Category Archives: philosophy

A classic hat

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In Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance there is a wonderful description of a debate between the narrator and a friend about ‘shim’, which leads to a long philosophical discussion of the difference between ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ outlooks upon life.

The friend is riding a shiny new BMW motorbike, but the handlebars are slipping. The narrator offers to fix the handlebars with a ‘shim’, ie a piece of metal to be inserted into the handlebar socket. The qualities needed for a ‘shim’ to work are that it should be soft enough to enable the handlebars to be gripped more consistently, without causing rust to build up over time. The narrator has the perfect material to hand – the aluminium from a Coke can. However the friend takes one look at the Coke can and reels with shock – there is no way that a piece of junk is going to be applied to the nice new BMW, so the friend simply ‘copes’ with wobbly handlebars for the rest of the journey.

The narrator draws a distinction from this: he was looking at the underlying properties of the material, ignoring their origin as part of a coke can – this he calls a ‘classic’ perspective. Whereas his friend was going on the surface qualities and ‘feel’ of the Coke can – a ‘romantic’ perspective. It’s not that one is better than the other, both are needed, but it means that sometimes there is a conflict between them, whereby something works wonderfully, but looks bad, or just silly.

Which brings me to my classic hat (which I was reminded of by the Seven Samurai)…

Schleiermacher and mysticism

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Came across this and was reminded strongly of my gripes about Robert Pirsig’s understanding of mysticism, which I wrote about here. I’d want to rephrase some of the points about Kant in that paper, but I think the basic argument has held up quite well. Nice to know I’m not the only sceptic on that front (and that much of the reverence towards “Eastern religion” is in fact a ‘return of the repressed’ – in other words, the Eastern philosophies, Kyoto school etc, were first influenced by Western philosophy, before they then became popular in the West as something ‘foreign’).

I’ve started up my ‘Learning Church’ sessions again, which are still – remarkably – popular. I’m going to do three sessions on Christian Mysticism next month, when all of the debates I have had on the MoQ list will bear fruit, I trust.

There are evil people in the world….

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“There are good people in the world. There are evil people in the world. Evil cannot always be repelled by incantations, by demonstrations, by social analysis or by psychoanalysis. Sometimes, in the last resort, it has to be confronted by force.”

An insight with which I am presently struggling.

Full article here.

hat tip to normblog, an excellent blog if you haven’t yet discovered it.

A Christian interpretation of the MoQ

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Something I posted to the MoQ discussion group earlier today.

[Ian Glendinning] challenged me to be more forthcoming about what I believe. My long posts last month in the ‘What it means to believe in the orthodox Christian God’ are part of an answer, but I suspect what you are after is some positive description of how I integrate the MoQ with my Christian understandings. So herewith a ‘Christian interpretation’ of the MoQ; an ‘interpretation’ because the MoQ as it stands is clearly non-Christian, indeed some parts are anti-Christian. However, I am comfortable that those bits can be amended (‘interpreted’) with a result which is still recognisably the MoQ, but which is compatible with Christianity, as I understand it.

So firstly I’ll sketch out how I understand the levels, and where they correspond with traditional Christian language. I’ll also say something about the nature of religious belief, concentrating on Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘grammar’, and I’ll say something about your understanding of theism. I’ll conclude with some very speculative points about the Trinity. I’ll try to be as bold and clear as possible, but with the caveat that this is very much a ‘work in progress’ as my thoughts are still evolving. It should answer what you need, though (I hope).

How I understand the levels:

– basic ‘engineering’ of how the levels work, I’m not aware of having any differences, as set out in my eudaimonic paper. So acceptance of patterns of value, ‘machine language interface’, “natural selection” (with quibbles about the word ‘natural’) etc etc

– level one, inorganic, no difference to standard MoQ (Christian language might call it ‘dust’);

– level two, biological, no difference to standard MoQ (Christian language might call it ‘the flesh’);

– level three, social, probably some distinct differences. I see the social realm as being a) the realm of language, in the Wittgensteinian sense, and b) the realm of group desires (in a Girardian sense, which I haven’t talked much about here). I think it is what Christian language refers to as ‘the world’; it’s also the realm of the ‘ego’, the ego being the agglomeration of social patterns which respond to the social pressures (eg flattery produces pride which encourages social cohesion). It is the realm of ‘other people’s desires’;

– level four, what I have called eudaimonic, major differences from the standard understanding of the MoQ, which you’re familiar with. Christian language would call this the level of the ‘soul’. I see this as the arena of ‘autonomous judgement’, by which I mean it is not conditioned by the social patterns. I see the ego (social patterns) as the ‘machine language interface’ between levels 3 and 4. I see the extent to which that ego becomes transparent to Quality as a) the expression/ salvation of ‘soul’, and b) the development of ‘freedom’ (I accept Pirsig’s account of free will, which I think is essentially a restatement of Augustine). This is not a discrete level, in that the ‘top’ is open to Quality in a way the others are not (pragmatically, not theoretically). I think the language of Christian mysticism maps comfortably onto this understanding, ie the soul needs to be stripped bare of all the level 2 and level 3 influences, at which point it becomes ‘transparent’ to God (quality), achieves union with God, expresses the nature of God etc.

Now, a bit more about religious language. What I often ‘rail’ about, concerning the misunderstandings of Christianity, is that the grammar of religious faith is misunderstood. That is, religious language does not function in the way that scientific language functions, and to construe religious language as making scientific claims is to necessarily misinterpret it.

