Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Some More Thoughts on Faith.

In the previous post's comment section, commentator Brockman asked the following:
Question: Can you come up with a short list of statements, your knowledge of which comes largely or entirely through this extra sense, rather than through normal senses, indoctrination, etc?


Clearly there could be some statements which one person believes because of indoctrination -- "I believe Jesus rose from the dead because authority figure X told me to believe in it (or else!)" -- where another might believe because of the extra sense -- "Well, I read this old book, and this part about Jesus really seemed completely inescapable".
Sure.  In My personal case, some of the propositions are:

1) There is such a thing as objective reality.
2) Catholicism is the "most right" religion.
3) Theft is intrinsically wrong.
4) Moral precepts bear the same relation to reality as physical things. The wrongness of lying is as real as the keyboard in front of me.
5) The non-perfectibility of man. (The doctrine of Original Sin)
6) The existence of God.

First a bit about myself. Without this faith sense, the person who would be my closest intellectual mirror is Roissy.  My natural tendencies drift towards atheism, hedonism and objectivity. To a certain degree, my religion runs against my grain. Now, whilst I was indoctrinated in some of the above beliefs as a child, there is no way that I would accept any of them if I thought they weren't true. In my adolescence, I held them as convenient beliefs, to be ditched when necessary, I was an effective situational ethicist.

If, for example, God didn't exist, life would be eventually meaningless. But as much as I would hate that meaninglessness,  it would be a fact of life; something I'd have to get used to. Comfortable thoughts are useless if they are lies, and I'm repelled by the thought of believing in bullshit and living my life according to it.  I religion is a lie then despair or hedonism are the only logical choices left.

Rationally, all the propositions listed above fall short of logical certitude and there is room for rational doubt in all, but this faith sense tells me that the above are true, not because of probabilistic calculations, but because I intuitively experience the truth of the them.  Stripped of its religious connotations and thinking about it as an epistemological mechanism,  it as a faculty which lets you recognise truthful propositions which cannot be demonstrated according to strict empirical criteria.

Another non-religious example that worth thinking about, is how can we prove that we are not connected to the Matrix?(A movie which illustrates Berkeley's subjective idealism) There is no objective way as self referential systems cannot validate themselves.  Yet I know that I'm not connected to the Matrix, I know that matter is real and exists independently of my being. When I'm dead, the atoms that make up my body will still exist, they are not figments of my imagination.  Still I cannot logically demonstrate this, the only way of  Berkeley's Matrix is not with logic but with faith. It's this faith sense that asserts convincingly that the world is real.

For many people faith=religion, whereas it really should be faith=sense, the religion is a derived product from the sense.

Commentator Thursday made the following comment:
This is essentially the argument from religious experience. The problem is that such experiences do not interpret themselves. They may reflect something real, or they may be the mind playing tricks on itself.

There also seems to be the problem that such experiences seem to be artificially inducible. IIRC, scientists have induced mystical experiences through stimulating certain parts of the brain. But one need not refer only to modern science: the use of drugs in religion has a long history

Yes and No. It's not necessarily a religious experience. It's more often than not an unwanted intellectual conviction. More factual than emotive. The C.S Lewis example in the previous post, illustrated this phenomenon quite nicely, in that Lewis was being nagged by something that he didn't want. In the end he acceded to the conviction that there was a God: there were no angels, fairies or mystical visions. In Lewis's case, it seems to be an effect that operated through rationality.

The thing is though, that faith seems to be doled out by God arbitrarily, he "calls" us through it. That's why the phenomenon is so incomprehensible to those who don't have it. Being outside this subjective experience they cannot relate to it. The question is though, does this subjective experience have any bearing on reality or not? It would appear however that the insights gained from Christian faith seem to correlate rather well with human happiness and well being on objective measures. It's either a series of extraordinarily consistent "lucky guesses" or there is something to it.

It is true that the mind can play tricks due to a variety of internal and external factors and that the insights gained may not reflect reality. That's why the Church fathers instructed that everything be put to the test as they understood that it was a sense with poor acuity. Faith may cause an assertion of the unprovable but the insight is false if it asserts the falsifiable; since faith and truth cannot contradict. If after having a few beers, you were to suddenly develop the insight that God said it was alright to fornicate, you would be contradicting a substantial amount of Christian tradition. Therefore either Christian tradition is wrong and the Christian conception of God is wrong, or you're wrong. A lot of the mystical experiences, drug induced or not, are immediately rejected by this type of analysis.

