider, however, Romney is simply saying that when he travels to the hotel and finds himself, presumably, without a handy copy of the Book of Mormon, he reads the text of the Bible that can be found in the drawer beside the bed. Some LDS insiders have been heard to wonder quietly how Romney could come to be traveling without his own copy of the Mormon scriptures — or why he isn’t staying in Marriott hotels, where the Book of Mormon can be found in the nightstand drawer alongside the bible.

This is the same issue but approached with more subtlety. Heresy, I suppose, has always been a problem for people who feel strongly about what other people believe. But that makes life so difficult for them. First of all, one has to spend the time to figure out what the other person believes and whether it is different in important ways from what one believes oneself. This may matter when beliefs determine action: I'll shoot you if you do this or don't do that. But in the case of Mormonism vs. mainline Christianity we're not talking about actions. We're talking about beliefs that (a) are basically the same — they all believe in a trinitarian "one God" — and (b) by definition are outside the realm of evidence and verifiability in any case — or they would be science, which they aren't.

It's my understanding, based on conversations with someone who is very committed to religion, that belief is not the essence of religion, that belief is a final step in adopting a religion, not a first step. The essence of religion is a search for a connection to something fundamental. The connection is an experience, not a fact claim. Beliefs as fact claims may arise from the experience, but they aren't the experience. In my opinion it's unfortunate when people attempt to express a religious experience as a fact claim. It's really just an experience. So the fact claims are (or should be) secondary. (There's a good Buddhist story about this. Someone sees a glimmering of fundamental reality. Mara, who is cynical about mankind and doesn't wish us well, is asked by his attendants whether it worries him that the man has seen a bit of reality. His answer is "No" because the man will just turn it into a belief. I quote the whole thing, which is not much longer, at the bottom of this post.)

So many people put so much weight on variants in statements of belief. It seems so strange to see people who claim to hold the same fundamental beliefs finding themselves so at odds about the details. It seems to make their lives so unnecessarily complex.

An unintentionally patronizing defense of tolerance?

Julianne Dalcanton, an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington and a blogger at Cosmic Variance has this to say about why she is tolerant of others' religious beliefs.

I typically stay out of the God vs the Atheists discussions in the blogosphere. I am soft enough of heart to take no pleasure in trying to argue people out of something that makes them deeply happy. I find no evidence for what they believe, and I profoundly disapprove of any attempt to institutionalize those beliefs beyond an individual church/synagog/mosque, but I just cannot build up a big head of steam to fight against individuals’ believing in something that helps them cope with life’s frustrations, tediums, and cruelties. …

As adults, even the most rational of us sometimes make small concessions to that joy in letting ourselves believe in something wonderful, but not sensible. When I bowl, I firmly believe that absurd amounts of body english after the ball has left my hand are key to keeping the ball out of the gutter. I obviously “know” that this can’t possibly help, but it makes me really happy to indulge my belief that it does. I have friends who have chants that will make parking spaces open up, who carry umbrellas to prevent it from raining, or who have magical articles of clothing that are critical to the success of their favored sports team. All of these beliefs are obviously absurd, but satisfying nonetheless. …

I won’t defend my tolerance with well-reasoned arguments, since I have none. Other writers and readers of this blog have given this topic far more rigorous thought than I. Instead, the tolerance grows out of the same inkling that it would feel a bit small for me to take away my daughter’s belief in Santa before she was ready to stand without it.

Does this seem patronizing to someone with deeply held religious beliefs? I posted this comment on the original blog entry.

I would guess that someone who is deeply religious would either (a) find that this post fails to understand the basis of their religion or (b) see it as patronizing. As it happens, I agree with you about most of what people call religion. But I know people who take their religion much more seriously than any child takes Santa Clause and would find the comparison either uninformed or offensive.

Update: One of the other comments on Juliane's post included this link to Leo Buscaglia's sweet fable "The Fall Of Freddie The Leaf".

Brownback on faith and reason

During the Republican presidential debate a few weeks ago, Senator Brownback was one of three candidates who raised their hands when asked whether they did not believe in evolution. In this NYTimes Op-ed piece he attempts to redeem himself.

