ON THE MEANING OF LIFE
ESSAY 3 : ALONG THE ROAD TO TRUTH
There are two mistakes one can make along
the road to truth – not going all the way, and not starting.
- BUDDHA
Confronted with
life’s grand opportunity to walk along the road to truth, most of us make at
least one of the mistakes identified for us by Buddha, above. I have avoided
the mistake of not starting, and it is my intention to try and avoid the other
mistake – in this, my attempt to go all the way. You are welcome to come with
me and learn from my adventures, my discoveries, my successes – and from my
mistakes.
In the previous
two essays I examined the House of God and the House of Disbelief – finding them
both to be unsound shelters containing only souls seeking comfort. Souls, in
other words, going nowhere along Buddha’s “Road to Truth”.
Is this a
problem – must we all be seekers of Truth?
That most
discomforting of all philosophers, Socrates, said: “An unexamined life is not
worth living”. I think he’s right. It is my observation from living, that life
is not a test – as religions believe – but a series of opportunities, and to
spend a life sheltering rather than seeking, misses the greatest opportunity
that life offers – the journey towards self knowledge.
The cost of an “unexamined”
life spent sheltering in an “H” House, calculated in the currency of self, is
high. Admission to the House of God is coined in the lost spiritual
opportunities involved in holding primitive “spiritual” beliefs in a parochial,
jealous, vain, brutal, sexist “g” god – and of believing that the meaning of
life is to achieve salvation from the sin of being human. The admission fee to
the House of Disbelief is likewise expensive to the self, coined in the costs
of outright spiritual denial – of believing that the human equation only has
material factors – and of believing that life has no special meaning our
ultimate purpose. The denizens of either House must forfeit the spiritual
opportunities that a life lived outside sheltering walls allows.
What sort of
opportunities?
The only place
we will find the answer to this question is along the road to truth.
AN INVITATION
TO VENTURE OUTSIDE OUR HOUSES
I invite those within their Houses to venture outside
and join me in an effort to firstly find the road to truth, then go as far
along it as we can. It will be a demanding journey into challenging territory –
fraught with cliffs of fall but, hopefully, blessed with exhilarating heights
and stunning views. We may be disturbed by what we find, but take heart – consider
this, from one of the wisest of us all – from the Gospel of Thomas (a Gospel
rejected by the fathers of the House of God as not suiting their purposes):
“Those
who seek should not stop seeking until they find.
When they find, they will be
disturbed.
When they are disturbed, they
will marvel.”
Jesus
– Gospel of Thomas (2:1-3)
EMERGING FROM OUR HOUSES AND FINDING THE ROAD TO
TRUTH
The House of God and the House of Disbelief are easy to
find – being built upon the high moral ground, they are clearly visible. And
they are remarkably close together, because being a fundamentalist believer or
disbeliever leaves you in much the same spot relative to the Truth – far, far
away. A few brave souls emerge from their Houses at my invitation to explore
without their walls, and together we descend to the fields below.
The fields below the high moral ground are lush – being
well fertilised by the sacred cows of both Houses which graze thereon. As we cast
about for our “Road to Truth” we are spied by the soldiers of orthodoxy from
both Houses who are each tending their cows. As we discovered in the previous
two essays, sacred cows are vulnerable, and we are quickly escorted away by the
sacred-cowherds.
We find we have been ushered towards a river which
has steep banks and wildly flowing waters.
ALL GREAT TRUTHS BEGIN AS BLASPHEMIES
There is a rickety bridge across the river and we have
no choice but to take it. The bridge bears a sign informing us that it is
called: “
The bridge creaks beneath our feet, and we can see through
its insecure planks down to the river below, full of ideological whirlpools which
can make the head spin before they drag you under – eventually a meal for the lurking
crocodiles. Cautiously, we inch across to the other side and step quickly off
onto the bank. We find ourselves delivered to the beginning of a small track,
which leads away into the depths of a looming forest. It doesn’t look very
grand, could this possibly be the start of our royal “Road to Truth”?
There is no other path, so we take it.
BURNING OUR BRIDGE BEHIND US
As we head off into the darkling forest the rashest members
of our band pause, and in a show of bravado, set fire to the bridge behind us.
It is quickly alight and there is no going back now. But at least the flames do
serve to cast some light onto our gloomy track. And fortunately so, because we
are soon confronted by two pitfalls.
One is sign-posted “Supernatural” and the other “Metaphysical”.
These mark the entry into tangled labyrinths of uncertain worlds – wherein it
has been reputed many escapees from the Houses of God and Disbelief have ventured
to seek Truth – only to emerge more confused than ever (if at all). Maybe we
will return to peek into these areas later if we can find a reliable guide but,
for the moment, I propose we dance around these potential traps – to explore
the unnatural rather than the supernatural, and the non-physical rather than
the metaphysical.
THE UNNATURAL AND THE NON-PHYSICAL
What do I mean by these terms?
By the “unnatural” I mean those behaviours of humanity
which are not well described as being the natural consequences of an entirely mechanistic
world. For example, while it is conceivable that atoms might have naturally,
mechanistically somehow have become alive, is it reasonable to deduce that
those atoms naturally, causally proceeded to compose the 9th
symphony, carve the Pieta, construct the Sagrada Familiglia, paint the
Giaconda, sing the Messiah, dance Swan Lake, and write Hamlet?
And by the “non-physical” I mean things which are
driving our behaviour but are not of the physical, material world of atoms and
forces – things like: humour, beauty, virtue, honour, shame, right, wrong, the
self?
The self?
The self, soul, spirit – call it what you will – that
part of us which is not of the animal body driven by instincts, survival needs,
and genetic imperatives. That part of us which wrote the 9th
symphony, that part of us which is “moved” by the hearing of it. The physical
universe appears to be causal and mechanistic – but there also appears to be a ghost
in the machine.
MANY TRACKS, BUT WHICH WAY TO VENTURE?
We haven’t ventured very far yet, but we have emerged
a little from our initial darkness and defined a few tracks. Which to follow? Here
we need some wisdom – a little knowledge perhaps?
PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy, according to the Oxford Dictionary of
Philosophy is: “The love of knowledge and
wisdom”. Just the thing – what better as a compass along our road to Truth
than philosophy? Let’s take out our philosophical compass and see where it
points us?
Western philosophy, after the great golden age of Greek
philosophers, was often described as a “footnote to Plato”. After Christianity
was institutionalised it also became a great force in Western philosophy. But, after
the early scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and others in the 16th
and 17th centuries, the main influence on philosophy became science
– eventually blossoming as the rationalist philosophical movement known as the
Enlightenment in the 18th century. Ever since then, philosophy’s
majority position, rather than a footnote to Plato, would be better described
as being the “handmaiden to science” – especially after Darwin’s theory of natural
selection was accepted. After
MEANINGLESSNESS MUST BE OUR LOGICAL DEFAULT POSITION
Philosophy – holding that all human behaviours are satisfactorily
describable in evolutionary terms of natural selection, animal survival, and
genetic imperatives – is forced to the corollary that life is necessarily devoid
of special meaning and ultimate purpose. There need be no first cause, no
Divine – humans have no duty or destiny. If any meaning can be detected in
existence it must necessarily be personal, any purpose naturally animal. Into
the 20th century and the attack of the “isms”: existentialism, materialism,
scientism, naturalism, relativism, post-modernism – existence was all – no
special meaning only our own personal and relative meanings; everything is
relative, there is no Absolute – no “T” Truth, only your, or my, “t” truth can exist.
Meaninglessness in this way has become the West’s logical
default philosophical position – any divergence from meaninglessness must be
proven. We are merely the results of chance – the universe accidental, life
spontaneous – we are cut adrift from our supposed destiny, from our central
position in the universe, from our special relationship with God. Philosopher Jacques
Monod spells it out:
“The
ancient covenant is in pieces: man at last knows that he is alone in the
unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by
chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. ”
- (P.167, “Chance and
Necessity”).
LOST ON THE ROAD TO TRUTH?
So, basically,
we are wasting our time on our “Road to Truth”. The truth is: there is no “T”
Truth. Our philosophical compass must necessarily point nowhere – we are lost
in a sometimes magnificent but, ultimately bleak, land. And we thought we were
getting somewhere, but, our road to Truth still a track, we have come so soon
to the brink of one of those “cliffs of fall” I mentioned in my introduction.
What to do,
where to go?
Let’s do what a
lot of us are inclined to do when given a death sentence, let’s get a second
opinion. Let’s consider what theoretical physicist and philosopher, Paul Davies,
has to say about Monod’s words:
“If the
magnificent edifice of life is the consequence of a random and purely
incidental quirk of fate, as the French biologist Jacques Monod claimed, we
must surely find common cause with his bleak atheism.”
- (P. 3,
“The Fifth Miracle”)
“If”? “If”?
“If”? Do I sense a chance? “Bleak” may be the word for Monod’s atheism, but,
Davies leaves us just a little glimmer – with his use of the word “if”. Let’s
examine this little (but potentially giant) word.
IF SO
If humanity has emerged out of the universe
“only by chance”, if we are “the consequence of a random and purely
incidental quirk of fate”, if everything has proceeded mechanistically
from an accidental beginning, if the human equation only has animal
factors – then meaninglessness and purposelessness must reign and we are indeed
lost on our road, with, as Bob Dylan would put it, “no direction home”. Worse,
we have committed blasphemy and burned our bridges back to a House where we
could have forsaken the pursuit of sinful knowledge and cuddled up to a little bit
of comforting faith – in God “The Father”.
IF NOT
But if we are not
just the incidental product of a quirk of fate – there may be more to our existence
than just our animal drives and genetic imperatives.
So, quickly, with
a little glimmer of hope in our hearts, let’s draw up a map of the “iffy” bits in
the materialist, physical, neo-Darwinian theory of everything to explore – let’s
see if, in the exploration of these things we can walk all the way down life’s
winding road to Truth?
THE MYSTERIES
OF LIFE
What sort of
things are iffy – “things” that don’t look like they are well explained by the
words “incidental”, “mechanistic”, “spontaneous”, “meaningless”, “purposeless”,
“causal”, “materialistic”, “random”. Let’s look at the unlikely: the unnatural;
the non-physical; the spiritual – the mysteries of life.
Such things as:
·
THE
INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF MATTER
·
THE
INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF BEING
·
INTELLIGENT
DESIGN
·
THE
ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES
·
GOOD,
BAD, RIGHT, AND WRONG.
·
SHAME,
ETHICS, CONSCIENCE AND AN INKLING OF THE SPIRITUAL.
·
BEAUTY
·
HUMAN
FACIAL BEAUTY
·
MATHEMATICS
AND THE UNCANNY TUNING OF THE HUMAN MIND TO NATURE
·
OVER-DEVELOPMENT
OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
·
CONSCIOUSNESS
·
MUSIC
AND POETRY
·
SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION
·
HAPPINESS
·
SPIRITUAL
OR PSYCHOLOGICAL?
·
EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL
·
THE
PARANORMAL AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
·
NDE’s
·
ITC –
INSTRUMENTAL TRANSCOMMUNICATION
·
THE
PHYSICAL WORLD AS MIND STUFF – QUANTUM WEIRDNESS
·
HUMOUR
So, there’s our map. We have obeyed Buddha’s first injunction
and set out on the Road to Truth, now let’s bravely continue on our path, map
in hand, to see if we can meet his other injunction to go all the way.
Time to explore the first place on our map – our physical
world.
Shakespeare said that “The whole world’s a stage and
we are but players upon it”. Two mysteries here: firstly, the very existence of
a stage and, secondly, the mysterious players who strut it.
THE STAGE
The physical universe, the platform upon which we strut
our lives – why is there a stage (something) rather than nothing? – the
primordial existential question.
The magisterium of our physical sciences does not
cover the “Why?” questions, their domain being the “How?” questions. The why’s
of existence fall under the magisterium of philosophy, and materialist
philosophy – definitely sciences’ handmaiden – holds that the “everything” of
existence can be explained in terms of matter and motion. Let’s look at the materialist,
natural, physical explanation for everything. It goes something like this:
THE PHYSICAL EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING
Everything about existence can be explained as being
the natural, mechanistic consequence of a purely physical event that most
scientists are calling the Big Bang which occurred about 13.7 billion years
ago. There are other terms for the physical beginning (the big expansion, big
inflation etc.) but all basically envisage the same thing – that this happened
spontaneously, accidentally – that is, without the aid of any outside first cause
or power – like a God.
The Big Bang was a multi-billion degree maelstrom of
energy converting into matter. The first matter was sub-atomic – particles like
quarks and gluons, which formed quickly into protons and neutrons. When one
each of these latter two combined with one electron the simplest atom was
formed: hydrogen (having a nucleus comprised of one proton and one neutron
encompassed by one whizzing electron). The existence of gravity compressed
these simple atoms into giant fusions events – stars. Stars formed larger and
larger atoms under the heat and forces within them, and were thus the factories
of our living worlds – spewing out these more complicated atoms, “star stuff” –
when they finally exploded as super-nova. Star stuff is the matter of planets,
and the matter of living things – like us – when one (or more?) planet(s) developed
conditions suitable to allow the (most likely spontaneous) occurrence of life.
Is this everything?
We may have come to understand the interrelationship
of energy and matter, and that the beginning of the universe was a chaos of
energy, matter, and radiation – but, if neither energy nor matter can be
created or destroyed (the first law of thermodynamics) where did the original
energy come from? Science says it does not have to answer this question because
the laws of physics (e.g. the laws of thermodynamics) could not have existed
“before” the Big Bang – the beginning of everything – including time itself.
Neat. But I don’t think that: (“ “ + original conditions = mass + energy +
life”) is going to stand as one of the great equations of all time? And where
did the original finely tuned conditions come from to act in concert with (“ ”) to create order out of chaos? Gravity
may be a natural property of matter, but it is not a natural property of
nothing. Many mysterious things needed to exist alongside (“ “) for the universe to get all its ducks in
a row, and the slightest alteration to any of them would reduce our intricately
interdependent universe to a chaotic jumble of energy and radiation, which by
rights it should naturally have been – if the product of an accident :
“We
really should live in a Universe with just radiation and no matter at all. But
we don’t – and one of the most exciting aspects of modern cosmology is trying
to understand what monumental accidents happened in the first microsecond of
the Universe’s existence.”
– Cosmologist Larry Krauss (quoted in Universe, Couper & Henbest P. 26).
Krauss is not getting carried away – he may call them
“exciting” and “monumental”, but he still calls the events leading to our
universe “accidents”. So let’s consider these “monumental accidents”.
Firstly, the accident of the unlikely formation of
enough and suitable matter to form a universe. Describing the initial moments
after the beginning Krauss says:
“Every
time a particle of ordinary matter was created, a deadly twin of antimatter was
spawned as well. The birth of every electron, for instance, also saw the
creation of an ‘anti-electron’, or positron. The two have exactly opposite
properties. If an electron and positron subsequently meet up again, they
mutually annihilate in a burst of energy. In the young Universe equally matched
battalions of matter and antimatter waged war on each other. The skirmishes
produced radiation…Why is there any material – matter or antimatter – left in
the Universe today?…every now and then, one out of 10 billion interactions
might have produced a particle of matter – one more than a particle of
antimatter. In the end, you’d have 10 billion particles of antimatter, and 10
billion and one particles of matter. The 10 billion particles of matter and
antimatter would annihilate, leaving just the one particle of matter left over.
And that little bit extra is responsible for everything we can see today – it’s
kinda remarkable!”
(Pp. 25-26 ibid.)
Kinda! Why
not 10 billion and one particles of antimatter instead? How about some of the
other crucial, “monumental accidents”?
THE FINE BALANCE BETWEEN ORDER AND DISORDER
Not only is there a very fine balance between matter
and anti-matter, but there is an equally fine balance between order and
disorder. All should be chaos in an accidental, spontaneous natural beginning –
any accidental order quickly reduced by entropy. Professor Roger Penrose
(mathematics, Oxford) has shown that, the chances of our universe naturally,
accidentally having the required amount of order to combat the forces of
disorder to produce the complexity we observe, is one in 1010 123 – a number so
huge that the number of zeros totals more than all the atoms in the universe!
SIZE DOES MATTER
Some see the immense size of the universe as proof of
its accidentalness – if there was some intelligent first cause, why so much
waste in the design – as illustrated by the huge amounts of space and
uninhabitable worlds?
But, apparently, the huge size and density of the
universe is immaculate. Not only were the above extraordinarily fine balances
of matter and anti-matter, order and disorder critical – but the size and density
of the universe is critical as well. I have quoted the following in the Essay
examining the House of Disbelief, but we need to consider this point again here:
“…the
mean density of matter in the universe at the very beginning has to be within 1
part in 1060 of the so-called ‘critical density’… If the density
is smaller than it is by this amount then the universe will expand far too
quickly for stars and galaxies to be able to form. If it is greater then the
whole universe will recollapse under gravity in just a few months … the
universe needs to be the vast size it is in order for man to exist. This is the
size it inevitably reaches in the 14,000 million years which it takes to evolve
human beings…only if it is so vast could we be here! ”
-
Dr.
Rodney Holder, P53 “Think” – issue 12
I’m not sure that I adhere to Dr. Holder’s apparently
human centric vision (he is a theologian as well as a cosmologist) – but his
scientific argument about the present size of the universe being critical to
preventing the collapse of the universe (therefore to allowing life) still
stands.
THE UNIVERSE IS CAUSAL AND MECHANISTIC
Our physical, material world observably proceeds in a
causal, mechanistic fashion. But its existence in the first place in order for
it to proceed anywhere remains the big question. So far the existence of our
physical universe is not looking very accidental, if anything, answering the “How?”
of the “something rather than nothing” question – has made asking the “Why”
question even more valid. But some feel that this supposedly ultimate question,
so beloved of theists, is a non-event. They feel that although science may still
be short of all the answers (there is as yet no Grand Unified Theory) there has
been sufficient theoretical evidence flowing from the field of quantum physics
that we can declare something can come from nothing:
“…let
me address probably the most common question theists ask atheists, one they
smugly think is the final clincher on the case for God: ‘Why is there something
rather than nothing?’…The eminent philosopher Adolf Grunbaum has shown that the
question is ill-conceived because it assumes that the natural state of affairs
is ‘nothing’ and some cause was necessary to bring ‘something’ into existence. That
argument can be supplemented with a physics argument that something is more
natural than nothing…As the Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek said
when he was asked why there is something rather than nothing: ‘Nothing is more
stable’.
“We
can also show that the laws of physics are just what they should be if the
universe came from nothing.”
Professor Victor Stenger – “Godless
Cosmology” (in “50 Voices of Disbelief”, Ed Blackford & Schuklenk P. 116)
We can only briefly touch on the extensive and
complex area of the mysteries surrounding the physical existence of anything,
but we can see that there is no conclusive way forward for our road to Truth
through these brambles. Suffice it to recognise that any mystery surrounding
the existence of matter may be soon, and irrevocably, settled. Any special
meaning, purpose, and God based solely on the existence of something rather
than nothing being a mystery is liable to be cut off at the ground, if the
universe is proven accidentally arisen from nothing.
No, in my opinion, if “T” Truth in the shape of
special meaning, ultimate purpose, and a “G” God exists in our relative
universe it is more likely to be found in the strange creatures who strut the
stage, rather than the stage itself.
Let’s now examine them.
In time, some of the stuff which was formed under the
great heat and forces inside stars formed into planets, and (on at least one planet)
some of this inert stuff became organic – alive. This happened on Earth about
3.5 billion years ago as the end result of organic monomers (e.g. amino acids) forming
from organic molecules (e.g. water, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide)
which teamed up with other (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) monomers to form
organic polymers (protein). The exact nuts and bolts of the process to the
first definite lifeform is still mysterious (as is the correct definition of
life – are viruses alive, toenails?) but, for our purposes, the position of
science is that it was yet another natural, spontaneous process flowing mechanistically
from the original accident of the existence of the physical universe. Science thinks
it is on the verge of a full understanding of the process by which life arose,
but even if we finally understand the mechanics of how life started, what life
evolved into is more mysterious, and more likely the key to any special meaning
and purpose.
After atoms somehow became alive, the first simple
single-cell lifeforms somehow became capable of multiplying. Random mutations happened
to some reproductions and those mutations which allowed greater adaption to the
environment for their lifeform were favoured in the subsequent out-breeding by that
lifeform. In this way advantageous mutations were naturally “selected” to
survive and multiply and disadvantageous ones failed – in a process called,
appropriately enough: natural selection. This totally causal process resulted
in the original, simple lifeform evolving into animals that were of increasing
diversity and complexity as they moved into the various differing environments
that the Earth offered.
This increase in complexity was exponential. In terms
of the age of the universe, the point at which some life became conscious came
quickly– then, very quickly, it became conscious of the universe. But, ignoring
the speed, the point here is those who think that we are accidental as we stand,
have three impossible things to believe before breakfast:
1. Inert
star-stuff became alive.
2. Star-stuff
became conscious.
3. Star-stuff
became conscious of the universe.
- In the words
of Carl Sagan, we are: “Star-stuff observing the stars!”
So, even when we come to understand how the inert
became alive, we are just at the start of mystery of the existence of us. After
star-stuff became conscious of the universe it became conscious of the language
the universe was written in (mathematics). This put the cat among the pigeons,
allowing star-stuff to become conscious of consciousness, and, conscious of
itself. In fact, star-stuff became to understand itself so well that it became capable
of re-designing itself through alterations to DNA. So while still a creature of
the universe, humanity has become a creator – at one and the same time.
Life spontaneously arising from an accidental universe
coming to understand itself to the point of creating itself?
