May 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie
“For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man.”
(Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Irish dramatist, novelist. First published in 1953. The narrator, in Watt, p. 77, Grove Press (1959).)
Posted in Beckett, Samuel, God, Void, Zero | No Comments »
June 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie
There are two important things to keep in mind when you are an atheist (like me).
We all live in a highly spurious, highly partial world, most of which is probably fictional. But who gives a fuck. Try this. Listen to James Brown. Listen to Otis Redding. Try a little tenderness. Pretend you have a soul. (But don’t go to church).
Posted in Atheism, Belief, God, Soul | No Comments »
October 9th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Spirit - an emotional response corresponding to love, compassion, awe,etc. in which the experience of the emotion is conceptualised as a physical entity. This (metaphorical) entity is usually conceived of as an invisible ether permeating space, or sometimes as space itself, and is often given the attribution of agency or intentionality (God).
Posted in Agency, Emotion, God, Metaphor, Space, Spirituality | No Comments »
June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie
One of the concerns of historical scholars of a religious persuasion was that, as science proceeds, the domain occupied by God would correspondingly diminish. The more that is explained rationally by science, the less mystery there is for God to hide behind. This association of God with the mysterious, unknown, or unknowable, leads to an understanding of spirit sometimes referred to as a ‘God of the gaps’; when God is understood as ‘all that cannot be explained’ then any advancement in knowledge necessarily diminishes God.
Posted in God, Knowledge | No Comments »
July 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Bettenson, in Early Christian Fathers (1969: pp.70-71), citing Irenaeus, cites the composition of humankind (man) as consisting of three elements. These are flesh, soul, and spirit. In this formulation, flesh is the material body, spirit is the ineffable unified absolute, possibly identified with God, and soul is the individualising entity placed midway between flesh and spirit. Soul is therefore connected to the Absolute Unity of Being represented by spirit, but is also connected to the earth-bound and limited vehicle of embodiment and the flesh.
A modern interpretation of this trinity might play out the various parts in terms of body, mind, and world. In this revisiting, the flesh of the body is acknowledged as possessing certain affordances, certain sensorimotor means of accessing, exploring, and processing the data of the world. This body (including the physical brain) is the product of an evolutionary history and of an ongoing imperative to operate as a ‘medium sized object moving at medium speed’, and as such it has developed a range of abilities appropriate to that imperative.
The world, to the extent that we are able to say anything at all about it, exists not only within the limits of the senses but also far outside of those limits. Whilst the comprehensible scale at which the body operates is medium sized, say within a scale that runs from ants to mountains, the scale of the world (or universe) stretches from the Planck length to the limits of cosmic expansion. Similar extensions of scale beyond the range of human ken exist in all dimensions of sensory experience, and indeed outside of sensory experience completely, and in many ways define the distinction between body and world. Also, the extent to which the body can know the world is not only limited by the affordances of the body, but is also partly constructed by those affordances. Kant claimed that space and time, for example, were not properties of the world at large, but were frameworks which were placed upon the world by our attempts to understand it. This idea of a negotiated relationship between self and world finds full fruition in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. Whatever world is then, it is certain that only a tiny portion of it is directly available to human sensory engagement. We may no longer refer to the entirety of this great disembodied unknowable as God, but there is still a sense that the world is that which is beyond the boundaries of the self in every sense.
Lying between these two concepts, the materially limited instrumental body and incomprehensibly disembodied world, is the mind: an interface between the mechanism of knowing and the source of all knowledge. With one foot in the animal kingdom and the other in the plenum of angels, the mind stares into the ineffable void with eyes made of meat. The ideas and feelings which make humankind what it is, our lauded consciousness, must be a product of this confabulatory poise.
Bettenson, Henry. - Early Christian Fathers. Oxford University Press. 1969.
Posted in Bettenson, Henry, Boundary, Embodiment, Evolution, God | No Comments »
August 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Richard Dawkins is correct in his pointing out that ‘intelligent design’ fails because it does not account for the design of the designer. I.D. and Creationist accounts of the development of (human) life are obviously nonsense, but the less radical theis postulation that evolution is somehow facilitated or even overseen by some kind of intelligent creator is also doomed to failure. It is obvious that intelligence, particularly the kind of super-intelligence we might be in such awe of as to call ‘divine’, can only reasonably be considered as produced by an evolutionary process, not be its producer. If there is a God, He/She/It exists at the end of the life, not at the beginning. (If there are processes by which highly complex structures such as organisms can be produced other than evolution we have yet to discover any.)