Scientific language grew out of Christian language (the shrub before the tree) but has incorporated certain mistakes _within_Christian_theology_ . In other words, the mistake about the grammar of religious language happened first within Christianity itself, and has been contained within the development of science on what might be called a ‘genetic’ basis.

I would characterise the difference like this: the ‘grammar’ of scientific discourse is abstract; the ‘grammar’ of religious discourse is ‘thick’ or ‘concrete’. By which I mean that the claims which science makes (*claims*) are for independence from social context. Whereas I see religious language as necessarily bound up with social context, they can’t be understood apart from the social context, and, to a very great extent, they are concerned with the structuring and maintenance of the social order. Religious language gains its meaning from its use in the various local language games that make up the practice of religious faith. It is less concerned with correct external reference than with the orientation of behaviour, and therefore life. However, pursuing that latter necessarily involves some external reference, but it’s not the primary source or motivation for religious language (as it is for scientific language). This religious language can be oriented in three ways: suppression of level 2 patterns, maintenance of level 3 patterns, and enabling of level 4 patterns. I think different religions can be evaluated on the basis of how well they do these three things.

Moreover, religious language is necessarily mythological, ie narrative based. As you know I don’t accept the scientific claims for being independent of social context; what I think has happened is that one mythology (rich and religious) has been replaced by another mythology (thin and ‘scientific’) – which is actually responsible for the ills which Pirsig diagnoses. Any language which overcomes those ills is necessarily religious and mythological.

So religious language is necessarily, limited, local and partial. Yet I would also insist that it is possible to discriminate between religious languages and determine which are better and which worse. Which is what I think gave rise to level 4 in the first place, as discussed in my eudaimonia paper. I think that the different religious languages can be assessed by their contribution to human flourishing, or, more generally, by their Quality.

Level 4 I see as necessarily wordless. This is a corollary of the private language argument that I mentioned, from Wittgenstein, which demonstrates that language is necessarily shareable, ie it is a social level phenomenon. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for higher purposes, what it does mean, I think, is that it cannot escape being level 3. In the same way that agriculture can be a biological phenomenon organised by the social level, I think that many languages (eg science and mathematics) are level 3 phenomena organised by level 4 understandings. Language cannot encapsulate level 4, for this reason. Hence, ‘the finger pointing at the moon’.

I see level 4 as being fundamentally oriented from the virtues; the virtues being those static patterns which enable resistance to social pressures (honesty and integrity etc – what the Sophists were teaching, originally). I see the various intellectual patterns like SOM, mathematics, Aristotelean logic – but also theatre, art, film, poetry (especially poetry) – as being the fruits of those virtues. Those virtues I think are the sinews of the soul; the soul being simply a level 4 pattern, more or less open to Quality (= salvation?).

The God question. I see Quality as one of the names of God, as final and accurate as calling God Father or Rock (no more, no less). I think it has advantages in terms of healing the breach between science and faith, I think it has consequent disadvantages in terms of actually living out the consequences of pursuing Quality. So in general terms I see no conflict between MoQ and belief in God, on this score.

You describe God as “a purposeful, willful, intentional, transcendent “intelligent” causal entity”. Firstly, God is not an entity. Hang on to the point I made before about God never being a member of a class. We know what an entity is – God is not one. Here we come up against ‘the limits of language’, in that no language can capture what the word ‘God’ refers to (which might suggest that construing the word ‘God’ on the model of reference is likely to mislead..) Now I’m not clear on where the modifiers, once you’ve let go of ‘entity’, are different between Quality and God, if at all. I’ll think further about this point and come back to it.

Finally some more specific things about intepreting Christianity using the language of the MoQ.

Jesus I see as someone who was wholly open to Quality, in such a way that everything he did expressed that Quality. He did this without breaking any of the social level patterns which had formed him (Pirsig’s point that you don’t need to destroy to transcend). This is what Christians mean when they talk about him being ‘without sin’.

The crucifixion is the conflict between level 3 and level 4 (and absolutely essential for understanding the claims of Christianity).

The resurrection a demonstration that the destruction of level 2 by level 3 makes no impact on level 4.

The Eucharist is the level 3 rite which reaffirms the establishment of level 4 (through crucifixion and resurrection), and provides the most important virtues for the growth of level 4 in a person (food for the soul).

I think there are some ways to correlate the language of the Trinity with the MoQ ‘Trinity’ of Quality – SQ – DQ, ie that ‘Quality’ is God the Father, SQ is God the Son (the visible form, fully expressing all four levels); DQ is the Spirit. We are to be so caught up in DQ that we become wholly open to Quality and thereby come to resemble Jesus in expressing SQ on all the levels. And they are all the same, ie our eventual end is to become identical with Quality, indistinguishable from it.

The mystical path I see as the cultivation of level 4. That’s what I see Christianity as all about.

I see the language of ‘immediate experience’ as the importation of a level 3 mythology (the social respectability of ’empiricism’, and all the fruits following from it) to function as a ‘pseudo-level 4’, that is, the pursuit of a ‘mystical experience’ is delusional (anti-mystical) and tied up with the ‘thin’ social practices associated with scientific influence. I think it is precisely a social pattern. I think the ‘orthodox’ account of level 4 as intellectual is a perpetuation of Platonic mythology, resulting in a form of gnosticism (a correct understanding provides salvation) – this is where the MoQ as presently constituted tries to replace religion, and is what lies behind my ‘cult’ allegation. (Tho’ let’s be clear, I only think there are a handful of people who actually DO let the MoQ function as a religion. They’re the most Platonist interpreters).