He starts off reasonably well, asserting that science and faith focus on different aspects of conceptualization.

The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions … .

But when it comes to applying that perspective to evolution, he loses it.

If [evolution] means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

If anything evolution is not deterministic. At its heart it is a stochastic process. But I doubt that saying that will make Brownback happy. He would probably also reject a materialistic, random vision of the world.

Furthermore, it's not clear what Brownback is rejecting when he rejects a materialistic vision of the world. Science is all about the material (i.e., natural, observable) world. If by calling the version of evolution that he rejects materialistic, Brownback is characterizing it as a scientific theory, then he is apparently rejecting evolution simply because it is a scientific theory. So if Brownback is rejecting evolution because it is a scientific theory, he has not at all redeemed himself with respect to his denial of evolution.

Furthermore, what does Brownback have in mind when he speaks of a guiding intelligence? Is this something that is observable as an empirical fact? If so, then it is the subject matter of science. But I doubt that Brownback has that in mind. If he instead is talking about something beyond empirical verification, i.e., the subject matter of faith, then it has nothing to do with either science or evolution. So again, if Brownback rejects evolution if it has no place for faith, then he again fails to redeem himself with respect to his denial of evolution.

The bottom line seems to be that Brownback says he rejects evolution unless it includes an element of faith. If by writing this op-ed piece he was attempting to make his position acceptable to people who respect science, he has failed.

Like all the rest of science, evolution is a theory of how the natural (i.e., material, observable) world works. The question is whether Brownback rejects a scientific theory if that theory doesn't include an element of faith.

The problem for Brownback is that science doesn't consider faith when making its theories. Science is quite simple. It observes the world and attempts to understand and explain what it sees. Of course it's not easy to do that. As Richard Feynman said, "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." But science is not about faith one way or the other. There is no such thing as faith-based science, much as Brownback would like there to be. (Similarly there is no such thing as ideology-based science, much as Bush would like there to be.)

If Brownback attempts to impose criteria on which scientific theories he will accept or reject based on something beyond the science itself — e.g., on whether or not it has room for a guiding intelligence — he will continue to get himself into intellectual trouble. Yet in attempting to sound like he accepts science without at the same time alienating his base of non-thinking faithful, that's just what he seems to be doing. It doesn't work.

Brownback failed live up to the separation of science and faith that he defined early in his essay. As he wrote

[Science] seeks to discover truths about [nature] and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions.

Science keeps its end of this bargain; it doesn't attempt to talk about spiritual truths. Brownback's version of faith fails to keep its end. According to Brownback, science is not acceptable unless it conforms to rules that his faith imposes. If Brownback were more vigilant in keeping his faith from interfering in the truths of science, we would all be much better off.

Andrew Sullivan on Faith

I find Andrew Sullivan quite brave in the final post of his debate with Sam Harris. He writes

You then ask why I should find it is so hard to imagine my non-existence? Your good points have made me realize more fully why I feel the way I do. The reason I find it so hard to imagine, I realize, is that I believe that God loves me. …

The reason I cannot conceive of my non-existence is because I have accepted, freely and sanely, the love of Jesus, and I have felt it, heard it, known it. He would never let me go. And by never, I mean eternally. And so I could never not exist and neither could any of the people I have known and loved.

I find it amazing for someone who lives in today's secular society to say something like that — Sullivan especially, who lives by his intellect. Yet there it is. As I said, I think it's quite brave of him to be as open about his faith as he is.

Of course I think he's mistaken. The mistake he makes in my view is quite simple. Sullivan is confusing his subjective experience (of feeling something, which he calls the love of God) with a fact about the world. Subjective experience, and especially our conceptualization of our subjective experience, is just that, subjective experience. It is something that goes on in our minds. This is not to take a dualist position. What goes on in our minds has a physical basis. But it's a level of abstraction above that physical basis. (This is a fairly long discussion. But a fundamental example here is that the software that implements the conceptual models we use to run our lives is a level of abstraction above the electrons flowing in computers. The electrons are required to run the software, but the conceptual models they implement, conceptual models like words on a blog, are not the same thing as electrons. See my papers on emergence for a fuller discussion.)

