Paul P. Mealing

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Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts

Friday 17 March 2023

In the beginning there was logic

 I recently read an article in Philosophy Now (Issue 154, Feb/Mar 2023), jointly written by Owen Griffith and A.C. Paseau, titled One Logic, Or Many? Apparently, they’ve written a book on this topic (One True Logic, Oxford University Press, May 2022).
 
One of the things that struck me was that they differentiate between logic and reason, because ‘reason is something we do’. This is interesting because I’ve argued previously that logic should be a verb, but I concede they have a point. In the past I saw logic as something that’s performed, by animals and machines as well as humans. And one of the reasons I took this approach was to distinguish logic from mathematics. I contend that we use logic to access mathematics via proofs, which we then call theorems. But here’s the thing: Kurt Godel proved, in effect, that there will always be mathematical ‘truths’ that we can’t prove within any formal system of mathematics that is consistent. The word ‘consistent’ is important (as someone once pointed out to me) because, if it’s inconsistent, then all bets are off.
 
What this means is that there is potentially mathematics that can’t be accessed by logic, and that’s what we’ve found, in practice, as well as in principle. Matt Parker provides a very good overview in this YouTube video on what numbers we know and what we don’t know. And what we don’t know is infinitely greater than what we do know. Gregory Chaitin has managed to prove that there are infinitely greater incomputable numbers than computable numbers, arguing that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem goes to the very foundation of mathematics.
 
This detour is slightly off-topic, but very relevant. There was a time when people believed that mathematics was just logic, because that’s how we learned it, and certainly there is a strong relationship. Without our prodigious powers of logic, mathematics would be an unexplored territory to us, and remain forever unknown. There are even scholars today who argue that mathematics that can’t be computed is not mathematics, which rules out infinity. That’s another discussion which I won’t get into, except to say that infinity is unavoidable in mathematics. Euclid (~300 BC) proved (using very simple logic) that you can have an infinite number of primes, and primes are the atoms of arithmetic, because all other numbers can be derived therefrom.
 
The authors pose the question in their title: is there a pluralism of logic? And compare a logic relativism with moral relativism, arguing that they both require an absolutism, because moral relativism is a form of morality and logic relativism is a form of logic, neither of which are relative in themselves. In other words, they always apply by self-definition, so contradict the principle that they endorse – they are outside any set of rules of morality or logic, respectively.
 
That’s their argument. My argument is that there are tenets that always apply, like you can’t have a contradiction. They make this point themselves, but one only has to look at mathematics again. If you could allow contradictions, an extraordinary number of accepted proofs in mathematics would no longer apply, including Euclid’s proof that there are an infinity of primes. The proof starts with the premise that you have the largest prime number and then proves that it isn’t.
 
I agree with their point that reason and logic are not synonymous, because we can use reason that’s not logical. We make assumptions that can’t be confirmed and draw conclusions that rely on heuristics or past experiences, out of necessity and expediency. I wrote another post that compared analytical thinking with intuition and I don’t want to repeat myself, but all of us take mental shortcuts based on experience, and we wouldn’t function efficiently if we didn’t.
 
One of the things that the authors don’t discuss (maybe they do in their book) is that the Universe obeys rules of logic. In fact, the more we learn about the machinations of the Universe, on all scales, the more we realise that its laws are fundamentally mathematical. Galileo expressed this succinctly in the 17th Century, and Richard Feynman reiterated the exact same sentiment in the last century.
 
Cliffard A Pickover wrote an excellent book, The Paradox of God And the Science of Omniscience, where he points out that even God’s omniscience has limits. To give a very trivial example, even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist. What this tells me is that even God has to obey the rules of logic. Now, I’ve come across someone (Sye Ten Bruggencate) who argued that the existence of logic proves the existence of God, but I think he has it back-to-front (if God can’t breach the rules of logic). In other words, if God invented logic, ‘He’ had no choice. And God can’t make a prime number nonprime or vice versa. There are things an omnipotent God can’t do and there are things an omniscient God can’t know. So, basically, even if there is a God, logic came first, hence the title of this essay.

Friday 18 March 2022

Our eternal fascination with Light and Dark

 Someone on FaceBook posted one of those inane questions: If you could delete one thing in the world what would it be? Obvious answers included war, hate, evil, and the like; so negative emotive states and consequences. My answer was, ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

What I find interesting about this whole issue is the vicarious relationship we have with the ‘dark side’ through the lens of fiction. If one thinks about it, it starts early with fairy tales and Bible stories. Nightmares are common in our childhood where one wakes up and is too scared to go back to sleep. Fear is an emotion we become familiar with early in our lives; I doubt that I was an exception, but it seems to me that everyone tries to keep children innocent these days. I don’t have children, so I might have it wrong.

 

Light and dark exists in the real world, but we try to keep it to the world of fiction – it’s a universal theme found in operas, mythologies and TV serials. I write fiction and I’m no exception. If there was no dark in my stories, they’d have no appeal. You have to have nemeses, figures of various shades of grey to juxtapose the figures of light, even if the light shines through flawed, imperfect glass.

 

In life we are tested, and we judge ourselves accordingly. Sometimes we pass and sometimes we fail. The same thing happens with characters in fiction. When we read a story we become actors, which makes us wonder how we’d behave in the same situation. I contend that the same thing happens in dreams. As an adult, I’ve always seen dreams as what-if scenarios and it’s the same with stories. I’ve long argued that the language of stories is the language of dreams and I think the connection is even stronger than that. I’m not surprised that storytellers will tell you that they dream a lot.

 

In the Judaeo-Christian religion I grew up with, good and evil were stark contrasts, like black and white. You have God, Christ and Satan. When I got older, I thought it a bit perverse that one feared God as much as Satan, which led me to the conclusion that they weren’t really that different. It’s Christ who is the good guy, willing to forgive the people who hate him and want him dead. I’m talking about them as fictional characters, not real people. I’m sure Jesus was a real person but we only have the myth by which to judge him.

 

The only reason I bring all this up, is because they were the template we were given. But fearing someone you are meant to love leads to neurosis, as I learned the hard way. A lot of people of my generation brought up the next generation as atheists, which is not surprising. The idea of a judgemental, schizophrenic father was past its use-by-date.

 

There is currently a conflict in Ukraine, which has grabbed the world’s attention in a way that other wars have not. It’s partly because of our Euro-centric perspective, and the fact that the 2 biggest and world-changing conflicts of the 20th Century both started in Europe. And the second one, in particular, has similarities, given it started with a dictator invading a neighbour, when he thought the world would look the other way.

 

There is a fundamental flaw in the human psyche that we’ve seen repeated throughout history. We have a tendency to follow charismatic narcissistic leaders, when you think we should know better. They create an army (not necessarily military) of supporters, but for whom they have utter contempt. This was true of Hitler, but also true of Trump and Putin.

 

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like Trump, became a TV celebrity, but in a different vein. He was a satirical comedian who sent up the country’s leader, who was a Russian stooge, and then ran for office where he won by 70%. I believe this is the real reason that Putin wants to bring him down. If he’d done the same thing in Russia, he would have been assassinated while still a TV personality. It’s well known that Putin has attempted to assassinate him at least twice since the invasion, but assassinating opponents in a foreign country is a Putin specialty.