I see the mystical as the cultivation of wisdom. Hence the emphasis on honesty etc as the foundation for what comes later.

I think there are lots of other things that could be said, but that’s probably enough for now. I hope that gives you a much clearer idea of ‘where I’m coming from’.

Regards
Sam
“I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think.” – Marshall McLuhan

SOL #1.4: Logic

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Humans are rational animals, that is, we are creatures that can apply a mental faculty to the understanding of events and actions. This has its roots in the very biological need to perceive the necessary consequences of certain actions: IF I put my hand in the fire, THEN I will be burnt. IF I go to the waterhole at dusk, THEN I might be able to kill one of the animals drinking there, AND I might gain some food. This faculty, this capacity to reason, is indeed a marvellous attribute.

In the paragraph above, I capitalised certain words: IF, THEN, AND. Computer programmers might recognise them as logical commands – in other words, they are commands which a computer can execute. The computer knows what to do when a program includes such terms – that is how it has been set up and programmed – and the computer will happily pursue such commands for as long as the person doing the programming wishes it to. When I was younger I learnt how to program computers using the language BASIC, which included terms like these. One of the most important elements in the programming was the IF…THEN command. This allowed the computer to make ‘choices’ according to certain established criteria. Perhaps the program wanted to ask the observer to press a certain key to indicate ‘yes’ and another key to indicate ‘no’ as an answer to the question that the computer was asking. The programmer could then write IF (keypress = ‘Y’) THEN do one thing, but IF (keypress = ‘N’) THEN do another thing. Of course, my language there was a little inaccurate – the computer is not making a real choice – it is simply following the predetermined path laid down by the programmer. The programmer wanted to give the user of a program a choice at this point, and has instructed the computer to react to that choice in the appropriate way.

What I would like to bring out from this example is the way that reason follows a set pattern – we even have the phrase ‘a chain of reasoning’ to talk about such patterns – and a computer program is a very clear example of the pattern in which reasoning functions. This pattern which reason follows has its own name: logic, and reason and logic are essentially linked. Logic is the study of these patterns or chains of reasoning, and the usefulness of logic lies in the way that it can show how some chains work (i.e. are ‘valid’) and some chains do not. To go back to the example of a computer program, the line of programming could read: IF (keypress = ‘Y’) THEN do such and such ELSE IF (keypress = ‘Y’) THEN do some other thing. When the computer follows the program and gets to this point then it will become stuck and ‘crash’. This is because the command has told it to do two different things at the same time. If the user presses the Y key then both sides of the argument are satisfied – and the computer will have to do both!

~~~

Another way of thinking about this same point is to talk about consistency. In the example of bad programming above, the source of the difficulty was that ‘Y’ was given as the ‘keypress’ in both cases. One or other should have been ‘N’ – or, even, ‘any other keypress’. This line of programming was therefore inconsistent – it was asking the computer to do two different things if the keypress was ‘Y’. Let’s go back to the waterhole – imagine a brain set up like a computer, with instruction sets that stated: IF it rained yesterday THEN go to waterhole today at dusk, but also, IF it rained yesterday, gather fruit from trees. In this situation, the person concerned is given two incompatible instructions – gather fruit or go to the waterhole? Chances are the poor individual will just stay where they are, unable to reconcile the contradiction, until some other impulse takes over and the situation changes.

To put this in the language of logic, the program at this point is invalid, and in computer programming to call a program ‘invalid’ is to say that there is something wrong with it, that it has a ‘bug’. Although the situation gets much more complicated with today’s software, in essence this is what happens when any computer crashes – it is trying to carry out commands that don’t ‘make sense’. The millennium bug caused some concern a little while ago – this was, in principle, just such an example of invalid programming. Computers were set up to recognise dates by only the last two numbers in the year – so 1999 was simply ‘99’, for example. This was because the computers were programmed in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the assumption was made (either consciously or unconsciously) that they would be changed before the year 2000 came along. So, in the programming, a certain assumption was built in – all years would be 19xx, where the xx was the date supplied by the user. The millennium bug happened because this assumption became untrue from the year 2000 onwards. Consequences followed from this mistake, which at some point were believed to be on the scale of a minor apocalypse, although in practice we were spared such a judgement.

~~~

So logic is really a way of working out if something makes sense, either in terms of an argument being able to follow on properly (like a computer program) or in terms of one thing being consistent with another. Consider the following, which is something of a classic:

1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
Therefore,
3. Socrates is mortal.

This is an argument: that is, it is the assertion of one item (3) as a consequence of the assertion of two other items (1 & 2). It is saying: because 1 & 2, therefore 3. In some ways it is a similar argument to a computer program which uses IF…THEN language. IF 1 & 2, THEN 3. As it happens, this argument is a valid argument, and it is worth unpicking why it is valid, and precisely what it means to say that the argument is valid.