So the point is that the love that Sullivan feels cannot be taken to imply the existence of a lover. Yet that's exactly what he does. It's such a simple mistake that I'm surprised that neither he nor Harris comments on it. As I quote Richard Feynman as saying,

Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.

And as I quote myself as saying,

Buddhism and humanistic psychology are what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about our subjective experience.

We must treasure our subjective experience. That's what makes us human. But we can't automatically turn our subjective experience into beliefs about the world. As Blue says about our species,

Humans: smart enough to have ideas; foolish enough to believe them.

.

Faith

9 Chickweed Lane has a nice definition of faith.

Since they don't keep the images available indefinitely, here's the text.

Faith: the unknowable promoted to the irrefutable.

Religious epistemology: what to believe

The New York Times reports:

A documentary by the Discovery Channel claims to provide evidence that a crypt unearthed 27 years ago in Jerusalem contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth.

Moreover, it asserts that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had a son, named Judah, and that all three were buried together.

The claims were met with skepticism by several archaeologists and New Testament scholars, as well as outrage by some Christian leaders. The contention that Jesus was married, had a child and left behind his bones — suggesting he was not bodily resurrected — contradicts core Christian doctrine.

In an earlier post I asked how religious adherents decide which statements in their religious literature to believe. After all, very few people, even the most religious, believe everything they read in their religious literature. So would it matter (and I'm not passing judgement on this particular claim) whether this or some future archaeological find is determined to be the bones of Jesus?

Certainly physical resurrection is a core Christian doctrine. But Christians have given up many beliefs. I suspect that no one believes that the story of the Garden of Eden is literally true. Pardon my Biblical scholarship, but here is one version of Genesis, chapter 2.

2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

…

2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

2:22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

It might be harder to back away from a belief in physical resurrection than from the Garden of Eden. But would it destroy the faith of the faithful? Should it? The bigger question is: how do people decide which religious beliefs to accept?

It had always seemed to me that the term religious epistemology was an oxymoron. But clearly it isn't. There seem to be serious religious epistemological questions. I have no idea how they are dealt with or if anyone has even raised this question before.

More from Andrew Sullivan

In The Unclean Glass, Sullivan responds to Harris.

So let me put this in a context that might appeal to you, as a rational, empirical person. How do you explain Christianity's enduring power? Is it all a terrible, ugly blight on the human mind that must be thrown out in favor of "truly honest, fearless inquiry"? But wouldn't "truly honest, fearless inquiry" into religious faith begin by asking how Christianity came to exist at all?

Consider the evidence. I do not believe in a flying spaghetti monster. I believe in Jesus of Nazareth as God Incarnate. We have no evidence of a flying spaghetti monster. But we have solid evidence of Jesus' existence. We have a handful of independent historical artifacts that attest that a minor Jewish rabbi in first century Israel was executed by the Roman authorities. We have many Gospels that date from the period after his death testifying to the power of his message. Purported messiahs and crucifixions were not uncommon at the time. But only one of the thousands of Rome's victims is remembered in this way - and not just remembered but worshiped over two millennia later in the most advanced civilization the world has ever known. Does this not intrigue you? Have you never asked in the spirit of "truly honest, fearless inquiry": How on earth did this happen?

As a simple piece of historical inquiry, it's an astonishingly unlikely turn of events. Within a short period of time, not only was an obscure, failed Jewish rabbi remembered, his teachings became the official religion of the empire that had executed him. In the ensuing centuries, his life and teachings inspired many of the greatest minds, souls and talents humankind has ever produced. The collapse of the empire that elevated him did not lead to the disappearance of Christianity. It led to its eventual re-emergence as a vibrant, beautiful, rich experience for millions. Only Muhammad and the Buddha rival the story of this man - a fact that leads me to ask questions of both (particularly Buddhism), but which prompts you to condemn and anathematize all religious claims of any kind.

I think that Sullivan misunderstand probabilities. This reminds me of the football betting scam.