“What
physical and chemical processes can transform non-living matter into a living
organism?…It is currently being tackled by an army of chemists, biologists,
astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians … On the basis of their research,
many of them fervently conclude that
the laws of nature are, to put it bluntly, rigged in favour of life.…Belief
that life is written into the laws of nature carries a faint echo of a bygone
religious age, of a universe designed for habitation. …[but] Many scientists are scornful of such
notions, insisting that the origin of life was a freak accident of chemistry,
unique to Earth, and that the subsequent emergence of complex organisms,
including conscious beings, is likewise purely the chance outcome of a gigantic
cosmic lottery.”
- Paul Davies, P. xii “The
Fifth Miracle”.
However –
“The
living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. …How did
something so immensely complicated, so finessed, so exquisitely clever, come
into being all on its own? How can mindless molecules, capable only of pushing
and pulling their immediate neighbours, cooperate to form and sustain something
as ingenious as a living organism?” (P.5, ibid.)
MINDLESS MOLECULES BECOMING MINDFUL ACCIDENTALLY?
If a just a mere living cell is “most complex…immensely complicated…so finessed…exquisitely clever…as ingenious”,
are there enough superlatives to describe the complexity, complication,
finesse, cleverness, and ingenuity of us, as we now stand – “mindless molecules, capable only of pushing
and pulling their immediate neighbours” – become mindful to the point of
consciousness of the whole process? And, according to majority scientific
opinion, the whole thing coming about accidentally – as Davies describes it: “purely the chance outcome of a gigantic
cosmic lottery.”?
But, if accidental, we as we stand in our present
complexity are not just the “chance
outcome of a gigantic cosmic lottery” but actually the chance outcome of
several gigantic lotteries – one after the other. The result of energy accidentally
emerging from nothing; of there accidentally being more matter than anti-matter;
of there accidentally being finely-tuned order in the chaos; of the accidental
existence of suitable forces like gravity to form stars; the resultant
star-stuff becoming accidentally alive; then that living star-dust accidentally
becoming “complex organisms, including
conscious beings”; then that consciousness becoming naturally so evolved
that the beings having it can understand evolution itself; and come to
understand the language the universe was written in to the point of being able
to alter the universe. If we are majority science’s “freak accident of chemistry, unique to Earth” – the end result of a
chain of mindless flukes – the odds against it could not be written down on all
the paper in the universe.
ON WHAT BASIS CAN WE HOLD OUR UNIVERSE TO BE ACCIDENTAL?
It is therefore hard to see how our highly-ordered
universe and the deeply conscious life within it could be logically believed to
be accidental. The philosophy of meaninglessness is the corollary of such a
belief – so, on what sort of basis can the philosophy of meaninglessness be
held?
Philosophical conclusions in a relative world – which
has no Absolutes – can only be held on levels of probability. Rather than rely
on the two-stage test of our law courts: “on the balance of probabilities” or
“beyond reasonable doubt”, let’s – in our world of philosophical shades of grey
– construct a Probability Clock.
PROBABILITY CLOCK
12 o’clock, being absolute certainty, is
unavailable to us creatures of the relative – so our range is 0:01
(highly unlikely) to 11:59 (true beyond reasonable doubt). I would place the conclusion
of the accidentalness of our universe at about 1 o’clock (and the philosophy of
meaninglessness hanging off it likewise). I would place the conclusion of the
purposefulness of our universe at about 10:30 (and the philosophy of special
meaning, likewise). The rest of our party must make their own choice.
Some have answers to the points we have been
examining.
EVOLUTION – THE NEO-DARWINIAN ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING
The readily observable existence of evolution through
natural selection can explain one factor of the human equation – the
development of our animal body. But it is only a description of the process
after the universe got many unlikely ducks in a row. Evolutionary Theory has
nothing to offer as an answer to the question of the original existence of
something rather than nothing, the unlikely order inherent in the original
conditions, the emergence of life from the inert, and the consciousness of
matter.
THE MULTIVERSE ANSWER
“Multiverse Theory” has been concocted with the aim
of undoing the probability maths contemplated above – “concocted” because there
are no observations to support it. This theory hypothesises an infinite number
of universes arising accidentally, so that one of them must eventually defy the
odds and have the right conditions for matter to form, become alive, and become
conscious. In other words, a never ending number of disordered worlds would
have to come into existence in order that this one could be as ordered as it is
– accidentally. Multiverse theory relies on an imagined immensity, and
it would be treated harshly by Ockham’s razor (the principle that any position
which needs unobserved complexity to support it, is weak).
A BIT MORE LIGHT?
There is much more to be examined about
consciousness, but I see we have it down on our map for later exploration, but at
this point on our Road to Truth, we have made enough progress to say that it is hard to see how meaninglessness has
become the default philosophical speculation for the post-modern academic
world. Those who subscribe to accident as a satisfactory explanation to the
universe and the life within it seem to have accepted the totally unlikely
multiplied by the completely improbable to the power of the incredible. We have
a fair way to go on our journey but, just here, it is safe to say that Monod’s
bleak meaninglessness is not looking too
sound as a philosophical conclusion.
There is much
more to explore of Shakespeare’s improbable players on our journey, but here,
our path although becoming more substantial is blocked by a lake – formed from
the waters we have so far only dabbled in – Intelligent Design. There is no way
around this lake, so we will have to cross it. While there is enough material lying
around to build a raft there is a perpetual storm over the waters – whipped up
by furious debate about how an apparently non-accidental universe implies a “D”
Designer.
·
INTELLIGENT
DESIGN
The storm on our philosophical lake is the wind and
fury generated by the Intelligent Design debate which has been raging in
philosophy for some time. We are forced into the storm when we talked (as we
did above) of the extreme unlikeliness of conscious existence being accidental,
and when we quoted authors talking about: “a
faint echo of a bygone religious age”; and the universe being: “rigged in favour of life”; and of
things: “written into the laws of
nature”. Let’s see if we can cross this lake safely?
What muddies the waters of the Intelligent Design
debate is that the proponents of Intelligent Design are usually followers of
religions who are trying to insinuate their stone-age god into the observable fact
that the existence of our universe and the life in it relies on so much fine-tuning
that it is unlikely to have been an accident. Our unlikely to be accidental
complexity, in the opinion of Bible-believers, opens the way for the argument
of irreducible complexity – the conclusion that animals must have been created
entire as we see them now (i.e. total creation as per the Bible). On the other
hand, the opponents of Intelligent Design feel that if they successfully demolish
the Bible’s “g” god, they have succeeded in killing off “G” God.
Both have chosen the wrong argument to prove their
position. Theists have only succeeded in proving that mystery remains (not that
their answer to the mystery is correct) and atheists have only proven that
religion is not science. The universe may indeed be “rigged” – with things
designedly “written into nature” – but nobody yet understands how or why. Both
sides conceding the mystery would be a big step for philosophy, the Intelligent
Design debate, like seemingly every debate in the philosophy of God, is about
installing or killing off the old Hebrew “g” god, and not about examining the
universe for any credible Divine.
One thing that is not in doubt, looking
dispassionately at the Intelligent Design debate, is that the Bible is of religion,
not science. To attempt to bring the Bible into science classes leaves Western
civilization at risk of losing its position of pre-eminence – as the once
pre-eminent, scientifically-advanced Moslem civilisations managed to do by a
similar means. But, within the
IS THE UNIVERSE
BIO-FRIENDLY?
Do we live in:
“a universe
designed for habitation by living creatures.”?
(P. xi, The Origin of Life, Paul Davies)
Are:
“…the laws of nature rigged in favour of life.”?
(P.
xii “The Fifth Miracle”, Paul Davies)
One day we may settle this by finding life on other
planets (some feel we have found satisfactory proof of life on Mars already). But
let’s consider before the event, what would the finding of life on other
planets establish?
Some feel that it would be the end of God and any special
meaning to life. Are they right? Finding life on other planets would definitely
disprove religious accounts of reality, and be another blow to their gods (who not
only placed the Earth at the physical centre of the universe, but declared humans
the universe’s only inhabitants). But if there is life on other planets, if we
are truly in “a universe designed for
habitation”, there is still room for God – a larger Divine than religions’
gods – a “G” God not just obsessed with humanity. A God making life inevitable
wherever the inherent order and forces made the environment suitable – to evolve
according to the environment. Such a God is vastly more magnificent than
religions’ human centric gods – even life in other universes would not demolish
such a God.
But what if we are able to definitively establish
that life is peculiar to Earth? It would allow Disbelievers to assert that life
is more likely accidental and therefore meaningless if it is only to be found on
one place in the universe. It would also allow the religiously-inclined to
maintain belief in the Bible which states that Earth and humans are special to
God. However, it still would not support religious belief that the Earth and
the life on it is 6000 years old – nor all the rest of Biblical religion’s
incredibilities. We will have to wait the outcome of our explorations into
outer space to establish the bio-friendliness or otherwise of the universe. But
it is not likely to be an issue resolved any time soon, because a definitive answer
would involve not only a complete exploration of our immense galaxy, but of all
galaxies – unless, of course, it is resolved quickly by an irrefutable visit or
contacted by aliens.
MANY MORE MYSTERIES THAN APPARENT DESIGN
Looking at the map of our journey, it can be seen
that there are many more mysteries awaiting our exploration – mysteries that speak
even more strongly of special meaning, ultimate purpose, and the possibility of
a Divine – than apparent Design.
We are now approaching the shore of the lake we have
negotiated. We can see a track leading away from the lake and, disembarking, we
take it. It leads us to a territory containing some mysterious things – things
which are hard to square with the materialist notion of all phenomena being
explicable in terms of matter and motion. It is a territory previously explored
by one of our wisest – Aristotle – it is the territory of the human virtues.
These are the human virtues as identified by Aristotle
:
Courage, Friendliness, Temperance,
Truthfulness, Liberality, Wittiness, Magnificence, Shame, Pride, Justice, Good
temper, Honour.
Other, generally accepted, modern virtues include:
Modesty, Sincerity, Empathy, Humility, Integrity, Compassion, Tolerance,
Honesty, Fidelity, Benevolence, Determination, Reliability, Insightfulness,
Commitment, Persistence, Resourcefulness, Creativity, Enthusiasm, Perspicacity,
Broadmindedness.
Now the peculiar thing about virtues is, if the
universe is a purely physical event how did non-physical things like virtues come
to exist? How were they generated in a world of matter and motion – blind atoms
and forces proceeding mechanistically – the material world of our physical sciences.
Physical scientists – and their camp-followers, the materialist
philosophers – have to describe non-material things like virtues in material terms
of physical brain states which can be shown on computer screens by blips and
flashes. But the fact that physical things, like brains, are able to comprehend
and construct non-physical things like virtues causes problems for the
materialist theory of everything. Tadeusz Zawidzki (Assistant Professor of
Philosophy, George Washington Univ.) outlines some of the problems thus:
“The
sciences of human nature, including neuroscience, biology, and cognitive
science, assume human behaviour is entirely the product of the nervous
system…Nervous systems are composed entirely of physical components: cells and
tissues constructed out of proteins, communicating using electrical and
chemical signals…Brain states exist in real space and time. They have a
definite location and duration. So they can only be related to other events and
objects that exist in space and time. For example, they can be triggered by
light that reflects off real objects, hits the retina in the eye and is
consequently transduced into neural impulses in the brain. But human beings can
think about things which do not exist in space and time. Human thoughts can be
directed at numbers and other abstract mathematical objects. Humans can think
about other abstract ideals like justice and beauty [and virtues]…But how can a state of the nervous system, a pattern of neural
activation, existing in space and time, be about or directed at objects that
don’t exist in space and time?”
(Pp.12-14
“Dennet”, Tadeusz Zawidzki – One World Thinkers)
Problems.
NEO DARWINISM
Enter Neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinists attempt to show
us how non-physical characteristics like the human virtues may have been selected
– once mysteriously in existence – by using
We have already considered in Essay 2 the
neo-Darwinian attempt to explain away a virtue like altruism by classifying all
altruism as kin-, group-, and/or reciprocal-altruism – i.e. beneficial to the survival
of the individual exhibiting altruism – therefore likely to be naturally
selected. But some altruistic virtues will in no way aid the survival and propagation
of the genes of the body exhibiting the behaviour in question – or may even be disadvantageous
to survival. For example, some altruistic virtues (like compassion) have caused
people to assist unrelated others (and their unrelated genes) to survive
sickness, injuries and dangers – and thus compete genetically with the
saviour’s genes in the future. This ensures the survival of competing genes in
direct contravention of evolutionary logic. The neo-Darwinians explanation is
“group altruism” (helping an individual’s genes survive by being a member of a
successfully surviving group – which group may not be comprised entirely of related
individuals). But humans often help strangers (non-group members) – or even wounded
enemies on a battlefield (anti-group members). Virtues like compassion have
evolutionary disadvantages in equal measure – so how were they naturally
selected?
Let’s consider another virtue – courage. When danger
enters the equation it is not enough to just have compassion, one must have
courage as well. Compassion and courage in the face of danger can see the
possessor not only wanting to help someone with competing genes to survive, but
being courageous enough to do so in dangerous circumstances – thus not only aiding
the propagation of competing genes, but risking their own precious genes in the
process – double jeopardy to the Darwinian notion of all human behaviour being explicable
by and reducible to purely survival and genetic imperatives.
To explain away risky altruism, neo-Darwinians ideologists
have developed a rationale they call ‘reciprocal altruism’. This term describes
altruism directed at non-related others from whom you could reasonably expect
pay-back – which would then help your genes survive. This from Richard Dawkins:
“The
other [the first being kin altruism]
main type of altruism for which we have a well-worked out Darwinian rationale
is reciprocal altruism (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’)”.
“The
God Delusion”, P. 216
But the problems, mentioned above, that human
behaviour often presents for kin altruism explanations for virtue also apply to
reciprocal altruism – lives have been risked and even lost helping individuals
from other groups (tourists from other countries for example) who we know can
never reciprocate our altruism, and we show altruism even to hostile strangers
who are direct genetic threats – more likely to kill us than reciprocate (there
are many examples of soldiers risking their lives to rescue enemy soldiers on a
battlefield). Humans have also shown unnatural compassion and courage when rescuing
animals of other species – animals that they don’t own either as pets or stock.
I have two newspaper articles in my hand – one (The Border Mail – Albury/Wodonga
3/1/2008) about the Melbourne-based Rescue Squad undertaking a 600 kilometre
round-trip to rescue an old dog from a mineshaft – and another (Herald-Sun –
Melbourne 2/7/2008) showing the picture of a man in the USA who jumped into the
ocean to rescue a panicked, 165 kg. black bear from drowning. Where’s the group-,
kin-, or reciprocal-altruism in such behaviours? These are just two recently recorded
examples of humans showing virtues – risking their own survival, and that of their
precious genes, purely out of compassion – with no hope of advancing their
group or getting pay-back (although I’m sure there would be no trouble getting
the bear to scratch your back?). We all know of acts of compassion and bravery to
animals (that were not only, not useful to our survival, but antithetic to it)
that did not make it to the newspapers.
There is no doubt that humans do acts driven unconsciously
by kin-, group-, and reciprocal-altruism, but not all virtuous acts are
explicable as being naturally selected (let alone naturally existing in a
material world). Some observations (we examined one by Pinker in Essay 2) show
that our behaviour towards each other is improving at a fairly fast rate, that
we are evolving to be more virtuous – not only towards other humans, but to animals
as well. How is this happening if our behaviours are naturally and amorally
selected, according to the genetic survival advantages that they impart?
NON-VIRTUES?
How about non-virtues – don’t they exist too and confirm
the expectations of neo-Darwinian theories of “selfish genes”? For example,
cowardice – this would enable the person possessing it to survive and pass on
his/her genes. While we may have a conception of non-virtues as something that
exist – as things in themselves – they don’t in fact exist. They only refer to
an absence of the virtues, not a presence – cowardice being the absence of
courage. The lack of virtues should have been overwhelmingly selected by
Neo-Darwinian logic, leaving us as a cowardly, selfish, uncompassionate, shameful,
dishonest species. While some comply with this description (and just about all of
us sometimes) as a species we are surprisingly virtuous.
So, to sum up, the unnatural is this: science tells
us natural, self-occurring, physical processes accidentally formed life. But
one life form thus accidentally formed has mysterious, unnatural, non-physical
things called virtues which often lead to non-accidental, non-causal behaviours
which cut across the only natural purpose for human behaviour which science can
ascertain – physical survival and genetic dominance. These non-physical virtues
have driven us to be so much more than: “just
bags of genetic material” (Dick Gross – “godless Gospel”, P. 238), or Pinker’s “meat puppet”.
SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION?
All that can be concluded at the moment is that our
relative (good, better, best) world is definitely very creative and evolution
is its sharpest tool, but more than just our bodies seems to be evolving – we,
our selves, are evolving. The first inkling of the existence of spiritual
evolution on our journey? I see spiritual evolution is on our map a little
further down the road. So, for the time being, let’s just notice we have
advanced a little on our journey, and our track now is looking a little more road-like.
Talk of virtues has led us into a strange field – the
field of ethics – humanity’s unnatural notions of good and bad, right and
wrong.
Again, these
are things non-physical and, again, we encounter the question of how the
non-physical came to exist in a material world solely made up of matter and
motion, atoms and energy?
And how do we
agree on subjective things such as good and bad, right and wrong – in an
objective world where nothing is actually “good” or “bad” – “right” or “wrong”?
And the knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong – is peculiarly human. Ethics
are part of what defines us as human. We share our ethics with no other animals
– they are unnatural. “Unnatural” because a human risking survival and selfish
genes saving another human who is not kin, who is not of our group, or who is not
able to reciprocate (i.e. who is not exhibiting neo-Darwinian, natural kin-,
group- or reciprocal-altruism”) is seen as “good” and “right” and rewarded with
praise, respect, and even civilian medals. If life is solely natural – about
survival of self and/or related genes – such unnatural behaviour should instead
be seen as perverse – naturally “bad” and “wrong” – against nature.
Perversely, humans
see more natural acts that would benefit you and your genes’ survival at the
expense of others’ (robbery, rape and murder for example) as “bad” and “wrong” in
all societies. These acts which would benefit your genes are always punished by
humans – even to the extent of ending the life of the perpetrating individual by
community-sanctioned murder (capital punishment). Only one species of animal known
to us has universal notions of good and bad, right and wrong – although our
sanctions may vary. Neo-Darwinian “altruisms” are found quite often in other
species. This is not some argument for the “superiority” of humans, just an
observation of their unnaturalness.
Sometimes humans
behave in a more natural, animal way – as if robbery, rape, and ethnic
cleansing against members of other tribal and genetic groups was good. This
behaviour is rare now, but common in the past – the Bible, for example, offers
many instances where this Darwinian behaviour was seen as good – sanctioned, even
aided by God (the Hebrew god extended daylight hours so Joshua could more
effectively cleanse
So where does
this sense of good and bad, right and wrong, come from? Some would say that because
it is not within us, not natural, we have been taught it by religion. But to
quote atheist philosopher Stephen Law :
“So it seems
that humans have an in-built sense of right and wrong that operates anyway,
independently of their exposure to religion. …I admit there is a difficulty [as
an atheist] about explaining how we come
by moral knowledge. But religion does not solve that problem.”
- (P.115 “Philosophy Gym”.)
If religion is
not the answer, is the explanation of “how
we come by moral knowledge” about spiritual factors in the human equation?
Is the existence of our non-Darwinian moral knowledge more evidence of the
ghost in the machine?
This from Immanuel Kant:
“Two
things move the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and
more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law
within.”
“Critique of Practical Reason” – Conclusion.
We have come to
a fertile valley – a region where some really strange and unnatural moral and spiritual
ideas grow – unnatural ideas like shame, conscience and ethics.
·
SHAME,
ETHICS, CONSCIENCE, AND AN INKLING OF THE SPIRITUAL
So, is our
conscience, a sense of right and wrong, our “moral knowledge”, in Dr Law’s
words: “in-built”? Because it often cuts across our natural, animal and genetic
imperatives, is it therefore a spiritual sense – rather than animal? “In-built”
because it is “us” (our selves, our souls). Is our notion of right and wrong a
spiritual notion, part of what it is to be a human being – a spiritual being?
A SPIRITUAL
BEING WITH AN ANIMAL BODY
Studying our
behaviours – spiritual and animal – the best description of a human being seems
to be: a spiritual being with an animal body. In the course of a life we will
do many things which are behaviours driven by our animal bodily needs, instincts,
and genetic imperatives. But we will also do things governed by what our self decides
to be “right” or “wrong” – not necessarily genetically beneficial. We have
bodies but we are not our bodies – we are our selves, souls, spirits – call our
“being” what you will. Our bodies are natural, and do natural things. Our
selves are spiritual and do many “unnatural” things. We have even turned the
study of humanity’s unnatural notions of right and wrong into a discipline –
ethics. There is broad agreement across humanity on the ethicality of certain
actions, on what is good form or poor form – what denotes uniquely “human” as
opposed to purely “animal” behaviours. We often call something of which we
vehemently disapprove – “an animal act”.
TO BE HUMAN IS
TO BE UNNATURAL
So, what does it
take to be human? To answer this question let’s consider a uniquely human
notion – that of shame. A natural, wild animal does not have guilt or shame
when it falls short of an ideal – an ideal of “good” behaviour for its species.
A lion has, for example, no notion of the human concept of “brave”, or what it
is to be a lion – what is expected in terms of behaviour from the “King of the
Beasts”. A pack of lions tearing apart a baby elephant wastes no time debating any
“shame” that may be brought upon their leonine selves – whether their actions are
“brave” or “cowardly” – beneath the “dignity” of a lion. They have no “shame”
at the “unfairness” of the lop-sided match, waste no time on the “ethics” of
the “cruel” situation or what is “beneath” them. All of the notions in inverted
commas are peculiar to humans and their ethics and ideals – the tag of “kings
of the jungle” has been imposed on lions by humans. The tag has a sense of
“noblesse oblige”, people having leonine bearing have a natural nobility about
them.
Notions of
shame, nobility, and dignity are not natural – so what are they? They are unnatural,
spiritual – they speak of the human “being” – the “self” – not the animal body.