 

Zelenskyy and Putin represent, in many Western people’s minds, a modern day parable of good and evil. And, to me, the difference is stark. Putin, like all narcissists, only cares about himself, not the generals that have died in his war, not the barely out of school conscripts he’s sent into battle and certainly not the Russian people who will suffer enormous deprivations if this continues for any length of time. On the other hand, Zelenskyy doesn’t care about his self-preservation, because he would rather die for a principle than live the rest of his life in shame for deserting his country when it needed him most. Zelenskyy is like the fictional hero we believe in but know we couldn’t emulate.

 

It's when we read or watch fiction that the difference between right and wrong seems obvious. We often find ourselves telling a character, ‘don’t do that, don’t make that decision’, because we can see the consequences, but, in real life, we often seem to lose that compass.

 

My father was in a war and I know from what he told me that he didn’t lose that particular compass, but I also know that he once threatened to kill someone who was stealing from the wounded he was caring for. And I’ve no doubt he would have acted on it. So his compass got a bit bent, because he’d already seen enough killing to last several lifetimes.

 

I’ve noticed a theme in my own writing, which is subconscious, not intentional, and that is my protagonists invariably have their loyalty tested and it ends up defining them. My villains are mostly self-serving autocrats who have a hierarchical view of humanity where they logically belong at the top.

 

This is a meandering post, with no conclusion. We each of us have ambitions and desires and flaws. Few of us are ever really tested, so we make assumptions based on what we like to believe. I like something that Socrates said, who’d also been in battle.

 

To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.


Sunday 20 June 2021

Grayling railing against God (I couldn’t help myself)

 I’ve just read A.C. Grayling’s book, The God Argument; The Case against Religion and for Humanism (his emphasis). It’s really a polemic against all deistic religions, even though he claims it’s not a polemic, while acknowledging it probably comes across as one. 

His basic argument, which he iterates in many different ways, is that any belief in God or Gods is irrational, starting with the gods of Norse and Greek mythology and including the Biblical God. It’s a sound argument, because, depending on your culture, you tend to treat one variant as fiction and the other as having personal and spiritual significance. Grayling doesn’t address it in this way: instead, arguing that a belief in God is no different to a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; one you grow out of and the other you don’t. The inference is that you are immature or unintelligent or, at best, delusional.

 

I’ve said before that all the Gods I know about have cultural ties and that includes the Abrahamic one. But comparing them to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is like comparing them to fictional characters like Superman and Tarzan, or Luke Skywalker. So, what’s the difference? The difference is in the potency that you give them. A God or Goddess is something internal that only has meaning for you. I’ll return to this idea throughout, because I think that God has no meaning outside someone’s mind. 

 

I rejected the biblical God in my teens, after a childhood spent immersed in its teachings. But the decision was more an emotional one than an analytical one. Grayling acknowledges, by the way, that religious belief is emotional, which, for him, is just another reason to dismiss it. I rejected God because I grew to really, really dislike Him. He was the worst type of tyrant: he ruled by fear and terror; he practised genocide on a global scale (the Noahic flood); he sent his ‘children’ to everlasting torment for disobedience; he tortured Job to win a bet with the Devil. Oh, almost forgot: he was going to get Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, to test his loyalty.

 

I once commented that the question: Does God exist? is the wrong question. The real question, which enters the consciousness of any rational person is: What’s the point? Is there a higher purpose to our existence? This is what religions have attempted to address, and in consequence, some have invoked deities.

 

Grayling, in a philosophical sleight of hand, categorises some Eastern philosophies, like

Buddhism and Confucianism as not being religions, because they don’t invoke gods. I think it’s fair to categorise Confucius as a philosopher in the same mould as teachers like Plato and Aristotle. But, like Jesus, both Buddha and Confucius had disciples, and they were all iconoclasts, challenging the social mores of their day, which they believed to be unfair and iniquitous. In fact, I would put Jesus in the same category as Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, who were all persecuted for challenging the status quo.

 

But Grayling conveniently overlooks that the Chinese, who adopted both Buddhism and Confucianism, culturally worshiped their ancestors, which is surely a religious practice. Perhaps Grayling doesn’t know many Chinese, whereas I have lived with Chinese individuals, and they definitely have deities as part of their traditional culture.

 

I’ve argued previously that science is neutral on the existence of God. In other words, science does not rule out a ‘creator’, yet there is obvious conflict between science and religious texts. Science is an epistemology and religion is not – they don’t compare. Some people argue that religion explains what science cannot, but that’s an argument from ignorance. There will always be things we don’t know – I’ve written extensively on that point – but no religious text can provide an explanation to a question that contemporary science can’t answer.

 

I think the notion of an omniscient God has problems with logic. Clifford A Pickover wrote a very thought-provoking book, The Paradox of GOD and the Science of Omniscience. To give examples: even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist; and God can’t make a prime number non-prime. Some people argue that God created logic and I argue that God is restrained by logic the same as us. The Universe obeys logic not because God created the logic but because logic transcends the Universe.

 

When I say that science does not rule out ‘God’, I mean it doesn’t rule out a ‘purpose’ that may be beyond our kin. We really don’t know. That doesn’t make me agnostic, as I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic creator, but neither does it mean that people who do, are axiomatically irrational, as Grayling contends. I’ve argued before that, in fact, it’s a non sequitur to believe the God you find inside your mind is the creator of the entire universe.

 

The major problem I have with polemical texts against religion is that, whether intentional or not, they promote intolerance. Back in 2010, I quoted Grayling where he seemed to be promoting religious tolerance.

 

And people who didn't have a religious commitment wouldn't mind if other people did privately and they wouldn't attack or criticise them. 

So there was an unwritten agreement that the matter was going to be left quiet. So in a future where the religious organisations and religious individuals had returned to something much more private, much more inward looking, we might have that kind of public domain where people were able to rub along with one another with much less friction than we're seeing at the moment.

 

I believe this is fundamentally the society I live in (in Australia) where, for the most part, people don’t care what you believe, and where religion is not part of our political landscape. In fact, despite having religion as part of my education, I was brought up with the tacit understanding that religious belief was personal and therefore only shared with others under the mutual understanding that it was confidential and deeply private. A secular society is not an atheistic society; it’s a tolerant society or it doesn’t work. 

 

I know people with completely different religious beliefs to me, best friends, in fact. What’s more, in our current society, I’d say political beliefs are far more divisive than religious beliefs. It puts a lie to the argument, proposed by Grayling and other militant atheists, that if we eliminated religion, ‘at its root’, then we would overcome the world’s conflicts. It’s not only simplistic, but naive, even dangerous. Religion does contribute to conflicts but only when it is politicised, which is what we witness in places where religion demarcates territorial disputes or differences in status. Religion is just one marker of ingroup-outgroup discrimination, with race, language and wealth being more likely contenders.

 

Grayling is contemptuous of people who adapt their religious beliefs to their circumstances, arguing that they ‘cherry-pick’ and are ‘hypocrites’. Well, I readily admit that I cherry-pick all the time - just read my blog - but I don’t see that as hypocrisy.

 

Don Cupitt provides a different perspective, which is the opposite point of view:

 

The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.

