Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

Cognitive Operators and Belief

July 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

D’Aquili and Laughlin (1979), give a cognitive explanation for the universality of myths, rituals, and ‘religious’ practices, citing three processes which the mind engages in, and which have identifiable cortical correlates. These innate and non-conscious forms of thinking, conceptualisation, abstraction, and binary thinking, are used by all humans to make sense of the world, to ‘organise unexplained external stimuli into some coherent cognitive matrix’ (1979: p.161). This idea is developed further in Newberg and D’Aquili (2002), which names eight of these ‘cognitive operators’ underpinning the organisation of psychological experience. This work further proposes a mechanism for how the functioning of these cognitive operators leads to mystical and religious belief.

This research suggests that all humans are universally determined to find explanations and produce ‘theories’ about the structure and operation of the world in which they are lodged and to invest these theories with belief. There is no evidence, however, of a cognitive operator, or any other cortical or cognitive structure, which corresponds to the protocols of rational sceptical science. This is presumably for good adaptive reasons: humans would be likely to evolve mental processes which organise experience in a way which optimises survival of the body, but the parsimoniousness required by evolution would not allow the kind of objective rigour that scientific process demands. Embodied cognition will tend to produce heuristics rather than laws.

Posted in Belief, Cognitive Operators, D'Aquili, Eugene, Newberg, Andrew, Religion, Science | No Comments »

Love and Proximity

August 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

There are many forms of love; of one’s country, one’s God, ones’s partner, child, team, and love of oneself. The behaviour and structure of these loves is obviously different but some features of all these loves are inevitably the same (otherwise they would not all be referred to by the same name). One of these underlying similarities is the use of the metaphor of proximity to describe the strength of the emotional bond. We associate the emotion of love with a sense of ‘closeness’ to the object of that love, and of the loss of love with an increasing distance. When we cease to love someone we say that we have ‘grown apart’, or we may act ‘distant’. An ultimate extent of proximity may be that the loved one is so close that the psychological and ego-based boundaries which usually separate us, the subject, from the object of our affection cease to exist. It is a cliche that lovers ‘become one’, but a cliche which refers to a metaphorical fact. This proximal fusion is also writ large in the logic of religious devotion; the ‘divine union’ of Christianity, the ‘advaita’ of the Upanishads, etc.

Posted in Love, Religion, Space, Unity | No Comments »

Lost Baby

October 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

We are among the first, and only, cultures in history not to have a shared consistent cosmology; a big picture’ which articulates the relationship between all the parts of our experience. The worldview held by most, if not all, religions may serve some of this totalising function, but they do this at the expense of the intellectual rigour which would force them to accept the inconsistencies and contradiction between dogma and science.

Posted in Cosmology, History, Religion, Science | No Comments »

All that Rises

August 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Transcribed from HERE.

There’s a short story called ‘All that rises must converge’, by Flannery O’Conner and the title of this story is taken from Teilhard De Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, albeit somewhat controversial in both areas. De Chardin was the guy who came up with the ‘Omega Point’ which is the theory that at some point in the future our evolution… it is a model of directed evolution or teleological evolution that we are somehow evolving toward some point at which we become singular and God-like. It is not a popular theory, and not a good theory, but it is interesting. This idea that he had that ‘all that rises must converge’, as well as being a beautiful phrase, but, I think is also quite interesting in relation to some of the ideas to do with the image schema of knowledge to do with our understanding of different types of knowledge, and a map of our epistemology being based on embodied experience, and in many cases that means visual experience, it is to do with visual awareness, visual consciousness of the world. What I have also mentioned is how various entailments of that schema, of that selection of metaphors map onto or organise our understanding of different types of knowledge and the different scales at which knowledge operates at etc. One I have spoken about before is the entailment of height, so when we want to indicate that we have access to greater knowledge we often use a height metaphor because elevated positions, be it the top of hills, in crow’s nests, standing on the shoulders of giants etc are the positions from which we can see more and tend to be metaphors which extend across so the position from which we know more tends to be an elevated position, in the ascendant. I think this idea that De Chardin is putting forward here, this idea that all that rises must converge is a related way of saying this. One imagines oneself rising into the air one also imagines oneself having access to greater and greater swathes of knowledge… I have this image in my mind of lots of people standing in this field where I am standing now and we all rise together, and as we rise our shared vision extends and it is almost as if we are moving together as these various planes in this field triangulate upwards. So the sense in which that all that rises must converge is a (very idiosyncratic) application of this spatial metaphor, and particularly the height entailment of it. That as one ascends one has access to greater knowledge; that the totality of knowledge becomes arrayed out underneath oneself and one becomes the focal point, the unique focal point from which one might view all of knowledge and if everyone was to go through a similar ascension process all would eventually arrive at that focal point, so there we would all be, all rising together, all converging on this unique focal point.