On the first weekend of the football season the scam artist sends out email messages to millions of people predicting the results of one of the games. In half the messages, he predicts team A will win. In the other half he predicts team A will not win.

On the second weekend, he send out messages to those who got the correct message the previous weekend.

He repeats this weekend after weekend until after a string of "correct predictions" he proposes to sell his final prediction to his remaining message recipients. Of course these people, having received a string of correct predictions will be hard pressed to resist.

One can make a similar case for Sullivan's story. As he points out, "Purported messiahs and crucifixions were not uncommon at the time. But only one of the thousands of Rome's victims is remembered in this way." Given the human inclination to believe, it's not unlikely that humanity will have adopted some religion. The particular religion it adopted (and it adopted a number of them) does not argue for the correctness of that religion. It does argue for a propensity of human beings to adopt beliefs. But that's not Sullivan's argument.

Elsewhere in the same piece, Sullivan attacks science as follows.

Science, your preferred mode of human understanding, is not contingency-free either. I know of no scientist who would claim so. It is shot through with contingency. It is the consequence of millennia of human thought, logic, experiment, argument, discovery, thesis, antithesis, synthesis - propelled by human curiosity, pride, obsession, and error. What science knows at any given moment is a function of everything it has ever known. And it is built and unbuilt by human minds with human weaknesses.

Of course he's right. As Richard Feynman, has said, "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." Science is not a doctrine, it is a search for understanding. It is a significant misunderstanding of science to portray it as comparable to religion as a way of viewing the world. Science is a commitment to do the best we can to understand the world, wherever that journey leads. Sullivan's religion appears to be a decision not to ask certain questions but to accept certain positions "on faith." These are not different doctrines or different bodies of knowledge, they are different kinds of approaches to examining one's life and one's understanding of nature.

Of course Sullivan may reply that his religion does not deny the truths of science. (He has said something like that elsewhere.) But in that case what is he claiming other than that the truths he argues for are beyond the scope of human reason and understanding. (He has said something like that elsewhere also.) But that brings us back to the position that everyone can accept. Sullivan is arguing for a position that has no intellectual consequences for the world in which we live. The only real consequences for religious beliefs with no implications about the natural world are the actions taken by believers as a result of holding those beliefs. Sullivan and Harris can then argue about the overall positive or negative effect on the world of religion.

It seems to me still open to debate whether religion has been a force for good or ill in the world. It's unlikely that this will be settled soon. To settle this question we will have to identify the distinct effects of religion and separate them from the way that human beings act without religion. Since we human beings seem to be built to construct and hang onto religious beliefs, I suspect that it will be extraordinarily difficult to characterize what a fully non-religious human being would act like. Perhaps it is a person who is open to questioning everything, if that is possible. Since there have probably been very few such human beings, a study of their effect on the world vs. the effect of everyone else is unlikely to yield much insight. The Buddha may be taken as prototypical of the person who is willing to question everything. How would one compare the effect of Buddhism to the effect of faith-oriented religions? Even that isn't a fair comparison since many Buddhist traditions have developed their own faith-like belief doctrines.

But all that is a completely different argument from one about whether religion includes anything comparable to what we would normally refer to as facts about nature. If both sides agree that religion does not assert any claimed facts about nature, then the two sides can agree on this common position. Those who find comfort in holding such beliefs may do so. Those who don't need not. Let there be peace among them.

More from Andrew Sullivan on his Faith

From Beliefnet.com

I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence - of a force beyond everything and the source of everything - goes so far back in my consciousness and memory that I can neither recall 'finding' this faith nor being taught it. So when I am asked to justify this belief, as you reasonably do, I am at a loss. At this layer of faith, the first critical layer, the layer that includes all religious people and many who call themselves spiritual rather than religious, I can offer no justification as such. I have just never experienced the ordeal of consciousness without it. It is the air I have always breathed. I meet atheists and am as baffled at their lack of faith - at this level - as you are at my attachment to it. …

I simply grew up from my earliest childhood in complete acceptance of this reality. … I have had two serious crises of faith - but neither came close to a loss of faith in God's existence. The first crisis was the worst. Almost fourteen years ago, it occurred to me not that God didn't exist - that never occurred to me - but that God might be evil. …