 

Grayling addresses the teleological arguments and the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, all in some detail, which I won’t go into. Paul Davies spent considerable time on them as well in his book, The Mind of God

 

But there is one argument that Grayling addressed which I found interesting, and that was Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument based on modal logic. I’ve come across this before, which is based on the premise that if something necessarily exists in a possible world then it must exist in all possible worlds (my emphasis). The problem is with the premise that God must necessarily exist in a possible world. I’ve always thought that this argument is somewhat circular, because it seems to assume that God necessarily exists, which is what it’s trying to prove, via logic alone. Grayling goes into it in some detail and claims that Plantinga eventually gave it up, falling back on an even less credible argument that we know that God exists in the same way we know that the past exists. I may have oversimplified it, but that’s the analogy that Grayling used.

 

The teleological argument comes from Aristotle, as Grayling expounds, because he argued that everything manmade has a ‘final cause’, which is the cause that prompted someone to make it, and you could apply this to the whole universe. I have my own response to this. If humans are the ‘final cause’ of God’s ‘creation’, then, without humans, God has no reason to exist. And this leads me to argue a reverse logic that God is dependent on humans rather than the other way round.

 

This is related to the fine-tuned argument that the Universe is ‘just right’ for complex life to emerge and leads to the anthropic principle. Grayling doesn’t mention the anthropic principle, probably because it tacitly allows teleology back into the picture. Grayling makes an analogy by saying that his antecedents only existed so he could exist, which is a good argument. But the point I like to make is that without conscious entities, the Universe may as well not exist. And we are special in as much as we have the unique ability to comprehend the Universe, as Einstein famously pointed out. Or, as Paul Davies said, ‘we can unravel the plot’. The alternative is what Davies calls the ‘absurd universe’, which appears to be the one Grayling plumps for: we give it a meaning because we are predisposed to providing meanings, but there is no reason to think one should exist. 

 

But this goes to the heart of the debate for me. The whole reason we have religion of any type is because humans wondered if there was something beyond the mortal realm. No one can answer that, but it’s why we created gods in all their manifestations. So gods become a part of a collective consciousness, which is why they can seem real to us. In this context, God is a projection that we laden with all our prejudices and hopes beyond death. One cannot dissociate any notion of God from the human psyche, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out in the 19th Century. God is always in human image, not the other way round. Grayling doesn’t discuss this at all, but I fail to see how one can address God independently of a human context. In effect, we get the God we deserve. And by God, I mean the ideal we imagine we should aspire to. This is why we deify mortal humans like Jesus and Buddha, because they represent an ideal that they could only achieve beyond death.

 

The second half of his book talks about humanism. He spends a chapter on the importance and interdependence of authenticity and truth, and another on human rights. They remind me of my 3 rules for humans. He spends an entire chapter on the ethics of sexual conduct and how it’s been perverted by civilised societies. The book is worth acquiring for that alone.

 

Anyone who reads my blog, knows that I think God is subjective, not objective. Anyone who is a believer, will tell you that God came to them, meaning that God only exists in their mind, not out there. I have no issue with this idea of God; but it’s not what religions tell you. Anyone who has a religious experience is an iconoclast, including Jesus and Buddha. I think the idea that God evolves as a product of our consciousness is far more logical than the idea that He (why he?) created us in his image, as potential companions.

 

I make a distinction between non-theists and atheists. In Australia, there are a lot of non-theists, meaning they don’t care what you believe. Going by this tome (2013), Grayling is ‘anti-theist’, though he claims it’s not a religious belief; it’s the opposite of belief. However, his polemic indicates that he cares about whether someone believes in God or not and, like Dawkins, Harris and others, he proselytises atheism. This is not a non-theistic attitude. Anti-theism may not be a religion, but it’s anti-religious in its rhetoric.

 

I will leave the last word to Einstein, who talks about religion with no mention of God.

 

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

Saturday 6 March 2021

The closest I’ve ever seen to someone explaining my philosophy

 I came across this 8min video of Paul Davies from 5 years ago, where I was surprised to find that he and I had very similar ideas regarding the ‘Purpose’ of the Universe. In more recent videos, he has lighter hair and has lost his moustache, which was a characteristic of his for as long as I’ve followed him.

 

Now, one might think that I shouldn’t be surprised, as I’ve been heavily influenced by Davies over many years (decades even) and read many of his books. But I thought he was a Deist, and maybe he was, because not halfway through he admits he had recently changed his views.

 

But what makes me consider that this video probably comes closest to expressing my own philosophy is when he says that meaning or purpose has evolved and that it’s directly related to the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself. Both these points I’ve been making for years. In his own words, “We unravel the plot”.


Or to quote John Wheeler (whom Davies admired): “The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”





P.S. This is also worth watching: his philosophy on mathematics; to which I would concur. His metaphor of a 'warehouse' is unusual, yet very descriptive and germane in my view.


Saturday 6 February 2021

What is scientism?

 I’m currently reading a book (almost finished, actually) by Hugh Mackay, The Inner Self; The joy of discovering who we really are. Mackay is a psychologist but he writes very philosophically, and the only other book of his I’ve read is Right & Wrong: How to decide for yourself, which I’d recommend. In particular, I liked his chapter titled, The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

You may wonder what this has to do with the topic, but I need to provide context. In The Inner Self, Mackay describes 20 ‘hiding places’ (his term) where we hide from our ‘true selves’. It’s all about living a more ‘authentic’ life, which I’d endorse. To give a flavour, hiding places include work, perfectionism, projection, narcissism, victimhood – you get the picture. Another term one could use is ‘obsession’. I recently watched a panel of elite athletes (all Australian) answering a series of public-sourced questions (for an ABC series called, You Can’t Ask That), and one of the take-home messages was that to excel in any field, internationally, you have to be obsessed to the point of self-sacrifice. But this also applies to other fields, like performing arts and scientific research. I’d even say that writing a novel requires an element of obsession. So, obsession is often a necessity for success.

 

With that caveat, I found Mackay’s book very insightful and thought-provoking – It will make you examine yourself, which is no bad thing. I didn’t find any of it terribly contentious until I reached his third-last ‘hiding place’, which was Religion and Science. The fact that he would put them together, in the same category, immediately evoked my dissent. In fact, his elaboration on the topic bordered on relativism, which has led me to write this post in response.

 

Many years ago (over 2 decades) when I studied philosophy, I took a unit that literally taught relativism, though that term was never used. I’m talking epistemological relativism as opposed to moral relativism. It’s effectively the view that no particular discipline or system of knowledge has a privileged or superior position. Yes, that viewpoint can be found in academia (at least, back then).

 

Mackay’s chapter on the topic has the same flavour, which allows him to include ‘scientism’ as effectively a religion. He starts off by pointing out that science has been used to commit atrocities the same as religion has, which is true. Science, at base, is all about knowledge, and knowledge can be used for good or evil, as we all know. But the ethics involved has more to do with politicians, lawmakers and board appointees. There are, of course, ethical arguments about GM foods, vaccinations and the use of animals in research. Regarding the last one, I couldn’t personally do research involving the harming of animals, not that I’ve ever done any form of research.

 

But this isn’t my main contention. He makes an offhand reference at one point about the ‘incompatibility’ of science and religion, as if it’s a pejorative remark that reflects an unjustified prejudice on the part of someone who’d make that comment. Well, to the extent that many religions are mythologically based, including religious texts (like the Bible), I’d say the prejudice is justified. It’s what the evolution versus creation debate is all about in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world.