Posted in Chardin, Teilhard de, Evolution, Religion, Spirituality, Up | No Comments »

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Spirituality

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The creeds and dogma of the world’s spiritual, religious and theological traditions do not describe the world beyond the senses, or its relation to the sensory world. Rather they describe the structures we need to create in order to think about that world.

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Binding Science and Religion

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The term ‘religion’ seems to be derived from a term meaning ‘to bind’ or ‘to hold together’, which although in the modern context we might interpret as being somehow ‘bound to God’ or ‘held together in faith’, in the original it seems to be much simpler and less a priori theistic. I don’t know if we have a natural desire to embrace some kind of theistic religion, I suspect not, but the desire to take disparate experience and form some kind of consilient whole does seem to be a human universal. This tendency, or cognitive imperative, seems to operate on a number of levels.

At the level of basic perception we are able to take disparate sensation and compose them into the multimedia event of lived experience. As I look around the room I am not subject to a ‘blooming, buzzing, confusion’ (1) as William James put it, but an impressively singular, coherent, all-embracing totality. I even seem to be able to fill in the gaps in my vision; I don’t feel the area behind my head as a constantly present darkness, but build its invisible contents into my overall picture. Moreover, this totality crosses the various sensory modes; I do not hear the hum of this computer separately from my seeing of the computer, they are completely integrated into a unity. Further, I do not experience this panorama as a set of flashing still images following one another rapidly, but disjointedly as each millisecond brings new rays of light to my eyes. As Husserl noted, my present also contains fragments of my past and fragments of my future; the now, the not-now, and the not-yet-now, as he is often translated (2). We seem to have the capacity to blend the frames of time’s passing into a single extended present, or as T.S. Eliot put it:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.(3)

The basic act of being alive and awake seems therefore to involve a massive, unconscious, act of creative binding together.

The acts of consciousness also seem to have this tendency in spades, as witnessed by our almost uncanny ability to search out and detect patterns and consistencies. As kids we look for figures in the design of the wallpaper and do dot-to-dot puzzles, finding one picture of one bear where before there was only 35 random dots on the page: a trick we carry on into adult life every time we look up on a clear night, or look at the clouds during the day. This conscious striving for a unified picture where before there was only wildly separated splotches of colour finds its most noble application in our ability to generate towering, visionary edifices of ideas. The awesome regularity of the periodic table, in which every particle of matter so far imagined is brought into a single frame: the phenomenally elegant Darwinian model of descent in which all of life that has ever lived on the planet is brought into the fold of one gigantic thought.

One thing that I find with these routine and extraordinary acts of binding together, is how extremely pleasant and rewarding they are. Looking around the room and seeing it, just as it is, feels good, and it feels even better to stand on a mountain and have a hundred square miles of land and an immensity of sky come together in the unique singularity of my experience at that long moment of Right Here, Right Now. Also, just thinking about ‘the river out of Eden’, as Dawkins so perfectly described it, and holding that fantastic idea in my hand like one perfect rose, gives my goosebumps. If there really is a theory of everything, and if I ever hear about it, I think I might spontaneously combust from sheer awe-struckness. Which brings me, by a circuitous route, to the point of this post. Religion isn’t really about dressing up in funny clothes and praying to half-naked statues, or following a certain dress code and not eating this or that animal. Religion is a logical extension to our natural tendency to make coherent sense out of the chaos of the world, and the more religious we get, that is, the more we are able to include in our singular vision, the better it feels. The big ideas of religion feel great because they are about seeing eternity in a single glance and embracing everything, with nothing left out, and the same is true of the big ideas of science. I think the ambitions of science are exactly the same as those of the practices we traditionally refer to as ‘religions’. As Aleistair Crowley put it:

We put no reliance on virgin or pigeon
Our method is science, our aim is religion (4)