One of our most prized possessions is our human dignity our sense of self – the
human sense of unique difference from all the other animals. Anyone who sees
dignity or a sense of good and bad, ethics, guilt, or shame in other animals is
suffering from severe anthropomorphism (except perhaps in pets – who are not in
a natural situation and are trained by us to behave like us – e.g. to be “nice”
to other dogs etc.). No wild, natural animal has a sense of “bad” behaviour as
defined by their idea of their “selves”. No animal is embarrassed by copulating
or defecating in “public”. Why should they – it’s a natural behaviour? Only humans
exhibit unnatural behaviour – we blush from shame or embarrassment if caught
doing something natural in public.
Our blush of
shame is physical evidence of the existence of something other than the natural
animal instincts and imperatives in us – the sense of self, the spiritual by
any other name. Neo-Darwinians say that hippopotami blush, but this is not a blush
but a flush of rage – visible because of their hairlessness, seen when they are
angry – for example, when hippopotami fight. The animal in us can also flush
with anger, but only the spiritual in us can blush with shame.
Humans are
unnatural – when we speak of “nature” we are always referring to the world of
all other animals than us.
OUR ETHICS ARE
CHANGING THE NATURAL WORLD
Humanity’s
unnatural sense of ethics is even affecting the natural, physical Universe. In
the past, many animals have been driven to extinction through the over-hunting
of a more efficient predator in the natural world – it’s one of the ways
natural selection works. But now, many naturally endangered animals still exist
because of humanity’s unnatural ethical sense of responsibility that we feel towards
the other “lesser” animals – our zoos are full of (often breeding) animals that
would have otherwise been no more. The continued existence of whales is another
good example. Whales have been unnaturally brought back from the brink of what
would have been a natural extinction at our hands from over-hunting. Not so
long ago, we saw them as large, slow-swimming, hunks of meat – but now, with some
spiritual evolution, we see whales as fellow-travellers – even making
recordings of their “songs” which spiritually move us. When less spiritually
evolved we were fighting among ourselves to advantage our genes by getting the
most meat – now we endanger our genes by fighting the Japanese (who still see
them as meat) in an effort to try and save them from extinction. When we were
acting more like animals we drove other species to extinction (Moas, for
example) simply because they were easy to catch and eat – and thought nothing
of it. Now we get a sense of shame when species are driven to extinction by us
– and we get a sense of pride when we successfully conserve animals. The more
evolved spiritually we become the more ethically we behave.
NEO-DARWINIAN
ANSWER
Neo-Darwinians
would put forward the argument that we protect other animals only because we have
come to understand that bio-diversity is in the best interest of our animal survival.
This may be a part of the current consideration, but bio-diversity was only given as one of the
reasons to protect animals in the later half of the 20th century
when the drive to protect endangered species was well underway. Shame is our most
common reaction to the news of human-caused extinctions of other species – a
lessening of self-respect. Is this natural? Self-respect is the key to human
happiness – even more so than genetic survival – an interesting fact that we
are due to explore in more depth down our Road to Truth.
A SPIRITUAL
BEING WITH AN ANIMAL BODY
All of this is
more evidence that the best description of the human condition is that we are
spiritual beings with an animal body. We can
hear the natural drumbeat of our animal bodies and of our genetic imperatives,
but what we think of our self/spiritual being, is as important to us as animal
survival and sometimes more so – many have committed suicide because of
self-loathing – they are ashamed of their self.
WE SPARE SOME
ANIMALS BECAUSE THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL
Our spiritual natures
are also evidenced in our appreciation of the beauty of other animals. We no
longer naturally kill and eat some animals, but unnaturally spare them and/or
propagate them just because we have come to see that they are beautiful (e.g. bears,
parrots). An example from my own life – I used to be a very keen fisherman – I would
fish in a puddle if you told me there were fish in it. Then I did a
scuba-diving course. The beauties of the undersea world moved me greatly. Now I
find I get no enjoyment from fishing – to me fishing would be like shooting
parrots up in the forest. I still buy de-beautified fillets of fish from the
fishmonger – just like very few lamb-eaters could kill a beautiful lamb
themselves, but readily buy chops from the butcher. What is it about beauty
which de-natures us?
Beauty?
We have come to an interesting point on our road with
a bit of a lookout. Let’s go and admire the view.
Beauty
is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
What is this strange, unnatural, human idea of beauty?
“Unnatural” because humans, alone of all the animal species have an
understanding of what beauty is, and an appreciation of beauty in all its forms
– natural and human-made.
Because we’re on a lookout, let’s first examine the
unique human idea of scenic beauty. Humans speak of scenic beauty “taking our
breath away” – Jack London, describing the beauty of the
“One
caught one’s breath and felt the pang that is almost hurt, so exquisite was the
beauty of it.”
Darwin himself writes of being spiritually uplifted
by the beauty of the world:
“In
my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a
Brazilian forest ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher
feelings of wonder, admiration and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is
more in man than the breath of his body.”
-
Charles Darwin, Autobiography
“More to man than the breath of his body” Charles? That
is exactly what these essays are trying to find out – it is, however, an idea
that fills your latter-day ideological followers with fear and loathing.
So, what’s going on with humanity’s appreciation of a
“view” – just a jumble of atoms when all is said and done – why, when they are
jumbled together in a certain way do we call them “beautiful”? And it is an
understanding unique to humans – animals have never been spotted on lookouts
admiring the view; when cattle settle for a rest in a paddock they face any-which-way;
dolphins don’t queue up to look into a glass-bottomed boat to view the wonders
of humanity; Bonobo chimps don’t go to pretty places for picnics; if you point
out the moon to a dog, he will look at your finger. Humans, alone of all the
animals admire – and go to great lengths (sometimes endangering the survival
chances of their genes) to take in a view. Humans are spiritually moved by a
beautiful view, and have universal agreement of what is beautiful in scenery
(although we may differ on what is most beautiful
– for example, all find the
THE NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
The (exceedingly uncompelling) Darwinian explanation for
our appreciation of scenic beauty – from the world of evolutionary psychology –
is:
“Why
do we find certain landscapes pleasing? Well, they are the ones that are most
promising for hunting and shelter. Hence if we are attracted to them we have a
greater chance of survival.”
-
“The Secret Power of Beauty”, (John Armstrong, P. 105)
This may go a little part of the way towards
explaining why we may find a view of an arable valley beautiful – but why do we
find a snow-capped mountain beautiful; a scene from Antarctica; a desert at
sunset; a waterfall; a beach; an iceberg; a field of colourful weeds – even an
advancing storm? And, for all those who remember the 60’s film Dr. Strangelove,
consider the beauty of the closing frames – depicting the explosion of atomic
bombs set to classical music! All of these examples of beauty are either
sterile – offering none of Armstrong’s “greater
chance of survival” – or are even inimical to it.
BEAUTY IS UNNATURAL
It is unnatural that a purely physical pile of atoms,
combined randomly by natural forces to no particular purpose, with no possible
survival or genetic use to us (like a snow-capped mountain) should be deemed
universally beautiful and have an uplifting spiritual effect on our human soul
while at the same time threatening our animal bodies and their precious cargo
of genes. Are there any other answers for beauty from neo-Darwinians’ ideologists?
They have one for the beauty of animals.
BEAUTY OF
ANIMALS
David Castle
(professor at the Mental Health Research Institute) sees the answer to the
beauty of animals in the Darwinian concept of sexual selection:
“the roots of
our aesthetic perception lie in sexual selection, which is an evolutionary
thing. Why should we be driven to like nice-looking things? What’s the point,
unless there’s some evolutionary selective pressure?”
Melbourne
Age newspaper (14/4/2004)
SEXUAL SELECTION
Sexual selection basically says that a beautiful bird,
for example, evolved that way because beauty is positively selected for by the
female when choosing a mate to bestow her favours on. So, a bird of paradise has
become beautiful because colour and elaborate form has been selected by the
females? Now, we humans tend to accept this argument because the male
bird-of-paradise appears beautiful to us – but why should the female bird see the
male as “beautiful”? The male’s gaudy, bright feathers offer no survival
advantages but will only make his (and her) offspring brightly coloured in turn
– and more likely to be seen by a predator. His unaerodynamic fancy feathers (that
we find beautiful in their elaborate form) will only make her offspring more
ungainly and less able to avoid a predator after they have been easily spotted.
If beauty in the animal kingdom is all about sexual selection – how does such a
display that would lessen the chances of offspring surviving get naturally chosen
above other more discreet displays?
And, another question is, if beauty is all about
“sexual selection” why do we humans see this bird as beautiful at all? – we
hardly are planning to mate with it! Its beauty indicates no survival advantages
for us – more colour and a more beautiful form does not indicate to us that
this animal has more meat, or better flavour – we just see it as beautiful for
some unknown reason. The same applies to other animals: cats; snakes; giraffes;
butterflies – all useless for, or harmful to, our survival but still found to
be universally beautiful. While we are at this place in our journey, there is
an interesting point here which supports the argument that the human condition
is best defined as body+spirit – our spirit can see, and be moved/lifted by, say,
the beauty of a colourful and patterned snake while at the same time our animal
body is repelled by the snake’s potential to end its survival. We can be
spiritually moved and bodily frightened at the same time by the same thing (another
example is being moved by the beauty of an approaching storm while being bodily
scared of it). This supports the argument that we are a duality – the body is
afraid of having its survival ended by the same thing our spirit is lifted by –
we are a body/spirit duality rather than a body/mind duality (the mind, after
all, is of the body). We are due to explore this issue more deeply further down
our Road.
IS BEAUTY IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER?
Some would say beauty not universal, a thing in
itself, but is just in the eye of the beholder. But all people find Australian
wattle beautiful, or a Chinese panda bear, or a Miss Universe. There are some
personal differences when asked to determine “more” or “most” beautiful – for
example, all will find a rose beautiful but some may prefer pansies. And there
are cultural differences – for example, if asked to judge beauty in, a
Norwegian might consider Fiords most beautiful; an Englishman, the Cotswolds;
an Australian, the Great Barrier Reef; an Arab, a view of the desert; an
American, the Rocky Mountains – but all will judge all the scenes to be
beautiful.
THE BEAUTY OF COLOUR
And the beauty of colour? Sometimes colour transforms
an ordinary scene into beauty. A field of “Patterson’s Curse” weed, for
example, turns a useless-for-survival paddock into a beautiful thing. The plain
rock monolith, Uluru – in the Australian desert – becomes beautiful at sunset,
when it turns orange, then red, then purple. People come from all over the
world into the desert – at great trouble and expense to see Uluru, and are spiritually
moved by it.
THE BEAUTY OF FORM
Humans can see beauty just in form – natural and
human-made. For example the Matterhorn is beautiful because of its rugged form;
the Sydney Opera House has beautiful form; an iceberg; the Empire State
Building; a tree etc. etc. All just have beauty from their form which for some
non-Darwinian reason we find beautiful.
THE BEAUTY OF SMELLS
And there also is the mystery of beautiful smells. Being
repelled by bad smells has selection advantages because excrescence and rotting
things have germs which could endanger our survival – but why are we attracted
to “nice” smells which have no survival advantage – we don’t eat the pollen? We
even grow useless flowering plants in vast, decorative gardens which take up
arable land because, as well as their form and colour, we like their smell. We
find gardens spiritually uplifting although they are worse than useless for our
animal bodies – taking up soil and labour valuable for survival. They take time
and energy we could better spend protecting our genetic kin – or giving birth
to more of them – which we should be rightly doing if our life is purely
governed by genetic and survival imperatives – as we are assured by the
neo-Darwinians.
BEAUTY THROUGH ALL THE SENSES
We also find beauty through other senses – touch;
taste; hearing (the mystery of music will get its own section). None of the
beauty we experience through these senses confer animal survival values either
– and, again, some could even be fatal (finding the feel of a tiger’s fur, or the
taste of a Japanese puffer fish – beautiful).
What do others think? This from that well-known judge
of all things beautiful – Tink R. Bell:
“ ‘Beauty’
is a non-natural property. It is non-natural in the sense that the philosopher
Robert Adams discusses: it ‘cannot be stated entirely in the language of
physics, chemistry, biology, and human or animal psychology.’ But let me tell
you, beauty is real a thing in the world. Who among you is so cold-hearted as
to deny that there is beauty in a piece of music, a poem, a painting, the face
of a lover, an artful bed of tulips? You might well start pontificating that
‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, or some other such cynical nonsense.
Are you going to start saying the same thing about the non-natural property of
morality? That it too is in the eye of the beholder? Of course not. No, you may
dispute about the degree to which something is beautiful or ugly, lovely or
unlovely, but that is merely to debate the measurement of those aesthetic
properties. To engage in such a debate is already to concede that there are
aesthetic properties. The aesthetic qualities themselves are there, real, and
not some physical things that one might pick apart on a lab bench. “
Tink R. Bell (otherwise known as Professor
Steven D. Hales,
Humans can experience beauty by sight, sound, smell,
taste, and touch – in things which confer no Darwinian advantage to us. We are
spiritually moved by beauty, and are the only animal to be so. What’s going on
within this strange, unnatural, spiritual, human animal? Our knowledge and
appreciation of beauty is another thing unnatural about us – or as Professor
Hales describes it, “non-natural”. Plato said that humanity had an a priori knowledge and appreciation of
beauty – a recollection of the acquaintance we had with the forms before our
immortal souls became imprisoned within our bodies. We are skirting the supernatural
here, but natural explanations have failed us.
Let’s be really naughty and take a little peep into the,
potentially entrapping, supernatural and metaphysical caverns we avoided
early-on in our journey.
A LITTLE PEEK INTO THE METAPHYSICAL
This from David Fontana, visiting fellow at
“Are
our thoughts, our creative endeavours, our art, our poetry, our philosophy, our
music no more than the by-products of electro-chemical energy in a brain that
would live out its earthly life just as well without them? Or are these
creative masterpieces hints and whispers of a grander and finer reality of
which we are all a part?”
-
“Is There An Afterlife?” (P. 468)
We may have a deeper look into the metaphysical and
supernatural a little later on our journey. Here, let it be established that we
are spiritually moved by beauty in all its forms is – and that it is, at the
very least, unnatural. Beauty also forms more empirical evidence for the
existence of the spiritual – and that humans are spiritual beings.
But wait – there’s more! Let’s get personal with
beauty. We have arrived at the gorgeous temple of human beauty.
Seeing beauty
in a body can be given a natural, Darwinian explanation. For example, big
breasts and hips are attractive characteristics in a female for breeding
purposes. Likewise wide shoulders, muscular torso, thin hips, strong legs – are
similarly desirable in a male. But what about that beauty which humans regard
as equally, if not more important – facial beauty? What instructions are there
in the human mind which recognises a face as beautiful when it has no natural
selection advantage? Darwinian apologists give the tenuous explanation that
what makes a face beautiful is a healthy glow and shiny hair (hence good for
breeding etc. etc). But what about people who are undoubtedly “ugly”, yet whose
visage radiates rude health? Consider, conversely, those beautiful but wan,
unrobust, and unhealthy-looking heroines so loved in romantic novels and films
(Lady of the Camellias comes to mind)?
FACIAL BEAUTY
IN A MATE IS A GENETIC RISK
In fact, facial
beauty in a mate often risks the survival of our genes – blinding us to perhaps
narrow hips in a woman – or weediness in a man (many pop stars come to mind). A
beautiful face often comes with vanity and a poisonous personality because
people are constantly drawn to it and pander to it (usually in order to use its
beauty for their own purposes). Having an egotistically damaged personality
makes a partner an unreliable breeding mate to propagate your genes. Even more
important, a beautiful partner is more likely to be wooed from you by others
for their beauty. If you are a woman this could leave you and your offspring
without a protector/provider after your facially beautiful husband has been
lured away, or – if you are a man – a woman of beautiful visage is more likely
to be impregnated by another male, leaving you bringing up someone else’s genes.
As Shakespeare said: “It is a wise man who knows his own father.”
We should
rightly be wooing “ugly” partners if all is Darwinian – but we are in fact
repelled by an ugly face. And it’s not a cultural factor – facial beauty is not
in the eye of the beholder. Cultural factors can come into play when
recognising beauty in body shapes – for example, big bottoms in Kalahari
Bushmen – having a natural, survival explanation (reserves of fat are stored in
the bottoms to survive the harsh Kalahari Desert). But human recognition of
facial beauty has no cultural explanation. And there is similar broad agreement
on human facial beauty as there is with landscape. For example, give Europeans
photos of the faces of ten Asian people chosen by Asians – five at each extreme
of the beautiful/ugly spectrum – and the beautiful and ugly ones will be easily
sorted by the Europeans every time. The same will happen with photos of
similarly beautiful or ugly Europeans selected by Europeans and judged by
Asians. And everybody agrees that Miss Universe is beautiful even though
they may think the entrant from their own country most beautiful.
THE
NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
Why does a
certain combination of lip, nose, eye and cheek sizes and shapes make a face
beautiful and so highly prized when it should be irrelevant or, more rightly
for genetic purposes, shunned? What unnatural recognition of beauty, totally
removed from natural selection advantages are we working with here? The neo-Darwinian
explanation for human facial beauty is that men see certain characteristics as
beautiful because they are associated with youthfulness (therefore appear to be
good, young breeding stock), large eyes, small nose, full lips and small chin
etc. But young people are very definite about recognising beauty and ugliness
amongst the faces of their peers – apparent youthfulness of features having no
influence here because they are all equally young. And, how does a young person
recognise beauty in an older person? I well remember my father, when he was
re-marrying, asking me what I thought of his bride-to-be – my reply was that I
thought she had a beautiful face. Also consider that women are very definite in
the recognition of what makes another woman beautiful – there is no Darwinian/genetic
explanation for this. Other studies have shown men aren’t attracted to younger plain
women over older, beautiful women.
FACIAL BEAUTY
ONLY APPLIES TO HUMANS
Unnaturally,
facial beauty only applies to human animals. You don’t see other male animals
fighting over just the “beautiful” females in a herd. Male animals spread their
genes over every available female they can cover – not just those with
beautiful faces. Watch a ram working a flock of ewes, or a bull a herd of cows,
or a stag some hinds – the face is the last thing they look at! The important
natural cues for attractiveness is just the colour, sight and smell of the
genitals indicating readiness to mate – just the natural, blind, Darwinian
spreading of genes for genetic survival and dominance that, we are assured by
scientists, explains all human behaviour as well. So, another mystery?
A SOUL-MATE?
Maybe the
answer resides in the importance for humans of eye contact. Most human
relationships are initiated by eye contact – a spiritual contact. A beautiful,
older (even barren) woman, or man, can win out over a younger person if “the
eyes have it”. It is often said that our eyes are the “gateway to the soul”. Maybe
we are all searching for that soul-mate?
Time to move on from the temple that is the body, and
examine another mystery. Time to jump into the strange field of mathematics
(another area humans can find beauty in).
The mysterious
underlying order of the universe, which we encountered earlier on in our
journey, can be expressed in mathematical form. The human mind – through its
understanding of mathematics – is thereby mysteriously linked into the secrets
of the universe.
This from Paul
Davies:
“The
belief that the underlying order of the world can be expressed in mathematical
form lies at the very heart of science, and is rarely questioned …Why this
should be so is one of the great mysteries of the universe.” (p.148 Paul
Davies, “The Mind of God”).
And:
“no
feature of this uncanny ‘tuning’ of the human mind to the workings of nature is
more striking than mathematics, the product of the human mind that is somehow
linked into the secrets of the universe.” (ibid. p. 160).
Our physical sciences
hold it that we are the mechanistic products of a purely physical event – and necessarily
meaningless because accidental. Yet the human mind is tuned into this accidental
formation by our understanding of mathematics – the language the accident was
written in? How can an accident have order written into it – is it then, still
an “accident”? How can we, supposedly a spontaneous, random, and mechanistic
result of an accident make sense out of it? Bizarre.
Davies quotes
astronomer James Jeans: “God is a mathematician”, and Galileo: “The book of nature
is written in mathematical language.” The secrets of nature are available to some
mechanistic star-stuff called humanity, through its understanding of
mathematics – unnatural, I say – or, to use
But is
mathematics just the product of our own mind?
There is some
dispute in the world of science as to whether mathematics is purely a human
invention, or whether it was always underlying order, having an independent
existence, and man just uncovered it. The first view is called the “formalist”
school of thought (mathematics is only an invention of the human mind, having
no meaning beyond that attributed to it by mathematicians); and the second is
“Platonist” (from Plato’s dualistic vision of reality – followers feel we do
not invent mathematics, we discover it).
Leading
“The
complete details of the complication of the structure of Mandelbrot’s set
cannot really be fully comprehended by any one of us, nor can it be fully
revealed by any computer. It would seem that this structure is not just part of
our minds, but it has a reality of its own … The Mandelbrot set is not an
invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like
– Roger Penrose, “The
Emperor’s New Mind”, p. 95
Davies has this to say about the Mandelbrot set:
“This
set has such an extraordinarily complicated structure that it is impossible to
convey in words its awesome beauty.”
– Op. Cit. p.151.
There’s that word “beauty” again – this time in the
arcane realm of pure mathematics. British mathematician G.H.Hardy also wrote
that he “practiced mathematics for its
beauty, not its practical value”.
Penrose has no doubt mathematicians are dealing with
the “works of God” and sees an analogy between mathematics and inspired works
of art:
“It is a
feeling not uncommon amongst artists, that in their greatest works they are
revealing eternal truths which have some kind of prior ethereal existence … I
cannot help feeling that, with mathematics, the case for believing in some kind
of ethereal, eternal existence … is a good deal stronger.”
– Op. Cit. p. 97
Paul Davies in his examination of the uncanny in
mathematics quotes physicist Heinrich Hertz:
“One
cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent
existence of their own, and they are wiser than even their discoverers, that we
get more out of them than was originally put into them.”
– Op. Cit. p. 154, (from M.
Kline, Mathematics p. 338.)
