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 – by attempting 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, calculated in the currency of self, then is high. Admission to the House
of God is coined in the costs to the self of holding primitive “spiritual” beliefs
– in a parochial, jealous, vain, brutal, sexist “g” god – and the costs 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 denying our spirituality – of believing
that the human equation only has material factors – and of believing that life
is meaningless.
To enter either
House, the denizens 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 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 – a meal for the lurking crocodiles.
Cautiously, we inch across to the other side and step off onto the bank. We find
ourselves delivered to the beginning of a small track, which leads off 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. There is no going back now, but at least the flames do serve
to cast some light along 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 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 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?
Philosophy, since the great golden age of Greek
philosophers, had often been described as a “footnote to Plato”. But, after the
early scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and others in the 16th
and 17th centuries, philosophy scrabbled to catch up – eventually
forming the rationalist philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. Ever
since then, philosophy’s position would be better described as “the handmaiden
of science”. After Darwin, and his Theory of Natural Selection, our natural sciences
became slowly dominated by evolutionary theory – and our philosophy followed –
to the point now where majority philosophy declares that to understand how our
bodies have evolved is to understand everything. A House of Disbelief has been
formed around this belief to house the doctrines, dogmas, and souls who gain
comfort from them.
MEANINGLESSNESS MUST BE OUR LOGICAL DEFAULT POSITION
Philosophy – holding that all our behaviours are satisfactorily
describable in evolutionary terms of natural selection, animal survival, and
genetic imperatives – is forced into the corollary that life is necessarily devoid
of special meaning and ultimate purpose. There can be no “D” Divine, no first
cause – humans can have no duty or destiny. If any meaning can be detected in
existence it must necessarily be personal, any purpose animal. Further, in a
relative universe all is relative, there can be no Absolute and, importantly
for our quest, no “T” Truth – only your, or my “t” truth can exist.
Meaninglessness therefore has become the West’s logical
default philosophical position – any divergence from meaninglessness must be
proven. 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. We thought we were
getting somewhere, but while our road to Truth is still a track we have come to,
so soon, the brink of one of those “cliffs of fall” I mentioned in my introduction.
What to do,
where to go?
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”)
“Bleak” is the
word, 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
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 (often disturbing) knowledge and cuddled up
to a little (always comforting) faith.
BUT, IF NOT?
But, if not,
if we are not just the incidental product of a quirk of fate – there may be
more to our existence than just our animal survival. 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
·
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 existence of a
stage in the first place and, secondly, the mysterious players who strut it.
THE STAGE
The stage – the physical platform upon which we live
our lives – why is there something rather than nothing?
Our physical sciences think that there is no “Why?”
question to answer – everything is answered when the “How?” question is
addressed. Materialists philosophy, following along behind the physical
sciences, concludes that the “everything” of existence can be explained in
terms of matter and motion – the question: “why there is something rather than
nothing?” is not an elephant in their comfortable loungeroom, at all.
Let’s look at the natural, physical, materialist
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 – eventually spewing out “star stuff” when they finally exploded
as super-nova. Star stuff is the matter of planets – and (at least) one planet
had conditions allowing life to spontaneously occur.
Is to know this, to know 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 (like the laws of
thermodynamics) – even energy itself – could not have existed “before” the Big
Bang which was the beginning of time as well. Ipso facto – everything came from
nothing.
Neat. But I don’t think that: (“ + original conditions = m + e + life”) is
going to stand as one of the great equations of existence. And where did the
original 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).
But Krauss is not getting carried away – he still
calls the events leading to our universe “accidents” (albeit “monumental”). 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
“humanocentric” 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.
At this point, I think it fair to observe that
Shakespeare’s stage – our physical, material world – may observably proceed in
a causal, mechanistic fashion, but its existence in the first place in order
for it to proceed thus – is so unlikely, that it is not looking very accidental.
If anything, answering the “How?” of the “something rather than nothing”
question – has made asking “Why is there something rather than nothing?” even more
valid.
It only gets more unlikely to be accidental when we examine
the unlikeliness of being of the creatures who strut life’s stage.
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 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 the start of life, what life evolved
into is the key to 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 by the subsequent out-breeding of 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.