The first item, 1, defines an attribute of men, stating that they are mortal. The second item, 2, states that Socrates belongs to the class of men. The third item draws the logical consequence of these two items: Socrates is a man and therefore shares the attribute that all men share – mortality. As such, Socrates is mortal. To say that this argument is valid is to say that the conclusion follows from the premises, that it makes sense. If it were a computer program you would say that it didn’t have any bugs in it. In this argument, the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises (philosophers say that the conclusion can be deduced from the premises) – in other words it has to be the case that, IF 1 & 2 are true, THEN 3 also has to be true. There are no situations in which 1 & 2 are true, and 3 is not. This is what is meant by a valid argument: that the logic is sound, there are no ‘bugs’.

~~~

However, although interesting, this is not ultimately very exciting. This is because logic and valid argument tell us nothing about truth, or how things are in the world. Consider the following adaptation of the above argument:

1. All men are born with two heads
2. Socrates is a man
Therefore,
3. Socrates was born with two heads.

In terms of the logic of this argument, there is nothing to choose between this argument and the original; they are both equally valid. Yet the first argument says something true, the second says something that is not true. This is because logic is not concerned with truth or falsehood, but only with consistency and the validity of arguments. The difference between these two arguments – one says that all men are mortal, the other says that all men are born with two heads – is not something that logic can be employed to decide between. Whether men are born with two heads or not is not a question about the validity of a particular argument but about what is the case – is it true that all men are born with two heads? In the normal course of events, this is a question that would be answered by looking at the evidence of our senses – have we tended to see men always born with two heads? Are one-headed men carrying wounds where one head was taken away at birth?

In order to establish the truth in this situation, then, we would need to employ a different tool of our understanding. This is a crucial point to bear in mind: logic is a tool, it is not the source of all enlightenment. Think of the tools in a tool-box; there is a hammer, a chisel, a hacksaw, a spanner. It would not be appropriate to use a spanner to separate a plank of wood into two halves – there you should use a saw. In a similar way, although logic is a wonderful and essential part of human life, it is not the only tool that we have when we are reflecting upon the true nature of our world – it must be used in the correct place, in the correct way, and not elsewhere.

~~~

So can we use logic to determine which account is the best, between Dawkins, Gould and all the others? Well, it will certainly assist (it might point out some self-contradictions in an argument), but on its own it is not much help. That is for the simple reason that any position you like can be made logically coherent, if a person is prepared to take the consequences. As pointed out above, something can be perfectly logically valid and still be untrue (Socrates has two heads). Consider: although I have never met someone who believes that the earth is flat, I am assured that there is a ‘flat-earth society’, whose members believe that the earth is not a sphere in orbit around the sun, but is instead a flat disc, with edges, and that it is possible to fall off the edge. You might think that it is impossible to make such a belief consistent, that it is impossible to be a logically consistent believer in a flat earth. Yet what arguments would be persuasive? Pictures of the earth as a globe could be fabricated; stories of travel around the world might be fables to lure the unwary; various physical tests could be written off as optical illusions. Even if it were possible to take such a believer out into space so that they could see for themselves that the earth is a globe – “Look! See! It IS round!!” – that would not necessarily succeed. The believer could say “I have been drugged; you have set up a theme park providing this remarkable illusion. My eyes see a globe, but I do not believe my eyes…” And so on.

You can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink. So our analysis must shift to the second of our standard criteria: questions of evidence. Even if we cannot reach a logically conclusive argument, we could at least gather together as much relevant evidence as possible and then let people make their own conclusions – and surely, there aren’t many people prepared to place logical consistency ahead of the straightforward evidence of their senses?

SOL #1.3: Gould, Intelligent Design, Creationism

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The first set of objections is associated with the name of the late Stephen Jay Gould, and this approach goes by the name of ‘punctuated equilibrium’. It should be stressed that – as Richard Dawkins himself has written, “the theory of punctuated equilibrium lies firmly within the neo-Darwinian synthesis.” The difference between Dawkins and Gould is rather technical, but illuminating nonetheless. ‘Orthodox’ neo-Darwinism – by which I mean that understanding described above, associated with Dawkins – asserts that the pressure which natural selection exerts is a gradual process; that species change in small amounts over vast stretches of time; and that this selection pressure operates through the genetic inheritance passed on from parent to child. Gould disputes this emphasis upon the gene – for him, not only is there a significant amount of luck involved in inheritance, but the pressures of natural selection bear down upon the individuals, not just their genes. Put differently Gould disputes the ‘genetic determinacy’ associated with the orthodox neo-Darwinian account. For Gould, much of Dawkins’ understanding is accepted, but Gould’s outlook allows more room for random chance (e.g. asteroid impacts), and also a slightly different notion of what science can and cannot achieve. For Gould science is not immune to cultural influences, and there is much in human history that cannot be sufficiently explained by reference to natural selection, or indeed, by any scientific outlook. Gould’s writings take much from the realms of literature, history and religion – and are much richer as a result.

The second set of objections is one which is presently gaining ground in the United States of America, and comes in two varieties – ‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design’. Put simply, these understandings of the universe derive from a more or less literal rendering of chapter one of the Book of Genesis in the Bible, so that the source of the diversity of life as we experience it is explained as a choice by God. Depending on the particular type of creation science advocated, the earth is seen to be only a few thousand years old, and the variation of life experienced is explained by describing the inexhaustible creativity of God. Intelligent design is a slightly different account, although it shares some assumptions; it accepts that the earth has existed for billions of years, but sees the change in different species – and most particularly the development of human intelligence – as something which results from a direct intervention in the universe by God. These approaches argue that the intelligent cause can be identified with the Judaeo-Christian deity, the ‘God of the Bible’. Their understanding grants authority to a religious text and a tradition of interpretation of that text, and they point out the various problems with the theory of evolution, which, on their accounting, leave room for that traditional religious commitment. The creation scientists go one step beyond the intelligent design theorists, in that their tradition of interpreting the Bible requires a strictly literal rendering of the account of creation given in the Book of Genesis. They reject the notions of natural selection, evolution, and indeed the generally accepted timescale provided by modern science, considering that the universe is only some few thousand years old.