And Richard Feynman:
“When
you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you
found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere, but there’s
nowhere for such things … in the case of physics we have double trouble. We
come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe,
so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing.”
– Quoted from: “Superstrings: A Theory of
Everything?” (P.C.W. Davies and J.R. Brown pp. 207-8)
For my purposes
the resolution of the dispute about mathematics being “created” as the
formalists would have it or “discovered” as the Platonists would have it does
not matter. The point is, for our exploration of the mysteries of life, is that
it is unnatural that the human mind has this capacity to understand and relate
to the workings of our universe through mathematics beyond what is explicable
by the Darwinian need to survive. Other animals survive perfectly well without having
an understanding of mathematics – and other societies. Why did we move on to mathematics
(whether a discovery or a creation) when it was overkill? – we were already on
top of the food chain. Davies wrestles with the problem in another work:
There seems to be no
particular reason why we should need to be able to achieve this sort of deep [mathematical] knowledge in order to make a living in the world. In fact, many
communities for many thousands of years, have made a perfectly satisfactory
living on this planet without having such an underlying theoretical knowledge.
“Are We Alone?” (Paul Davies – p. 82)
No satisfactory
neo-Darwinian explanation has been tendered to try and explain away the mystery
that is our understanding of mathematics – to explain that to speak the
language of the universe could possibly be accidental. Davies again:
“…consciousness
and our ability to do mathematics is no mere accident, no trivial detail, no
insignificant by-product of evolution that is piggy-backing on some other
mundane property. It points to what I like to call the cosmic connection, the
existence of a really deep relationship between the minds that can do
mathematics and the underlying laws of nature that produce them.”
-
Ibid. p. 84
We will explore
Davies’ idea that our consciousness “is
no mere accident” in a moment – here, at this point on our road we will
examine more closely the idea previous to that – that we unnaturally have a
knowledge of the universe “deeper” than we need to ensure our animal survival
in this world.
This from scientist John Barrow:
“But
how strange this is. Our minds are the products of the laws of Nature; yet they
are in a position to reflect upon them … A more interesting problem is the
extent to which the brain is qualitatively adapted to understand the
Universe. Why should its categories of thought and understanding be able to cope with the scope and nature of the
real world? Why should the Theory of Everything be written in a ‘language’ that
our minds can decode? Why has the process of natural selection so over-endowed
us with mental faculties that we can understand the whole fabric of the
Universe far beyond anything required for our past and present survival?… None
of the sophisticated ideas involved
appear to offer any selective advantage to be exploited during the
pre-conscious period of our evolution…Why should it be us?”
– Theories of Everything: The Quest for
Ultimate Explanation, Pp. 172&173
Downright unnatural, I say. Paul Davies, as usual, is
more eloquent :
“What
is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this
code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual
equipment for us to unlock the secrets of nature…we find a situation in which
the difficulty of the cosmic code seems almost to be attuned to human
capabilities …The challenge is just hard enough to attract some of the best
brains available, but not so hard as to defeat their combined efforts and
deflect them onto easier tasks …The mystery in all this is that human
intellectual powers are presumably determined by biological evolution, and have
absolutely no connection with doing science. Our brains have evolved in
response to environmental pressures, such as the ability to hunt, avoid
predators, dodge falling objects etc. What has this got to do with discovering
the laws of electromagnetism or the structure of the atom?”
– (Mind of God, Pp.
158-159).
The minds of
every other animal developed just as far as they needed to survive, to cope
with environmental survival imperatives. The unnatural here is obvious. Humans
are supposedly purely accidentally-occurring, natural animals – so natural we
were actually created by our environment – but find ourselves now on the brink
of a full understanding of it. We are in fact not only on the brink of
understanding it but beyond the brink of knowingly altering it, purposely
creating it anew for our own ends with our scientific endeavours like genetic engineering
(for better or worse?). We are star-stuff, not only able to observe the stars,
but understanding and altering our universe as well. We are creatures and
creators – both. Weird stuff.
And our
position is unique in the animal kingdom. The chimps are our near neighbours in
the animal world (just 1.5% different in DNA), but their difference in
understanding our shared universe is way beyond that – they do not have 98.5%
of our understanding but zero understanding of the concept “universe” let alone
the language it is written in. How did we move so far beyond the chimps in
exactly the same amount of evolutionary time – we started at the same point
because we have a common ancestor. And why were we naturally propelled so far
beyond the chimps – they cope quite well in the survival stakes – there was no
natural selection pressure to force human intellectual powers so far beyond our
nearest competitor. We have just evolved, like them, “in response to
environmental pressures such as the ability to hunt, avoid predators, dodge
falling objects etc.” – in the same amount of time.
The spectrum of
all mammalian abilities and understandings – lesser to greater – is pretty much
what you would expect to see as a result of natural evolution in our world,
except for the huge, unnatural gap between humans and our nearest neighbours.
Why? Can it be explained in terms of opposable thumbs and upright postures – in
such a relatively short time? Again, this is not an argument for the
“superiority” of humans, just another mystery that needs exploration.
Are we conscious
of being radically different from the other mammals in any other ways? Conscious,
how about consciousness itself? Our road has now come to an interesting peak on
its journey towards Truth. Let’s see if we can manage to scale at least a
little way up the difficult slopes of
·
CONSCIOUSNESS
The phenomenon
of human consciousness provides substantial problems for our physical sciences
who believe that everything can be satisfactorily described in physical terms –
that ours is a purely physical universe with causal closure – everything existing
being the mechanistic result of a physical beginning. Again, the problem that
consciousness presents for the physical theory of everything is that if
everything is physical – matter and energy, material and motion – how did something
non-physical like consciousness come to exist? The beginning of life in our
inert universe may eventually be proved to be a purely physical event, but how
did consciousness emerge from living matter – the non-material from the
material?
Nobody has the slightest
idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would
be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be
conscious.
“The Big Idea: Can There Be a Science of Mind?” Jerry
Fodor – Times Literary Supplement 3, (July 1992):5.
Is Fodor
perhaps overstating the issue? This from the International Dictionary of Psychology (Stuart Sutherland, 1989):
Consciousness is a
fascinating but elusive phenomena; it is impossible to specify what it is, what
it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.
Impossible to
say: “what it is”, “what it does”, and ”nothing worth reading has been written
about it.”? Golly, seems like Fodor was right. Have we bitten off more than we
can chew by presuming to consider it here? Let’s try another dictionary – this
time the “Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy”.
“Possibly the
most challenging and pervasive problem in the whole of philosophy. Our own
consciousness seems to be the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost
impossible to say what consciousness is.”
Most likely we
have bitten off a wee bit too much, but we’ll see how far we can clamber up the
side of Mt. Consciousness – even a little bit of elevation will help us along our
Road to Truth?
So, we may as
well start with the – what is consciousness? – question. The Dictionary of
Psychology declares it “impossible”, but the Dictionary of Philosophy is more
philosophical – downgrading it to “almost impossible”.
WHAT IS
CONSCIOUSNESS?
Consciousness
is to be awake. Human consciousness is to be aware that we are awake; further, that
to be awake is to be alive; further, that to be alive is to die. Beyond our
mortality, human consciousness is being aware of the universe; being aware of
the language the universe was written in; and being aware that we are aware. Consciousness
is being aware (in Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s words) “of what it is like to be”
– a human.
Human consciousness
is, the defining factor of the human condition. Other animals are conscious –
in that they are awake, aware of their surroundings – but they have no
understanding of being alive, or of being mortal, or of being part of a
universe, or even an awareness of being a bird, a fish, a lion.
Consciousness
for humans is to be able to contemplate the human condition.
WHAT DOES
CONSCIOUSNESS DO?
We may know
that human consciousness is to be conscious of the human condition – but what
does consciousness do? Consciousness of being a mortal part of an immortal
universe(s) – a passing part of something infinite allows us – no, drives us – to
contemplate not only life, but our life.
What consciousness
does, then, is to spur us not only to contemplate life – but the self.
What does
contemplating the self do?
It allows us,
no drives us, to know the self.
But, in turn,
what does that do? To know the self is the first step to happiness – the apparent
goal of human life. The human drive to be happy is unique in the animal kingdom
– humans strive to be happy, other animals just strive to be.
This takes us
back to Socrates and his statement on page one: “The unexamined life is not
worth living”. The self was very important to Socrates who was the first to
teach the importance of personal integrity – in terms of a person’s duty to the
self. Socrates gave up his animal body rather than give up his self – what he
believed was right. Jesus said: “What will a man gain by winning the whole
world, at the cost of his true self?”; and Shakespeare: “This above all: to
thine own self be true.”; and Goethe knew that to enter a Faustian pact against
the soul was to risk all.
I see on our
map that we are to shortly explore the glades of human happiness in more
detail. Here just let us contemplate that what consciousness does is allow us
to be aware of the self – opening life’s grander opportunities – raising our
consciousness.
SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION – RAISING OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
By being
conscious of our self – and to be conscious that the self is the spiritual
factor in the human equation – we have an opportunity to raise our enjoyment of
life beyond just an animal experience. In “New Age” speak, this is “consciousness-raising”
– spiritual evolution. What does that do? By approaching the animal and
spiritual factors of the human equation together, it allows us to enjoy life
more – ecstasy becomes available to us – not just animal contentment. Even that
ultimate object of human life – happiness – may become more reliably available.
An example of “raising”
our consciousness is when we heighten our awareness of our surroundings and
allow elements like beauty – elements “above” our physical needs and our physical,
animal senses – to move our soul, our self. We have already considered beauty
and
“In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the
midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of
wonder, admiration and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is
more in man than the breath of his body.”
- Charles Darwin, Autobiography
Why should we raise
our consciousness when all other animals do perfectly well without doing so? If
we manage to raise our consciousness – become aware of the spiritual aspects of
being human – we can employ those aspects in our day to day lives, and more joy
may be available from life than just the animal. How? By making love rather
than have sex; by dining rather than feeding; by enjoying the beauty of the
scenery of our physical universe rather than just passing through on a genetic
mission. When we stop to smell the roses we can potentially en-joy them. This
gets considered again when we come to human happiness
CONSCIOUSNESS-LOWERING
AND EXISTENTIAL ANGST
While raising our
consciousness of life allows us to especially enjoy the fact that we are alive,
lowering our consciousness causes us to descend to more animal, neo-Darwinian
behaviour. After the Enlightenment, existential beliefs and the angst they
generated became a big part of the 20th century human experience. It
is a century which saw the finality of a credible belief in our primitive
religions – and the savagery of the secular political systems which replaced
them – like Nazism and Communism. The philosophies generated in the 20th
century were mainly existentialism (absurdity of life generated by the absence
of any apparent rational special meaning – existence was all); scepticism (how
do we know we exist, are we really experiencing this, maybe we are just a brain
in a jar thinking it all up?); post-modernist relativism (everything is
relative, there are no “T” Truths only your or my “t” truths); materialism
(everything is of matter and energy); neo-Darwinism (everything can be
explained by natural selection and genetic imperatives); scientism (“there is
physics and there is stamp-collecting” – physicist E. Rutherford describing
life); and consumerism (consume then die).
SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION
But after an
almost century-long “ism” mania – a lowering of our consciousness – an
understanding that a full description of the human being requires us to address
our spiritual self emerged. In the latter part of the 20th century
and into the 21st century “New Age” religions have thrived, and some
people are re-examining the old religions. Everything in a relative world is in
a state of evolution – even our consciousness. This is spiritual evolution.
THE NEO-DARWINIAN
EXPLANATION
But the
neo-Darwinians deny the spiritual. Consciousness is not so mysterious, it can
be explained in material and evolutionary terms. This from philosopher and
psychologist Nicholas Humphrey :
The more mysterious and
unworldly the qualities of consciousness, the more seriously significant the
Self. And the more significant the Self, the greater the boost to human
self-confidence and self-importance – and the greater the value that individuals
place on their own and others’ lives.
In which case it is easy to
see how the very qualities of consciousness that seem to render it so
mysterious and magical would have been the occasion for consciousnesses’
becoming a runaway evolutionary success. In fact these qualities would soon
have been designed in.
“Seeing Red”, Nicholas Humphrey (P. 132)
This is the
standard neo-Darwinian attempt to explain the existence of everything through
natural selection. Consciousness is a “thing” which, when it magically
materialises in people, will be selected by nature because it leads to the
greater survival and breeding of its possessors. Like all such natural
selection ideology, it still does not explain how the non-material, like consciousness,
emerged from a purely material world to be available for selection. In the
words of Thomas Nagel, “natural selection…doesn’t explain possibilities at all,
but only selection among them.” How cells comprised of inert atoms could bunch
together mechanistically into “mindless
molecules, capable only of pushing and pulling their immediate neighbours”
(in the words of Paul Davies) into
more and more complicated arrangements until they became not only alive, but aware
of being alive – and mortal, i.e. conscious – is a mystery – even if a flimsy
argument can be made for its possible natural selection once in existence.
Conscious of the universe and its beginning, and conscious of concepts like
nothing; everything; then; now; death; eternity; the relative; and the Absolute?
Other animals are conscious beings but, of all Earth’s animals, only humans know
they are conscious, know they are alive (and mortal), and they know they know –
we have consciousness.
For Professor
Humphrey “Consciousness is something we
do with our brains” (p. 133 ibid.) and thus can be dismissed, with the brain,
as being part of the evolved animal body – therefore somehow entirely natural,
and its existence not mysterious at all. We might as well say that music is not
mysterious because it is something we do with our hands. Humphrey has entered
the ‘mind/body’ problem strongly on the side that holds consciousness is a
purely physical phenomenon – a function of the physical stuff that is our
brains.
But there are
other schools of thought that hold consciousness “exists independently of its physical substrate” (Horgan, “The End
Of Science” p. 173 – quoted from Roy Williams, “God Actually” p. 67). Williams
concludes about consciousness:
“What
is, I think, incontestable is that the properties of consciousness are
deeply complex and almost
utterly mysterious. They remain beyond explanation in a material, determinist
way, by any laws of chemistry or physics.” (ibid. p. 67)
IS THE SELF THE
SAME AS THE BODY?
So what does an
examination of life provide as evidence to resolve the tension between these
conflicting assertions? Is Humphrey’s notion of “S” Self being just a fancy
word for the body correct? Is the old Cartesian mind+body dualism the one that
we should be still wrestling with, or should we accept that the mind is of the
body and we should rather be considering a body+self duality?
The Self is not
the body. The Self remains the same (albeit with some evolution in the course
of a life) while the material, physical stuff of the body changes as our atoms
change (which they are constantly doing – there are no human atoms, just atoms
which we swap with the environment – including each other, past and present). How
can the self be the body? If consciousness is just a product of a physical part
of the body how can the present self be conscious of earlier thoughts our minds
had when not one atom of the present mind remains from the old mind which
originally had those thoughts?
Consciousness
is not invariably an evolutionary advantage for out-surviving and/or
out-breeding our genetic rivals – many of those who have raised their
consciousness most are reducing the number of children they have, or have put
off having children at all – while the least conscious are breeding away full
steam. Consciousness does more than give us an exaggerated notion of Self, as
Humphrey would have it, it leads humans to struggle with the notions of
existence versus non-existence, meaning versus meaninglessness – for only genetic
disadvantage – while other animals, or humans with a lower consciousness, just
get on very successfully with the Darwinian out-breeding thing. There is something
weird about humanity that is not well explained by an upright posture and an
opposable thumb.
RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS
AND CREATIVITY
Further evidence
that human consciousness is a product of our spiritual beings and not a
physical product of a physical event rests in the role our consciousness (and
our raising of it) plays in human artistic creativity. We can communicate with
each other without words through our raised consciousness – spiritually – through
our arts. Our consciousness is a great creative driver – music, poetry, dance, painting,
sculpture, humour, literature all speak of our consciousness of life and its
beauties, absurdities, joys and dramas – of what it is to be alive, and what it
is to be a human. Our spirits can be moved, raised – our selves can be inspired
– by the raised spiritual consciousness of another human being – through our
various arts.
In this way our
individual consciousnesses can speak to each other on a level higher than the animal
and physical – on a raised, spiritual level.
OBSERVING AND
CREATING OUR WORLD – AND US
Our
consciousness allows us not only to observe and consider our world, but to partake
in its ongoing creation. We do not just react to life, like other animals, but
because we are conscious of it we consider it, and try to understand it. We are
a product of life, but through our consciousness we are also taking part in the
creating of it – especially the part that is our Selves. Some people feel that
for life to have meaning it should be a safe theme park – no danger, no
accidents, predictable, no sickness, good to the good, bad to the bad, no sickness
or death. This, of course, would not be life but a version of heaven, and no
creativity, no evolution – spiritual or physical – would be spurred. The point,
the special meaning, the ultimate purpose of the relative Universe lies in its
creativity. To get closer to any special meaning and ultimate purpose we need
to contemplate what exactly is being created.
Physical things
like bodies are being created/evolved by our relative universe in the classic
Darwinian way, but non-physical, spiritual things like our “Selves” are also
being created/evolved in our relative universe through our consciousness. How
this happens we are due to examine shortly, here suffice it to say that those who
cannot manage to raise their consciousness above their bodies are missing quite
an experience, and quite an opportunity – the opportunity of spiritual
evolution.
Did we scale this
particular peak on our road to truth? Understanding consciousness is a big task
that has occupied many a more expert expedition for a much longer time. We have
definitely highlighted the mystery of the emergence of consciousness out of an
unconscious material world. We have also seen that our consciousness, and our
ability to raise our consciousness, adds evidence to the contention that humans
are spiritual beings with animal bodies – a body+spirit duality rather than the
Cartesian mind+matter duality – our minds being part of our material bodies.
The raising of our consciousness is also evidence that evolution driven by the
relative world, is available to the self/soul as well as the body. All considered,
we have climbed high enough up the difficult slopes of
So what’s next
on our journey towards Truth? The contention that we are spiritual beings is
pivotal, and before being accepted by this exploration, needs further supporting
evidence. We have seen how our arts are a product of our consciousness of life
– emanating from and speaking to, our souls – time then to relax a little on
our journey and listen to some:-
The
man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with
concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit
are dull as night,
And his affections dark as
Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-
Shakespeare, The Merchant of
How do we have
a soul (or a “spirit”, in Shakespeare’s words) if we are just an animal body – the
evolved but entirely physical product of an original purely physical event? Neo-Darwinians
would say we don’t have a soul, we are just bodies evolved by natural selection
from a physical accident who like to imagine that we have souls because,
somehow, the notion gives genetic advantage, therefore has been naturally
selected. But, if we don’t have souls, what part of our animal body is moved by
our arts like music and poetry, and how?
Let’s examine music
a bit more closely – why are humans the only animal who make music, why is
music (an unnecessary part of life with no adaptive function) universal in all
human societies back to the dawn of history? It’s a mystery to neuroscience:
“Given its
omnipresence in human culture, why is there no clear-cut adaptive function?
…The origins and adaptive significance of music thus remain deeply mysterious.”
-
Hauser
& McDermott, nature neuroscience, July
2003.
How do we
convey non-physical, spiritual states to other consciousnesses through the
physical act of making air molecules vibrate at different pitch, beat and
timbre? Why did only humans develop the capacity to enjoy and perform music based
on mathematical scales? Neo-Darwinian scientists argue that all human skills,
such as language or walking on two legs, were naturally selected in that they
gave their possessors an evolutionary advantage over rival creatures. But
Charles Darwin wrote in 1871:
“As
neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties
of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be
ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”
– “The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex”, P.878.
So, “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes
are…of the least use to man”. Music adds no advantage to the execution of our
“daily habits of life”. But it must have a purpose because of “its omnipresence
in human culture”?
Music allows us to express something of our consciousness of being alive
and something of our consciousness of the human condition – something of the
ineffability of life. As Aldous Huxley described it: “After silence, that
which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
How does music
work? Could music be just a freak accident (like neo-Darwinians assure us
explains the phenomena of even life itself?) or is there something deeply
mysterious about music – as there is with humans being in key with mathematics
– the language the universe was written in? Music and mathematics are, in fact,
related.
“How likely is
it that music is but another freak accident of Nature? Music works because of
the laws of mathematics, and those laws are wired into the Universe from the
beginning.”
- “God, Actually.” – Roy Williams, p. 92
THE
NEO-DARWINIAN EXPLANATION
The “music” of
other animals, for example, bird and whale “songs”, can be given a Neo-Darwinian
interpretation – viz. noises for territorial and/or mating purposes. And some
human music can have an evolutionary/animal explanations and functions – for
example, martial music (to spur adrenalin of soldiers), rock and roll music (to
spur the hormones), relaxing background music (similar to the vibrations of our
mother’s voice we were soothed by in the womb). So, some music can move, or
still, the body – but some music can move the soul – Beethoven’s 9th
always does it for me, and Handel’s “Messiah”.
THE MUSIC OF
OTHER ANIMALS CAN ALSO MOVE US
Just as we can
be moved by the beauty of other animals, we can also be moved by their raw
music (e.g. bird song). Neither fact confers any survival advantage to be
selected for. What makes the noises of other animals beautiful to us if we are
completely describable as just an animal on genetic business – as the
Neo-Darwinians would have us believe? How do we universally recognise some
animal sounds (the nightingale for example) as beautiful and be moved by them?
“Now
more than ever it seems rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou are pouring forth thy soul
abroad
In such an ecstasy!”
- John Keats,
“Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)
This brings us
to poetry.
POETRY
Not only music can
move our souls – our souls can be transported on the wings of beautiful words. How
can words be beautiful and spiritually moving if they are just animal
communication?
More from Keats:
“Away!
away! for I will fly to thee,
Not
charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But
on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Thou
the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already
with thee! tender is the night
And
haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne…”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
moves us by bringing the music and meaning of words magically together:
“I
caught this morning morning’s minion,
king-
dom
of daylight’s dauphin dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,
in
his riding
Of
the rolling level underneath him steady air, and
striding
High
there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In
his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As
a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
And
gliding
Rebuffed
the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred
for a bird – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
– Gerard
Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”.