The sense that evil was the ultimate victor in the universe, that evil is the fundamental meaning of all of this, that "none of this cares for us," to use Larkin's simple phrase: this sense pervaded me for a few minutes and then somehow, suddenly, unprompted by any specific thought, just lifted. … [That moment] represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind all of this actually loved us, and even loved me. The calm I felt then; and the voice with no words I heard: this was truer than any proof I have ever conceded, any substance I have ever felt with my hands, any object I have seen with my eyes. …

You will ask: how do I know this was Jesus? Could it not be that it was a force beyond one, specific Jewish rabbi who lived two millennia ago and was executed by the Roman authorities? Yes, and no. I have lived with the voice of Jesus read to me, read by me, and spoken all around me my entire life - and I heard it that day. If I had been born before Jesus' birth, would I have realized this? Of course not. If I had been born in Thailand and raised a Buddhist, would I have interpreted this experience as a function of my Buddhist faith rather than Jesus? If I were a pilgrim right now in Iraq, would I attribute this epiphany to Allah? An honest answer has to be: almost certainly. …

I believe what I specifically believe - but since the mystery of the divine is so much greater than our human understanding, I am not in the business of claiming exclusive truth, let alone condemning those with different views of the divine as heretics or infidels. …

I should add that this unchosen belief in God's existence - the "gift" of faith - does not prompt me to lose all doubt in my faith, or to abandon questioning. I have wrestled with all sorts of questions about any number of doctrines that the hierarchy of the church has insisted upon.

These thoughts by Sullivan remind me of the following Buddhist story from Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, “Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart,” extracted in Everyday Mind, Jean Smith (ed).

One day, Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was traveling with his attendants through the villages of India.

He saw a man doing walking meditation. The man’s face was lit up in wonder.

He had just discovered something on the ground in front of him.

Mara's attendants asked what the man had found.

“A piece of the truth,” Mara replied.

“Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of the truth, O evil one?” his attendants asked.

“No,” Mara replied. “Right after this they usually make a belief out of it.”

Hence the line at the top of this blog.

Andrew Sullivan replies to Sam Harris

Sullivan agrees with me that science has a narrow scope and that there are truths that should not be categorized as scientific. Writing to Harris, he says,

Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true - and could never be proven true - by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.

Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve. But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.

Fine so far. But he goes on to say the following.

My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof, you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode.

That seems to me to be a non-sequitur. What do mathematics and history have to do with "the validity of religious faith?"

Sullivan then quotes himself as follows.

If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know - because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.

I find Sullivan's discussion quite frustrating. If there will always be something that eludes him, then I wish he would stop claiming to know it as true.

I keep coming back to subjective experience as the essence of what Sullivan is talking about. If only he would acknowledge it. I wouldn't use the term true in describing my experience of, for example red or pain. But this sort of direct experience is pretty much as real as it gets for us. That may be what Sullivan is talking about when he uses the terms true and higher truth for some of his experiences.

Furthermore, there is no way that the experience of red or pain can be communicated in words other than to appeal to someone else's experience of red or pain. My (and your) experience of red or pain is beyond categories. It sounds to me like that's what Sullivan is talking about. But instead of the "humility and doubt" that he claims for himself (elsewhere in his article), he claims knowledge of a "higher truth." In my view it is intellectually dishonest of him to misuse words like true in this way.

On his humble side Sullivan says,

I may believe these things, but I am aware that others may not; and I respect their own existential decision to believe something else.

Is that so? Does he really respect a decision to believe something he knows to be wrong? Does he, for example, respect the decision of someone to believe in Creationism or slavery or that the earth is flat or that the Holocaust didn't occur or that earth, air, fire and water are the ultimate constituents of matter? What does he mean by respecting such a decision? Perhaps he won't make it his business to change someone's mind. But what sort of respect does he grant such beliefs? If I knew people who believed such things, I would not have much respect for their intellectual depth, openness, honesty, or vigor.