 

I’ve long argued that science is neutral on whether God exists or not. So let me talk about God before I talk about science. I contend that there are 2 different ideas of God that are commonly conflated. One is God as demiurge, and on that I’m an atheist. By which I mean, I don’t believe there is an anthropomorphic super-being who created a universe just for us. So I’m not even agnostic on that, though I’m agnostic about an after-life, because we simply don’t know.

 

The other idea of God is a personal subjective experience which is individually unique, and most likely a projection of an ‘ideal self’, yet feels external. This is very common, across cultures, and on this, I’m a theist. The best example I can think of is the famous mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who believed that all his mathematical insights and discoveries came directly from the Hindu Goddess, Namagiri Thayar. Ramanujan (pronounced rama-nu-jan) was both a genius and a mystic. His famous ‘notebooks’ are still providing fertile material 100 years later. He traversed cultures in a way that probably wouldn’t happen today.

 

Speaking of mathematics, I wrote a post called Mathematics as religion, based on John Barrow’s book, Pi in the Sky. According to Marcus du Sautoy, Barrow is Christian, though you wouldn’t know it from his popular science books. Einstein claimed he was religious, ‘but not in the conventional sense’. Schrodinger studied the Hindu Upanishads, which he revealed in his short tome, Mind and Matter (compiled with What is Life?).

 

Many scientists have religious beliefs, but the pursuit of science is atheistic by necessity. Once you bring God into science as an explanation for something, you are effectively saying, we can’t explain this and we’ve come to the end of science. It’s commonly called the God-of-the-gaps, but I call it the God of ignorance, because that’s exactly what it represents.

 

I have 2 equations tattooed on my arms, which I describe in detail elsewhere, but they effectively encapsulate my 3 worlds philosophy: the physical, the mental and the mathematical. Mackay doesn’t talk about mathematics specifically, which is not surprising, but it has a special place in epistemology. He does compare science to religion in that scientific theories incorporate ‘beliefs', and religious beliefs are 'the religious equivalent of theories'. However, you can’t compare scientific beliefs with religious faith, because one is contingent on future discoveries and the other is dogma. All scientists worthy of the name know how ignorant we are, but the same can’t be said for religious fundamentalists.

 

However, he's right that scientific theories are regularly superseded, though not in the way he infers. All scientific theories have epistemological limits, and new theories, like quantum mechanics and relativity (as examples), extend old theories, like Newtonian mechanics, into new fields without proving them wrong in the fields they already described. And that’s a major difference to just superseding them outright.

 

But mathematics is different. As Freeman Dyson once pointed out, a mathematical theorem is true for all time. New mathematical discoveries don’t prove old mathematical discoveries untrue. Mathematics has a special place in our system of knowledge.

 

So what is scientism? It’s a pejorative term that trivialises and diminishes science as an epistemological success story.


Monday 5 October 2020

Does infinity and the unknowable go hand in glove?

A recurring theme on my blog has been the limits of what we can know. So Marcus du Sautoy’s book, What We Cannot Know, fits the bill. I acquired it after I saw him give a talk at the Royal Institute on the subject, promoting the book, which is entertaining and enlightening in and of itself. I’ve previously read his The Music of the Primes and Finding Moonshine, both of which are very erudite and stimulating. He’s made a few TV programmes as well.


Previously, I’ve written blog posts based on books by Bryan Magee (Ultimate Questions) and Noson S. Yanofsky (The Outer Limits of Reason; What Science, Mathematics, and Logic CANNOT Tell Us). Yanofsky is a Professor in computer science, while Magee was a Professor of Philosophy (later a broadcaster and Member of British Parliament). I have to admit that Yanofsky’s book appealed to me more, because it’s more science based. Magee’s book was very erudite and provocative; my one criticism being that he seemed almost dismissive of the role that mathematics plays in the limits of what we can know. He specifically states that “...rationality requires us to renounce the pursuit of proof in favour of the pursuit of progress.” (My emphasis). However, pursuit of proof is exactly what mathematicians do, and, what’s more, they do it consistently and successfully, even though there is a famous proof that says there are limits to what we can prove (Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem).


Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician, and a very good communicator as well, as can be evidenced on some of his YouTube videos, including some with Numberphile. But his book is not limited to mathematics. In fact, he discusses pretty much all the fields of our knowledge which appear to incorporate limits, which he metaphorically calls ‘Edges’. These include, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, consciousness, the Universe, and of course, mathematics itself. One is tempted to compare his book with Yanofsky’s, as they are both very erudite and educational, whilst taking different approaches. But I won’t, except to say they are both worth reading.


One aspect of du Sautoy’s book, which is unusual, yet instructive, is that he consulted other experts in their respective fields, including John Polkinghorne, John Barrow, Kristof Koch and Robert May. May, in particular, did pioneering work in chaos theory on animal populations in the 1970s. An ex-pat Australian, he’s now a member of the House of Lords, which is where du Sautoy had lunch with him. All these interlocutors were very stimulating and worthy additional contributors to their respective topics.


Very early on (p.10, in fact) du Sautoy mentions a famous misprediction by French philosopher, Auguste Compte, in 1835, about the stars: “We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure.” Yet, less than a century later, it was being done by spectroscopy as a virtually standard practice, which in turn led to the knowledge that the Universe was expanding consistently in all directions. Throughout the book, du Sautoy reminds us of Compte’s prediction, when it appears that there are some things we will never know. He also quotes Donald Rumsfeld on the very next page:


There are known knowns; these are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.


At the time, people tended to treat Rumsfeld’s statement as a bit of a joke and a piece of political legerdemain, given its context: weapons of mass destruction. However, in the field of science, it’s perfectly correct: there are hierarchies of knowledge, and when one looks back, historically, there have always been unknown unknowns, and, therefore, it’s a safe bet they will exist in the future as well. In other words, our future discoveries are dependent on secrets the Universe has yet to reveal to us mere mortals.


Towards the end of his book, du Sautoy gets more philosophical, which is not surprising, and he makes a point that I’ve not seen or heard before. He argues that some things about the Universe, like time, and the possibility of a multiverse, might remain unknown without physically getting outside the Universe, which is impossible. This, of course, raises the issue of God. Augustine, among others, has argued that God exists outside the Universe, and therefore, outside time. Paul Davies made the same point in his book, The Mind of God, with specific reference to Augustine.

Du Sautoy, who is a self-declared atheist, contends that God represents what we cannot know, which is consistent with the idea that some things we cannot know, can only be known from outside the Universe. But du Sautoy makes the point that there is something that exists outside the Universe that we know and that is mathematics. He, therefore, makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that maybe we can replace God with mathematics. Curiously, John Barrow made the same mischievous suggestion in one of his books – probably, Pi in the Sky. According to du Sautoy, Barrow is a Christian, which surprised me as much as du Sautoy, given that you would never know it from his writings. While on the subject of God, John Polkinghorne is a well known theologian as well as a physicist. Again, according to du Sautoy, Polkinghorne contends that God could intervene in the Universe via chaos theory. I once made the same point, although I also said I didn’t believe in an interventionist God, as that leads to people claiming they know God’s will, and that leads to all sorts of acts done in God’s name, and we all know how that usually ends. The problem with believing in an interventionist God is that it axiomatically leads to people believing they can influence said God.

Getting back to the subject at hand, du Sautoy says:

If there was no universe, no matter, no space, nothing. I think there would still be mathematics. Mathematics does not require the physical world to exist.