I'm not a biblical scholar but I do understand that there were may other gospels circulating around in the early Christian period. That fact that the Chruch only settled on four tells you that a lot of the "mystical" experiences felt by the early believers were felt by the Church leaders to be rubbish.

15 comments:

RobertT said...

"Therefore either Christian 'tradition' is wrong and the 'Christian conception' of God is wrong, or you're wrong."

Interestingly enough, I once did a Biblical study on the importance of traditions for a church group i was speaking to. Unfortunately, I found just the opposite. Tradition is apparently an enemy to the gospel. I would guess "Christian conception" would be little different from "tradition" in that regard.

Otherwise i don't disagree with the other points in your post. I think they are highly intuitive.

Thursday said...

It's not necessarily a religious experience. It's more often than not an unwanted intellectual conviction. More factual than emotive. The C.S Lewis example in the previous post, illustrated this phenomenon quite nicely, in that Lewis was being nagged by something that he didn't want. In the end he acceded to the conviction that there was a God: there were no angels, fairies or mystical visions. In Lewis's case, it seems to be an effect that operated through rationality.

You're right that it doesn't have to be some grand mystical experience, more like an intuition, a feeling that "something is out there." But I think that the same objections can be made.

Anonymous said...

As someone who has had his share of chemically induced hallucinations, I can tell you how different they are from the authentic religious experience.

The Social Pathologist said...

Thursday

But I think that the same objections can be made.

It's one thing to say the religious experiences may be chemically simulated, but its another to say that all religious experiences are chemically simulated.

If you follow that same line of logic you could argue that since LSD can cause visual hallucinations, all vision is hallucination.

Robert Brockman said...

This list is quite interesting.

Several of the items on the list I have arrived at through what seem to be traditional empirical means:

1) I subscribe to "objective reality theory", which posits the existence of a unified external world. This theory has the advantage of being relatively simple, and seems to explain/predict my observations very well so far.

2) I have been unable to avoid observing that however shaky the core assumptions of Catholicism seem to me, the "training system" has a very high "yield" of kindly and loving people. Since I try to spend as much time around loving people as possible, this means that I now seem to be surrounded by Catholics. This makes the apparent shakiness of the core doctrine all the more awkward for me.

5) It would seem to be a matter of logic that since we are finite beings with limited processing power, we will have incomplete maps of reality and make suboptimal decisions. Beating ourselves (and each other) up over this would seem to be unreasonable.


The other three items on the list are even more interesting, in that I indeed have strong affirmative notions about them that are difficult to ground empirically.

I am in total agreement with 3) and 4), which basically posit an "objective morality", but can't really give a good reason why. My belief (faith?) in 3) and 4) have increased considerably over the years. My current suspicion is that there's something about sentient beings and information processing systems in general that resonates strongly with these ideas. It seems to be in the nature of thinking beings to create order and seek real understanding, and theft and lying would seem to run counter to this.


6) is really several claims. The first is that there is some fundamental organizing force to the Cosmos (literally, the created order.) Consuming enough physics and mathematics is sufficient to generate this suspicion. The true nature of this organizing force becomes more mysterious and alien the more physics one learns.

(I cannot emphasize strongly enough the theological and philosophical implications of advanced physics. People who desire to speak authoritatively about theology and philosophy really owe it to themselves to go back to school and get a physics degree, including all the necessary mathematical background and experimental work.)

The second claim is that there is a powerful mysterious force of "love" that operates to keep humanity from destroying itself. (Access to this force is thus necessary for "salvation".) Empirically observing this force seems to be very difficult for people. The easiest way to "measure" it that I am aware of is to observe that people who don't take it into account make predictions that are too pessimistic. Feynman, for example, realized sooner than most that the existence of the Bomb hadn't changed primate politics very much, and therefore expected it to be used on a large scale very soon. As a result, he despaired and for a while didn't understand why people wasted time trying to create anything anymore. I suspect that the proliferation of "survival horror" video games is a related phenomenon -- people on some level expect that something terrible is going to happen very soon based on a limited understanding of humanity that excludes this "love" force.

The third (and least well supported IMAO) claim is that the Creator God and this mysterious "divine" love force are related in some non-trivial way.