1. James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. p.488.

2. Husserl, E. (1964). The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

3. Eliot, T. S. (1943). Four quartets. New York, Harcourt.

4. This phrase appeared on the masthead of each edition of the O.T.O. publication “The Equinox”.

Posted in Binding, Perception, Religion, Science, Time | No Comments »

Open Source Religion

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

“Any sufficiently advanced Open Source religion will be indistinguishable from science.” - Not Arthur C. Clarke

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The God Paradigm

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 »

Binding Religiosity

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine a traditional monotheistic religion, perhaps a little like one of the big three Earth-based religions we know so much about: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This religion has its holy scriptures, its administrative architecture of clerics, prophets, and priests. Its buildings and sacred burial grounds. This religion is totally embedded within the fabric of the society and the people who live in this land, and references to its axioms, its characters, and its creed appear, unbidden and unconscious, on the lips of the people many times a day. When they wish to assert the truth of a claim they say it in the name of the deity, and this holy name is the most common last word of those unfortunate pilots who fly their planes into the ground.

The people of this society find great solace in their religion, and it explains many things that would otherwise be inexplicable to them; the source of good and evil, the creation of the world, why their loved ones die and why they themselves will die. Their religion provides an answer for all of these questions, and these answers all come from a single source, an idea that is at once so powerful, economical, so intuitively satisfying, that not only does it account for the wildness of the world, but it can be held in its entirety between the fingers of the mind like a pearl.

Posted in Binding, Religion | No Comments »

Soul of an Atheist - Overview

November 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The ‘Soul of an Atheist’ section of this writing refers to the hypothesis iterated in various places throughout this blog that the desire to understand the relationship between self and world, the universe and the place of human beings within it, is a universal tendency. This desire may be simply a side-effect of the operation of cognition, perhaps an overactive holistic operator (Newberg & D’Aquili), or some version of the HADD or ‘Hyperactive Agency Detecting Device’ suggested by Barrett, or some other pattern recognition system. Such devices, systems, or operators are presumed to provide the function of cohering data from the senses such that prediction and control become possible; we see patterns in the seasons which allow us to plan our harvests, and this same cognitive skill allows (or demands) that we see patterns in the stars, or in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Furthermore, this cohering tendency operates across a range of scales. At one end there is the relatively discreet process which allows us to cohere the partially occluded outline of a tiger in the bushes into a complete image of the entire terrifying animal. At the other end of the scale the tendency urges us to find a single unifying pattern in all creation. It is interesting to note that at both ends of this scale we ourselves are also posited as an element within the unified image; the fearful symmetry of the tiger produced by our cohering cognition is fearful to us, and that fear is part of the image and the rationale for our producing it in the first place. Similarly, our seeking of a unified image of the universe, a cosmology if you will, also inevitably contains ourselves as active participants.

The quest for a satisfying cosmology probably underpins much of the action of scientists in their talk of ‘theories of everything’, and also of seers, prophets, and evangelists who make apparently similar claims for a unifying goal.

For a cosmology to be both useful and satisfying, as well as being resistant to rational dismissal, it must fill certain criteria. These are, that it be coherent, without obvious internal inconsistencies; that it be expressed in concepts which are capable of embodiment (possibly through the use of conceptual metaphor), and that it not be contradicted by the processes of logical deduction and the scientific method.

Posted in Binding, Cognition, Cosmology, Religion, Science, Universals | No Comments »

Religion as Folk Cosmology

November 27th, 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 could scarcely be regarded as distanced. Typically such cosmologies place the human firmly at the centre of the universe, a universe 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.

Posted in Centre, Cosmology, Panpsychism, Perennialism, Religion, Universe | No Comments »

Binding Religiosity

November 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine a traditional monotheistic religion, perhaps a little like one of the big three Earth-based religions we know so much about: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This religion has its holy scriptures, its administrative architecture of clerics, prophets, and priests. Its buildings and sacred burial grounds. This religion is totally embedded within the fabric of the society and the people who live in this land, and references to its axioms, its characters, and its creed appear, unbidden and unconscious, on the lips of the people many times a day. When they wish to assert the truth of a claim they say it in the name of the deity, and this holy name is the most common last word of those unfortunate pilots who fly their planes into the ground.