Following on from du Sautoy’s book, I started re-reading Eli Maor’s book, e: the story of a number, which incidentally covers the history of calculus going back to the ancient Greeks and Archimedes, in particular. The Greeks had a problem in that they couldn’t acknowledge infinity – it was taboo. Maor believes that Archimedes must have known the concept of infinity because he appreciated how an iterative process could converge to a value, but he wasn’t allowed to say so. Even in the modern day, there are mathematicians who wish to be rid of the concept of infinity, yet it’s intrinsic to mathematics everywhere you look.

This is relevant because the very nature of infinity tells us that there will always be truths beyond our kin. You can use a Turing machine (a computer) to calculate all the zeros in Riemann’s hypothesis and, if it’s true, it will never stop. Now, du Sautoy makes an interesting observation about this (which he expounds upon in this video, if you want it firsthand) that it’s possible that Riemann’s hypothesis is unknowable. In fact, there’s a small collection of conjectures associated with prime numbers that fall into this category (the Goldbach conjecture and the twin-prime conjecture being another 2). But here’s the thing: if one can prove that the Riemann hypothesis is unknowable, then it must be true. This is because, if it was untrue, there would have to be at least one result that didn’t fit the hypothesis, which would make it ‘knowable’.

The unknowable possibility is a direct consequence of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. To quote du Sautoy:

Godel proved mathematically that within any axiomatic system framework for number theory that was free of contradictions there were true statements about numbers that could not be proved within that framework – a mathematical proof that mathematics has its limitations. (My empasis).

I highlighted that passage because I left it out when proposing a definition to someone on Quora, and as a consequence, my interlocutor tried to argue that my definition was incorrect. Basically, I was saying that within any axiomatic system of mathematics there are ‘truths’ that can’t be proven. That’s Godel’s famous theorem in essence and in practice. However, one can find proofs, in principle, by using new axioms outside that particular system. And we see this in practice. The axiom that geometry can be non-Euclidean created new proofs, and the introduction of -1 created new mathematics, called complex algebra, that gave solutions to previously unsolvable problems.

Towards the end of his book, du Sautoy references a little known and obscure point made by the renowned logician Alonso Church, called the ‘paradox of unknowability’, which proves that unless you know it all, there will always be truths that are by their very nature unknowable.

In effect, Church has extended Godel’s theorem to the physical world. Du Sautoy gives the example of all the dice that are lost in his house. There is either an even number of them or an odd number. One of these is true, but it is unknowable unless he can find them all. A more universal example is whether the Universe is infinite or finite. One of these is true but it’s currently unknowable and may be for all time. Du Sautoy makes the point that if we learn it’s finite then it becomes knowable, but if it’s infinite it may remain forever unknowable. This is similar to the Riemann hypothesis being knowable or unknowable. If it’s false then the Turing machine stops, which makes it finite, but, if it’s true, it is both infinite and unknowable, based on that thought experiment. It was only at this point in my essay that I came up with its title. I’ve expressed it as a question, but it’s really a conclusion.

If we go back to Archimedes and his struggle with the infinite, we can see that probably for most of humankind’s history, the infinite was considered outside the mortal realm. In other words, it was the realm of God. In fact, du Sautoy quotes Descartes: God is the only thing I positively conceive as infinite.

I’ve long contended that mathematics is the only ‘realm’ (for want of a better word) where infinity is completely at home. In Maor’s book, at one point, he discusses the difference between applied mathematics and pure mathematics, and it occurred to me that this distinction could explain the perennial argument about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. But the plethora of infinities, which is also intrinsic to unknowable ‘truths’, as outlined above, infers that there will always be mathematical ‘things’ waiting to be discovered. What’s more, the ‘marriage’ between theoretical physics and pure mathematics has never been more productive.



Addendum 1: After writing this, I re-watched an interview with Norman Wildberger on the subject of infinity and Real numbers. Wildberger is an Australian mathematician with ‘unorthodox’ views on the foundations of mathematics, as he explains in the video.

Wildberger is not a crank: he’s an academic mathematician, who has unusual philosophical ideas on mathematics. He makes the valid point that computers can only work with finite numbers (meaning numbers with a finite decimal extension), and that is the criterion he uses to determine whether something mathematical is ‘real’. He says he doesn’t believe in Real numbers, as they are defined, because they are infinitely uncomputable.

In effect, he argues they have no place in the physical world, but I disagree. In chaos theory, the reason chaotic phenomena are unpredictable is because you have to calculate the initial conditions to infinite decimal places, which is impossible. This is both mathematical and physical evidence that some things are ‘unknowable’.


Addendum 2: Sabine Hossenfelder argues that infinity is only 'real' in the mathematical world. She contends that in physics, it's not 'real', because it's not 'measurable'. She gives a good exposition in this YouTube video.


Tuesday 3 September 2019

Universe origin theories

This is another mini-essay I posted on Quora in response to the following question(s):

Does the universe have a creator? Can the universe create itself? Is the universe cyclical? If the universe can create itself, will heat create a new universe after death?


No one can answer these questions definitively. A belief in a Creator has little to do with epistemology and more to do with cultural and religious beliefs. In other words, people find arguments, often based on known science, that support their core belief that there is a God and ‘He’ is the Creator of the Universe.

For example, it’s well known that there are dimensionless numbers that appear to be fine-tuned to allow complex life (meaning us) to exist. Jordan Ellenberg has written an excellent book called How Not to Be Wrong; The Power of Mathematical Thinking, where, among many other contentious topics, he discusses the ‘Bayesian inference of the existence of God’, whereby he shows that the Universe being a computer simulation has at least the same probability as it has being a divine intervention. He demonstrates that Bayesian statistics is heavily dependent on initial assumptions as well as data.

In conclusion, Ellenberg has this to say: As much as I love numbers, I think people ought to stick to “I don’t believe in God,” or “I do believe in God,” or just “I’m not sure”…. On this matter, math is silent.

The point is that whether there is a God or not, is not a question that science can answer, even though people on both sides of the debate use science to support their ‘belief(s)’. On the subject of Ellenberg’s book, very early on he talks about the statistical power inherent in the ‘law of large numbers’ and that ‘improbable’ and ‘impossible’ are mathematically distinct. The improbable invariably happens some where at some time, whereas the impossible has zero probability.

There are many speculative theories about the origin of the Universe. Alan Guth’s inflationary theory is the most popular, and according to Guth, could arise from ‘nothing’. He called it ‘the ultimate free lunch’. Paul Davies gives a very good account in his God and the New Physics (published over 30 years ago).

Roger Penrose argues for a cyclic universe or what he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC): not one that contracts and bounces, but one that becomes full of Hawking radiation after all matter is drawn into black holes, which eventually evaporate. He argues that this would ‘reset’ the entropy of the Universe (if I understand him correctly). He discusses this in a mostly non-technical book called Cycles of Time.

Penrose won the 1988 Wolf Prize jointly with Stephen Hawking, and Hawking developed his own ‘origin cosmology’ with James Hartle, known as the Hartle-Hawking universe, whereby time was originally a 4th spatial dimension, which Hawking refers to as ‘imaginary time’ because you have to multiply it by i (√-1) to change it into ‘real time’. Basically, Hawking and Hartle argue that in the beginning there was no time (I know, it sounds like a contradiction); it’s called the ‘no boundary universe’.