And Dylan
Thomas, while raging against the mortal, bodily factor in the human equation,
illustrates (and moves) the spiritual factor:
“And
you, my father, there on the sad height
Curse,
bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do
not go gentle into that good night.
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.”
– Do Not Go
Gentle Into That Good Night
I don’t think
that there is any debate that music and poetry, like beauty, can move our souls
– can raise our consciousnesses – of our world and what it is to be alive in it.
The sounds of music and poetry may enter our bodies through a physical organ
and be received by our physical brains, but their rhythms when perfect mesh
with our souls and move us – our self. They move us – not in a physical way – but
in a spiritual way. The fact that our spirits are moved by music and poetry is
more empirical evidence that they exist – that we are spiritual beings.
The Shakespearian
quote at the beginning of our exploration of music raises an interesting point
– he implies that there could be people who “hath no music” – people of whom it could be said “the motions of his spirit are dull as night.
It has been my experience of life that while I have found people who are moved
to greater or lesser extents by beauty in music, I have found none who are not
moved by beauty in one or more of its various shapes or forms. It is my
conclusion then, that the extent of our spiritual reaction to beauty in
whatever forms is an indicator of our spiritual evolution?
This raises again
the issue of spiritual evolution – an issue that is cropping up frequently on our
journey – an issue that needs closer examination before we are going to get any
further.
What exactly do I
mean by “spiritual evolution”? Perhaps I should first determine what I mean by
the “spiritual”? Professor John Armstrong does it well:
“The word
‘spiritual’ needs some clarification. It is intended to refer to the whole of a
person’s inner life… it is about their way of being, their soul.”
“In Search of
Civilization.” (P. 164)
Our spiritual
evolution is, then, the evolution, the growth, the development of our “inner
life” – our “way of being” – our self/spirit/soul – us. We, our being, is definitely
associated with an animal body and enjoy, fear, and suffer through it the
experience that is life – but “we”, “us”, our “selves” cannot be completely
described in terms of our animal bodies.
OUR BODIES CHANGE
Our animal bodies
are made up of atoms which are constantly changing – moving into and out of the
body all the time. If we are adults, our bodies are highly unlikely to have any
atoms remaining from those we were born with – and any that may have found
their way back to our body are most likely to be now be making up other organs
or parts of our body – a hydrogen atom in our brain may have been in one of our
muscles before. There is no such thing as a brain atom, or a leg atom – or even
a human atom. The majority of our present atoms previously made up other animals,
plants, and/or our planet. An atom is an atom, is an atom – there is no
difference between a carbon atom in a rabbit, radish or rock – animal,
vegetable or mineral. There is no such thing as a unique collection of atoms
that is “us”.
UNLIKE OUR BODY, OUR
SELF IS THE SAME
While we are not
our atoms, there is such a thing as “us” – a unique human being – a
unique self – a distinct “way of being”. There are no two people whose selves
are identical – even identical twins (with the same nature and nurture) – you
can clone a body, but not a soul. Our bodies may not be the same matter we
began with, but our being, our self, remains the original spiritual entity that
was born years ago. We do not interchange our selves with other human selves,
other animals – as we do with the fabric of our bodies. Our atoms are on loan –
our self is us – forever.
But our selves do
evolve.
OUR SELVES DO
EVOLVE OVER A LIFE
Our bodies do not
evolve over the course of a life – they do age, but they don’t evolve. Physical
evolution takes generations upon generations. However, “we” – our selves – observably
change, grow, develop – evolve – over the course of a life. And that change is spiritual
evolution.
“The rung of a
ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough
to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.”
– T. H. Huxley
Life is a ladder
– an opportunity to ascend. Some take life’s opportunity and manage to climb several
rungs in a life, some don’t – some even seem to manage a descent?
DO OUR SELVES
EVOLVE OVER SEVERAL LIVES?
Do we only have
one ladder? Maybe we/our selves/souls have more than one life and we evolve our
selves over several lives? Many religious traditions hold this to be true – and
the orthodox ones do not. I see from our roadmap we may examine this idea more
closely further down our road – here just let it be said that there is
absolutely no evidence that we must live only one life, and quite a bit of
evidence (of varying quality) that we live several.
KNOW THYSELF
Life in this
relative, neutral, dangerous but thrilling, frightening but beautiful, challenging
but rewarding universe – inevitably and immaculately reveals our self for us to
know. Life peels us layer by layer, like an onion, to reveal our core – our
self. “Know Thyself” has been received as ultimate wisdom in many human
civilisations – but while it is stated as an injunction, it remains a choice.
While a full life invariably reveals the self to be known – we don’t all
invariably choose to do so.
Again, we are at
the issue of those whose life ends early – they have not had the opportunity a
full life presents for self-knowledge, and subsequent self-evolution. As above,
I note we are due to examine this question shortly.
FREE CHOICE
That some choose
to know the self and some don’t, is evidence that free choice exists. The
Theory of Everything of atheists, sceptics, and Neo-Darwinists (most are usually
all three) states that free-choice does not exist. That the world is entirely
causal is necessary doctrine for their beliefs/comfort systems.
It is my
experience that the soul has choices – unlike the body which only has
imperatives. This is why free choice is anathema to the House of Disbelief. According
to it, only the body exists – to accept free choice is to imply that there
exists something other than the animal body and the entirely physical, material,
phenomenological, causal universe – and total anathema to them.
HOW DOES SELF EVOLUTION
WORK?
Only after self
knowledge is chosen, is self evolution possible. Life reveals our selves by our
words, and more surely by our actions – are we compassionate or uncaring; are
we brave or cowardly; are we determined or feckless; are we giving or selfish;
are we kind or cruel; ignorant or feeling; which of the human virtues do we have
and which do we lack? How have we filled our many roles – have we been a good
friend or poor; a good parent or negligent; a good worker or lazy; a good
citizen or not; an inspiring human being or shameful? It is when we reflect
truly on our selves that we come to truly know our selves – sometimes friends
and/or foes are agents in the process; sometimes families and/or strangers;
sometimes solitary meditation. Its what happens next which determines whether
any spiritual evolution occurs – what does self-knowledge do for the happiness
of the self? To be happy with the known self is to be happy, to be
unhappy with the truly known self is the catalyst for change/evolution. We are
due to examine happiness next on our Road to Truth.
THE NEO-DARWINIAN
ANSWER
Neo-Darwinians feel
the personality (their preferred word for self/soul/spirit) is solely
determined by genetics and upbringing – nature and nurture. Any parent will tell
you this is untrue. My two boys are different souls to me, to their mother, and
to each other – although sharing similar genetics and very similar upbringing
(only 2 years apart). They were different souls from the beginning, as is the
case with the children of all my friends. I know of no one whose children are
identical selves – even identical twins (basically, physical clones).
Of course, their different
extra-familial experiences have had an effect on their different opportunities
for spiritual evolution. Our body is determined by genetic factors: tall or
short, athletic or not; dark or fair – and by some nurturing factors:
nutrition; self-improvement like body-building and/or conditioning etc. But our
self is original, and changes determined by the success of our drive to be
happy.
WHAT EVIDENCE IS
THERE OF HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION?
I have covered much
of this ground in essay 2, but it needs a reprise here. While many may be
apparently striving for self-knowing and self-growing, what evidence is there for
the fact of the existence of spiritual evolution from the results of this
striving – is it observable that humanity is evolving spiritually?
Some days humanity’s
spiritual evolution is a bit hard to see but a very short tour back through history
will show you that spiritual evolution is happening – our choices and values
are getting what Darwin himself called “higher”. Even only 100 years ago
spiritually-evolved attitudes were unlikely, 200 years ago – close to non-existent.
I tender an example of our “enlightened” attitudes just over 100 years ago – this
from Thomas Huxley in 1871. (Huxley was known as an enlightened liberal in his
time – and as
“No rational
man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal,
still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply
incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous
relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able
to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a
contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest
places in the hierarchy of civilizations will be assuredly not be within the
reach of our dusky cousins.” -
Huxley 1871 (Quoted from The God
Delusion, Richard Dawkins. P.266).
So much for educated, secular enlightenment and the
spiritual evolution of the supposed best of us 136 years ago – ironic to read
it now, just after Barak Obama’s election to President of the
“The
spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals,
howling with pain, were singed, roasted and finally carbonised.” Steven
Pinker, TED Conference,
Less than 2000 years ago (still a blink in terms of
the time humans have been around) people were killed by wild animals and each
other for amusement in sports stadiums; 2000-3000 years ago slavery, animal
sacrifice and ethnic cleansing were even approved by our “god” – according to the
Bible – and brutal death by stoning was righteous punishment for a long list of
minor “offences” including blasphemy, working on the Sabbath, adultery,
homosexuality, and disrespecting one’s parents!
We have demonstrably become less violent, more compassionate,
more spiritually evolved. But some disagree – it has become politically correct
to state humanity is getting worse, less evolved. This from journalist and
“Some people do
not like to hear that the world may not, after all, be getting worse in every
way. But those of us who believe in the possibility of the improvement in the
human condition are not necessarily foolish or naïve. In the past century there
has been a revolution in health, longevity, education, human rights. The
proportion of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has dropped
from about 80% in 1820 to about 20% today. You’d never think it by watching the
nightly news, but since the early 1990’s the number of armed conflicts in the
world has fallen by 40%. The percentage of men estimated to have died in
violence in hunter-gatherer societies is approximately 30%. The percentage of
men who die in violence in the twentieth century, despite two world wars, is
approximately 1%. The trends for violent deaths so far in the twenty-first
century are still falling, despite wars in
-
Pamela Bone, Bad Hair Days, Pp. 208-209.
And more from the above TED address by Steven Pinker
– renowned atheist/humanist (responsible for the opinion: “man is just a lucky
meat puppet”):
“In the decade
of Darfur and
Some of the evidence has
been under our noses all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in
many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,
human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labour-saving device,
conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of
acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death
penalty for misdemeanours and differences of opinion, assassination as the
mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as
outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution –
all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But,
today, they are rare to non-existent in the West, far less common elsewhere
than they used to be, concealed when they do occur and widely condemned when
they are brought to light.”
-
Lecture at TED Conference –
IS THIS SECULAR EVOLUTION – NOT SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION?
But, does this improvement represent spiritual
evolution or secular advancement? Are we still the same “underneath”, in our selves/spirits,
and now just more constrained by secular laws and orders? Our laws are more
“evolved” but who made those laws – were they perhaps imposed on us from outer
space?
I say we show demonstrable signs of spiritual
evolution. Wars do still originate, but our attitudes to them have
changed remarkably. Now an ever-growing percentage of us demonstrate vehemently
in the streets against them – consider the recent marches and demonstrations
against the war in
As well as against wars we now also have massive
protests against despoiling the natural beauty of our planet, we march for whales
and for animal rights, against economic policies perceived as unfair to foreign
third-world countries (as shown by the World Economic Forum demonstrations at
Davos and elsewhere). And we demonstrate against racist and sexist ideas. Political
assassinations now only regularly occur in
Public floggings, once common, are rare. Our growing
compassion and sense of responsibility for disadvantaged members of our society
is another example of our growing spiritual evolution. As is our growing sense
of responsibility as the peak animal life for other animals. These are spiritually
evolutionary behaviours, steps forward – representative of spiritual evolution
because it has nothing to do with our bodily and genetic survival – even taking
energy and resources from that genetic task. No, we are at a more advanced level
of spiritual evolution than we were just a half century ago – our improved
behaviour is not just the result of our evolving physical bodies.
And, unnaturally again, humanity alone is taking these
spiritually evolutionary steps. I am open about the idea whether other animals
have spirits, but in the last 100 – 250 – 100,000 years – a chimpanzee (98.5%
DNA the same as humans) is a chimpanzee, is a chimpanzee, is a chimpanzee. They
can be trained by humans but show no signs of even rudimentary spiritual
evolution. Humans are well short of anything resembling perfection but we are noticeably evolving – spiritually –
in our selves – in what behaviours defines us as human. And the things which
make us feel happy with our self are those things which we see as human virtues
– and the majority of them unnatural (i.e. not possessed, or valued, by all the
other animal species which are behaving as Neo-Darwinians say they should if
driven solely by animal needs, instinct and genetic imperatives).
CAN SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION HAVE A CAUSAL, DARWINIAN
EXPLANATION?
Neo-Darwinians find spiritual evolution a mystery – Pinker
again from the above quoted lecture:
“The other
challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that
pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents and scales of
social organisation mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. … Nor could
it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense. Even if the
meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favour the genes for
meekness quickly enough ... Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has
profound implications … Why is there peace? From the likelihood that states
will commit genocide to the way people treat cats, we must have been doing
something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”
A MYSTERY
So our evolving human virtues are a mystery that “mocks
our standard tools of causal explanation” and “Nor could it possibly be
explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense.” Maybe to understand the “decline
of violence”, our increasing “meekness”, and how “we must have been doing
something right” – we need to move away from the Neo-Darwinian theory of
everything – the theory that everything can be understood and explained solely
in terms of the physical evolution of our animal bodies. The relativity of our
universe does have an evolutionary function, but apparently also for our spirits/selves
– as surely as our bodies. Plato, in Phaedrus,
has Socrates describe humans as souls that have shed their wings and fallen to
Earth. Maybe we are, more rightly, beings that are gaining our wings – while
still retaining our bodies?
Our spiritual evolution has not been a straight-line
advance – more like a dance: some steps forward, some to the side and some
back. Some of us appear to be more spiritually evolved than others – usually
those of us not stymied by religions – which tend to be Darwinian rather than
spiritual (as discussed in Essay 1). Some nations regress for a time – reverting
to the animal usually in response to threats to their animal security – like
the
If you believe we are no more than our animal bodies,
then our spiritual evolution is a mystery – as it is for Pinker. But it is a
mystery worth exploring because it just may be the key to any ultimate purpose
of life, so let’s look further into this mystery of our spiritual evolution – and
what may be driving it.
It’s time on our journey along the Road to Truth to
enter the sylvan glades of human happiness.
·
HAPPINESS
“What
is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost
complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness and
make happiness identical with good life and successful living. They disagree,
however, about the meaning of happiness.”
Aristotle,
(Nicomachean Ethics 1.4)
The idea of happiness is peculiar to humans – humans
are driven to be happy – other animals are just driven to be. In fact, we are
so driven by the desire to be happy, it often seems to be the purpose of our
life.
Whether
one believes in religion or not, whether ones believes in this religion or that
religion, the very purpose of our life is happiness, the very motion of our
life is toward happiness.
–
Dali
Lama
Once our animal survival needs are met, we spend most
of the remainder of our time in pursuit of happiness. I suspect the answer to
the question of what makes us happy will have much to tell us about the human
condition – much about “the very purpose of our life” – about who we are.
So what makes
us happy?
HAPPINESS THROUGH
OUR ANIMAL SENSES, NEEDS AND IMPERATIVES
Human animals, can
achieve pleasure and contentment – even passing happiness – through the animal
senses and/or meeting bodily needs. We can experience a degree of happiness
when we are tickled, when we feed, when we drink, when we find warmth, even when
we just smell baking bread. These animal pleasures can be said to make us
“happy” – but only for a while. Contentment from the animal senses must
necessarily be passing – all pleasant stimulation to the body’s senses will
soon be no pleasure at all – constant tickle will soon turn to pain, we need to
be thirsty to get some happiness from a drink, hungry to get contentment from
food, cold to get contentment from warmth.
HAPPINESS
THROUGH BREEDING
We can also get
some happiness from obeying our genetic imperatives and having offspring –
observe new parents and/or grandparents. But just being parents and/or
grandparents is not all that is required to be lastingly happy (there are many
unhappy parents and/or grandparents).
HAPPINESS
THROUGH HEALTH
To be healthy
is a good feeling. If we feel healthy we feel as though we are “bursting with
life”, we feel as though we are “ready for anything” – we can feel happiness.
But, like successful breeding, good health is not enough on its own to make us
lastingly happy people – many unhappy people can have rude health, and many
unhealthy people can be happy (I have seen friends who have died of cancer who
remained happy people).
THE ANIMAL IS DEFINITELY
A FACTOR OF THE HUMAN EQUATION
Because we do
get some happiness from our animal senses, health, needs and imperatives it
must be concluded that being animal is very much a part of the human equation. But
are there any other ways we can experience feelings of happiness?
SPIRITUAL
HAPPINESS
Just about
every day certain things will make us happy by uplifting our spirits. For
example: seeing a beautiful view; hearing beautiful music; smelling a beautifully
perfumed flower, tasting beautiful food. These may be experienced through our
animal senses and register in our animal brains, but they are not about our animal
needs and genetic imperatives. There are other things which are not of our
animal needs but serve to make us feel happiness by inspiring us: a gratuitous
act of kindness; witnessing virtuosity in any field of endeavour; encountering
a beautiful soul.
SO THE HUMAN
CONDITION IS TO BE ANIMAL AND SPIRITUAL, BOTH
So, spiritual
things can give us contentment and can make us happy as well as animal things.
If what makes us happy are animal and spiritual things – both – we can safely
conclude that we are both animal and spiritual. We are perhaps best described
as spiritual beings with an animal body? Let’s explore this further.
THE HUMAN
DUALITY
Many have seen
the human condition as a mind+body duality – but the human mind is obviously of
our brain – part of the animal body (and obviously evolved/evolving – we still have
remnants of the reptilian brain, for example – and apparently some reptilian responses
and behaviours). But maybe the true human duality is soul+body? We are definitely
a duality because we have seen that two distinct things can make us happy –
sometimes spiritual, sometimes animal things. But, even more interesting,
sometimes the two can be met together – with blissful results.
ANIMAL AND
SPIRITUAL TOGETHER
When the two factors
of the human equation are met together we can experience intense “peak”
experiences – of ecstasy. For example, when dining – eating a
beautifully-cooked and presented meal (as opposed to just feeding); when making
love to someone you love (as opposed to just having an orgasm); or during peak sporting
achievements (of able flesh and willing spirit). Healthy flesh is always willing,
but if the spirit is weak, ecstasy will not be available for the human self. We
will examine ecstasy a bit more in a moment, but here it is sufficient to
notice that all these experiences – animal, spiritual, or even both together in
peak experiences of ecstasy – can only make us feel passing happiness. The big
question is:-
WHAT DOES IT
TAKE FOR US TO BE HAPPY PEOPLE?
Can we be happy
people (as opposed to just experiencing happiness)? If so, what possession(s)
enable us to be happy people? To answer these questions we need to go deeper
into the human condition – we need to explore the self – and especially the
self’s needs.
BEING HAPPY
WITH THE SELF
The key to humanity
rests literally with the word “being”. We are not our bodies. We have bodies, but
we are a being – a self/soul/spirit – call it what you will.
The first step
to being a happy self, rather than just experiencing passing happiness, is to chose
to come to know our self. We have already discovered in the above section of
our journey which explored spiritual evolution the importance of the ancient
dictum to “Know Thyself”. Why is this important in our quest to be happy? Because,
if we come to truly know our self we can come to know if we can be happy with
our self – with our being – with who life has revealed us to be. Can
we be (as the saying goes) “happy in our skins”?
THE TRUE SELF
If we manage to
come to truly know our self, and can honestly say that we love that self,
then we will be happy – as opposed to just feeling happiness. “Truly” is
crucial here because faking it won’t work for long. If we imagine our selves to
be other than we truly are – through wishful thinking; through being misled by egotism;
through mistaking the body for the self; or through being misled by the
blandishments of others – we will never know the real self, lasting happiness
will not be available, and unhappiness beckons.
THE DANGER OF
NOT KNOWING THE TRUE SELF
The ego is an
essential ingredient for animal survival, but more and more studies have shown
that criminals who are given to random violence actually have a high ego,
rather than being victims of low self esteem. A high, but false, sense of pride
in the self – of personal superiority even – can lead to anger and violence
when the world does not agree with your own inflated opinion of self. As I will
discuss shortly, the best reality check of our own self opinion is genuine love
from others.
WE BECOME OUR
CHOICES
Our true self is
represented by our actions flowing from our choices. In this way we create our
selves – we become our choices – not our wishes or our dreams, but our actions.
Do we love our actions, can we love our self? Neo-Darwinians, materialists, and
the such like, won’t allow free choice because it does not fit their
necessarily mechanistic model of the universe, but nowhere is there greater
evidence for the existence of free-choice than in our creation of self – we
don’t all create the same self.
UNHAPPINESS
Of course, just
knowing our true selves is not enough to be happy – in fact it may lead to unhappiness.
If we cannot love the self we have come to truly know, then we will be unhappy
– even to the point of self-loathing and sickness. Medical studies have shown that
self-loathing can lead to fatal sickness – more empirical evidence of the
existence of the spiritual.
However, unhappiness,
even self-loathing, is not the end – the discomfort of it can spur us on to
life’s greatest opportunity.
THE
If we are not
happy with the self that life has allowed us to know, life gives us its
greatest opportunity – the opportunity to grow our self – to evolve spiritually.
Life in the relative is an opportunity for many things, its most immaculate is this
one to evolve our self. To know and grow – driven by humanity’s unique need to
be happy with our self. “Unique”, as I have said before, because other animals
don’t need to be happy with the self, they just need to be.
Every person
who can be described as truly and lastingly happy (as opposed to just feeling happy
for the moment) is happy with their self, to the point of being able to love
the self. Mind you, most people who are happy are not deliriously happy
all the time – I would describe them as having a quiet happiness, a background
radiation of happiness almost – which helps them through life’s difficulties
and inevitable moments of sadness and unhappinesses.
What, then, is
the best way to get genuine, well-founded, enduring self-love?
THE GETTING OF LOVE
Humans do many
things for the getting of love – some work, some don’t. Some not only do not
work, but are counter-productive – involving us in Faustian pacts against the self/soul.