Let us imagine that biological evolution has not yet reached any kind of end point (how could it?). Let us also imagine that such biological evolution also includes the evolution of consciousness and the kind of extended phenotypic evolution again put forward by Dawkins. As (human) evolution continues into the future, more and more cognitive faculties are ratcheted into place and the definition of a human being starts to extend beyond the skin to include cultural artifacts and tools, and also to overlap such that the boundary between one ‘individual’ and another becomes less clear. It is likely that in 1000 years time, assuming our species lives that long, our consciousness of, and ability to control, vast areas of experience will be greatly developed. We may routinely imagine the world in radically different ways than we are currently able to countenance, and will be able to live in that imagination as successfully as we now live in our imagination of a spherical world orbiting a class 2 star. Maybe we will be able to see matter and energy as Einstein saw it, or space as Minkowski. Maybe our understanding of time will owe more to Kant than to Eddington. That we will feel the entirety of time as a single extended specious moment with ourselves both as active participants in it and as its constructors and organisers. I am using the term ‘we’ because at this point in the narrative of the future maybe we will regard each other as phenotypical extensions of a single self, and we will indentify not with the parcels of flesh that we do now, but with the tissue culture that unites us as one. Maybe this identification will even embrace other entities: animals, plants, inanimate matter. Maybe I, you, everyone and everything will be a single all-embracing ‘we’ that is experienced with the same ontological certainty with which we now hold ourselves to be self-evident. In the distance of time the mechanisms of evolution may incrementally lead to the development of an entity, call it and captitalise it as ‘We’, that lives in all time and all space and sees no separation between itself and everything. We see the fall of the sparrow and desire in the hearts of men. We is the Omega with the power to also be the Alpha. Maybe the future will be the past and when we are truly We and We is everything, everywhere, everywhen, then we may be of a mind to recapitulate. Finnegan begin again. A tongue returning to a broken tooth. A fish going back to its spawning ground. A bird settling on a branch.
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August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie
A 3D object, say a sphere, in a 2d space would appear as act of magic, appearing and disappearing as if from nowhere and apparently contravening all the known laws of 2 dimensional physics. A more complex object, a human hand for example, would appear not as a single object but as a number of separate, disconnected entities, each finger appearing alone (in cross-section as a rough circle). However, there would be interaction, communication, and apparent communion between these entities. The appearance would be of distinct, individual, intentional interacting entities.
Posted in Flatland, God, Hand, Space | No Comments »
August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Untheism is a school of though which denies not only the existence of the divine being usually referred to as ‘god’, but also the existence of any phenomena, entity, or material which can be referred to using the definite article word ‘the’. Also, (although perhaps less stridently,) we untheists deny the validity of the indefinite article ‘a’ (or ‘an’). In this spirit, for the remainder of this writing the words ‘the’, ‘a’, and ‘an’, will be put ‘under erasure’ as Derrida might say, as indicated by a strike through. These words will be present, but in reading them you are to remember that they are there as a gesture of courtesy to the habits of reading and have no semantic value.
The term ‘the’ indicates an artificial stasis in the flux of existence, a petrification of the otherwise dynamic flow of creation. This denial of the noun as captured and ossified in direct and indirect articles applies to all entities, but Untheism has a particular position with regard to the fictional construct referred to as ‘the mind’. This concept, which has no real validity in any truly representative discourse, is a product of the human tendency to fix everything into a noun form and thus gain a sense of control over it. This concept of ‘the mind’ is discussed and analysed in various ways according to the particular discipline in which the discussion takes place. What is rarely if ever stated is the simple reality that ‘the mind’ is what the brain does. ‘Mind’ is not a noun it is a verb, or more accurately it is a number of verbs: remembering, perceiving, imagining etc. To give this verb ‘mind’ the status of a noun and thus pronounce it to be a ‘thing’ is the equivalent of watching an apple fall from a tree and saying that there are two entities involved, the apple and this other mysterious thing called ‘the falling’. This would be patently ludicrous, in that situation ‘falling’ is what an apple does and it makes no sense to regard it as a separate entity.
This analogy of mind(ing) with falling is further revealing if we remember that older theories of why objects fell to the earth did indeed posit the existence of a mysterious entity-like force or substance. This ’substance’ sometimes called ‘entelechy’ was considered to be somehow inside of the object and provided the motivation or intention for the object to return to its natural place, usually the ground. An interesting variant on this downwardly directed entelechy was that possessed by birds which, since their natural place was in the air not on the ground, tended to move upwards when released not downward. This upward moving entelechy whas supposedly also contained within smoke and flame. We may sneer at this obvious superstition but it is worth remembering that the idea of ‘weight’ which use routinely in our daily lives is as fictional a property as the entelechy of Medieval alchemists. When we talk about the weight of an object we are imagining that the object possesses this property of weight in largely the same way that it might possess size or shape. However, we can disabuse ourselves of that notion simply by taking the object into space when we see that, although the shape and size are conserved, this mythical weight has completely disappeared. So in talking about weight we are effectively repeating old ideas about entelechy; we are inventing a term, a noun, to indicate what is actually a verb. Weight is not a thing and we have no business putting direct or indirect articles in front of it. Weight is what, under the right conditions, an object does.