Or is he saying that religious truth is so personal, so subjective, that it is up to each of us to find our own truth? If that's his point, I agree. But if that's his point, I wish (again) that he would stop talking about a higher truth that he knows. From that perspective we all have our higher truths — or don't have our higher truths. I don't claim to have any higher truths of this sort. Would he find my lack of a higher truth to be as valid as his higher truth?

Basically I'm finding it difficult to understand what Sullivan is really saying. He seems to me to be both confused and unwilling to confront his confusion. Instead of confronting his confusion he retreats to talking about an oxymoron like a truth beyond understanding. Doing so seems to me to be a way of closing down and refusing look for a way to talk about what he really wants to say.

Sullivan and Harris on magic, miracles, love, and compassion

In their continuing debate, Andrew Sullivan writes

For me, the deconstruction of a crude notion of Biblical inerrantism is not a path to a weaker faith but to a stronger one, unafraid of history, of truth, of the past, or the inevitable confusion that the very human followers of a divine intervention created after his death and resurrection. I find in this unsatisfying scriptural mess very human proof of a remarkable event - the most remarkable event, in my view - in the history of humankind.

Sam Harris responds that this sort of position—the claim that negative evidence is positive evidence—illustrates how the religious faithful fool themselves about what they know.

Sullivan wants to focus on issues of love and compassion. Most of his reply—the extract above was not a representative sample—is in that vein. But with statements like the above, he keeps opening the door to Harris' complaints about claims about truth. Sullivan and Harris are clearly talking about different things.

What I don't understand is why Sullivan keeps playing Harris' game — and necessarily losing. Why doesn't he stick to love and compassion and stop claiming to have proof of an impossible physical event? He is willing to give up other literal interpretations of Biblical texts. As he says, the Bible is not without factual error. Why can't he leave it at that and stop insulting the intelligence of those who don't believe in magic or miracles? It seems to me that this is at the heart of what's not really a debate.

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It didn't occur to me to ask this question until writing the preceding paragraph, but I now wonder how those who believe some but not all of the supernatural events described in the Bible decide which to believe and which not to believe. After all, most modern religious adherents don't take the Bible literally. How do they decide which parts to take literally and which parts to read metaphorically?

Francis Collins on stem cells and faith

Discover interviews Francis Collins in this month's print edition. Collins is the Director of the Human Genome Research Institute (part of the NIH). According to the article,

A devoted Christian, Collins defends evolution and embryonic stem cell research in his new book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Collins' opening answer seems to sum up his position.

We live in an unfortunate time when the Richard Dawkins crowd says religion is silly, and other people say evolution is silly. Most people don't agree with either extreme. The dominant position in the past for most working scientists was a middle ground: You use the tools of science to understand how nature works, but you also recognize that there are things outside of nature, namely God, for which the tools of science are not well designed to derive truth. The middle-ground position is that there is more than one way to find truth, and a fully formed effort to try to answer the most important questions would not limit you to the kinds of questions that science can answer, especially the eternal one: Why are we here, anyway?

I wish I had a chance to talk to Collins. My first question would be what he means by "there are things outside of nature." Normally we use the term nature to refer to the natural world. To say that there are things outside of that world is perplexing on its face. Are these things with which we can have contact? If so, what sort of contact? Does that contact involve natural phenomena? If not, is the implication that part of ourselves is outside nature as well? Otherwise, how does our contact with something outside nature enter our experience? In other words, is he saying that there is a transition from things outside nature to things within nature? If so, how and where does that transition occur? If not, i.e., if our experience of what is outside nature is also outside nature, what does that really mean? Isn't that selling nature short?

The second issue I would discuss with him is the meaning of truth. I've gone on about that in the past, so I won't repeat it other than to say that from my perspective truth refers to a relationship between an idea in our heads and nature. He seems to mean something different by the term.

I would agree with him about his final point, namely, that there are questions that science is not designed to answer. I don't think there is an answer to the question, "Why are we here?" So I wouldn't expect science to be able to answer it. I also don't think science is designed to answer ethical questions or questions about what is a good life.