Which are these things?
MONEY
We have seen on
our journey that humans are complicated things, actions can have clear motives,
or they can have dual (animal and spiritual) motives. Or they may start out as
one thing and end up as another. For example, the accumulation of money may
start as the animal need to be rich enough for survival, but end up being about
feeling good about the self – the attitudes of other people towards you changes
when you become rich. If you are rich, people will appear to respect you, to
like you – even to love you – allowing you to love your self. But “appear”
because it is usually blandishments to get their hands on your wealth, or some
of your prestige by association. People who are as rich as you are (or richer)
don’t treat you as anything special. Money, in and of itself – and beyond the
needs of survival – won’t make you any happier. This from Professor Mirko
Bagaric,
“money makes a
negligible difference to our well-being once we are beyond average wealth,
extracting ourselves from poverty gives a significant boost to our happiness
barometer.”
Quoted from Age
newspaper – 27th May, 2009.
Money more than
our fellows allows a change in self-respect – a change (we know, perhaps
unconsciously) as fragile as our temporal wealth.
POWER
Power, another
popular way to get self love, also may start out with animal survival motives
but again, when achieved, the possession of it changes people’s behaviour
towards you. You mistake their behaviour as respect, and even love – but it is
most likely fear – people don’t love or respect your self, but fear you, or
want some of your power. Communist dictators are/were good examples of this –
all the false fawning admiration expressed in statues etc, and the false
mourning at death (there are still tears to be seen in the tomb of that bloody
murderer, Lenin. The Old Testament god is another good example of fear being
mistaken for love. Religious people are mostly victims of the Stockholm
syndrome – a syndrome about mistaking fear for love – where people come to love
the captors that have power over them. The religious fear a brutal God and
mistake it for love. Is it possible to love a god who slew men, women,
children, horses, donkeys, and anything that drew breath in innocent cities that
his chosen tribe wanted. A god still advocating such behaviour in the “New”
Testament?
FAME
Fame also
brings many people to you who profess friendship, love and respect. But ask any
ex-star how genuine this is. “Love” from people based on fame, like love based
on power and/or money, disappears as quickly as that fame, power or money. Any
self-love based on such love is built on quicksand.
To watch their
antics is to know that the powerful, rich, famous, and/or beautiful are most
often the unhappiest (or at least, the not-happiest) of all.
OTHER METHODS
AND TALL-POPPY LOPPING
Many of us also
get self-respect/love and some happiness from our being associated with power
and/or success through membership of a gang, a religion, a football team. It
does explain why some apparently decent people will do indecent things to
further their religion. But self-love by association is fraught (as any
supporter of
We most often
measure our own achievements with the yardstick of others’ achievements. Some
of us, frustrated at this attempt to feel good about the self, realise that it
is easier to drag others down than build our selves up, and engage in that all
too human pastime of tall-poppy lopping. Bringing others down to our own
perceived level (or below) brings some grim satisfaction, but no lasting
happiness – there are always others who appear relatively good/better/best.
HOW TO GET REAL
SELF RESPECT AND LOVE?
So, how best to
get self love and self-respect that is true and lasting? We are not all capable
of truly great achievements in fields like the artistic, sporting, or academic,
for example – most of us have humble capacities. But there are some things we
all have the ability to do. We all have the ability to love others, to forgive
them, and do good things for them (the things we would like them to do for us).
Love, forgive,
do – sounds familiar? Consider also this:
“If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of
his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and the latter
gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth.”
– Charles Darwin, (Autobiography, P. 94.)
From
THE IMPORTANCE
OF THE LOVE AND APPROVAL OF OTHERS
Why is the
approbation of our fellow men so important? Because the best evidence of our
self-worth seems to come from others. This from Alain de Botton:
“The attentions
of others might be said to matter to us principally because we are affected by
a congenital uncertainty as to our own value – as a result of which what others
think of us comes to play a determining role in how we are able to view
ourselves.”
Alain
de Botton, “Status Anxiety” – P. 15
And self-worth
is more important than bodily survival.
“For the
dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling
what he may think of himself.”
Alain de Botton, ibid – P. 116
ACADEMIC
STUDIES ON HAPPINESS
Our happiness
is so important to us that it is one of the most popular areas for academic
studies. What do academic studies have for us on the subject of happiness?
Innumerable studies have found that if we have friends, a partner, good
connections with our community, a job, purpose in our life, the love of our
fellow men, we will be happy.
True. But why
do these things make us genuinely happy? For the reasons we discussed, above –
they allow us to feel good about our selves, our beings – genuinely happy for
genuine achievements. They are a mark of the worth of our selves/souls – not the
beauty of our bodies, of our power, the amount of our temporal possessions. This
from 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne about assessing our
worth:
“A man may have
a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large
income. All that may surround him, but it is not him…Measure his height with
his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show
himself to us naked…What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful
one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or
are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? ... That is what we need
to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.”
Quoted from Alain de
Botton, “Status Anxiety” P. 200.
TO EVOLVE A
BEAUTIFUL SOUL
So, if life is
an opportunity to know our self, then grow/evolve our self until we are happy
with our self – then it is an opportunity to evolve de Montaigne’s “beautiful
soul”. The best way to achieve it seems to be to obey the above injunctions of
Jesus and Darwin – to “love one another”, and “act for the good of others”. If
we do this we will find we have lots of friends, a partner who loves us,
connections with our community, purpose in our life, love from our fellows – all
the things academic studies have shown to be necessary to our lasting happiness.
We will be happy because we will have become a beautiful soul – spiritually
evolved.
Only our
beautiful souls/selves will not lose their power, money, fame, or get wrinkles
– it is the only part of our being which has any chance of being eternal.
NEO-DARWINIAN
IDEOLOGY
In the
background I can hear the neo-Darwinians ideologists singing their usual
refrain: self love and happiness is not about spiritual growth, evolving a
“beautiful soul”, but just about the animal – ego, status and prestige –
necessary for animal survival and breeding purposes. This from Jonathan Haidt
(Haidt uses an elephant as an analogy for the human body):
“The elephant [human body] was shaped by natural selection to win at
the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their
admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige,
not happiness and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is
prestigious.”
- P. 101 “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Haidt’s italics underlined).
Seen through
the lens of neo-Darwinian ideology, gaining the admiration of others is not
about our need to be happy with our spiritual self – but just another purely
animal act to garner prestige in order to breed more successfully than other
animals of our species – to win the “game of life”.
DO WE CARE ONLY
ABOUT PRESTIGE, NOT HAPPINESS?
Is this what truly
drives the human need for the admiration of our fellows? Is this what makes their
admiration, in the words of
For Haidt, in
“the game of life” all animals, including humans, are the same, and: “the
elephant [our animal body] cares about prestige, not happiness”. But we have
seen on our exploration that humans spend much of their waking hours in
non-genetic, or non-survival behaviours – in seeking happiness (even if the
activity is not recognised as such, and/or is futile). Many of us have recognised
that a higher happiness is available beyond just prestige for breeding – the
happiest people you will meet are those who recognise the prestige treadmill
for what it is and have stepped off – taken a survival risk, tried to know
their true selves – to follow their vocation, their calling, their souls.
HAIDT’S DUALITY
Haidt, by
stating “the elephant cares about prestige, not happiness” allows that
happiness and prestige are different. Neo-Darwinians tend to confuse the two. Prestige
and status is of our animal bodies and driven by our egos. Our animal egos
are to do with bodily survival and successful mating. Lasting happiness is, conversely,
happiness with the self/soul/spirit. Throughout his book Haidt refers to the
human duality as analogous to an elephant and a rider – the elephant being the animal
body with its unconscious animal instincts and genetic imperatives, and the
rider is the mind – the conscious, thinking self. But this exploration has
allowed us to see the human duality rather as a spiritual being with an animal
body. The human mind is part of the bodily singularity – it is an animal mind. To
couch this idea in terms of Haidt’s analogy I would describe the body (which includes
the mind) as the elephant (our delightful but doomed material vehicle), and the
self (our possibly eternal spirit) as the rider. In other words, I see the mind
not as the rider of the animal body, but as an integral part of it – and it is
not always in control!
The spirit/rider
is not of the body, but is moved by other things, what gives our self joy is on
a higher plane, or higher consciousness, than the animal. It often seems to be
part of something “larger” – a numinous – a Divine even – an “S” Self. We have
seen that the spiritual and the animal can be stimulated together to experience
ecstasy – but they are essentially separate factors of the human animal/divine
equation. The human totality seems to be the way the Divine experiences this
physical world – its joys and fears, its dangers and beauties, its animal and
spiritual experiences.
SO WHAT IS
HAPPINESS, AND WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT US AND OUR PURPOSE?
We posed these
questions at the beginning of this section on happiness. We have answered the first
“what is happiness?” question by discovering that lasting happiness is firstly knowing
the self, and knowing that we can love the self.
The second question
– what does our happiness say about us? It says two things:- firstly, that because
both animal and spiritual things can give us contentment and some happiness it
says that we are both animal and spiritual; and secondly:- because love is the
only thing which works invariably to
make us lastingly happy – we are love.
Lest that sounds to you like a sentimental-sounding generalisation consider
what George Vaillant had to say in summarising a 70 year-long study on human
development and happiness (Vaillant is professor of psychiatry at the
“The only thing
that really matters in life are your relations with other people…happiness
equals love – full stop.”
Quoted from an article written by
Vaillant, Australian Financial Review, 21st August, 2009. Study – http://adultdev.bwh.harvard.edu
Loving others
ensures they will love you. If you are loved by others, you will allow it as
evidence that you are worthy of your own love. If you can love your self, you
will be happy. Genuine self-respect and love, based on the true love of others,
is the only thing the possession of which invariably leads to happiness – and,
conversely, self-loathing invariably leads to unhappiness. Funnily enough, self-love
is also the only possession which is totally within our control – no one else
can change/evolve/devolve your self.
And the third
question – our purpose? The purpose of anything is what it does. What do we do?
While we sometimes do acts which society calls “evil”, evil is never the object
of those actions in, and of, itself. As we have seen above, we do evil things
when we engage in efforts to love the self through the getting of power, fame,
money, and/or other – eventually futile – means. Evil acts can also emanate
from the animal side of the human equation when we strive to ensure our animal
survival – for example, invading the land of others and killing or enslaving
them (read the Bible). We invariably find that evil never leads to lasting
happiness but, if the life is long enough, it will invariably lead to
self-loathing – ask anyone on their deathbed.
THE WILL FOR
HAPPINESS
The relative universe
(and that includes us) does creation through evolution. Humans have free will
(which I argue for in other places in this essay) and our strongest will is not
Nietzsche’s will for power, but our will to be happy. Our will to be happy creates
many things, but its greatest creation is our self. Humans create their selves in
striving to be happy – we are what makes us happy. Only love makes us truly
happy – we are love. It sometimes takes a lifetime (maybe several?) to know
that.
We now, in our
journey along the road to truth, emerge from the sylvan glades of human
happiness and stumble into the foggy, froggy hollows of semantics. Some shelter
in their mists playing a semantic game – saying the self/spirit does not exist,
all is of the body – the “spiritual” is more truly labelled psychological or
emotional.
I have stated,
and presented evidence throughout this essay, that we are spiritual beings with
animal bodies. But those who see life as just a fluke occurrence in an equally
fluky, entirely physical and mechanistic universe argue that the spiritual does
not exist, that the things I have been ascribing to our spiritual being are
more correctly described as psychological and emotional – in other words, of
our bodies – our “spirituality” just an electro-biological response of a lump
of meat – our brain. Is this semantic gymnastics by neo-Darwinian materialists
to explain away the difficulties that the existence of the spiritual poses for
their material theory of everything?
Some semantic
difficulties can arise because certain words can be used to describe both psychological/animal
things and spiritual things. For example, by the word “love” we can mean the
Darwinian, naturally-selected feeling we must have towards our genetic
offspring and/or our tribe members to survive. Or we can mean that other
Darwinian love: romantic love (or lust) we must have to procreate.
But, in humans,
love from others is as important as love for others. Spiritual love
– the love we must have for our selves/souls/spirits – is essential for us to
be happy, and a different thing to the Darwinian “love” we must have for our
partners to breed, and/or the love of our social group and/or offspring to
survive as a species. Needing love from other animals, spiritual love – love from
others of our species to love our selves – is unnatural because other animals
don’t have the need to love the self. As we have seen before, animals other
than humans don’t need to be happy, they just need to be.
To illustrate
this point, consider the peacock. A peacock spreads his tail – for only one
purpose – to spread his genes. This is a natural behaviour with a Darwinian
motive – the type of motive that evolutionary ideologists claim explains all
human behaviours as well. Now, a human can do the Darwinian thing and dress
up like a peacock to attract partners in order to spread their genes, but humans
are a bit more complicated – sometimes they are after another thing when they exhibit
this behaviour. Even humans who are not interested in breeding (even de-sexed
people) still try to feel good about their selves by being considered physically
attractive (especially if they have no other means of getting approval from
others). Similarly, feeling good about the self by having a beautiful body, is
a behaviour of older humans who are past breeding – often to the extent of risking
their animal survival by having body-enhancing plastic surgery. They probably
won’t succeed with their ultimate aim of happiness because they are confusing
the body with the self, but the point I am making is that the driving need for human
peacock-type behaviour is not necessarily Darwinian gene-spreading – whereas it
is always about genes for other, more natural animals. Animals other than
humans can achieve the maximum happiness they are capable of through their
bodies and genes – humans can reach a higher happiness through spiritual
happiness, even ecstasy through satisfying the self+body together.
To get back to
the original point, human self-love is a spiritual need and cannot be demoted
to a psychological, and/or emotional animal need and/or response.
EMOTIONS
Emotions are
not the same as being spiritually moved – or inspired. Emotions are bodily
responses to Darwinian survival situations – for example the animal emotions of
fear and anger, which trigger the physical reactions – flight or fight. Are
these reactions of the same level as those I call spiritual – for example, when
we hear sublime music, take in a sublime vista, smell a beautiful flower – all
of which spiritually move us but have no Darwinian function? Is the deep,
spiritual connection we have for someone whose soul we have experienced – a
lover, a close friend – a soul mate – the same as the Darwinian emotions we
feel for a sexy individual who has just come into view, or the emotions we
accord a fellow teammate or tribe member? The former speaks of a spiritual
connection and understanding – the latter of bodily needs and animal/genetic
survival.
WE CONFUSE
RELIGION WITH THE SPIRITUAL
The way that
the spiritual is most often confused with the psychological is by confusing it
with religion. Religion is about our bodily/psychological needs and our
emotions. To illustrate this let’s consider this about the psychology of
religion from Freud:
“illusions,
fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind…man’s
need to make his helplessness tolerable”
-
(Sigmund
Freud, Civilisation, Society and
Religion, Page 208. Penguin, 1985).
And the
following which, along with: “religion is
the opiate of the masses”, we might call Marx’s atheist manifesto? :
“Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world and the
soul of the soulless condition.”
-
(Economic
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.)
Jungians also
see religion as a useful part of society – about the collective unconscious, a
necessary and therapeutic tool for civilisation. Sociologists such as Emile
Durkheim have a similar utilitarian outlook on religion as well, viewing
religion as a social tool, something used by societies to control and maintain
societies in their complexity.
RELIGION IS
DARWINIAN
Aspects of religion
can sometimes be spiritual – yearnings expressed in words, art, buildings,
music – but more often religion is Darwinian – about venal power – power over other
people through fear, and power over a vain god through supplying “his” needs: worship,
praise, fidelity. Religion also cures humanity’s animal fear of death by
promising perpetual animal survival – “S” Salvation is key Christian doctrine –
and the explanation for its sweep through the
But the human
condition is not established as “soulless” simply by clearly understanding
religion’s Darwinian character and functions, or by recognising its other
non-spiritual uses as Freud, Marx, and a string of philosophers, psychologists,
and sociologists have done. Our spirituality extends way beyond religion. This
from John Armstrong:
“It [the
spiritual] names a set of complex
properties that material creatures have. Religions, cults, and myths are
attempts – for better or worse – to organise and guide our inner lives. But the
issue of spiritual life can be raised and pursued apart from religion. “
“Op. Cit.” (P. 164)
So, while religion
definitely is emotional and psychological – animal responses to existential threats
– this does not mean that our spirituality is likewise. Human spirituality is
rarely served or demonstrated by our religions – except in the art, buildings,
and/or music inspired by our imaginings of the Divine. But our animal fears are
always served and played upon by our religions. The spiritual exists in many
places other than the religions in our world, and evidence of the spiritual
outside of religious imaginings is what this essay seeks.
So far I have
considered the abstract notions like beauty as evidence for the existence of
the spiritual, but is there any empirical evidence for the existence of the
spiritual?
·
EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL
We have
discovered on our journey that medical studies have shown that self-loathing
can produce physical changes to our bodies – people can get bodily sick (even
to the point of death) from loathing the self. It has also been shown that
feeling good about the self, loving the self, can result in positive physical
changes to our bodies. Hospital studies have shown that sick people can have
their spirits lifted by music or pets, and such “lifting” can positively affect
their physical health. How? There is nothing about the love, or touch, of a
pet, or about music that changes the physical molecular structure of our bodies
– it can only affect our spirits/souls/selves – which in turn must make the
physical changes to our bodies. Bodily changes, brought about by spiritual
means, is empirical evidence for the existence of the spiritual. More evidence
that humans cannot be totally described in material terms – while we have a
body – we are not that body.
GUILT
Conversely,
people can become sick through spiritual means. For example, people can get physically
sick from guilt. Guilt can be very destructive, physically, to the human body. “Badness”
to others does not sit well with the human condition – or not for long. And it
is interesting what we see as “bad”. For instance, rape – if we are just
genetic machines then raping someone is natural (as it is in the animal
kingdom) and, more correctly, “good” because it furthers the domination of our
genes. But for us it is a crime against another’s being, their self, their soul
– and for those of us with even lowly spiritual evolution it will produce guilt
within.
LOVE
The fact that
there is not one recorded case of someone from getting sick from being good to
others or by being loved by others – in fact the very idea is ludicrous – is further
evidence in the discussion about the true human nature is love. Being good suits
us, being loved makes us ecstatically happy, being bad or “evil” (a concept not
available to other animals) can make us physically sick.
SOME CAN’T GET
NO SATISFACTION
More empirical evidence
for the existence of the spiritual can be found in our sexuality, which can operate
at just base, animal levels of satisfaction – like a rock band screwing all
available comers (so to speak) – up to sublime spiritual encounters. At the “lowest”
animal/physical level of human sexuality we have masturbation, prostitution,
and sexual exploitation (by pop- and sports-stars of fans; by adults of
children; managers of underlings). Sex at these base levels provides animal,
physical satisfaction but absolutely no self/spiritual satisfaction – hence the
pop song (“I cain’t get no satisfaction). Animal “satisfactions” of the type
above can even lead to self-loathing – spiritual damage.
PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL
ECSTASY
But, as we have
seen in the above exploration of human happiness, human sexuality can rise to a
higher spiritual level enabling a higher level of satisfaction – ecstasy. Making
love to someone you love, rather than just having sex for animal pleasure or
ego satisfaction – or for spreading your genes – is a vastly different
experience available to humans. Tantric sex, often called spiritual sex, is an
example of incorporating love into the sex act. Tantric sex is a physical
manifestation of a spiritual bond – it is the physical realisation of the love
of a soul mate – it produces a physical/spiritual ecstasy through the self and
the body together at once. The difference the spiritual makes to a physical, animal
act is more empirical physical evidence for the existence of the spiritual.
More evidence is
available in the fact that ecstasy can be achieved by introducing spiritual
elements to other physical pleasures and/or needs – for example, eating. Feeding
meets animal needs but dining can be ecstatic. Good food cooked with
artistry and, as many great chefs describe it – with love – can lift the
spirits, enabling heights of enjoyment beyond just meeting survival needs. We
can dine even on a beautiful piece of fruit – if we raise our consciousness to
take in its physical perfection: shape, colour, ripeness, smell, taste, texture
– and of course the fact that someone thought enough of you to present you with
such a perfect thing. The Japanese, for instance, spend great amounts of money
on just one perfect piece of food, perfectly presented. It is not just about
the food, but about spiritual aspects of receiving and eating such a gift – it can
lifts our spirits if we manage to lift our consciousness sufficiently to appreciate
it all.
Once ecstasy
has been experienced, physical satisfaction without the spiritual being
addressed at the same time is much the same as a boring meal – adequate on an
animal level, but uninspiring. We can’t remain in a state of lasting ecstasy in
this relative world (sometimes animal survival must come to the fore – without
the animal body surviving there is not the vehicle for the often spiritual experiences
and opportunities this physical world offers).
RAISING OUR
CONSCIOUSNESS FOR GREATER ENJOYMENT OF LIFE
If we take
advantage of life’s opportunity to evolve our spirituality, raise our
consciousness in/of life, we can appreciate physical/animal existence in the
relative/material world much more. We can raise our consciousness alone – walking
through a garden, through the bush, along a beach – or with others – singing in
a choir, playing in a band, chatting as a group. We humans, uniquely among the
animals, have to put up with existential suffering because of our unique higher
consciousness of life (of our mortality, for example) so we might as well also
enjoy the benefits that higher consciousness can provide. Spiritual evolution
allows us to bring the spiritual factors of the human equation to bear on day
to day life for our greater enjoyment of it.
The complete
human equation has spiritual as well as animal factors, we need to raise our
consciousness of the human condition so that we can come to know who we really
are – and what we are really capable of. Those who try to describe the human
condition in terms of its body alone are doing the equivalent of trying to
describe a book only in terms of its paper. We need to be conscious that our selves
are spiritual – possibly part of a larger Divine – if we are to ever “Know thy ‘Self’”.