Similarly, under the right conditions, this concept of ‘mind’ is what the brain does, and to give it the ontology of an object is to misidentify it.
Posted in God, Language | No Comments »
September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The ‘God of the Gaps’ argument critiques certain approaches to theism on the grounds that, if we use God as an explanation for all those phenomena that we do not understand, then as our understanding increases, inevitably God decreases. Presumably then, the hypothetical end point to such inevitable progression of knowledge would be an epistemological universe in which no space was left in which God might hide. Even if knowledge is never total, as it surely will never be, this understanding of God is still problematic as it presents an image of a deity which is in a state of progressive decline. Every new article of information, from the most robust and powerful scientific theory to the simplest new fact acquired through routine acts of perception constitutes an amputation of the limb of God. For this reason the ‘God of the Gaps’ description of a deity has been roundly criticised as both a failure of the scientific imagination and an insult to the Almighty.
Having said that, a case could be made for a different kind of God of the Gaps, if we understand these gaps not to be in knowledge, but in our ability to conceptual this knowledge in a way was directly embodied.
The extensive work done in the field of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Embodied Cognition points to the importance of our embodiment in our ability to make sense of ideas and to structure concepts. The outcome of such research suggests that whilst we are easily able to conceptualise concepts which have direct sensory impact (medium sized objects, forces, substances, schema etc) when we wish to think about anything which is beyond the horizon of our bodily experience we have to use indirect methods. Chief among these methods is the systematic and consistent use of metaphor, such that we think of concepts which are abstract in terms of others which are concrete. We commonly think of love for example, as a journey, or of anger as heat in a sealed container. (These examples are from Lakoff and Johnson’s excellent introduction to these ideas ‘Metaphors We Live By’). Outside the relatively narrow domain of direct embodied experience is all the really interesting stuff of science, philosophy, politics, culture, and religion. Most of these practices, it can be demonstrated, are concerned with abstractions, and therefore the currency of their debates is metaphor and imagination.
In terms of science, As Stephen Jones points out in ‘Physics and Metaphor’ many of the most robust and elegant theories of science are understood only through acts of imagination. The concept of the origin of the universe in a Big Bang is one such example of this. Whatever event took place that triggered the subsequent creation of all that we see around us today clearly was not Big and did not go Bang. Yet this image of a kind of explosion is a useful image around which to structure our understanding of something that we simply are not adaptively equipped to understand literally. This does not mean that something that we call the Big Bang didn’t happen, it simply means that we are too stupid to understand it without drawing a picture of it, rather like the scene in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, where a bunch of post-apocalyptic children try to tell each other what television was using only cargo-cult materials of sticks and leaves. The big difference that makes a difference between Mad Max and Georges Lemaître (an early proponent of the BBT) is that Lemaitre tested his imaginary explosion against the data of other ideas and theories.
This example, of the organised application of imagination to fill a significant gap in embodied knowledge, is typical of the way that science works, and indeed is also typical of the way that non-scientific gaps are filled. When I talk to my kids about what they will do in the future, the question a career often comes up, but if I am honest I have absolutely no idea what a career is. It has no smell, taste, or visible substance, and I can’t hear it or touch it. In fact I have to admit that there is a huge gap in my ability to think literally about their career. This doesn’t seem to stop me thinking about it though, and I do, and the way I do it is through the (largely unconscious) use of metaphor. If I look closely at how I am thinking I would say that I imagine their careers as something like the flight of an arrow, curving gently upward to arrive at a desired target, and I try not to imagine them as careering out of control, like a driverless vehicle, a danger to themselves and passers-by alike. Without some kind of image like this I don’t see how I could conceive of something like ‘a career’ at all.
Which brings me, finally, to the God of the Gaps. Given that much of what we say and think is outside embodiable range, and is therefore in this realm of the metaphorical and the imaginary (up to 90% by some estimates), this means that our thoughts are entirely dominated by the imagination and it is not some freaky little playground in the corner of our brains where only fairies and artists hang out. It also means, at noted earlier, that any idea which is even remotely interesting is probably suffused with imagination, if not constructed of it entirely. If I was a theist, which I am not thank Richard, I would definitely want my God to be at least as wild as the Big Bang, if not more so, which would definitely put Him in imagination territory.