How are we to determine the truth between these different accounts? The conventional view – and I imagine the one that Professor Dawkins would advocate – would be to examine each point of view and ask: does this point of view make sense, is it logically consistent? And then ask: what is the evidence for each point of view? Which point of view is best supported?

So let us look at logic and evidence.

SOL #1.1: Beginning from Richard Dawkins

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Chapter One – The story of creation

“Very intelligent and well-educated people believe in the story of creation in the Bible, while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds of the latter are well known to the former.” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §336)

“The popular scientific books by our scientists aren’t the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.” (Wittgenstein, 1942)

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.52)

~~~

I read this in ‘The Independent’ newspaper of 20 February, 2003. Richard Dawkins is responding to questions sent in by readers of the newspaper.

Did you have a Pauline conversion to atheism? Or did your beliefs evolve more slowly over time? What changed your mind?
(Adam Elford, Northampton)

I had a normal, decent Anglican upbringing, which is to say that I was never brainwashed as I might have been had I been brought up in another faith.

I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn’t all be right, so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realised the shattering complexity and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since.

…

If, when you die, you find yourself unexpectedly at the Pearly Gates, what would you say to St Peter?
(Mark Richards, by e-mail)

OK, I was wrong. But I was wrong for the right reasons. Those guys in there were right. But just look at their reasons.

Richard Dawkins is possibly the most prominent atheist in England. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He has written many books about the nature and implications of evolutionary theory, books marked by their lucidity and intellectual verve. He is clearly a very intelligent man with a gift for communicating difficult ideas in an accessible way. Unfortunately, almost everything that he has ever said about Christianity is false.

~~~

This is not entirely Professor Dawkins’ fault. His understanding of Christianity is a very common one. Yet, as I am sure that Professor Dawkins’ would agree, the fact that many people hold such a common understanding does not mean that it is the correct understanding. As the joke has it: a hundred thousand lemmings cannot be wrong.

~~~

My point is not that Dawkins believes Christianity is about believing one thing, whereas in truth Christianity is about believing something else. No: although beliefs have their place, my disagreement with the Professor is more basic than this. Dawkins – in common with many people on both sides of the Christian/atheist divide – considers that the defining characteristic of a Christian is the acceptance of certain beliefs. This I deny. Christianity is not about belief in certain propositions, it is about the orientation of your life.

~~~

Dawkins has a very distinct conception of what sort of thing religious faith is. He writes in ‘The Selfish Gene’:

‘Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.’

In a footnote to this passage he expands:

‘But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn’t matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway… I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed.’

Dawkins goes on to say:

‘…faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness… Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings… What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.’

According to the Dawkins conception, then, faith is ‘blind’, and not open to rational debate. Justifiable beliefs must rest upon a rational account of the world, where there is recourse to publicly available evidence and harmony with our discoveries and experience. In other words, they must be scientific answers.

Faith and science are therefore the same sort of thing. They are both beliefs about the world. They have the same logical status. The difference between them is one of rational legitimacy. Religious beliefs cannot be supported by appeals to reason or evidence. Scientific beliefs can. Therefore, scientific beliefs are superior to religious beliefs.

This is the key mistake, for religious beliefs and scientific beliefs are not at all the same sort of thing.

For my friends

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Hello my friend.

You and I have had many conversations in this last decade, for we share significant interests – not least an enjoyment of ‘popular science’. Yet I have so far been unable to explain how and why it is that I see no conflict between science and my Christian faith; or, to make that point more strongly, why it is that I consider my Christian faith to include and perfect science – to be a more sophisticated and complete understanding than science could ever offer.

For you, things are different. You find it impossible to believe the sorts of things that (you think) Christians are required to believe, even though you are not hostile to religions in general. You enjoy debating religious questions, many of your best friends are Christians, and yet you cannot see a way to accept Christianity without at the same time surrendering your intellectual integrity. For surely Christianity is historically discredited – a threadbare stitching together of superstition and supernatural nonsense, compromised by papal arrogance and protestant bigotry, implicated in wholesale slaughter and the denial of our deepest human values. Centrally, Christianity and so many Christians seem transparently unreasonable, both in belief and behaviour. You do not consider it an accident that Galileo was condemned, and deep down, I suspect you think that those Christians whom you respect are worthy of respect in so far as they are less whole-hearted in their faith; they are ‘liberal’ and accommodating to the modern world.

I do not deny that, as a Christian reflecting on Christian history, there is much cause for shame and repentance. Yet I would like to explain why I do not abandon my faith – to retell the story of Christian history in such a way that the causes of such evil are laid bare, leaving, in consequence, a clearer understanding of what Christianity actually is – and, moreover, a clearer understanding of science, that pattern of thinking with which Christianity has been struggling like Cain with Abel.

I can summarise our differences quite easily: you consider Christianity to be, at root, built around certain supernatural beliefs. I deny this – strongly – for I consider Christianity to be, at root, built around certain mystical practices, which bear fruit in a holy life. My hope that I can explain Christianity to you is founded on the belief that we would both recognise such a holy life when we saw it.