In my view science has a very narrow scope. As Collins says, science is designed to answer questions about how nature works. Besides ethical and value questions, it is also not designed to answer mathematical questions (such as whether Goldbach's conjecture holds — in my view pure mathematics isn't science since science is the investigation of how the natural world works) or constructive questions (such as what would a computer program that can beat any human Go player look like—in my view the constructive arts like computer science and engineering aren't science either). Nor is science designed to answer predictive questions such as whether we will destroy civilization by our carelessness with the environment or whether a terrorist will explode a dirty nuclear bomb in the next 10 years.

Even though science is not designed to answer these questions, I wouldn't say that any of them are outside of nature. (I include mathematics as part of nature in that we do it, and we are part of nature. I don't know what Collin's position is on whether these question are part of nature.) So I don't see the fact that there are questions that science is not designed to answer an argument for a faith-based religion, which is the position he holds. These sorts of questions should be discussed and considered by those of us who are interested in them. (Some questions, such as the one about a dirty bomb, are unanswerable except by letting time pass.) That's a lot different from saying that faith provides answers for them.

Andrew Sullivan on faith and truth

Sam Harris, famous athiest, and Andrew Sullivan, famous author of the Conservative Soul, are debating religion. Here's how Sullivan sums up the issue so far.

Here's the nub, I think. You write:

I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not.

Agreed. As the Pope said last year, I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth. So I am perfectly happy to believe in evolution, for example, as the most powerful theory yet devised explaining human history and pre-history. I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe - since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator. I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith - since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.

It seems to me that Sullivan falls victim to what I had earlier called the anthropomorphism of thought. There is no such thing as truth except when it refers to a thought in one's mind. A thought may be true, but that's the only thing that can be true. The word true applies only to thoughts. To say that "Truth may be beyond our human understanding" may be poetic, but it doesn't have any real meaning as far as I'm concerned. Truth is exactly a matter of human understanding. There may certainly be experience which is beyond our current (or perhaps even future) ability to explain or conceptualize. The experience of red, for example, is not a matter of true; it's a matter of experiencing red. I wouldn't call that sort of thing "truth."

Similarly, to say that "God is truth" doesn't seem to me to be saying very much if truth has no concrete meaning. If God is truth in the traditional sense of truth, then Sullivan is saying that God is science or whatever science reveals. (He does seem to be saying something like that.) That may, of course, be a useful way to think about God since it certainly is not a good idea for religion to set God against science. So if one wants to say that the universe is wonderful and that whatever science finds out about it is all due to God then perhaps everyone can be happy. The scientists can say that such a statement is fine if it makes you feel good, but it doesn't mean a whole lot. The religionists can say that their faith is justified. I suspect that Sullivan means more than that, but I don't know what it is. I'm surprised to see Sullivan speak in such foggy terms. He is generally a clear thinker. I thought he would do a better job of representing the religious position.

P.S. Normally I include a picture of the person I'm writing about in blog entries. In this case, I couldn't resist. When I looked for a picture of Sullivan this is the first thing that came up. It was a picture that he had published on his blog. It's difficult to concentrate on the weighty subject matter of this blog piece with that picture there, isn't it.

Faith, belief, and knowing

Stephen Batchelor makes the point about faith and belief that I made a while ago.

The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe.

Tricycle has initiated a blog service that include Batchelor and a few others.

Benedict's homily

From a transcript of the homily Pope Benedict gave yesterday in Warsaw's Pilsudski Square as reported by Zenit News Agency

"Dear brothers and sisters, faith … is revealed as love that prompts us to promote the good inscribed by the Creator into the nature of every man and woman among us, into the personality of every other human being and into everything that exists in the world. Whoever believes and loves in this way becomes a builder of the true 'civilization of love.'

I looked up the homily because I was curious to know what he really said about faith and reality. In a statement I like to quote Lorenzo Albacete says

Benedict's conversations with nonbelievers have convinced him that their major concern about Christianity is not its 'other-worldiness' but the very opposite. For them, what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike.

I wanted to see whether Benedict stayed on the faith side in his homily or strayed to the truth side.