What other
evidence is there for the existence of the spiritual? How the evidence said to
come from beyond our temporal world? At this point of our journey we need to
double back along the Road to Truth to have a peek into those labyrinths we
encountered earlier – labyrinths that were signposted “Paranormal” and
“Supernatural”. We skirted them at the beginning of our journey because they
are dangerous areas and we were low on light, courage, and a reliable guide.
·
THE PARANORMAL,
SUPERNATURAL AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
I may have
found a reliable guide into these areas – we’ll see – but first, why do I call
the paranormal “dangerous”?
BOGUS OPERATORS
PREYING ON NEEDY PEOPLE
The paranormal
is dangerous because it is liable to be infested with bogus operators preying
on the often needy people who go there. “Needy people”? For example, those who
are needy because they have been recently-bereaved and are having a struggle continuing
in our world without their departed loved ones. There are some bogus operators
who will get “messages” from recently departed loved ones – supposedly from the
other side – for the usual fee. Comfort is comfort, I suppose, and while “t”
truths may enable some to carry on it does not help us in our stated objective
of approaching “T” Truth.
OUR RELIGIONS
CONTAIN MANY BOGUS OPERATORS TOO
Among the bogus
operators in the supernatural arena preying on those in need of comfort are, of
course, our religious leaders. Leaders, seeking temporal power and status based
on their supposed knowledge of – and control over – God. Religions claim to
have the knowledge of what we have to do in this world to please God, thus gain
eternal life in heaven (complete with waiting virgins and/or hosanna-singing
angels), and avoid hell. It is no exaggeration to say that our religions have brought
down misery upon us many times over the years – and to this day – in their
competition with each other for their coveted temporal power over the hearts
and minds of men.
AN AREA OF
MISUNDERSTANDING, DISINFORMATION, INCOMPETENCE, ANECDOTE, AND SUBJECTIVITY
The paranormal
and supernatural is also a dangerous area because it is prone to
misunderstanding, disinformation, and incompetent operators (however honest and
well-intentioned some might be). It is dangerous because it is an area that
tends to be low on empirical evidence but high on anecdotal evidence. And it is
an area of much subjectivity (it is hard to be objective in an area where all
have a strong vested interest – we all have strong wishes about the existence
or not of any hereafter – and the form we would like it to take).
BUT IT IS AN
AREA OF VITAL CONCERN
But, while being
mindful of the potential dangers, we do need to explore this area because the
existence and nature of any afterlife will be of vital concern to us all. Ant
Truths we can approach will have a lot to say about how we should live our
lives, about what are the real opportunities of this relative reality, and how
to best live so as to fully take them? And it could answer some of the conundrums
of the human condition – are we truly an eternal spiritual being experiencing
mortal life for ultimately creative purposes – are all animals spiritual beings
– are there other planets, beings, universes? I don’t think that humanity has
the luxury of leaving such mysteries as these unanswered anymore – because, as
previously stated, our technological evolution has far exceeded our spiritual
evolution – humanity is rapidly becoming unsustainable.
EXPLORERS RISK
THEIR SANITY, THEIR UNDERSTANDINGS AND CONTROL
These are big
questions, and many who are presently exploring the paranormal and supernatural
have lost confidence that our religions, philosophies, and/or sciences have the
answers. But this is risky business – to go beyond the “normal” and “natural”
world into the paranormal and supernatural is to risk our sanity – our present understanding
of life – the “t” truths with which we operate day to day – our comforting
beliefs.
OUR COMFORTING
BELIEFS AND UNDERSTANDINGS
As we have
seen, the comforting beliefs of Atheists are that science has proven existence
is merely about accidental atoms and forces – no God, nor any judgement in an afterlife
to worry about. Theists are comforted by their beliefs of supposed control over
this life and the next. Who is right – atheists, theists, neither? Maybe both
have some truths but neither a complete understanding? I suspect that the
latter may be the case (much like the debate over water-divining which started
me on this quest for Truth in the first place). So, let’s see – in an effort to
stay true to Buddha’s injunction to “go all the way” along the Road to Truth we
must have a peek inside the often misleading, dangerous, and scary realms of
the paranormal.
SPIRITUAL
MEDIUMS
At the end of
the 19th century and the start of the 20th the popularity
of the paranormal was high. Spiritual mediums were popular – the best of them
were renowned – and séances were a common form of entertainment. This was the
post-Enlightenment era when the House of God was losing its sway, but before scepticism
and scientism had gained theirs. It was also the era before movies, radio, and
TV – people had to find their own ways occupy their free time. Religion made some
tentative forays into the paranormal (usually in the form of exorcism) but was
generally reticent – afraid of the potential can of worms that could be uncovered
for religious doctrine.
EARLY
PSYCHOLOGY
During this
period the inchoate science of Psychology made some assays into the paranormal
world. The “Father” of modern psychology, William James, was one to do so – with
mixed results. James concluded there were bona fide mysteries which we most
likely would never answer – and that for life to work properly it was probably best
we didn’t.
MODERN SCIENCE
As I have
already mentioned, academia has tended to confuse and equate the spirit world
with religion, and as a result, spirituality has been tarred with religion’s
brush of incredibility. As a result, parapsychology is an area not many academic
scientists have seriously ventured into subsequent to James. However, some have
– of varying credibility. Professor David Fontana (Professor of Psychology at
Liverpool’s
I find
“Having studied
the evidence for these [psychic]
abilities for over 30 years and seen a significant amount of the evidence at
first hand, I am in no doubt that the evidence of psychic abilities can only be
rejected on doctrinaire grounds and not on those of objective judgement.
Psychic abilities are a matter of fact, not of belief.”
“There is no
doubt in my mind that the question of whether or not we live after death is the
most important that faces us, and has always faced us. It is the most important
not only because it has to do with our destiny and the meaning and purpose of
existence, but because it has implications for the way we live our present
lives.”
After considering
his extensive experiences of the paranormal often in the company of other
respected scientists (the most intriguing of which is the 2-year-long examination
of the séances at Scole – a town in
… If your answer is that you
are more than a biological accident whose ultimately meaningless life is
bounded by the cradle and the grave, then I have to say I agree with you.”
David Fontana, Is There an Afterlife? (above quotes Pp. 468-9)
THE SCEPTIC
RESPONSE
“the Scole
Group had no discernible financial motive for practising deception. In fact
they were considerably out-of-pocket as a result of the work of their Spiritual
Science Foundation, and steadfastly refused financial assistance…even to cover
their expenses. Publicity could also be ruled out as a motive for deception, particularly
in the case of the two mediums, who remained anonymous throughout the
investigation.”
p. 329 Ibid.
As I have
stated, sceptics have a very important role to play, but for most, the
slightest potential for fraud is given the same weight as proof that fraud did
happen.
WHAT INFORMATION
WAS COMMUNICATED?
Some of the
extraordinary, but coherent information that was conveyed by spirit
communicators from the other side through the mediums Fontana studied included
that the afterlife is comprised of planes of ascending levels of spiritual
evolution and:
“that the way
in which the next world – at least at the lower levels – is experienced by each
individual is shaped not just by his or her own thoughts, but by the thoughts
of others who think in similar ways. Thus it is said we gravitate to that part
of the next world where there are people of like mind to ourselves. Those who
love trees and flowers, peace and harmony, go to a domain where the thoughts of
others who love these things have helped to create just such an environment. By
contrast, if we prefer the city, we go to a city-like environment, and if we
are identified with violence and strife we go to a place of violence and strife...
it is worth remembering that our
environment in this world is also largely created – if indirectly – by thought.
If we wish to build a house we go to an architect with ideas generated by our
own creative thinking.” (ibid. Pp. 451-2)
I like that –
talk about Divine justice – if we are peaceful we go to a peaceful place, if we
are violent we go to a violent place!? But does that necessarily make it just my
“t” truth rather than the “T” Truth? However, such an idea that we create our
own reality sits in harmony with some of the discoveries of quantum physics – that
matter has more the nature of energy than substance and that our consciousness
and observation of realities affects them (maybe even effects them?).
And
“Generally,
however, these communications speak of this judgement as a form of
self-judgement rather than as something handed down from on high.” (ibid. P. 454)
And, punishment:
“…involves
directly experiencing within oneself the emotional happiness and suffering
caused in others – including non-human forms of life – by one’s actions. No
divine being hands out rewards or punishments. The rewards and punishments are
implicit in the judgement process itself, and in the pleasure on the one hand
and the remorse on the other that it brings. This judgement must sooner or
later be faced if spiritual progress is to be made…” (ibid
P. 454)
“Spiritual
progress” – spiritual evolution – messages from the other side state
continually that our existence in this material reality is about the
opportunity it allows for spiritual evolution.
And about
overcoming ignorance, greed, and hatred – about learning to behave selflessly and
compassionately – and about the primacy of love:
”…it is
important to add here that there is an almost universal emphasis, from mystics
and communicators alike, upon the fact that ultimate reality is “love”, and
that the purpose of our life on earth is to learn how to love, how to behave
selflessly and compassionately, and to overcome the ignorance, greed, and
hatred to which material existence lays us open.” (ibid. P. 455)
THE END OF
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION?
If
IS THE ANSWER
TO THE MEANING OF LIFE MEANT TO BE AVAILABLE?
As mentioned, the
father of modern psychology, William James, after his frustrations at proving
anything from studying this area concluded that for life to work properly it
needs to retain its mystery – any ultimate purpose of life may well be denied
by our full knowledge of it?
“William James
may have been right when he lamented that it rather looks as if the Almighty
had decreed that this area should forever retain its mystery. If this is indeed
the case, then I assume it is because the Almighty has decreed that the
personal search for meaning and purpose in life and in death are of more value
than having meaning and purpose handed down as certainties from others. If the
certainties of life and death were so well known that they appeared in every
school textbook, there would no longer be scope for the personal search, and
for the inner development that may be possible only as a product of such a
search.”
p. 327 ibid.
THE SCOPE FOR
PERSONAL SEARCH
“Inner
development” is, of course, again, the same phenomenon of life that I have been
calling spiritual/self evolution. Life may not be what some people would call “perfect”
(i.e. heaven) but it certainly does perfectly provide “scope for the personal search…for
the inner development”.
WHAT
ALTERNATIVE IS THERE TO
There is of
course the possibility that
We have free
choice, and all have to exercise it here – there is no Darwinian causality here
that will do it for you. The Neo-Darwinians may be right, maybe one of our many
religions,
Maybe bits of
all – or none of the above – may have the Truth? What other areas of the
paranormal and supernatural labyrinths remain to be explored for more evidence
which may lead us towardsTruth? Well, there are NDE’s – Near Death Experiences.
Let’s explore these for any Truths.
NDE’s have been
taken seriously by many in the scientific world, especially those who are
involved in the more dramatic surgery, emergency, and intensive-care areas of
medicine – areas where people have a habit of dying suddenly and can sometimes
be “brought back”.
“Back” from
where?
Some revived
patients have remarkable stories to tell about their experiences of death (we
will take “death” to mean the cessation of all vital signs). NDE’s are not
uncommon for those who have been revived after death. Just how common it is, is
hard to calculate because not all report their experiences – being afraid of
what others will think about the state of their sanity. The length of time
people have been declared dead varies – but several have been revived after having
no vital signs for periods of time medical science considers impossible.
Several books of
varying reliability have been written on the subject – but enough of them by
rational, credible, highly credentialed scientists and/or medical people, to
take the matter seriously – and more are constantly being brought out. One
credible and extensive study was conducted by Kenneth Ring, professor of
psychology at the
“I do believe –
but just not on the basis of my own or others’ data regarding NDE’s – that we
continue to have conscious existence after our physical death and that the core
experience does represent its beginning, [and] a glimpse of things to come.
Quoted from “Near Death – stories from the other
side”, Craig Mitchell, Pp. 136-7.
Those who have
personally experienced NDE’s are completely convinced and find them
life-changing – changing their whole outlook on life, fear of death and especially
their own previously received ideas about spirituality. In just about every
case the changes are positive. The following, concerning changes in the fear of
death, is from Dr. Cherie Sutherland (School of Sociology, University of New
South Wales) who conducted a scientific study into N.D.E.’s:
“A strong
decrease in fear of death among near-death experiencers has also been noted by
a number of researchers and commented upon by most people writing in this
area…This change in attitude on the part of those who’ve had an NDE has
important implications, not only for their own future lives, but for society in
general since, as Flynn [C. Flynn, “After The Beyond”, 1986 – P. 5] notes:
‘ Psychologists and sociologists have traced
many of our individual as well as societal problems to anxieties related to
death…Such freedom from fear leads to indifference to negative kinds of
immortality striving.’
Freedom from a drive for
material success, with all that entails, is one such change frequently noted.
An intuitive acceptance of both life and death and a focus of attention on the
here and now are further outcomes of this change in attitude to death.”
“Transformed By The Light,” Cherie Sutherland
Pp. 40-41
A PRODUCT OF
RELIGIOUS CONDITIONING?
Some sceptics
claim that NDE’s are simply a product of religious conditioning and/or
expectations. But half of Sutherland’s sample had no religious affiliation, and
half of those who had such, lost it after their experience:
“In terms of
religious affiliation, about half of the sample (46 per cent) claimed to have
no religious affiliation at the time of their NDE. However, after their
experience 84 per cent claimed to have no religion.”- Sutherland, ibid. P.
95.
Many diverge from
previously received religious understanding of the afterlife. This from
Professor David Fontana – who also studied NDE’s:
“Furthermore, although religious belief is
very much a feature of both US and Indian culture, Osis and Haraldsson found
that the ‘phenomena [of NDE’s] within each culture often did not conform to
religious afterlife beliefs.’ Several
basic beliefs, such as judgement, salvation and redemption, in the case of
Christians, and reincarnation and dissolution into Brahma in the case of
Hindus, were notably absent. ‘We reached the impression,’ say the authors, ‘that cultural conditioning by Christian and
Hindu teaching is, in part, contradicted in the visionary experiences of the
dying.’ “ -
EXPERIENCERS
OFTEN RETURN WITH LESSENED RELIGIOSITY
Researchers have
found it quite common that NDE experiencers return with greater spirituality
but lessened religiosity. Some experiencers report contact with a God or “Higher
Being” that is hugely different – grander, more accessible – to the gods of
religious traditions. The 51 person sample in Dr. Sutherland’s study of NDE’s
reported:
“there is a
feeling among this sample that they now have an ongoing direct contact with God
or a Higher Power that requires no mediation by institutions such as the Church
or interpretation by the teachings of any denomination or tradition.”
- Sutherland, Op. Cit. P107
THE MATERIALIST
EXPLANATION – JUST MEAT TALKING TO ITSELF?
Materialists have
attempted a few answers for the phenomenon of NDE – most falling into
pharmacological, psychological, and/or neurological categories. Dr. Karen
Stollznow of
“It
can be anything from drug intake to epilepsy. It’s just the mind playing tricks
on us…Thinking is just meat talking to itself.”
(quoted by Melbourne Age newspaper,
1/8/09)
Fine in theory, but
many near death experiences have been reported by people who had their NDE “in
the field”, so to speak – away from medical treatment and drugs. And
recreational drug-takers report a vast range of hallucinations – not the
remarkably similar end-of-life experiences of the NDE’s. And Epileptics tend to
have very little memory of their episode at all. NDE-experiencers, rarely if
ever experience the kaleidoscope of hallucinations and disturbances of
drug-takers – and return to us settled and beatific rather than rattled by the
experience. If NDE’s are the psychotic flickers of disturbed, drugged, or dying
“meat” – a brain shutting down – why are they so vividly remembered? Most
people have trouble remembering dreams the next day – rarely we manage to
remember the details for a week – but most people who have NDE’s are able to
recall the details forever.
Professor K. Ring
summarises materialist, naturalistic interpretations as follows:
“It is not
difficult – in fact it is easy – to propose naturalistic interpretations that
could conceivably explain some aspects of the core experience…[ but such an] interpretation, to be acceptable, should be able to provide a
comprehensive explanation of all the various aspects…”
K. Ring, “Life at
Death”, P. 216
NEUROBIOLOGICAL
EXPLANATION
Sceptics like to
point to the work of Canadian neuroscientist Dr. Michael Persinger – who has
claimed that he’s replicated NDE’s by inducing temporal lobe seizure with the
application of a magnetic field to the brain. In reply, Drs. Emily and Edward
Kelly from the
Recently,
providing ammunition for the sceptics, Lakhmir Chawla, an anaesthesiologist at
“We think the
near-death experiences are caused by a surge of electrical energy as the brain
runs out of oxygen. As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the cells
fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and
spreads in a cascade and this activity gives people vivid mental sensations.”
(Reported in The Australian Newspaper, 31/5/2010 – Dr.
Chawla’s research also published in the Journal
of Palliative Medicine.)
Oxygen starvation
often produces vivid mental sensations – often very night-marish and
hallucinatory – probably accounting for some of the “hellish” NDE’s? But for
every purely neurologically-produced mental sensation that resembles an NDE symptom
or two, there are many reliable cases that are far more complicated than just a
few lights, noises, and vivid disturbances – cases that utterly defy medical
explanation.
COMPELLING NDE
REPORTS
There are many
books, articles, and reports of NDE experiences. Some compelling, and some not.
Particularly compelling are the experiences of people who have reported NDE’s
even though they have been blind from birth. They experienced, and accurately
reported on, a world they had never seen with their eyes. Professor Kenneth
Ring studied 21 blind people (Ring and Cooper 1999) – some blind from birth –
and most had encounters indistinguishable from experiences recounted by sighted
people. There was some understandable confusion among some who had never
experienced sight – as to what they were experiencing during their NDE’s – but
five said they could see, and two “contain
accounts of particularly clear vision of both earthly and ‘paradise’ conditions
during the NDE.” – their descriptions of objects were “striking and precise.”
Also compelling are
cases where some other survivors reported with amazing accuracy on what occurred
around them when they were physically unconscious – when their selves were out
of their bodies (“selves” because their brains/minds were still on the
operating table). One famous case is the experience of Pam Reynolds:
“Reynolds, an
American singer, watched and later reported on with remarkable accuracy the top
of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved into a bright
glowing realm. But it was her account of the surgical implements used and the
words spoken in the theatre that make the case so intriguing.”
And another case
known as “Maria’s tennis shoe”:
“Maria,
meanwhile, underwent cardiac arrest in 1977. She floated out of her body,
drifted around the hospital and noticed a tennis shoe on a window sill. It was
later found to be exactly where she said it was. The shoe was said to be
invisible from the ground and not in any location where Maria could have seen
it.”
(Reported by Bryan Appleyard – The Weekend Australian
Magazine, 17/1/2010.)
AN AREA WHERE
TRUTHS WILL BE HARD TO ESTABLISH
Indubitably, quite
a few of the NDE’S reported must be physiologically-induced, and some
embellishments – or downright fraudulent. All reports, of course, must
necessarily be anecdotal. Many experiencers don’t have the ability or desire to
go into print themselves and have to be interviewed (hence my use of newspaper
articles), and most experiencers have difficulty with finding the right words
to explain what were essentially ineffable (and intensely private) experiences.
But bear in mind, only one of the many NDE experiences of the existence of the
“other side” has to be true, for an absolute reality (other than our relative
one) to be the “T” Truth. As the saying goes – it only takes one white crow to
establish that not all crows must be black.
Some of the NDE’s
vary in their details, but the most convincing ones tend to be those which in
which the main aspects are strikingly similar – regardless of culture,
religion, and pre-existing personal expectations and/or wishes. There are some
studies currently underway, but it is an area where conducting controlled
studies is very difficult – “anyone care to volunteer to die – just for a
little while!?” But there is another area of paranormal research which lends
itself more to scientific controls – an area in which interest is growing. I
refer to the field called ITC – Instrumental Transcommunication.
Instrumental transcommunication
(abbreviated as ITC) is a more recently popular means of research into the
afterlife. ITC describes the phenomena of communicating with beings from the
next plane(s) of existence through electronic media – rather than by using human
psychic mediums. It is a field which has generated increasing interest because
it tries to avoid the subjective and anecdotal by using objective methods –
which methods should be open to controlled experiments and to gathering
empirical communication with “the other side” in the form of recordings, rather
than anecdotes of what was said.
One of the present
leaders in this field is Dr. Anabela Cardoso – a senior Portuguese career
diplomat (not a profession known for producing flighty, unreliable people). Highly
educated, well respected, Dr. Cardoso has held senior postings for
THE REMOVAL OF
SUBJECTIVITY IN COMMUNICATIONS
The inevitably
subjective human element in communicating with the beyond via human psychics
and mediums (in séances and such like) has been removed by using electronics
like radios. Over the years, communicators from the afterlife have often reported
that the accuracy of their attempts to communicate information is affected by
the ability, sensitivity and earnestness of the humans mediums involved. Earth-side
ITC communicants need have no psychic and/or mediumistic powers. That said,
they have to be genuinely committed to the task.
WHAT INFORMATION
IS BEING CONVEYED?
From what I have
learned so far, most of the information being received by ITC from “the other
side” is similar to that gleaned by
We will examine ITC
more closely when Dr. Cardoso’s book becomes available.
AGAIN, THE END OF
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION?
ITC has received some
opposition already and when it gains a wider audience we can expect a lot more.
Humanity has been struggling with the meaning of life since we first became conscious
of our mortality and our various religions and philosophies are a product of the
struggle. We take our ideas about the Divine seriously and many bloody wars
have been fought because our ideas vary – many people have been slaughtered in
the name of the “One True God”.
Theism and
atheism have also fought a long battle against each other – intensifying with
the increase in scientific knowledge of our physical world. If ITC researchers can
establish communications with the next reality using objective methods, then
the subjective methods of the past, involving: personal revelations from the
one true God (varying greatly with the individuals involved); religious
doctrines based on ancient (varying) Divine “B” Books; atheistic philosophical
theories based on the ideology de jour – will be sidelined into museums of
philosophy and religion as historical curiosities. “T” Truth direct from the
other side it has the potential to spell the end for our little “t” truths!?