To justify these comments is the endeavour of the book that you hold in your hand. I have come to realise that I need this large canvas on which to paint my portrait of Christian faith. As a portrait it reflects my own understandings and emphases; it is a sketch, not an exhaustive analysis. I have deliberately tried to use broad and bold brushstrokes and not to become distracted by academic detail, for both practical and principled reasons. As will become clear, I do not believe that the academic method is appropriate in all forms of inquiry, indeed, it can be radically counter-productive. Nor is this book meant to be a ‘final answer’ to our questions – on the contrary, it is an invitation to conversation, a conversation at a deeper level than many of our favourite ‘popular science’ writers have shown themselves able to achieve. Perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to develop a more rigorous ‘summa’, but that is not in my hands – if it is God’s will, then he will ‘make it so’. In the meantime, I offer this brief essay to you, with my love and prayers.

The first two chapters of my book can be downloaded here

I’m going to write it on-line, in small chunks. Feeback welcome :o)

The religion of metaphysics

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As you may be aware, I spend too much time arguing philosophy at a place called MD, stemming from my falling in love with the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ in my late teens. I’ve posted a few times about it (they’re the really long ones that don’t get read. This’ll be another).

There was an academic conference at Liverpool University recently, filmed by a crew from the BBC, attended by Robert Pirsig (author of ZMM) and convened by Anthony McWatt, who had just been awarded his PhD for work on Pirsig’s ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. However, it turns out that one of the papers for the conference was a hoax. See here.

This makes me wonder whether all the time and effort that I have put into the MoQ over the last few years is worthwhile (not the first time I’ve wondered that). Grounds for doubt are:
– the MoQ discussion group often functions like an evangelical cult;
– if you accept Wittgenstein (as I do) then what are you doing with ‘metaphysics’ anyway?
– haven’t I got more important things to do?
– aren’t there some severe flaws in Pirsig’s presentation, which make the whole thing useless?

Well, sort of. Maybe I do need to scale back my involvement (or refocus it on a more academically significant outlet). But what this episode has crystallised for me is the way in which metaphysics functions as a religion (and this is where I reconcile the MoQ with Wittgenstein).

Consider the role of agriculture in a human economy. At the subsistence level agriculture simply is the economy, there is no distinction between the two. As an economy develops and become more affluent then part of the economy becomes non-agricultural and the economy can support other things. In our modern economy agriculture is a very small percentage of the whole economy, most economic activity is non agricultural and that is where most development takes place. Importantly, there is influence from the non-agricultural sector to the agricultural, for example scientific advances can help to increase crop yields. However, even though agriculture is a very small part of the economy, the economy cannot exist without agriculture, and remains dominated by it. Unless people are fed they will die, and the sophisticated economy supported by agriculture would collapse (which is something that elements of our culture appear to have forgotten). In this analogy, the whole economy represents our lived experience; the agricultural economy represents our bodily or instinctual nature; the non-agricultural sector represents our understanding, our theorising – our linguistic forms of life in all their variety (in MoQ language, the agricultural is the biological level, the non-agricultural is the social and intellectual).

As I understand Wittgenstein he is trying to argue that the mistake made by philosophers is to assume that the non-agricultural economy is all that there is, in other words he wants to resist the attempt to give a global explanation of our life. This is because these explanations are by their very nature linguistic products, products of our understanding, and are therefore irretrievably part of the ‘non-agricultural sector’. When Wittgenstein talks about a practice having ‘depth’ he is referring to the fact that some practices involve more of us than our conceptual understanding, they resonate with our bodily and instinctual nature. With his remarks on Frazer he is not arguing that all ritual is reducible to this instinct; he is trying to remind us of an inescapable part of ritual experience. Most importantly I don’t think for a moment that Wittgenstein would wish to deny the importance of conceptual reflection upon a ritual, or the way in which ritual can develop into liturgy through the benefit of prayerful consideration. Just as there is interaction between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors of an economy, so too can there be interaction between our intellectual and instinctual natures.

One implication of this is that for Wittgenstein we will never be able to gain a complete understanding of our experience. This seems to me to be the basis of his ‘religious point of view’, for his position seems ultimately to be apophatic. The roots of our religious and moral life lie outside the realm of the conceptually understandable, and can never be fully integrated within a conceptual understanding. In other words, it is impossible to say anything final about God: ‘If such a book were written it would immediately explode the whole world’.

Wittgenstein is concerned to provoke a remembrance of the importance of agriculture within the economy; that is, of our bodily nature in our humanity. He is not concerned to say that all economic activity is agricultural, or that all our humanity is bodily. This bodiliness is far reaching in its scope: ‘the way in which animals are similar to and different from one another and in relation to man, the phenomena of death, birth and sexual life, in short, everything we observe around us, year in and year out’ . For Wittgenstein we cannot understand our language until we understand our embodiment, and it is in understanding our embodiment that we gain a proper understanding of our language. There are (of course) languages that are remote from our bodiliness – eg maths and logic – but for our purposes, in religion especially, we need to be reminded of what actually happens when religious language is used.

Wittgenstein saw the search for an overarching explanation as ultimately pathological. I understand him to be saying that metaphysics is the attempt to understand conceptually that which will always be beyond our understanding: an attempt by the non-agricultural sector to describe the agricultural sector in non-agricultural terms, to return to my analogy. What Wittgenstein is trying to do is to encourage us to recognise the primacy of our non-conceptually mediated bodily life in order that our language does not try and extend beyond itself. Metaphysics understood as a proclamation ‘this is how things are’ is inevitably totalising. Metaphysics understood as poetic ‘this is where I stand (and this is how it looks from here)’ is ultimately religious, a form of theology, and it allows for a proper recognition and validation of our human nature which does not prioritise ratiocination. It allows for the discovery of the new – it allows room for the Holy Spirit. It is in this sense that ‘all that philosophy can do is destroy idols’ for an idol is that which is put into the place of God, whether a golden calf or a metaphysical system.