JMSmith said...

I like what Anonymous says about the tangible difference between drug-induced pseudo-religious experiences and the other kind. Anyone who has had both types knows that there is a difference. This alone doesn't mean that non-drug-induced religious experiences are "real," but it does considerably weaken arguments that reduce all religious experience to simple brain chemistry. I've also had what might be called socially-induced pseudo-ethical experiences, in which I thought I "saw" something as wrong, but later understood that this was merely a result of conditioning or peer pressure. Like most males, I've experienced hormonally-induced (and alcoholically-enhanced) erotic attraction, but I learned to tell the difference between these experiences and another sort. This isn't to say that hormones didn't play a part in real attraction, but it seems as if it was only a part, because the hallucination didn't vanish.

Bogus religious experiences have, over time, increased my faith in the reality of what I can only call real religious experiences.

R. Brockman: Isn't solipsism even simpler than a theory of objective reality, and equally predictive? It seems to be the philosophy of infants, for whom simplicity is paramount.

The Social Pathologist said...

@R Brockmann

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the theological and philosophical implications of advanced physics. People who desire to speak authoritatively about theology and philosophy really owe it to themselves to go back to school and get a physics degree, including all the necessary mathematical background and experimental work

I think its a very important point to make. Although many good scientists are atheists, there are quite a few that are not. These people repudiate the false dichotomy between science and the religion. Good science is not opposed to religion, good science is opposed to bad religion.

@JMSmith

Bogus religious experiences have, over time, increased my faith in the reality of what I can only call real religious experiences.

Agreed.

Ben said...

Normally people wouldn't rally so heavily against arbitrary beliefs except for a major point: a god's support has been relied upon as a reason to commit innumerable atrocities.

Claiming that one has a 'god sense' that provides extra-sensory confirmation of beliefs? That you, and only you and people like you can detect it? And that everyone else just has to trust you on the validity because there's not any empirical evidence? That's dangerous.

But I'm wasting my time. Your desire to believe trumps your desire to understand.

Mostly I'm impressed that your sense just happens to confirm main concepts you were taught as a child, despite thousands of different religions, even religions that are more numerous and popular than yours.

The Social Pathologist said...

@Ben

Normally people wouldn't rally so heavily against arbitrary beliefs except for a major point: a god's support has been relied upon as a reason to commit innumerable atrocities.

Old trope. It is true that there have been religious wars and atrocities committed by even religion it its depravity is no match for "enlightened" atheism.

The Black Book of Communism.

And that's not even counting the all the abortions.

As I've demonstrated, a life based on "pure rationality" and empirical evidence alone seems to clearly protects men from causing atrocities.

And that everyone else just has to trust you on the validity because there's not any empirical evidence?

I'm not asking you to trust me at all. That's the whole point of the past few posts. I can see your point of view quite clearly, but there is no way in hell that you can see mine.

You clearly don't get it. I'm like you except I've had this unwanted experience which separates me from you. Your inability to understand what I and others have experienced leads you to all sorts of erroneous conclusions, either about my motivation or my rationality.

Posit this for a moment. Maybe, just maybe, there is a bit of truth in what I'm saying.

The Social Pathologist said...

@Ben

This one's for you Ben.

Think of us as like the guy with cellphone.

I didn't go looking for Him. He came looking for me.

Ben said...

There is no Black Book of Religion because religion has been so entangled with our society that it's indistinguishable from conflict motivated by other reasons. Even if you're going to war over land, you tell your troops that their god is on your side. So you're right - I can't make that comparison.

You linked me to a Nickelback song. Watched it anyway.

Positing that there is truth in what you're saying: that you have an extra-sensory ability to detect the truth of certain ideas. Allow me to restate the proposal in my own words, to confirm my understanding.

You cannot control the subject upon, or when or where or how these realizations occur. Despite your best efforts, you are unable to truly disagree with them (beyond a superficial logical argument or resistance). The realizations may not agree with your current ideals or beliefs, but your ideals and beliefs eventually shift to include these realizations because they are essentially inviolable. These realizations almost always line up with a set of beliefs you were instructed upon as a child. You suspect that others have similar realizations because of the accounts you've quoted, and because these realizations seem to have common themes over a long period of history.

You have not had any realizations which contradict your childhood religion. You have not had realizations which confirm your birth religion to the degree and depth it was taught or written.