LOSING TEMPORAL
POWER AND STATUS WILL BE RESISTED
The impact ITC
has will (rightly) depend on the strength of the evidence it can present in
this sceptical and scientific age. While we must retain a healthy scepticism to
test the evidence properly, we need the Truth – we have enough competing truths
already. But abandoning our religious and atheistic ideologies won’t happen in
a hurry – there are huge vested interests involved – much money, temporal power,
tenure, and status.
UNTIL WE COME TO
UNDERSTAND THE HOLE WE ARE DIGGING FOR OUR SELVES
But maybe if our
leaders (especially those who are killing and/or abusing those in their care) come
to contemplate the kind of hole they may be digging for their selves in the
timeless hereafter, then perhaps their behaviours might be more considered – sooner
rather than later? If the Muslim religious leaders who are sending young men
off to kill themselves and others in the name of their god understand that they
will have to face all of those they have killed; if the Christian religious
leaders understand that they will have to face all of those they have sexually abused;
if corrupt political and business leaders know they will be revealed as thieves
– maybe they will think about the wisdom of gaining temporal power and wealth
at the expense of the timeless hereafter – dwelling not in Eden among virgins
and angels singing hosannas – but in the dismal planes among the selfish fellow
liars, murderers, abusers, bullies, and thieves – for as long as it takes to
evolve?
RAISING OUR
CONSCIOUSNESS ABOVE THE MATERIAL
If our
intellectual leaders can come to understand the importance of raising their
consciousness above the lower, and obvious, material “reality” – they may gain
real wisdom? If we all come to understand the power of love we may come to be
loved – especially by our selves? Let’s hope so, humanity badly needs a change,
some much needed advance in our spiritual evolution as a species.
CONCLUSION ABOUT
THE PARANORMAL
Both the House of
God and the House of Disbelief oppose the possibility of Truth in the
paranormal – because it crosses the vested interests of both. When two opposing
sides, neither of whom have shown themselves to be in possession of the Truth,
join together to strongly oppose an idea, it makes you go hmmmm? – and look
more closely at that idea.
So, what to
conclude at this point in time?
“Are we no more
than biological accidents with nothing to motivate us beyond the struggle to
stay alive, or is there more to it than this? Is there no purpose to our lives
beyond self-interest, or are selfless ideals such as love and compassion, empathy
and altruism, peace and harmony, the very stuff from which existence arises?
Are our thought, our creative endeavours, our art, our poetry, our philosophy,
our music, no more than the by-products of electro-chemical energy in a brain
that would live out its earthly life just as well without them? Or are these
creative masterpieces hints and whispers of a grander and finer reality of
which we are all a part?”
-
“Hints” and
“whispers” is all we have managed so far this side of the absolute/relative
divide – unless we have a convincing experience ourselves of the paranormal. I
have had no experiences of the paranormal, but have had two experiences related
to me by friends. The compelling features of these shared experiences, for me,
were not the stories themselves (although amazing enough) but the integrity of
the people concerned. In both cases (one an NDE, and the other an amazing ghost
story) the friends sharing the experience with me were stable, credible, and
honourable. The ghost story confirmed
MAYBE THE THERE
IS NO PARA IN PARANORMAL?
Here’s an
interesting thought – maybe the spiritual, the next world, and its inhabitants
are not paranormal and supernatural? Maybe all is actually perfectly
normal and natural – the “next” world very much part of the present – parallel
to it in all things – including time? Maybe “the beyond” to this relative
reality is only “paranormal” and “supernatural” to those who feel that to
understand the atoms and electromagnetic components of the human body is to
understand everything? A book can be described solely in terms of its paper –
but can it be described thus completely and satisfactorily – will it ever be
understood thus and its potential unlocked?
THERE CAN BE NO
PHYSICAL PROOF OF THE NON-PHYSICAL
In the end,
physical, material evidence of the non-physical can never be produced. Even if
a materialist had a personal experience of the afterlife that contained
evidence he found convincing, he could not bring a lump of it back to convince
his fellow materialists. Good ol’ matter, you only have to handle a lump of it
to know that this is the one and only reality. Or is it?
Quantum physics
has shown us that even a lump of ordinary stuff is mysterious – in fact, the
closer we look at it, the curiouser and curiouser our “normal” material world
looks. Our path along the Road to Truth is now enveloped in the swirling mists
of quantum “reality”.
Those who feel
that our material world is rock-solid and completely understood – purely
physical, totally matter and energy, mechanically-causal – and that such a
normal world must necessarily argue against the paranormal, have not contemplated
the actual weirdness of our world. It may feel like we live in an understood world
of Newtonian physics of cause and effect, but we actually exist in a barely conceivable
quantum world full of the non-solid. A world: where there is evidence for many
more dimensions than the four we operate in; where matter can be altered by
consciousness – matter affected by mind (or even effected)?; a world with
something called “non-locality” where particles can continue to be connected to
each other even though far apart physically – allowing mind and brain to be
unglued (or perhaps, self and body?).
“Unglued”? In our
world both thoughts and things exist – a dualism. Our brains are things with
thoughts. If we didn’t allow some dualism in our philosophy we may be worried
about crashing our cars into the thoughts of others, for example. But consider
this:
“Much of modern
science can be seen as an attempt to disprove dualism. In the strictly
scientific world-view there is only one stuff – out of which bricks and brains
are constructed. My thoughts and feelings are just what the brain does…It’s
largely an illusion that the mind has any affect on the world. We’re all
imprisoned in the chains of cause and affect that started with the Big Bang.
But in spite of numerous claims this remains a statement of faith.
Neuroscientists may be able to show what happens in the brain when we think, or
when we exercise “free will”, but this cannot be shown to be proof that dualism
is wrong…Those electrical patterns are not thought itself; they may be no more
than symptoms of thought.”
And:
“quantum
mechanics…is the most effective scientific idea ever: it powers your
television, your computer, anything dependant on electronics. So we know it’s
true enough to work, but it’s also weird enough to defy belief…Crucially, two
things [have] been discovered. First particles can continue to be connected to
each other even though separated by long distances…a phenomena known as
non-locality. Second, quantum theory shows that the mind can affect the world.”
Bryan Appleyard – Both quotes from Weekend Australian
Magazine, 17-18 January, 2009 (Pp. 15-16).
In his article,
Appleyard quotes distinguished physicist Henry Strapp (
“The observer
is brought into quantum physics in an essential way, not only as a passive
observer, but as an active part of the dynamics. He makes certain choices not
specified by the physical dynamics which seem to come from the psychologically
described realm rather than the physically described realm.”
Ibid. P. 16
THE END OF CAUSALITY
AND SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM?
The
implications for the debate about the existence, or not, of free choice are
considerable. Non-locality, for example, allows the mind to be separate to the
brain – and Strapp’s “certain choices not specified by the physical dynamics” unhinges
causality. These discoveries are, in Appleyard’s words:
“world-changing.
This idea would, if widely accepted, end the reign of scientific materialism,
replacing it with a new dualism. It would mean that the universe is not a
“causally closed” system, locked down since the Big Bang, as mainstream science
has always insisted it is, but open to freedom of choice by the autonomous,
floating, matter-altering mind. We would have regained our souls.”
Ibid. P.16
Our actual “material”
world is comprised of more space and energy than matter – even our bodies are way
more space and energy than anything else. The particles which make up atoms (which
make up our bodies) have more space between them proportionally than the scattered
bodies of the universe – electro-magnetic and nuclear forces create an illusion
of solidarity. Are, then, reports of beings from other realities passing
through our “solid” objects like walls, so weird – so unlikely? If we find that
we can create or alter this present physical “reality” by our observations of, and
choices about, it – are then some of the reports we have received about parallel
“after-worlds” so incredible?
“Thanks to the
advances of modern science we know that this material [the matter of which
this world is composed] is also
mysterious, and more in the nature of energy than of solid substance. We do not
know what it really is and we do not know from where it really comes. If the
findings of quantum physics are to be believed and if it can indeed be directly
influenced at some level by the consciousness of the observer, it may be rather
nearer to a form of “mind stuff” than a form of inert matter. The more we
ponder such possibilities, the more descriptions of the next world come to
seem, if not credible, at least a little less incredible.”
- David Fontana (Op. Cit. P.453)
Another mystery for
the “certain” view of the materialists’ world. We are getting near the end of
our journey. Our original, barely perceivable track has grown into a road and
there is a growing glimmer of something up ahead. There is only one more place
on our road map to explore – humour – did you hear the one about:-
The world is a comedy to those who think,
A tragedy to those who feel.
– Horace Walpole
What is humour?
Why does it make us smile, even sometimes in the grimmest of situations? What makes
us go into strange, often involuntary spasms of the body called laughter? It is
a mystery with no good Darwinian explanation. This from Arthur Koestler:
“What is the
survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of fifteen facial
muscles associated with certain noises which are often irrepressible? Laughter
is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one
might call it a luxury reflex. Its only utilitarian function, as far as one can
see, is to provide temporary relief from utilitarian pressures … where laughter
arises, an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humourless universe
governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest … that a
complicated mental activity like the reading of a page by Thurber should cause a
specific motor response on the reflex level is a lopsided phenomena which has
puzzled philosophers since antiquity.”
Arthur Koestler, “The Act of Creation”, 1964 (Quoted
from “How the Mind Works”, Steven Pinker – P. 545)
The noise of
people laughing is one of the loveliest sounds. It is funny in itself – often
producing near hysterical laughter on its own – people placed in front of
recorded laughter will always come to laugh themselves after a while – probably
at the absurdity of the situation. Are we the only species that laughs? Without
being too anthropomorphic, I feel some animals seem to, and some seem to indulge
in the lowest form of humour – elementary slapstick humour – watch a cage full
of chimps for a while – especially when they come to realise they have an
audience.
SLAPSTICK,
IRONY AND HYSTERIA
Humans like
slapstick too, but humans often take the mysterious thing that is humour a step
further. We indulge in subtle humour like irony and laugh at satires of the
human condition. We find much of life ridiculous and absurd – for example, the
above laughing at laughter and the popularity of human existential comedy like
the Goons or Monty Python. Human humour often skirts the abyss, bordering on
madness and hysteria – witness hysterical laughter – barely controllable. We
laugh at our selves, at our pomposities and dignities, at the ridiculousness of
the human condition – we even find our existential fears and angsts risible –
we laugh at death in black humour and gallows humour.
We laugh at the
absurdity of life, we split our sides at its unnaturalness – the Divine soul
having to cohabit with the base animal – we like jokes derived from natural
animal behaviours – like “dirty” jokes, we laugh at our sexual and excretory
functions: (toilet humour). We humans are the only animal to be embarrassed by
engaging in natural things like excretion or copulation in public. How can
humans be so offended or amused by natural acts if we are just animals? Animals
we undoubtedly are, but we have greater aspirations – this from one of our
greatest comedians:
“Humour [is] something that thrives between man’s
aspirations and his limitations.”
– Victor Borge
Are we tickled
by the ridiculous dichotomy of the human condition – the absurdity of the
spiritual self in a base, animal body? Is our peculiar humour pointing us
towards the Truth?
“There is more
logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth.”
– Victor
Borge
Humour, like
all the other oddities we have considered in an effort to approach the Truth of
our peculiar existence, is not conclusive on its own – but considered along
with the, now considerable, body of evidence that we have gathered on our
journey, we may be in a position to make a safe conclusion about what it is to
be human – the meaning of life?
CONCLUSION – OUR LAST CLIMB
We’ve been on
our road for a while now and have explored the last place marked on our map. Only
a hill remains in front of us – with a glow emanating from behind it. Before we
climb it, let’s pause for a while and contemplate what we have achieved.
Our Road to Truth started when we plunged into a
darkling forest lit only by the flames of our burning bridge. We immediately
encountered, and skirted, some dangerous labyrinths; got lost but found our
moral compass and map; emerged from the forest to cross a lake made stormy by
the Intelligent Design debate; climbed some arduous and controversial ranges; crossed
some broad and sunny fields; descended into a few dim dales; scrambled through
some prickly Darwinian brambles; scaled the occasional spiritual height; looked
into the odd frightening abyss; came back with a guide to peek into the
metaphysical and supernatural labyrinths; wandered in the quantum mists; had a
laugh at our own existential expense – to arrive here.
WAS IT WORTHWHILE LEAVING OUR COMFORTABLE HOUSES?
We obeyed Buddha’s first injunction by avoiding the
mistake of not starting along the Road to Truth, but have we managed to obey his
other injunction to go all the way? Or have we just managed to unsettle our
selves by leaving our safe and comfortable Houses – have the residents of the
House of God who joined our journey blown their chances with God by rejecting
Pascal’s wager that it is easier (and safer) to believe; have the residents of
the House of Disbelief who joined us disturbed a previously comfortable belief
in life’s meaninglessness but not found its true meaning?
Socrates’ said: “the unexamined life is not worth
living”. We have examined life, but have we found one worth living? On this journey we
have found that although we are obviously in a natural, neutral, material world
which proceeds by mechanistic laws, there is plenty in our world that is not
mechanistic and causal – much that is inexplicable to a materialistic theory of
everything – especially when you examine human behaviour. We have found that
there is much in our behaviour that is seemingly unnatural, and much in our
supposedly entirely physical world that is non-physical. We have found that,
while humans observably have an animal body, we just as observably have a
spiritual being. We have found that that spiritual being is us, we are not our
body – we have, but we are not, an animal body – we are our selves. We may even
have found hints of a Divine – but a rational Divine visible without the
rose-coloured binoculars of faith.
THERE IS SOMETHING FISHY
ABOUT OUR WORLD
This world – for a machine which supposedly started
accidentally and proceeds mechanistically – often operates:
“by
grace of some pretty felicitous arrangements … how are we to judge just how
‘fishy’ the set-up is? The problem is that there is no natural way to quantify
the intrinsic improbability of the known ‘coincidences’. … What is needed is a
sort of metatheory – a theory of theories – that supplies a well-defined
probability for any given range of parameter values. No such metatheory is
available, or has to my knowledge even been proposed. Until it is, the degree
of ‘fishiness’ involved must remain entirely subjective. Nevertheless, fishy it
is!”
– Paul Davies,
The Mind of God P. 226.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
For me, the greatest “fishiness” of this world is
that such an apparently accidental, material, and random universe is such an
immaculate machine for self creation. The physical universe may be mechanistic
– a machine – but there is a ghost in the machine – the Self.
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?
The purpose of anything is what it does – so what
does life do? Life does self-creation.
How?
Daily, we make decisions, choices. Some of those choices
are not free – choices made for us by animal imperatives (feeding, breeding,
surviving). But some choices are free – the choices we make for our selves (the
choice to know the self, choices about what makes us truly happy – happy
with our selves). And we, our self, become the choices we make about our self.
KNOW THYSELF
“Know Thyself” is ultimate wisdom because it is the
first step to true happiness. To know the self is to know if we can love the
self – are we happy with the self life has revealed? Love of true self is true
happiness.
GROW THYSELF
If we are not happy with the self life has revealed, we
have the choice to grow the self.
HUMAN HAPPINESS
Know and grow the self until we are happy with the
self – the key to human happiness – self-evolution. This is what life does –
therefore its purpose.
TO ENJOY MOST, IS TO BEST LIVE
Passing animal contentment and some happiness from it
is possible, but by raising our consciousness of life (which especially includes
each other) through our spiritual evolution life can be so much more enjoyable.
For example, if we incorporate the spiritual into our physical/animal pleasures
we can achieve ecstasy – by dining rather than feeding; making love rather than
having sex; enjoying the moment rather than rushing through it to “get”
somewhere; seeking self-love rather than ego dominance of others. Most manage
some of these things some of the time, but all can raise their spiritual
consciousness through spiritual evolution and en-joy life and ecstasy more.
If we looked at each other as fellow souls and lovers
rather than just as competitors for food, money, power, fame and genetic
dominance; if we looked at life as a spiritual opportunity rather than an
animal struggle, what a much more fabulous experience it could become – and for
all, not just a lucky few.
IS MEANINGLESSNESS A LOGICAL DEFAULT SETTING?
So at what point do we decide that life has special
meaning – how much of Paul Davies’ “fishiness” do we endure before meaninglessness
is removed as the default setting for our post-modern world?
Many forget that meaninglessness, itself, is a
speculation. Speculations are only as good as the evidence they are based on,
and this examination of life has shown that there is much more evidence against
the speculation of meaninglessness than for it. On what basis can
meaninglessness become the default speculation of a world full of such
immaculate creativity? This from Davies:
“There
is no blueprint for the universe only a set of laws with an in-built facility
for making interesting things happen. The universe is then free to create
itself as it goes along … The very fact that the universe is creative and has
organised its own self-awareness is, for me, powerful evidence that there is
something going on behind it all.” (Paul Davies, Bulletin Magazine [Australia], 17/7/1990.)
There may be no blueprint for the universe, but such creativity
out of the initial chaos is certainly “powerful evidence that there is
something going on behind it all”.
ALL UP, A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF HUMANITY IS
INADEQUATE
Humanity is one of the products of this universe’s
creativity – and what a strange product we are. We are beings which have
strange, unnatural notions of beauty, shame, dignity, humour, compassion, and
right and wrong – all from an entirely mechanistic, causal, amoral universe. Through
science, we understand how human bodies evolved, but to try and describe human
beings solely in terms of our bodies is hopeless – it is like trying to describe
a book by only referring to its paper. You can do it but you get an inadequate,
incomplete picture. If our journey has shown anything, then it has shown that
it is impossible to explain all of human behaviour in terms of our genetic
imperatives – although their existence is undoubted. At what point do we decide
that, beyond Davies’ observation of “fishy”, if it looks like a fish, swims
like a fish, feels like a fish, smells like a fish, and tastes like a fish – it
most probably is a fish!
OUR SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION LAGS OUR SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION
Spiritual evolution has not been, and will not be, a
straight-line march for humanity but more like a dance – two steps forward,
some to the side and one back. Some countries are ahead of others in their
spiritual evolution (the laggards are usually oppressed by fundamental ideologies
– like atheism, materialism, communism, capitalism, or religion). But, while it
may be erratic, you don’t have to go back many years to observe our spiritual
evolution happening. However we face a threat in that our technological
evolution is way ahead of our spiritual evolution – we have atom bombs in the
hands of stone-age religions whose gods approve a final holocaust scenario. If
our human societies are going to survive they have to be more in touch with our
spirituality, rather than be governed by our religions – which cater to our
animal bodies and their fears and wishes – Darwinian, not spiritual and a great
force for our separation rather than unity.
WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE A GOD?
There doesn’t have to be a God, but we urgently need to
increase our spiritual evolution, to raise our ideas of what a God could be.
Our best minds need to shed light rather than generate heat – to seek and
contemplate a rational God rather than dancing on the (empty) grave of the “g”
god Nietzsche declared dead long ago.
“By
degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather
than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called
instincts.” (Autobiography P. 94)
“Higher” impulses
(higher than our purely animal “sensuous
passions”) are our spiritual impulses. Our “higher impulses… rendered habitual” (to the point of being
instinctual) is spiritual evolution.
WHY?
But there is an
elephant in this living room – the ultimate question – “WHY?”
Is the glimmer
we earlier reported, up ahead of our road, the “T” Truth, or have we just
created for ourselves a larger question? Have we torn down the “IF” we
encountered at the very start of our journey, broken it up, only to find we
have forged ourselves a massive “WHY?” We may have determined that the ultimate
purpose of life is spiritual evolution because that is what it does – but why? Maybe
the glimmer up ahead is not the shinning light of Truth but the bright,
rational sun of our post-modern era glinting off this ultimate, and obdurate, WHY?
question?
OVER THE LAST RISE IN OUR JOURNEY
So, gamely, in an effort to obey Buddha’s injunction
to go all the way along the Road to Truth, we climb up and over the last rise.
As we clamber down the other side – we see ahead of
us, indeed, a giant WHY? – bathed in and glowing from the unremitting sun of a
rational age. And beside it we find a Goliath – a giant made from the evil men
do, carrying the protective shield of religion, flanks hidebound by ideology, armed
with disbelief’s sharp spear of doubt. A monster of meaninglessness and the
arch-enemy of humanity’s survival – one day we must slay it or it will slay us.
Time is running out – having come face to face with our
nemesis, let’s confront it now.
So we walk up to stand before the enemy of meaning
and purpose. Brave but trembling – and we have every right to be afraid, for we
are facing the absolute armed only with a mind born of the relative – facing
Goliath with a slingshot. But it’s all we’ve got, so keeping a wary eye we reach
down to pick up a rock to load our sling. We examine it quickly, to see if we
have selected a missile suitable for slaying such a foe.
We find we have picked up a thing of incredible
beauty – a large and perfect diamond. Our attention is drawn into its luminous
depths, wherein we can make out some wondrous things: the smell of a rose; the
taste of a peach; the sound of a nightingale’s song; the touch of a friend; the
sight of an autumn tree; the kiss of a lover; the wag of a tail. We marvel at the
mysterious fact of stardust observing the stars; of our understanding of the
language the universe was written in; at our unnatural notions like right and
wrong; the mysteries of consciousness; virtues; dignity; shame; humour;
compassion for genetic competitors; the existence of the spiritual in a
universe born of physical forces; the immaculate process of self revelation and
self knowledge that life is – and the opportunity for self evolution that it
provides. Within our missile we can also see that love is our deepest need;
that loving our self is the key to human happiness; that the love of others is
the only true path to self-love – finally seeing the “T” Truth in the message, brought
to us in such a way, of the primacy of loving one another; forgiveness even for
our enemies; and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.
We know in an instant we are well armed and load our
missile to the sling. We raise our eyes to take aim – only to find that the
monster of meaninglessness has gone – faltered and fled – turned tail and run.
The massive WHY – left unsupported by the Goliath – has
fallen flat, to reveal the Truth.
We have it in our hand.
Graeme Meakin, 2003. Revised 12th August,
2010
EXAMINATION
OF THE HOUSE OF GOD