By limiting, from within, what philosophy can actually do Wittgenstein allows room for our conceptions to be altered. It is the closed conceptual scheme which is idolatrous – and it is the closed conceptual scheme that the MoQ was slowly becoming. As Struan Hellier put it, some language was used pejoratively for those who hadn’t ‘found salvation’ in the MoQ. But it is a perennial human tendency to seek salvation, to seek an understanding that gives peace to our hearts and minds. Trouble is, in a culture which has a terrible blind spot where it’s own religion (Christianity) is concerned, that religious thirst will be slaked in stagnant water.

What can be salvaged? Or, what do I actually think the MoQ is worth? I would pick out two things that have stood the test of time for me. The first is the way that it integrates scientific understandings with wider artistic understandings. There are commonalities across the different fields, and I think the language of ‘Quality’ is an excellent unifying term. Secondly, the levels – how higher levels are built up out of the lower levels, that still makes profound sense to me. But other stuff, especially grounding it all on “experience” (pretending to be ’empirical’) and using the phrase “Dynamic Quality” in a parallel way to how religious people use ‘God’ – all that is garbage, from my point of view.

Interesting (for me at least). I wonder where it’ll go from here.

Dust and bones

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A post from the MD discussions that I take part in:
~~~
DMB,

Sam is totally identified with his religion. It’s his tightly held persona. He’s a Christian priest and it suits his needs. Strip Sam of his persona and you have dust and bones. But Sam has Value, I’m sure like Bono he performs good deeds.

I know you like Sam. I do too.

Marsha
~~~

I’ve definitely pushed the boat out in the MD discussions recently. I’ve always previously kept my most deeply held beliefs under a tight(ish) rein – because it’s a secular forum, so I have never felt it that appropriate to come right out and say ‘hey, I’m a Christian, I really do believe this stuff’. But after one comment from a newbie, which – I thought – portrayed me as a hypocrite, I felt the need to lay my cards down on the table. This is what I said:

I would place my understanding of God within the Christian tradition, specifically, in the context of classical Christian mysticism. So to explain some of the core sense of that, I’ll need to use two words ‘cataphatic’ and ‘apophatic’. (I’ve written about this to DMB before, but probably nobody else noticed).

Can God be spoken about or not? The cataphatic answers the question positively, saying that there are things which can truly be said about God – so the language used in the Bible to talk about God is meaningful language. And it is also possible to say true things about what God is not. So God is NOT X, Y or Z. In contrast, the apophatic tradition answers this question negatively, so apophatic mysticism is the ‘negative’ tradition, which says ‘not this, not that’ etc. Specifically, it says that all language about God is meaningless so we should shut up and not ‘yelp about God’.

The important thing to know is that these two answers to the question are siamese twins, rather like yin and yang, and they cannot exist without the other. The mainstream mystics in the western tradition (Denys, Eckhart, Julian of Norwich etc) have their different emphases and ‘flavours’ but in each case the language of their writings is predicated on the truth of both answers. So first there is the cataphatic response to the question, and there is an overflowing abundance of language referring to God, eg saying ‘God is light’ and then, in dialectical movement, there is the negation of this, eg saying God is darkness (this is STILL the cataphatic, NB), and then – *and this is the key ‘apophatic’ moment* – this distinction of positive and negative is itself negated by saying ‘God is dazzling darkness’.

So, just to ensure this is understood, the cataphatic is *both* statements (God is light, God is darkness) and the apophatic is the paradox *beyond* the statements, that state of understanding or enlightenment when the soul has absorbed or developed the truth about God. In other words, the mystical writers in the Western tradition are using the natural language of theology, for “Good theology… leads to that silence which is only found on the other side of a general linguistic embarrassment” (Denys Turner). It is the difference between knowing nothing (the state of innocence) and knowing that you know nothing (the state of wisdom) – and the mystical tradition is a way of enabling the journey from the one to the other, _through_ the dialectic of cataphatic and apophatic.

(This mystical tradition, just to head off a possible criticism, isn’t exclusively Christian. It has two parents – Moses going up the Mountain, and Plato’s allegory of the cave – and it’s the latter which brings out its relevance to Pirsig, for he is a neo-Platonist.)

So when I say ‘God does not exist’ I’m using the _first_ bit of cataphatic language (ie I’m denying ‘God exists’). And Paul is quite right to say that I’m committed to saying ‘God does not not-exist’. That is the apophatic response, and this is the paradox and failure of language to capture the reality of God.

Much more interesting than that technical stuff, however, is the spiritual journey within which that language makes sense. That is, the soul aspires to union with God, but is prevented from enjoying that union as a result of sin. Putting that in MoQ terms, our fourth level patterns seek to be fully open to Quality, yet are restricted by the social patterns which are harmfully static. The process of mysticism (as I understand it) is the discipline of renouncing all the static patterns so as to enable mystical union.