Benedict talked about the "the truth about God and about man" and he talked about "the truths of faith." But he did not claim that faith is a road to secular (i.e., scientific) truth. His message was that a good Christian lives a life of love as a result of faith and not that he believes any particular fact about the world. The core of his message was the passage quoted at the beginning, a sentiment everyone can subscribe to.

Knowledge and Love

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Lorenzo Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest whom I admire, plays spin doctor to Pope Benedict XVI's recent encyclical on love.

First he does a fine job of laying out the position of those who fear religion.

Benedict's conversations with nonbelievers have convinced him that their major concern about Christianity is not its 'other-worldiness' but the very opposite. For them, what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike.

The Christian faith faced a similar criticism before, Benedict has argued, when it first came into contact with the religious and philosophical world of the Roman Empire. The Roman world celebrated religious pluralism and was willing to welcome Christianity as an ethical or 'spiritual' option, but not as a source of truth about this world — that was considered to be the realm of the philosophers.

At that time, Christianity would not accept a place with the religions of the empire. It saw itself as a philosophy, as a path to knowledge about reality, and not primarily as a source of spiritual or ethical inspiration. The problem was that it claimed to be the only path to full knowledge about the meaning and purpose of life.

Indeed, throughout history Christians have used this claim to justify their intolerance of other views, even turning to violence in order to affirm and defend their idea of what is true. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, reminded us that this unhappy tendency was not limited to the Christian faith, but seems inherent in religious belief. If a god offers absolute truth, then those who disagree with that god's teachings are enemies of the truth, and thus harmful to society. It makes no difference whether the intolerance comes from a Christian god, who punishes countries and cities with natural disasters, or a Muslim god, who encourages terrorists to kill the innocent.

Right on target.

But then less convincingly he argues that the encyclical should be reassuring.

Hence the pope's insistence on the importance of emphasizing that God is, above all, love, and that love and truth are inseparable. "In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred, this message is both timely and significant," he wrote. "For this reason I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us, and which we in turn must share with others."

Albacete clearly sees the problem with a religion that insists that faith "is the source of knowledge about this world." But it's not at all clear to me that Benedict XVI agrees with this diagnosis.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Albacete wrote this piece not only as an attempt to present Benedict XVI's encyclical to the world as secular-friendly but also as an appeal to Benedict XVI himself, urging him to confirm the position that he doesn't hold faith to be a source of knowledge about the world. I doubt that Benedict XVI will respond positively to that appeal. I hope I'm wrong.

I also hope that other religious leaders would respond positively to Albacete's message. I'm not optimistic that many will.

Lorenzo Albacete

Lorenzo Albacete is a Catholic theologian that even an athiest can love—and who will love him in return. In a Slate video interview (no transcript is available), Albacete discusses what it takes (according to Catholic teaching) to get into heaven. It's not (he says) faith or belief. It's what's in one's heart. It's not good acts or right behavior that gets one into heaven. It's one's stand with respect to otherness—one's ability to respond to other people.

From the Slate profile

According to the New Testament, Jesus was born as a sign of God's love for humanity--sent to Earth so that "whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life," as the gospel of John puts it. Over the years, this prerequisite for admission to heaven--believing that Christ died for your sins--has been a strong incentive to become or remain a Christian. But if God really loves humankind, shouldn't He let, say, a good Buddhist or Jew through the pearly gates? God goes further than that, says Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete in this clip from his meaningoflife.tv interview: even atheists are eligible for salvation. This radical reinterpretation of scripture, Albacete notes later in the interview, has now become official Catholic doctrine (unbeknownst even to many Catholics). And it raises a question: Can the world's major religions coexist harmoniously without amending core beliefs--such as the belief that they've been blessed with a uniquely enlightening revelation?

All of which reminds me of an extract from the Dalai Lama's recent book that I've been so taken with that I've added it to this blog's sidebar.

A religious act is performed out of good motivation with sincere thought for the benefit of others. Religion is here and now in our daily lives. If we lead that life for the benefit of the world, this is the hallmark of a religious life.

This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart, is the temple; your philosophy is simple kindness.