The bottom line with any conceptual metaphor and any imaginary entity yielded by that metaphor is how well it functions. The Big Bang metaphor works really well to cohere data and observations into a single big picture. The flight path of the arrow that (I hope) traces my kids’ career also helps them organise and plan their actions. I am quite happy to believe in an imaginary God; at least to the extent that I believe in the Big Bang or a Career Plan. I can see some potential value in this kind of God of the Gaps, a complex, coherent anthropomorphic metaphor which helps to give form to certain aspects of the universe that are beyond my embodiment. If someone can show me what the function of this particular imaginary entity is, ideally someone who does not misunderstand science and the imagination to such an extent that they insist that God is real, .I’d be happy to consider believing in it, (although I would probably draw the line at worship).
Posted in God, Johnson, Mark, Jones, Stephen, Lakoff, George, Lemaitre, Georges, Metaphor | No Comments »
October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie
“The same brain responses that enable you to see a tree as a tree, instead of as a ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms, also enable you to experience God.” - Deepak Chopra. ‘How to know God’. p.17
In this Chopra is probably correct. There are undoubtedly mechanisms within the neural labyrinths of the mind which take the raw data of the world and transform it into our imagination of that world. This data, filtered through the senses, is cast together into the unified experience of conscious awareness. In neuroscience this is referred to as ‘binding’, but was known in medieval times as the ’sensus communis’; the common sense of singular being in which seeing this branch, this leaf, this twig, is transformed into the communion of ‘tree’.
Chopra is right to suggest that these binding and consilient sense-making processes are not limited to the construction of those parts of the imagined world which appears as physical reality. It is this ability to build coherent and singular patterns out of fragmentary data which also allows us to conceive of conceptual ‘objects’ which are experienced purely cognitively, and which appear to have the same imagined wholeness as trees and rocks. These are the mechanisms which lie behind our apprehension not only of God, but also of theories and archetypes, of quarks and leptons, black holes and big bangs, love, justice, time, and anger. Such phenomena are inherently abstract, leaving no direct impression on the senses in the way that buzzing clouds of atoms seem to. And yet the sensus communis which makes the sense of a tree out of the imagination of atoms also makes sense of these ephemeral, disembodied, and evansescent entities. All of these, trees, gods, and atoms, are experiential patterns in one’s imagination of the world.
This does not mean however, that because all these entities are similarly produced within the individual imagination that all are necessarily equal, that all are equally ‘real’. What Chopra does not go on to say is that one’s individual imagination of a tree exists also within the imagination of anyone with eyes standing near where you are standing and looking where you are looking. The ghostly swarm of buzzing atoms (which is neither ghost nor swarm, and most certainly does not buzz), appears in the interpersonal imagination of the objectively described world. This is similarly the case with at least some of the abstractions noted above; a good theory is one which appears robust not only in the imagination of a single individual but in the minds of many, and which maintains its robustness in the face of attack and competition, whether this be in the form of organised scientific attempts at falsification, or the more vernacular processes of scepticism and doubt. It is through these processes that such theories as natural selection, heliocentrism, and relativity come to exist not as follies, ideosyncratically located within the private garden of an individual mind, but as metaphorical objects in the common ground of the shared imagination.
The U.S. constitution forbids the construction of religious icons on government land, and similarly there is no statue of God in the public park of interpersonal reality. Whilst it is likely that the God concept is a result of the same processes of binding and imagination that produce the image of the tree, there is little agreement regarding the nature, appearance, provenance, role, or substantive nature of this God. To the extent that he, she, or it appears within the interpersonal imagination at all it is as the ill-defined subject of sectarian discord and is only maintained through institutional dogmatism, wishful thinking, and pseudo-academic theological hand-waving.
Posted in Binding, God, Tree | No Comments »
October 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie
In the talk that Richard Dawkins presented as part of the Tedtalks series in 2006 he referred to physical matter as a ‘convenient fiction’. Our experience of the apparently solid table in front of us and the apparently solid wall around us is, he claims, a product of our brains interpreting the relationship between our (middle sized) bodies and the (middle sized) objects of the world. Physics determines that the relationship between two medium sized objects is generally one of non-penetrability, we cannot routinely walk through walls or pass our hand through the surface of a table. If we wish to avoid repeatedly banging into walls and other matter then the survival imperative of an evolutionarily determined brain requires that interpretation of this relationship dramatises this non-penetrability. We see and feel walls and similar objects as ‘hard’. This general principle applies to all substances, resulting in the various grades of hardness and softness we encounter without a second thought to their provenance. All matter, in this understanding, is a story told to us by our brain so that we might better navigate the world of the medium-sized.