Your model is that these realizations are evidence of an extra-sensory ability rather than something produced by your own mind, experience, or cognition. Your evidence of this is that such realizations are inconvenient, go against your natural instincts, or disagree with other things you've learned (such as empirical skepticism). You posit that not everyone has this extra-sensory ability, nor can it be learned.

Do you acknowledge that there are people who have a similar sense whose realizations disagree with yours? And that these people were raised in cultures which practiced a different religion? Or do you suspect this sense only occurs within Christians or Catholics, or that there is a reason this sense is somehow misled in others?

Please correct me on anything I've stated here. I do strive to be empirical and am doing my best to temporarily forgo my prior understanding in order to evaluate new evidence.

Ben said...

Just a PS.

I really didn't intend any of that last comment to be confrontational, except perhaps for mocking Nickelback. Even if my prior comments have been confrontational.

Likely I made a few typos, some of which may have changed my intended meaning. Please correct me and give me the benefit of the doubt.

I do not intend any of the questions to be leading or suggestive, insofar as it's possible for me to try to fill in my own gaps of knowledge without exposing personal bias.

The Social Pathologist said...

There is no Black Book of Religion because religion has been so entangled with our society that it's indistinguishable from conflict motivated by other reasons

That's a cop out. Claiming that religion causes wars and then claiming you can't distinguish its degree, gives you the benefit of an assertion without any duty of proving it. What we do see, with a simple cursory examination of the facts, is that when religion is removed from the cultural environment wars become far more savage.

The oft quoted Spanish inquisition killed less people over sixty years than a single night's carpet bombing of Hamburg. You're wrong on this one.

You cannot control the subject upon, or when or where or how these realizations occur

Correct.

You can disagree with them, in the same way you can ignore a red light or ignore data demonstrating genetic differences in race. What you can't do is pretend that they are not there. You can go with them or against them, the choice is up to you.

These realizations almost always line up with a set of beliefs you were instructed upon as a child.

In my instance they agreed with my childhood teaching in many others they found totally new beliefs. And this guy.

You suspect that others have similar realizations because of the accounts you've quoted, and because these realizations seem to have common themes over a long period of history.

Yes, the religious experience is a human experience, it's the atheists who are the statistical oddities.

You posit that not everyone has this extra-sensory ability, nor can it be learned.

Correct.

Do you acknowledge that there are people who have a similar sense whose realizations disagree with yours?

Yes.

or that there is a reason this sense is somehow misled in others?

This sense has poor acuity, so getting it wrong is quite easy. That's why we should be tolerant of others. They are wrong in good faith.

JMSmith said...

R. Brockman: Since you are genuinely curious and not just baiting the theists (thanks for that), I'll relate a couple of things relevant to your question about reversion to childhood beliefs. It's one I've asked myself, since my faith was interrupted by twenty years of practical atheism. Was my second phase of faith a second childhood? Had my courage and reason failed me in middle age? These are valid questions, and since I try not to be too big of a fool too much of the time, I asked them of myself.

Superficially the answer is yes. If I was going to get religion, it would most likely be the form commonly practiced in my surrounding culture. As it happens, I started out Protestant and ended up Roman Catholic, but I was (am) Christian in either case. I will also grant that I was prepared by my childhood to interpret my religious experiences with Christian categories (e.g. sin, repentance, grace, atonement, etc.) and through Christian images (e.g. Heaven, Hell).

But my experience was not an experience of these categories and images. To keep this simple, let's say it was an experience of a gap or void or dread that my atheist worldview could not explain or resolve. As it happens, a version of my old Christian worldview could. If it hadn't, I suppose I might have moved on to Hinduism or Islam; but that wasn't necessary.

So the perception did not come from my childhood. It was altogether new. But the basic interpretive schema did.

Robert Brockman said...

The problem with solipsism is that its difficult to explain how I could both be clever enough to run such a sophisticated simulation in my brain and yet simultaneously be so unclever in my bumbling about inside the simulation. It also has the same problems as most other forms of Creationism: what happened before I became conscious and how did that come about? Objective reality theory is IMAO much cleaner at handling these issues.


Of course atheism has huge gaps in its worldview that it cannot fill at this time. However, the Christian worldview has internal inconsistency problems that need to be resolved before it can be taken seriously as a replacement.