“In the Pauline and Johannine writings of the New Testament, life in Christ consists in a dynamic union with God. Depending on the emphasis, this union is presented as being with Christ as with God’s divine self-expression, or with God (the Father) in and through Christ. God’s spirit seals the union and initiates an ever-growing participation in the intimacy of the divine life. The presence of the Holy Spirit endows the Christian with a ‘sense’ of the divine that if properly developed enables the believer to ‘taste’ (_sapere_) God and all that relates to him.” (Louis Dupre, ‘Unio Mystica’)

In other words, what motivates the quest for God is love; as Augustine put it, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him. I understand the mystical tradition to be a process of breaking the back of the intellectual ego, so as to allow the soul to grow in wisdom, and grow into God.

Kevin (the newbie) said:

> I ask
> myself, what meaningful purpose would the leader of a
> Christian community have
> for engaging…no that’s not quite right…for
> championing a stumbling block.

(the stumbling block being my – orthodox – assertion that God ‘does not exist’)

Which as you might imagine is quite a challenge.

Firstly, for the record, might I state (if anyone had any doubt) that I believe in God, I pray to God, I worship God, etc etc. It’s the defining feature of my life. My relationship with God runs deeper in me than any thoughts or perceptions or considerations that might otherwise emerge. I am absolutely certain of the reality of God. Indeed, if that certainty were to fail, I would check myself in to a psychiatric unit, as I would have no other conclusion to reach than that my mind had failed. The reality of God is more firmly rooted in me than any sense of self, so if there is a conflict, its the sense of self which is suspect.

So why might I be saying ‘God does not exist’? Part of the answer I’ve already provided; part is, as you rightly point out, that I am being provocative. But is it a needless provocation, or is there something more substantial? I think the latter.

A bit of personal history might help explain things. I was raised in a fairly standard Anglican home. Religion was there in the background, but it was never dominant. I became an atheist when I was 12, following a conversation with a conservative evangelical, when I was told that Gandhi was going to Hell because he didn’t confess Jesus Christ as his personal lord and saviour. That seemed unjust to me; God cannot be unjust; therefore if he claims that then he doesn’t exist. I remained an atheist throughout my teenage years, lapping up people like Richard Dawkins and all the other secular opposition to Christianity. I tucked into lots of ‘alternative’ understandings, both the occult and more mainstream mythological stuff like Campbell. Christianity was simply a busted flush. Nobody with any intellectual self-respect could possibly take it seriously.

I then went to university to study Philosophy and Theology (and read ZMM). My conscious purpose was to get lots of good arguments to bash Christians around the head with (I was very influenced by ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ – source for ‘The Da Vinci Code’). However, once I was dealing with the subjects at a serious academic level I discovered that most of what I understood about Christianity was wrong. What I had been rejecting wasn’t Christianity- it was a degraded, watered down hybrid of Modern Philosophy and Protestant Fundamentalism. Once I realised how mistaken I had been, the scene was set for me to enjoy a moment of enlightenment, which is what has given me, ever since, the certainty that I refer to above.

But a fundamental driver in my personality now (which sometimes leads me astray) is to uproot and destroy the misconceptions that prevented someone like me from understanding, and therefore taking seriously, the claims which are made by the Christian faith. And those misconceptions abound, especially on this forum. Take the claim that a person believes that God exists. That might be considered (eg from a fundamentalist viewpoint) as sufficient for faith. To my mind, that is profoundly mistaken. Belief that God exists is next to useless in the context of Christian faith. (Even the demons believe – and they tremble). For the key thing about Christian faith is to be transformed by the love of God into a creature capable of sharing that love of God in the world. This is less about a belief that God exists than about developing the relationship with God, so that one gets caught up within the love of the Trinity, what the medieval mystics called the _unio_mystica_.

So when I challenge people by saying ‘God does not exist’ I am wanting to unsettle the belief – held by both believers and atheists – that they know what ‘God’ is, as explained to Paul. I think people have far too much confidence about the nature of ‘God’ (I wouldn’t exclude myself either). So often belief or disbelief in God seems to be about the existence or non-existence of a particular entity with definable attributes. As if the difference between a believer and a non-believer were that in the universe of the believer, everything was just the same as for the non-believer, except for the addition of an extra item, the causal source of it all, called ‘God’. I think such debates are totally unconnected with the living reality of what Christian faith is about. To believe in God is to see the world – ALL of the world – completely differently. To see the world in a certain way – and live out the consequences – that is what it means to believe in God, whether God is named as such or not. Yet one can claim a belief that ‘God exists’ and still completely miss what that means. And in precisely the same way, one can claim that ‘God does not exist’ – and therefore reject Christian faith – and yet have completely misunderstood what is being claimed and rejected. What I am trying to do (probably failing, but I’ll always try) is to _remove_ a stumbling block. I am saddened that I appear to have created a different one.

By being (i) explicitly Christian, and (ii) saying that ‘God does not exist’, I am not being a woolly liberal post-modern trendy vicar. I am consciously trying to unsettle the certainty with which people say they don’t believe in God. I think a lot of people (not all) are in the position I was in when I was a teenager – they reject a deformed part of Christianity, and believe that they are rejecting the whole. As I said to Ian recently, if he explained the nature of the God he didn’t believe in, he would probably find that I don’t believe in him either. Hence my regular quotation from Denys Turner: “in the sense in which atheists. say God ‘does not exist’, the atheist has merely arrived at the theological starting point. Theologians of the classical traditions, an Augustine, a Thomas Aquinas or a Meister Eckhart, simply agree about the disposing of idolatries, and then proceed with the proper business of doing theology”.

But I DO believe in the orthodox Christian God, so help me God.

“I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless, that you have to change your life (or the direction of your life)…the point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you, you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction.”
(Wittgenstein)