This seems straightforward enough; ‘the world is’, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, ‘queerer than we can suppose without making up imaginary entities like solid matter’. This raises the question of what the ontological difference might be between the convenient fiction of matter and the equally fictional (although possibly less convenient) god? Why is believing in god a delusion whereas believing in matter is simple common sense? A posting on the Richard Dawkins website forum noted that the distinction is not between god and matter, but between god and the experience of matter that we call ‘hardness’. Whilst this refinement does shift both entities more clearly into the realm of abstractions, it does not explain the very different attitude we have to these concepts. ‘Hardness’ is one of a range of human interpretations of the properties of the universe; it is qualia familiar as common sense to (apparently) everyone and hardwired from birth. God, on the other hand, whilst it is also a human interpretation of the workings of the universe, and whilst some variation of the god concept seems to be a human universal and therefore also approaches the status of common sense, possibly even hardwired, seems to be less resistant to disbelief. Although god, as a concept, in some cases ‘won’t go away’, the presence of atheists in the world (and even in foxholes) demonstrates that he, she, or it can indeed be banished by an act of educated will. As Dawkins goes on to mention in the same presentation, the most determined efforts my Major Albert N. Stubblebine of US Military Intelligence failed to dissolve the hardness of matter by a similar act of will. A failure of organised disbelief that caused him to repeated crash into the wall he was trying to walk through.
These two delusional entities, the hardness of matter and being of god, may mark two points on a continuum of embodied imagination in which the impact of the delusion is felt to greater or lesser extents. The hardness of matter is felt at the surface of the body, the being of god, if it is felt at all, is felt in the mind. Both feelings are, in a sense, interpretations. ‘Hardness’ is an interpretation by the sensorimotor system of certain enduring and consistent laws of physics related specifically to the properties of substances; god seems to be an interpretation of a supposed unification of the big questions of life, the universe, and everything.
Posted in Dawkins, Richard, Evolution, God, Haldane, J.B.S., Sense, Substance | No Comments »
October 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The ‘God Hypothesis’ which Dawkins puts forward in ‘The God Delusion’ is not, strictly speaking, a hypothesis at all. A hypothesis is a statement from which experiments might be directly derived, the results of which support or nullify that hypothesis. No such experiment can be produced from the general concept of a God. God could, however, be considered a paradigm from which other, more functional hypotheses can be derived. In this, the God Paradigm would be essentially no different from the Big Bang paradigm: both have a certain explanatory power but neither can be tested directly. A significant difference of course, is that the Big Bang paradigm can be used to generate hypotheses which are in turn fully testable and falsifiable. The results of such experiments can never prove or disprove the reality of the paradigm, but they can lend support to its validity as an explanatory structure. The search for the existence of background microwave radiation (COBE) was one such hypothesis which, when found to be valid, supported the Big Bang paradigm. A theist who argued that the presence of such radiation does not prove that the Big Bang happened is completely correct, as paradigms can only be supported, not proven. However, as such supporting evidence increases, as it has in the case of evolutionary theory, then the onus is on the dissenter to provide a better paradigm supported by better, properly supporting hypotheses. The God paradigm does not have a good record in generating functional hypotheses, and to the extent that it has, these have tended to be null and therefore fail to support the overall paradigm of a divine entity.
There are two hallmarks of a really good paradigm particularly a large-scale ‘cosmological’ paradigm that explains pretty much everything. Firstly, it has to provide a satisfying, easily grasped ‘big picture’. Secondly, it should be capable of generating many statements or hypotheses that can be tested. The God Paradigm, depending on which version you look to, has a record of being excellent at fulfulling the first requirement, as evidenced by the millions of people worldwide who not only grasp it but hold onto it in the teeth of quite amazing adversity. The second requirement, that it offers testable hypotheses, is less well covered, and to the extent that it is, has not performed well. The deist God, who lit the blue touch paper of the Cosmos and then stood well back, is completely inaccessible, and makes no moves, mysterious or otherwise, that might leave tracks in the experimental record. (This is the God for cop-outs in my opinion). Some other Gods, that of Roman Catholicism for example, are much more amenable to hypothesising, since He does intervene in the ways of the world. Miracles and intercessionary prayer are perfectly testable hypotheses which, if demonstrated as valid, would lend support to the God Paradigm. Such support would not constitute proof, of course, for the same reason that the results of COBE don’t prove the Big Bang paradigm. You could demonstrate the existence of miraculous cures and crying statues from now until Doomsday, and that would still not prove the existence of God, but would only lend support to the God Paradigm, an explanatory structure that, however well supported, would always be tentative, always open to doubt, always ready to be swallowed up by the next, even more encompassing big picture. The fact that these hypotheses have not been validated means that they do not provide such support, and the GP, for many of us, is just too weak to take seriously. However, lack of support does not mean disproof, and the God Paradigm, whilst it remains devastatingly unsupported, to the point that it is probably a hazard to passers-by, is as valid as it ever was. It just seems such a shame that so many people invest in this catastrophically weak idea of a divine being, an entity incapable of pulling of the simplest testable miracle, when there are so many other paradigms around which have awe-inspiring explanatory power and in their complexity and elegance make Chartes and Canterbury look like Birmingham Bullring (on a bad day).