The complexity was exponential – to the point that
some life became conscious – then, very quickly, conscious of the universe.
So, those who think all is accidental, 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: “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 existence. 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 observed entities
are not to be theoretically multiplied beyond necessity).
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 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 our way
ahead has been blocked by a lake – formed from the waters we have so far only
dabbled in – Intelligent Design.
There is
nowhere to go, so we will have to cross the lake. There is enough material lying
around to build a raft, but we must be brave to cross the lake a such a rickety
craft because there is a storm brewing – whipped up by furious debate about how
an apparently non-accidental universe, implies a “D” Designer.
·
INTELLIGENT
DESIGN
The storm that is brewing 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 our universe and the life in it is so complex and fine-tuned that it is
unlikely to be an accident. Our unlikely to be accidental complexity, in their
belief, 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 Biblical design, they have
succeeded in killing off all “D” Divinity – and all special meaning and
ultimate purpose with it. Like Nietzsche, they believe that: “God is dead, and we have killed him”. They
urge us to dance on a grave they say contains any and every possible Divine – when
it contains (if anything) only the straw corpse of a “g” god created around the
campfires of pre-scientific, nomadic herders.
Both have chosen the wrong argument to prove their
position. Atheists can only prove that religion is not science, and the
religious have only succeeded in proving that mystery remains (not that their
answer to the mystery is correct). 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.
So, the Intelligent Design debate is mainly about
installing or killing off the old Hebrew “g” god and not about examining the
universe for Truth. 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 religion into science classes by teaching the Bible as science,
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 this means.
IS THE UNIVERSE
BIO-FRIENDLY?
But, within the
“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). So
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.
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, but a God making life
inevitable because of the inherent order and forces (like gravity) of the
universe. “Inevitable” in that life would arise wherever the inherent order and
forces made the environment suitable – to evolve according to the environmental
changes. A relative (good, better, best) universe dictates that evolution must
occur to life. Such a God is vastly more magnificent than religions’ humanocentric
gods – things would be way more interesting – there may not only be life on
other planets, but in other universes?.
But what if we are able to definitively establish
that life is peculiar to Earth? It would allow atheists to assert that life is
more likely accidental 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
exploration of all galaxies – unless, of course, we are irrefutably visited 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, and we can see a track
leading away from the lake. We disembark and 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 – 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?
Atheist Stephen
Law, by recognising our “in-built sense of right and wrong”, has led us to a fertile
valley – an area 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 spiritual? Is there any evidence for an existence, a
reality, beyond the temporal? At this point of our journey I suggest we double
back along the Road to Truth to have a bigger 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 and we were low on light, courage, and a reliable guide.
·
THE PARANORMAL
AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Is there such a
thing as a reliable guide into the potentially dangerous areas of the paranormal
and supernatural? ”Dangerous” because they deal with the strong wishes (our “t”
truths) we rely on to get through life, and/or the fears we have to suppress. This
area is a minefield of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and vested
interests – misleading and unsettling to those who may be presently having a mental
struggle with life – often the sort of people who are driven there. While many
good and stable souls inhabit the area, evidence is often anecdotal, and
charlatans who exploit the damaged and needy also abound.
At the end of
the 19th century and the start of the 20th the popularity
of the paranormal was high. This was an era not long after the persecution of
“witches” by the House of God, before scientism held sway, and before the
popular distractions of movies and TV. Mediums were popular – the best renowned
– and séances became common forms of entertainment. Religion made 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.
A RELIABLE
GUIDE?
Psychology, as
a science, made some early assays into the spiritual world. The “Father” of
modern psychology, William James, was one to do so – with mixed results – he
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. 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 decreasing credibility (at the hands of science). As a result not many
respectable scientists have seriously ventured therein subsequent to James.
However, recently, one did so – Professor David Fontana (Professor of
Psychology at Liverpool’s
I find
Poo-pooing psychic
abilities is a politically-correct thing which has brought many easy plaudits
to those who need them. But Fontana called it as he saw it, and came down
heavily on the side of the fact of the veracity of the psychic abilities of
some practitioners – this from his concluding chapter:
“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.”