So there are many possible scenarios according to some of the best and brightest in physics and cosmology. As for your last question, I don’t even know where to begin, but given how little we know about the Universe’s origins (as per above), I would say it’s unanswerable.

Saturday 10 August 2019

Christianity and Buddhism

Last month’s issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 132, June/July 2019) had as its theme ‘West meets East’, so it was full of articles about Eastern philosophies and comparative philosophy. It led me to revisit this essay I wrote when I was a student some 20 years ago, studying philosophy, and specifically, when I took a unit called Religious Studies.

I should point out that I was brought up Christian, which I rejected in my mid to late teens, and in my 30s I took an interest in Buddhism and neo-Confucianism. So I had some background knowledge before I took the course. One can already see my existentialist leanings. 

Whilst I have previously written a post on Jesus, I haven’t written a post on Siddhārtha Gautama specifically, though I’ve made references to Buddhism in various posts.


‘Most religions envisage the spiritual path as a journey away from the false claims of the illusory self towards an understanding of the Real Self.’ Critically discuss this in relation to at least two of the three traditions studied in this course.

I will address this topic with respect to two of the religious systems under study: Christianity and Buddhism. The terms ‘illusory self’ and ‘Real’ or ‘True Self’ are open to wide interpretation within both systems, but if we perceive life as a journey, then what we are discussing is nothing less than the purpose of that journey as interpreted by both these religions.

This essay is not about the relative merits of Buddhism and Christianity, nevertheless it compares philosophical doctrines and points of view in relation to man’s mortal existence and his destiny. It also compares two views of a metaphysical universe which of course directly impact on how man perceives himself.

Buddhism and Christianity are both religions that evolved from earlier religions: Hinduism and Judaism respectively. Both arise from a distinct personality who remains central to the beliefs of their respective systems. Accordingly, I think there are two parts to these religions, and I intend to discuss both parts. Firstly, there is the part concerned with the personae: their lives as exemplars; and secondly their teachings and the philosophies that evolved therefrom.

Any great man, any personality who had an immense impact on a large body of people, eventually becomes mythologised, and it is the myth that continues and lives in people’s consciousness until it completely displaces the original persona. This is no different with Jesus and Siddhārtha Gautama, but as I will explain later there are more mythic qualities associated with the Christ than with the Buddha.

Historically, myth and religion have been synergistic. A myth, often but not always, includes factual elements, but it is not my intention to distil truth from fiction. For the purpose of this discussion, I’m taking another tact, where the mythic elements are not the focus.

When people refer to ‘The Buddha’, it is generally acknowledged that they are referring to Gautama Buddha or Siddhartha, even though he is not the first or only Buddha. Siddhartha was a prince born of the Ksatriya caste, a warrior and ruling caste, who became an ascetic when he juxtaposed his privileged style of living with the suffering of ordinary people. His impulse was not as simplistic as that however, because he was also aware that sickness, old age and death were burdens on human life that neither privilege nor wealth could avert.

As a result, he spent his entire life searching for the means, psychologically rather than physically, in releasing man’s spirit from this burden. At the age of 35 he achieved a state of enlightenment or awakening: an event which defines Buddhism in its essence. ‘The portrait of the Buddha...  is thus one of a man of both great wisdom and great compassion moved by the spectacle of human suffering and determined to free men from its fetters by a rational system of thought and a way of life.’ (ref. Encyclopaedia Brittanica)

Jesus’ story on the other hand, is told within the context of an enormous history: the history of the Jewish people. But it is more than that because it has mythic consequences relating to Divine judgement and the end of mortal history. But I would prefer, for the purposes of this discussion, to look at Jesus in a human context because I believe that is where his greatest message lies.

Jurgen Moltmann in Man gives a very good account of Jesus that reminds us of Jesus’ basic humanity and how he related to the lowest strata of society rather than those privileged by birth. Jesus provided a role, which to this day, very few people follow. I am not referring to the role of martyr, but to the role of facing the worst in human suffering and human weakness and human oppression, and revealing to such people his common humanity with them. There is a resonance here with Simone Weil’s Essay: On Human Personality; which reminds us that the intelligent person recoils from affliction in the same way ‘flesh recoils from death’.

I believe this is the greatest lesson Christ ever taught: that he was superior to all people, yet he gave his Grace to those least fortunate, regardless of creed, background or social position.

Buddha was not mythologised in the way that Christ was, neither was he a martyr, but in the final analysis these differences are of less significance than the hope they provide to all people through their example, their teachings and their lives. Both Christ and Buddha are not heroes in the traditional sense. They were antiheroes and pacifists, who were both renowned for their incomparable compassion to their fellow man. In this way, by their very lives, they both point to an identity and a destiny that ordinary people can emulate. This of course, is not how either of these religions are defined, but the lives of these men hold as much significance, perhaps even more, than their teachings.

On the other hand, to approach the destiny of the Self from a purely philosophical viewpoint, in either Christianity or Buddhism, one needs to go to the core of their respective beliefs. In Buddhism this is the concept of karma, and in Christianity it is a relationship with God through Christ. This also highlights the fundamental, and some would say irreconcilable differences between their philosophical and religious viewpoints.

Karma is generally understood as a causal connection between man’s actions and his destiny or fate. This causal relationship has metaphysical consequences, because it traverses lives. In other words, action in this life can affect destiny in the next life, which infers that some aspect of the Self is reborn. In Buddhist philosophy this leads to a contradiction because the Buddha explicitly preached a philosophy of no-self: that is no attachment, but also no soul.

Karma is a concept common to Hinduism, and is used as an explanation and rationalisation of the caste system, but Buddha considered the caste tradition inequitable.

More significantly, there is another way of perceiving karma that is best explained by John Hick in Death and Eternal Life, where he discusses the concept of a world karma. Hick explains with this concept that there is no need to consider an individual karma or rebirth, and so overcomes the contradiction. With or without the contradiction, the idea of a universal karma has a certain appeal and finds resonance in other concepts like Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.

Masao Abe also makes reference to a similar, if not the same concept, when he cites Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s notion of FAS: “Awakening to the Formless Self”. What Hick and Abe are both inferring is that there is a collective karma of the whole of mankind: past, present and future. What Abe describes as the ‘depth, breadth, and length of human existence’ According to Abe, Hisamatsu identifies this awakening as the same experience as satori (enlightenment in Zen Buddhist terminology).

To many Buddhists, satori, enlightenment or nirvana, is the whole purpose of man’s existence as an individual, and this is what is meant by finding the ‘True Self.’ Personally, I believe there are other perspectives to this question, without denying the significance of satori, and I will return to them later.

But another significant attribute of karma in Buddhist philosophy is that it deals with good and evil in human life without acknowledging a Deity or a Devil. I think this is fundamental in understanding the differences in Buddhist and Christian beliefs and also how they approach the question of the Self and its destiny.

To elaborate we need to examine the other obvious distinction between Christianity and Buddhism, which is that Christianity fundamentally requires a relationship with God. To a large extent, this philosophical nexus also determines the role of Christ.

It is Christ that makes Christianity unique in a way that Buddha doesn’t. As Fritz Buri says: ‘But in distinction to the Buddha, Jesus is not only teacher, but also an actor in the history of existence.’ It is Christ’s resurrection that places him mythically above man, though not immortal. It places him perfectly between God and man. In the Christian perspective, Christ is our connection with God, with Heaven and with a consciousness beyond death. This is the Christian response to both karma and nirvana.