Posted in Atheism, Dawkins, Richard, Evolution, God, Paradigm, Religion, Science | No Comments »
October 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
The ‘God of the Gaps’ argument critiques certain approaches to theism on the grounds that, if we use God as an explanation for all those phenomena that we do not understand, then as our understanding increases, inevitably God decreases. Presumably then, the hypothetical end point to such inevitable progression of knowledge would be an epistemological universe in which no space was left in which God might hide. Even if knowledge is never total, as it surely will never be, this understanding of God is still problematic as it presents an image of a deity which is in a state of progressive decline. Every new article of information, from the most robust and powerful scientific theory to the simplest new fact acquired through routine acts of perception constitutes an amputation of the limb of God. For this reason the ‘God of the Gaps’ description of a deity has been roundly criticised as both a failure of the scientific imagination and an insult to the Almighty.
Having said that, a case could be made for a different kind of God of the Gaps, if we understand these gaps not to be in knowledge, but in our ability to conceptualise this knowledge in a way that was directly embodied.
The extensive work done in the field of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Embodied Cognition points to the importance of our embodiment in our ability to make sense of ideas and to structure concepts. The outcome of such research suggests that whilst we are easily able to conceptualise concepts which have direct sensory impact (medium sized objects, forces, substances, schema etc), when we wish to think about anything which is beyond the horizon of our bodily experience we have to use indirect methods. Chief among these methods is the systematic and consistent use of metaphor, such that we think of concepts which are abstract in terms of others which are concrete. We commonly think of love for example, as a journey, or of anger as heat in a sealed container. (These examples are from Lakoff and Johnson’s excellent introduction to these ideas ‘Metaphors We Live By’). Outside the relatively narrow domain of direct embodied experience is all the really interesting stuff of science, philosophy, politics, culture, and religion. Most of these practices, it can be demonstrated, are concerned with abstractions, and therefore the currency of their debates is metaphor and imagination.
In terms of science, As Stephen Jones points out in ‘Physics and Metaphor’, many of the most robust and elegant theories of science are understood only through acts of imagination. The concept of the origin of the universe in a Big Bang is one such example of this. Whatever event took place that triggered the subsequent creation of all that we see around us today clearly was not Big and did not go Bang. Yet this image of a kind of explosion is a useful image around which to structure our understanding of something that we simply are not adaptively equipped to understand literally. This does not mean that something that we call the Big Bang didn’t happen, it simply means that we are too stupid to understand it without drawing a picture of it, rather like the scene in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, where a group of post-apocalyptic children try to recreate television using using only cargo-cult materials of sticks and leaves. The big difference that makes a difference between the children in Mad Max and Georges Lemaître (an early proponent of the Big Bang Theory) is that Lemaitre tested his imaginary explosion against the data of other ideas and theories. As Richard Dawkins might put it, the image of the Big Bang is the beginning of a knowledge-gathering process whereas the TV made of sticks is the end.
This example, of the organised application of imagination to fill a significant gap in embodied knowledge, is typical of the way that science works, and indeed is also typical of the way that non-scientific gaps are filled. When I talk to my children about what they will do in the future, the question of a career often comes up, but if I am honest I have absolutely no idea what a career is. It has no smell, taste, or visible substance, and I can’t hear it or touch it. In fact I have to admit that there is a huge gap in my ability to think literally about their career. This doesn’t seem to stop me thinking about it though, and the way I do it is through the (largely unconscious) use of metaphor. If I look closely at how I am thinking I would say that I imagine their careers as something like the flight of an arrow, launched upwards and curving gently to arrive at a desired target, and I try not to imagine them as careering out of control like a driverless vehicle, a danger to themselves and passers-by alike. Without some kind of image like this I don’t see how I could conceive of something like ‘a career’ at all.
Which brings me, finally, to the God of the Gaps. Given that much of what we say and think is outside embodiable range, and is therefore in this realm of the metaphorical and the imaginary (up to 90% by some estimates), this means that our thoughts are entirely dominated by the imagination and it is not some freaky little playground in the corner of our brains where only fairies and artists hang out. It also means, at noted earlier, that any idea which is even remotely interesting is probably suffused with imagination, if not constructed of it entirely. If I was a theist, which I am not thank Richard, I would definitely want my God to be at least as wild as the Big Bang, if not more so, which would definitely put it in imagination territory.
The bottom line with any conceptual metaphor and any imaginary entity yielded by that metaphor is how well it functions. The Big Bang metaphor works really well to cohere data and observations into a single big picture. The flight path of the arrow that (I hope) traces my kids’ career also helps them organise and plan their actions. I am quite happy to believe in an imaginary God; at least to the extent that I believe in the Big Bang or a Career Plan. I can see some potential value in this kind of God of the Gaps, a complex, coherent anthropomorphic metaphor which helps to give form to certain aspects of the universe that are beyond my embodiment. If someone can show me what the function of this particular imaginary entity is, ideally someone who does not misunderstand science and the imagination to such an extent that they insist that God is real, I’d be happy to consider believing in it, (although I would probably draw the line at worship).