Fontana
recognised that the existence of any spiritual afterlife, and its nature, is a
very important question, pivotal to humanity – not only to the meaning and
purpose of our lives – but to the way we should live them:
“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 a
consideration of his extensive experiences (often in the company of other
respected scientists) of the paranormal (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.”
All
the above – David Fontana, Is There an
Afterlife?(Pp. 468-9)
THE SCEPTIC
RESPONSE
The Sceptics
have responded to the studies
“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 the most strident,
the slightest possibility of fraud is given the same weight as proof that it
did happen. I suspect that the stridency of some comes from their desire
not to seek truth, but rather their desire not to lose the comfort that
residency in the House of Disbelief offers – comfort from the guilt we all
sometimes suffer, and from fear. Even if not fear of dying, or of Divine punishment,
the insidious fear that we, our self, has been revealed by life – and been
found wanting. A fact to be known by all at some time and place of absolute
knowing?
WHAT INFORMATION
WAS COMMUNICATED?
Some of the
extraordinary, but coherent information that was conveyed by spirit
communicators from the other side included:
“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.”
–
I like that –
talk about Divine justice!?
And such an
idea sits in harmony with some of the discoveries of quantum physics – that
matter has more the nature of energy than substance – and it is in harmony with
quantum research that our consciousness and observation of realities affects
them (maybe even effects them?). Re our thoughts creating our realities
And I like
these communications about judgement:
“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 if spiritual progress is to be made…”
(ibid P. 454)
And 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)
It is
interesting that
If
IS THE ANSWER
TO THE MEANING OF LIFE MEANT TO BE AVAILABLE?
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?
“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.
“Inner
development” is, of course, again, the same phenomenon of life that I have been
calling spiritual/self evolution. To create our selves, we need to make our own
choices – in the present functioning of our present world we are the sum of our
choices. Such “sum”, is our Self – to be known by our self, and evolved into a
better Self for our greater happiness – if we choose. This is such an
immaculate function of life that it seems to be its purpose – the purpose of
anything being what it does.
There is of
course the possibility that
There is
another area that we need to explore while we are in the world of the
paranormal before we can make our choices about what to believe these areas.
There have been
several books written on the subject of near death experiences. NDE’s have been
taken seriously by many in the scientific world, especially those who are
involved in the more intensive-care medical areas where people frequently die
suddenly – and are sometimes revived. Some respectable studies on the phenomena
of NDE’s have already been conducted, and more are in the pipeline. 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 them 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 (
“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] notes:
‘ Psychologists and sociologist 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.’ (P.5)
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
I also find it
particularly interesting that many NDE experiencers return to this physical
plane more spiritual than they used to be – but not necessarily more religious.
More from Dr. Sutherland:
“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.
NDE’s therefore do
not seem to be a product of religious conditioning and/or expectations – as
some sceptics claim. Many diverge from previously received religious
understanding of the afterlife. This from Professor David Fontana – who also
studied NDE’s – from his previously mentioned exploration of the paranormal:
“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.’ “
-
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
I have read a few
books and articles on the subject and find several of the recorded experiences of
NDE’s convincing. Particularly compelling were 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.”
THE MATERIALIST
EXPLANATION
Materialists have
attempted a few answers for the phenomenon of NDE. These answers usually fall
into pharmacological, psychological, and/or neurological categories. The most
heavily relied upon theory is that NDE’s are a result of mind-altering
medicines which may have been administered to patients who “died”. Psychotropic
medicines can give people hallucinations but, equally, many near death
experiences have been reported by people who had their NDE “in the field”, so
to speak – away from medical treatment.
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.”
(as quoted in the Age, 1/8/09)
But people who
are actually drug-takers or epileptics do not report all the various aspects of
an NDE experience. And, 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 week, but
people who have NDE’s seem to be 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
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. Drs. Emily and Edward Kelly from
the
The truly
interesting NDE’s tend to be those which in which the main aspects bear
striking similarities – regardless of culture, religion, personal expectations
– or whether they occurred under drugs or not. And as I have previously said,
the ones I find most compelling are those NDE’s experienced by people blind
from birth – NDE’s during which they can see. How does the pharmacological,
psychological, physiological, and/or neurological explanation cope with that
phenomenon? It must also be noted that not all psychological events that people
experience during health dramas fit the description of near death experiences –
some are just plain hysteria, dreams or nightmares – and should not be included
as NDE’s. It is an area which lends itself to controversy, and some of the
studies currently underway may tell us more.