Much of contemporary Christian belief revolves around the idea of being born again; of ‘finding Christ’. Many believers maintain that without this rebirth, which includes the acceptance of Christ as their saviour, there is no possibility of achieving the kingdom of Heaven. Yet according to Matthew this is not enough. In Matthew 7:21, Jesus says it is not enough to use his name: ‘It is not anyone who says to me: “Lord, Lord”, who will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in Heaven’.

But in Christian doctrine, it is the metaphorical rebirth that signals a change in spiritual identity. To the orthodox Christian, this is the only path, the only destiny for the Self to consider.

Once again, I believe there are other perspectives to be considered, and it is another passage in Matthew which provides a clue. In Matthew 12:33-37, Jesus maintains that what comes from a man’s mouth (in words) comes from his heart - in this way one can tell evil from good. Specifically: Matthew 12:34; ‘You brood of vipers, how can your speech be good when you are evil? For words flow out of what fills the heart.’

‘What fills the heart’ is perhaps what the True Self is all about, and has resonances with Buddhism as well as other Eastern philosophies, but more importantly, is a key factor in Augustine’s neo-Platonic influenced philosophy: ‘...to reach the good, which is the real, one must “return into” oneself; for it is the spirit at the heart of man’s inmost self that links him to the ultimate reality.’ (ref. Encyclopaedia Brittanica)

In Christianity, the essential element of life’s journey is man’s relationship with God. This relationship is obviously deeply individualistic and despite the rituals and liturgies of the traditional churches, can really only be achieved within an individual’s consciousness. Again, in reference to Augustine: ‘Grace awakens the dormant power of the mind to see God’s image in itself, to see itself, that is, as God’s image.’ In other words, God is found only by looking inside ourselves, not by a leap of imagination into the unknown, conjuring images of a supreme being or a pantheistic spirit. That is not to say that Augustine didn’t recognise God as creator of the Universe, but man’s conscious accessibility to God is an inner journey, not an external relationship.

This, I believe, provides the best insight into the Christian perspective of understanding the Self and its destiny. The state of Grace that the Christian strives for, is to my interpretation, the same state as satori or nirvana, that is the Buddhist’s highest goal.

In Buddhist philosophy, as perceived from a Western perspective, the biggest conceptual hurdle is the belief in karma but not the soul. To overcome this paradox, Buddhist philosophers invoke the concept of no-self, but it tends to create more confusion than resolution.

If one simply dwells on the self or no-self paradox in Buddhism, then I believe one misses the point. The point of the journey of life is to acquire meaning and perhaps also an identity. In Christianity the notion of identity is very clear: it is achieved in a metaphorical rebirth (finding one’s identity in Christ). In Buddhism the purpose of the journey is to achieve satori or nirvana. But if the emphasis is changed from the destination to the journey itself, then it gives a different perspective. It is then concerned with the way we live our lives. It is the notion of karma that gives substance to Buddhist belief, not a concern with self or no-self. Buddha’s teachings on the no-self, I believe, reflect his concern with man’s preoccupation with the self and its unhealthy consequences. Whilst karma can be seen as a stick and carrot approach to religious teaching, this is a misplaced emphasis. If karma is seen instead as man’s connection to the rest of humanity, including past and future humanity, then one begins to grasp the point.

‘Interconnection between the individual and the whole universe is stressed in the Buddhist doctrine of karma.’ (ref. Encylopaedia Brittanica) From this conceptual viewpoint, the notion of individual karma and rebirth can be taken as a secondary consideration, and is neither denied nor affirmed.

But perhaps more relevantly, individual karma and therefore the Self, should not be considered as being independent of our universal or collective karma. That, at least, is my interpretation.

There is still another perspective of the Self, which is man’s purpose given by God. An idea that finds resonance in both Christian and Eastern beliefs. Tu Wei-Ming, a Confucian scholar, expresses it best: ‘...we are guardians of the good earth, the trustees of the mandate of Heaven....embedded in our human nature is the secret code for Heaven’s self-realisation.’

Humankind is above all else, the caretaker of the planet Earth. If one believes in a God, Christian or otherwise, as a creator who explicitly places man in charge of his creation, then the responsibility is huge indeed. Buddhist doctrine, on the other hand, ignores any explicit reference to this responsibility; nevertheless man’s karmic relationship, either individualistic or holistic, points him in the same direction - Earth’s fate has a causal dependency on man’s fate. From this point of view, one cannot ignore that the individual’s journey has a connection to humankind’s collective journey, with or without a heaven, with or without rebirth. From this perspective, the difference between the illusory self and the True Self is perhaps not one of identification but of awareness. An awareness not of Divine inheritance but of responsibility to our inheritance.

In the final analysis, I believe that religion or religious viewpoint is not so much a belief as an attitude. An attitude towards the Universe, towards one’s life and life in general, but above all, an attitude that reflects the Self at its deepest core rather than at a superficial level.

The spiritual journey is a euphemism for the search inside oneself to discover the true nature of the Self so that it may ‘light the world’  (Budda’s last words, purportedly). This is why the artist who has the most impact on us, is the one who digs deepest into his or her psyche. Augustine was right when he said the search for God was an inner journey. It is the inner journey which finds the True Self not the journey in the material world. Both Buddhists and Christians agree that the desire to create a position or an identity for ourselves in the world of business, commerce or social environment is the illusory self. The True Self, through which we engage our relationships to others and to the world at large, is, in the final analysis, the means by which we gain satisfaction from living.





References:

Abe M., Transformation in Buddhism, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol.7, 1987, pp.15-20.

Augustine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edition 15, 1989, Vol.14, pp.286-390.

Balthasar H.U. von, Engagement with God, trans. J. Halliburton, SPCK, London, 1975, Part 2, ch.4, pp.67-80.

Bultmann R. Existence and Faith, trans. Schubert M. Ogden, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1961, pp. 248-66.

Buri F., Ingram P. & Streng F. (Eds), Buddhist-Christian Dialogue - Mutual Renewal and Transformation, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1986.

Burnaby J., ‘Introduction’, in J.Baillie, J.T.McNeill et al. (eds), The Library of Christian Classics, Vol.III, SCM Press, London, 1955, pp.23-31,31-6.

Ching J., Paradigms of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 4, 1984, pp.31-50.

Cochrane C., Christianity and Classical Culture, Oxford University Press, London, 1944, pp.399-411.

Collins S., Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Therevada Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, 1982, Part IV, pp.218-24.

Coward H., Psychology and Karma, Philosophy East and West, Vol.33, No 1, 1984, pp.54-58.

Fenner P. ‘Cognitive theories of the emotions in Buddhism and Western psychology’, Psychologia, vol.30, 1987, pp.217-27.

Fenner P., The self and its destiny in Buddhism, Religious Systems B,
 Deakin University, Geelong, 1996.

Hick J. Death and Eternal Life, Collins, London, 1976, ch.18, pp.347-60.

Hopkins J. & Rinbochay L., Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, Rider, London, 1979, Introduction, pp.13-21.

Howard W., Christianity according to St. John, Duckworth, London, 1943, ch. IV, pp.81-105.