Posted in Embodiment, God, Imagination, Metaphor, Science, Universe | No Comments »
October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
It has been conclusively demonstrated that much of the language that we speak is metaphorical, these metaphors not only being linguistic turns of phrase but echoing the widespread use of such metaphors as a cognitive strategy allowing us to think the otherwise unthinkable. A tenet within the various disciplines of conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, cognitive linguistics and experiential philosophy is that the mind can only think in terms of the affordances of a (evolutionarily constructed) body and sensorimotor system. Cognition uses the totally familiar and concrete experiences of pulling, pushing, containment, direction, substances, entities, directions etc as the basic vocabulary from which all thoughts, however apparently abstract, are contructed. The use of conceptual metaphor within cognition allows us to conceive of entities and phenomena which would otherwise be inconceivable, these entities being outside the range of the senses.
Most of the work in this area has been concerned with the excavation of such metaphors and the mapping of key metaphor groups across specific areas of experience. What has not been systematically identified and analysed is the wide range of metaphors in common daily use which refer to entities which are not only abstract but which are, in all likelihood, non-existent. We may be familiar with (and perhaps condescending toward) the use of such fictions in the past, totally unaware that we are maintaining similar fictions in the present through the repeated positing of such ideas in language and thought.
Some entities which figure extensively in our language and cognition seem to exist purely in metaphorical form; they have well-articulated sources for the metaphorical mapping but no evidence exists at all for the target of such mapping. These are concepts without referents: free-floating figures of speech and thought that occupy our minds and feature extensively in social discourse. Their only life is in language and mentation and perhaps the most two prevalent of these are the concept of mind and the concept of God.
Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, God, Imagination, Language, Metaphor | No Comments »
October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
For many of us, when we read about the neurological evidence for the existence of states of being that are experienced as transcendent, it is very tempting to interpret this correlation as a reduction in the status and value of the experience. The fact that the subjective feeling of enlightenment is accompanied by changes in the electro-chemical organisation of the brain, or of the patterns of activation across networks of neurons, seems to suggest that because such experiences are ‘all in the mind’ they are therefore delusional, having something of the status of hallucinations or tricks of the light. The probing of the fMRI scanner become the pin which bursts god’s bubble and inevitably we ourselves feel deflated as a result.
There are two aspects to this deflation which bear closer examination; there is the apparent explaining away of the experience itself such that it is no longer valid as a real event, then there is the biochemical rationalisation of our subjective responses to that experience, the feelings and emotions which we have at these times which often stay with us for years afterwards and significantly transform our lives.
The first of these effects, in which for example we come to realise that the god that we felt to be in the room with us is nothing but an overstimulation of the left temporal lobe, can, at first pass, seem to be incontrovertible evident for the god delusion, as Dawkins puts it. And places this delusion firmly in the fairyland of our own wacko imagination. After all, what kind of god turns up on demand in the laboratory every time a large magnet is waved near the side of a person’s head, and yet is conspicuously absent from those place that could really benefit from his presence: the cancer wards, AIDS clinics,and torture chambers of the world? What kind of omniscient, all-powerful superbeing can be turned on and off like a cheap flashlight?
Posted in Consciousness, Enlightenment, God, Neuroscience | No Comments »
November 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Cosmology is the study of the Universe and the place of humanity within it, although ’study’ is perhaps too objective a word for it. It seems to be a universal human tendency to derive, construct, or imagine a structure for the Universe, a ‘big picture’ if you will, in which the human being is somehow represented, but the means of arriving at this big picture are not necessarily coterminous with what we tend to think of as ’study’. Study implies a dispassionate, rational, distanced investigation of the matter under scrutiny, whereas the majority of cosmologies in which the human is present as anything other than pond-life are anything but distanced. Typically these humanist cosmologies are populated by spirits, gods, ethers, panpsychic forces and otherworldly energies that would not stand up to the most rudimentary rational assault.
The beliefs inherent in most religious practices, represented in their commonality in the form of the Perennial Philosophy, can be regarded as a form of institutionalised Folk Physics, or more specifically, a Folk Cosmology.