The people of this society find great solace in their religion, and it explains many things that would otherwise be inexplicable to them; the source of good and evil, the creation of the world, why their loved ones die and why they themselves will die. Their religion provides an answer for all of these questions, and these answers all come from a single source, an idea that is at once so powerful, economical, so intuitively satisfying, that not only does it account for the wildness of the world, but it can be held in its entirety between the fingers of the mind like a pearl. It is at once the single, infinitesimally small unity at the heart of everything, and also the infinitely large, inexpressibly all-embracing totality of that everything.

Posted in All, Binding, Centre, One, Religion | No Comments »

Problem-finding and the Feeling of Meaning

December 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is some evidence to suggest that there is a universal human need to engage in cognitive behaviour which exceeds the demands of the immediate situation. Rather than simply being limited to responding to the ‘problems’ posed by the environment, humans also engage in active ‘problem finding’, (what Newberg and D’Aquili refer to as the ‘cognitive imperative’). This excessive cognition, which undoubtedly conferred adaptive advantages upon our ancestors, most likely underpins such human traits as; worrying about what might happen at some unspecified point in the future, finding fault with situations and the behaviours of others, and more positively, inventing solutions to potential problems before they arise, and all forms of creativity. The reach or ambition of this tendency does not seem be confined to the realm of potential opportunities and threats to the physical body or the immediate community, but extends to the construction of problems which have no direct impact on the material body at all. These include such worrisome conundrums as ‘why is there something rather than nothing?, ‘What happens after you die?’, and ‘Why is there evil in the world?’. The fact that these and related problems underpin most religious and philosophical practices, and the fact that such practices are found in all cultures throughout all of human history, demonstrates the omnipresence of such superhuman problem-finding tendencies. An interesting facet of this is that possessing the solutions to such problems, if such solutions did exist, (which is unlikely), would confer no survival advantage on individual, group, or species, other than relief from the burden of the problem itself. Having the answer to the question of what happens after a person dies would have almost zero impact on the ability of that person to stay alive, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of adaptive evolution. Such knowledge, were it available, would however provide relief from worrying about the problem, presumably freeing up attentional resources for more pressing concerns. Beyond this circular purpose, the big problems appear to have no function whatsoever. This is not to say that they should not be asked of course; addressing, or at least operating in the presence of, such questions is hugely enjoyable and entertaining, and the feelings associated with their possible solution are some of the most profound and overwhelming available to human beings. It is such feelings that we associate with meaning and purpose, and our attachment to the significance of such felt knowledge is at the heart of the human condition. One might almost say that these feelings and pleasures are addictive, so determinedly do we hang onto their source, the apparent solution to the big problems.

Posted in Evolution, Feeling, Problem, Religion, Science | No Comments »

Practical and Factual Reality

December 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society biologist and anthropologist David Sloan Wilson makes a case for the persistence of religious behaviour in post-enlightenment cultures. Framed within a larger theoretical framework which argues for the existence and power of group selection, Sloane-Wilson makes the claim that, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, the ability of humans to construct rational, evidence-based models of reality does not necessarily confer any survival advantage. He makes the distinction between two types of ‘realism’, factual realism which is a product of rational (scientific) enquiry, and practical realism which is a ‘good enough’ interpretation of experience, providing heuristics for behaviour and belief without recourse to evidence or analysis. Citing this distinction in relation to the likely relative survival of groups of organisms, particularly humans, he claims that:

If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism, such that our
beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then
factual realism will be the loser every time. … Factual realists detached
from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who
elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental
weakness from an evolutionary perspective. (Wilson 2003, p.228)

This is evidenced in relation to religious belief which, he says, provides examples of just such practical realities. In terms of the survival of a group it may be beneficial if most or all members of that group have, for example, a belief in an afterlife. Such a belief would allow individuals to martyr themselves, confident that their life would not simply end on the battlefield. An army of soldiers imbued with this belief, if faced with an army of atheists who have the rational belief that death marks the absolute end of individual existence, are far more likely to fight to the death, and therefore to enhance the survival potential of their group. Over the eons of human evolution, such selective processes would tend to favour the maintenance of belief in practical reality even when such a reality is found to have no basis in fact.

Posted in Atheism, Evolution, Religion, Science | No Comments »

Why Art Won’t Go Away

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 »

Midwinter Christ

December 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Christmas and Mid-Winter

The alignment of Christ’s notional birthday with the seasonal moment of mid-Winter was, most likely, 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 two 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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Midwinter Christ

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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