Lichter D. & Epstein L., ‘Irony in Tibetan notions of the good life’, in C.F. Keyes & E.V. Daniel (eds), Karma. An Anthropological Enquiry, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1983, Part 2, sn 9, pp.233-38.

McLellan D., Utopian Pessimist: The Life and thought of Simone Weil, 
Poseidon Press,1990.

Moltmann J. Man, SPCK, London, 1974, pp. 16-21, 105-17.

The New Jerusalem Bible - New Testament, Darton, Longman & Todd, Reader’s Edition, 1991.

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Tu W., LIFE magazine, Dec. 1988, p.93.


Sunday 21 July 2019

Religion and politics in secular society

This is a letter I wrote to The Weekend Australian, Christmas 2017, so 18 months ago. There was a side-debate at the time, during the same sex marriage debate about ‘religious freedom’. It seemed to me that ‘religious freedom’ was ‘code’ for freedom to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and it’s not over. From what I’ve read and seen, the only arguments against same sex marriage came from conservative religious figures (some being politicians) even if they claimed it was about ‘the sanctity of marriage’.

The letter below alludes to that debate, even though the topic is much broader. It’s really about a perceived conflict between secularism and Christianity in Western societies, including Australia. There is a recurring argument that our Christian heritage provides the moral fabric of our society with the inference that, without it, we’d lose our moral compass. If that was true, and we really followed Christ’s calling, we wouldn’t treat refugees the way we do. In fact, our 2 most conservative Christian leaders, in recent times, have been the most ruthless advocates for persecuting refugees, and of fomenting xenophobic sentiment in the electorate.

The names referenced in the letter below, are journalists or commentators. The Australian is a Murdoch publication, so it has conservative political leanings.



Both Paul Kelly and John Carroll in separate articles (Weekend Australian, Enquirer, 23-24 Dec.2017) seem concerned that the modern secular world that dominates Western societies, and therefore Australia, has forgotten, even ‘turned its back’ on our Christian heritage. I’m officially retiring age, so I grew up in post-war Australia when going to Sunday School and scripture classes (in public schools) was still considered part of a child’s education (neither of my parents were religious; they just thought it was the cultural norm). Strangely, I don’t lament the loss, for want of a better word, the Church’s role in political and secular life, epitomised by the divide between Catholics and Protestants that dominated even the small country town where I grew up.

I found the greater part of Paul Kelly’s lengthy editorial a stimulating read, even when I might proffer alternative views, but his commentary on High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s concerns about the future of Christianity in this country, I found alarmist to say the least:  “The question for the West is how it retains its civilisational heritage if it abandons beliefs in its Christian ethic or, indeed, if its political culture begins to assault that ethic.” Without referencing them specifically, he’s obviously referring to the passing of the recent same-sex-marriage bill in Federal Parliament and the euthanasia bill in the Victorian State Parliament. Both of these have provoked ‘concerns’ from the Catholic church, in particular, who are effectively under siege for the sins they committed in the previous generation.

Personally, I think it’s a landmark moment that gays and lesbians now have the same rights as heterosexual couples. A law that has symbolic and pragmatic importance for the people it affects, and absolutely no effect on the people who oppose it. No one is being forced to have same-sex marriage – it’s a choice. Kelly and his fellow detractors will talk about religious freedom, but it’s only an issue for the people who, for whatever reason, think that homosexuals and lesbians should stay in the closet, or at least, stay out of our churches. If it comes to a choice – and it shouldn’t – between gay and lesbian rights and religious freedom, then it’s a no brainer for most Australians, including the ones like myself, who are heterosexual.

To give credit to The Australian, on the same page as John Carroll’s very lengthy piece on Christmas and the declining relevance of Jesus’ story to most Australians, there is a piece by Helen Dale, who explains, at some length, the pagan roots of Christmas that most Australians are either unaware of or blissfully apathetic about. This created a counter-perspective that was running through my head even while I was reading Carroll’s thesis.

Don Cupitt, a theologian, turned philosopher and author, is a bit of an iconoclast when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. He’s made the salient point that humanist morality really started with the novel, where moral dilemmas and issues concerning good and evil were resolved without invoking a Deity or scripture. Carroll, to his credit, makes a similar point about the role of literature and popular culture in stimulating our psyche in this regard, without resort to prescriptive Christian ethics. He then goes on to say: “Further, we have now had 150 years of gloomy prediction that the death of God would lead to political anarchy and the moral collapse of the West. That has simply not eventuated.”

For Carroll, the Jesus story is all about imbibing us with meaning, and that is what we are losing. The point is that the Jesus story is mythology and when I was a child, undergoing the religious education I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, I really believed the stories were true, because at that age we believe whatever adults tell us. Like many of my generation, I grew up disillusioned in my mid teens, when I realised the stories were not only mythologised but defied rational analysis. And that is the real reason that Christianity has lost its meaning for most people with a Western education.

In the Review section of the same issue of the Weekend Australian, John Carey reviews a book by Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, where he charters the literary history of the book of Genesis, from its origins in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Augustine’s seminal re-interpretation as signifying the ‘Fall of Man’. I’m not sure if it’s Carey’s or Greenblatt’s insight, but one of them points out the logical inconsistency in the morality tale: “For if God was all-knowing, why did he forbid Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, knowing they would disobey? Why did he create them at all, since he intended to kill them?”

Both Carroll and Kelly refer to the heritage or legacy that Christian ethics has provided to Western cultures. Well, historically, so-called Christian ethics has created a lot of bigotry, wars, genocide and inquisitional torture. Many contemporary commentators point to the current issues surrounding Islam, claiming that the religion itself is flawed. Well, if Islam is flawed then so is Christianity.

Hugh Mackay, in his book, Right & Wrong; How to Decide for Yourself, warns of the dangers of believing that God is on your side, because then anything can be justified, which is what we’ve witnessed both historically and contemporarily.


Addendum: The same day I posted this, I read an article in the Australian Weekend Magazine (July 20-21, 2019) about Israel Folau and the issue of religious freedom. Folau is a star rugby player with the Australian Rugby Union team and famously posted a piece on Facebook that all homosexuals, adulterers, liars and various other sinners would go to Hell. What created a furor wasn’t so much what he said but that he was sacked from the team (his contract was terminated). I agree with former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, that the Australian Rugby Union went outside their remit.

The incident has brought out the worst on both sides of the debate, and demonstrates what happens when you try to enforce what people are allowed to say in public. Peter Singer is another unexpected supporter of Folau's right to free speech. My attitude is that everyone should be allowed to make complete fools of themselves, whether they be sports stars, TV celebrities, politicians or even the President of the United States.

Sunday 26 May 2019

Evolution of culture; a uniquely human adaption

I finally got around to reading Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, after someone lent me a copy. I’d already read and reviewed his follow-up book, Homo Deus, so I’m reading them in the reverse order. I have to say he makes bleak reading, yet you feel there’s a lot of truth in his words. Having said that, I still feel I can challenge him on some issues to provide a more optimistic outlook. He is both provocative and thought-provoking, which are not necessarily one and the same thing.

He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.

One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.

He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.

I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.

They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.

Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.

Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity:  ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.

As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.

To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.

The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.

One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:

If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.

Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.

Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.

I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.

And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:

Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.

Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.

So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.

I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).

But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.

So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.

Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.

This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.

One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.

I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.

One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.

I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.

But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.

In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.

Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.

Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.

If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.

You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom
.

I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.

A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.

While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.

An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.