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December 10th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Much has been written recently about the persistence of religious belief in cultures and societies which otherwise seem to operate on entirely rational principles. Edward Slingerland, Daniel Dennett, and others at the Beyond Belief 2007 Conference all remarked on the unwillingness of religious belief to politely relinquish its hold on the hearts and minds of millions of otherwise reasonable people across the world. It is odd that superstitions and practices which only make any sort of sense in a pre-scientific, pre-enlightenment world, nevertheless show no signs of disappearing. Something like religion and its associated rituals seems to have been around for as long as humans have walked the Earth, and it could be said that they represent reasonable responses to an uncertain world; good first guesses at understanding and controlling. In the modern world, when systems of producing, testing, and sharing knowledge are so much more effective and predictive it is nothing short of remarkable that so many are invested in a form of knowing which is untestable, incoherent, anachronistic, and in many cases actively toxic. A number of suggestions have been made why religious belief continues to outstay its welcome in the human psyche, most of which draw upon either the social functions that it serves outwith the specific metaphysical promises it might make (a point first made by Durkheim but reiterated many times since), or on the evolutionary history of human condition which may ‘hard-wire’ us for this tendency to believe in gods and spirits. An example of the latter is the work of Newberg and D’Aquili on what they refer to as ‘The Mystical Mind’ in the book of that name, and also in ‘Why God Won’t Go Away’ which posits a mechanism linking ‘brain science and the biology of belief’. Such theories suggest that religiosity is not something which can be wished away, but is something we will have to recognise as an innate human process. (This makes no claim for or against the existence of God of course, it simply demonstrates that there are other explanations for why we might believe in a deity regardless of the truth status of that belief). Also, the existence or non-existence of the fact of God or other tenets of religious faith does not necessarily render such faith useless. As Dennett points out in the presentation noted above, there may be very good adaptive reasons for belief in a deity. He makes the hypothetical case of a battle between two armies, the Gold Army and the Silver Army. The Gold Army firmly believe that they have God on their side and that if they are slain in battle then their soul will go to join the legion of heroes in an eternal afterlife. The Silver Army, on the other hand, are an army of economists, who are able to do highly effective cost benefit analyses of the various strategies available, and are expert at calculating the relative values of different combatants. Dennett poses the question, ‘Which army would you rather have fighting for you and your cause?’ Most of us, he claims, would intuitively choose the Gold Army, for the very good reason that in a life or death situation they would probably win. This provides an example of a plausible narrative of why religiosity and its accompanying worldview might enhance the survival prospects of those groups or communities who tend to hold those beliefs over those who do not.
A similar exposition may be possible for the persistence of art as a phenomenon in cultures for which it seems to have no obvious purpose. Whatever function art served in the past it is by no means clear what function is serves at this point in our history. We could, of course, talk about it in terms of the social and economic opportunities it provides, bringing together people in safe and pleasant situations where they can discuss and negotiate shared values etc, but these are secondary features which are not directly related to the experience of art itself, the ‘aesthetic response’ if you like. This special feature of art has a hold over us which, whilst distinctly different to religious faith, is similarly compelling and irrational. Despite the annual round of criticism at the Turner Prize short list; despite endless tabloid jeering and broadsheet hand-wringing about elitism in the arts; despite art’s obvious excesses and abcesses, most recently exemplified in Damian Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull (coincidentally titled ‘For the Love of God’), Art is clearly not going away. This requires explanation.
Posted in Art, Evolution, God, Religion | No Comments »
December 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Christmas and Mid-Winter
The alignment of Christ’s notional birthday with the seasonal moment of mid-Winter was, most likely, mostly driven by the political need to ’sell’ Christianity to pagans, a task made easier if minimum alteration was made to the festival calender.
The correspondence of these to narratives; one originating in the cosmic, astronomical, and geophysical, and the other in the heroic and personified, creates an interesting fusion. The moment in Earth geometry at which (parts of) that Earth are most tilted away from the Sun is also the moment that the Child of God, (or God himself) makes an appearance. This is an orientation in the orbit of the planet which creates the bleakest, coldest days and the longest nights, and at which the warm-blooded life on (part of) that planet are most at risk, most scared, most likely to die. And because of the alignment of myth and astrophysics, it is at the exact time, when humanity is at its most needy, that a saviour is born. It is no wonder that the early Christian publicists and marketing men had such success.
Interestingly, as our contact with the seasons has reduced with industrialisation, and as Winter in Western Europe seems to arrive later each year, this alignment is no longer what it was. Even though our Christmas cards and tree decorations endlessly repeat motifs of snow and ice, Christmas now actually falls long before the worst of the weather, and it is rare in England to have snow before the end of December. Christmas celebrations do not now take place in the middle of a period of glowering dusk when spirits are at their lowest ebb. Nor is it the watershed moment after a time of increasing difficulty, beyond which the gloom will start to lift and the we will feel the first suggestions of new life. Xmas now is the last hurrah of a people moving into the dark. Last orders have been called at the bar and the glasses are raised in a final raucous toast before the party breaks up and we all go quietly into the not-so-good night. This is the new Xmas, and every year it is at this moment, when everyone is collecting their coats off the bed in the spare room and thinking about loft insulation, that Jesus shows up.
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