But there are
some facts of human life that are not well explained by our physical sciences –
some facts that are non-physical therefore must remain mysteries to them. We
have examined many of these during our journey along the Road to Truth and, as
Dr. Sutherland says:
“It is
important to keep this caution [against accepting scientific belief as
scientific data] in mind since the
fallacy of ‘scientism’ is that empiric-analytical science, grounded in the five
senses, is the only path to knowledge.”
- Sutherland, Op Cit, P. 19
Bear in mind also,
that only one of the many NDE experiences recorded has to be true, for a higher
reality to be true – for example, an existence of the self independent of the
present body and outside of this material world.
A DECISION –
CHOICES, CHOICES, CHOICES?
A decision about
the integrity of paranormal experiences and what they establish about the existence
of another, higher reality – and what this has to say, in turn, about the
special meaning and ultimate purpose of this life – rests forever in our hands
(and must remain so, if life is to have any special meaning and ultimate
purpose). There can be no absolute proofs in a relative universe – this
universe’s creativity rests on its relativity. This relative universe is a vast
creative machine, and a life lived in it is especially creative of self – we,
our selves, are the end result of a long string of choices we have made. We are
the sum of our free choices, not those “choices” which are compelled by our
animal bodies for survival in the material world.
Some deny free
choice, but even the belief that free choice does not exist is a free choice –
a free choice made on the balance of probabilities – there are no absolute
proofs in a relative world, which is what makes it so creative after all.
If we choose to
believe that we have no freedom of choice in life, and conclude that we proceed
blindly as an animal driven by our animal drives and genetic imperatives (restricted
only by any secular sanctions over them) in a totally causal universe – then our
subsequent actions (which make up our selves) are as a result of our free
choices to that affect. All choices are self-constructive, and or self-revelatory.
“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?”
-
Our free choices
from the above alternatives will be influenced by our wishes and our fears, but
also by our experiences – and by experiences shared. I have had no experiences
myself but have had two friends share their experiences of the paranormal with
me. In both cases (one an NDE) I was compelled by the integrity of the people
concerned, and in both cases they agreed with
Your choice.
THERE CAN BE NO
PHYSICAL PROOF OF THE NON-PHYSICAL
NDE’s are just another
part of the rich tapestry of human spiritual experiences. NDE’s (like other paranormal
evidence from mediums and spirit guides) suggest the separate existence of self
and body (not to be confused with mind and body dualism – it is my observation
that the mind is of the body, but not the spirit). In the end, physical,
material evidence sufficient to convince materialists must always be lacking in
these areas which explore the non-physical. Even if a materialist had a
personal, spiritual experience that he found convincing, he could not bring a
lump of it back to convince his fellow materialists. But quantum physics has
shown us that even such a lump of stuff is mysterious – in fact, our supposedly
empirical world looks curioser and curioser the closer we look at it.
Time to emerge
from the paranormal labyrinths and explore the material world that materialists
are convinced is the all of existence. Our path along the Road to Truth is
about to be enveloped by the swirling mists of quantum “reality”.
Those who feel
that our material world is rock-solid – purely physical and completely understood,
and that such a material, mechanically causal world must argue against psychic and
spiritual phenomena – have not contemplated the actual weirdness of our
“physical” world. It may feel like we live in a 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 can perceive and/or experience; that matter can be altered by the
consciousness of the observer of it – mind affecting matter; and of 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 Weekend Australian
Magazine, 17-18 January, 2009 (Pp. 15-16).
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. Is then our experiences of the “spirit“-world, from
which beings reportedly can pass through our “solid” objects like walls, so weird
– so unlikely? If we find that we can create or alter physical “reality” by our
observations of, and choices about, it – is then an after-world of spiritual energy
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 view of our “certain” 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 who have an audience for a while.
SLAPSTICK,
IRONY AND HYSTERIA
Humans like
slapstick too, but humans often take the mysterious thing that is humour a step
further. We indulge in irony and laugh at satires of the human condition. We
find much of life ridiculous and absurd (as per the above laughing at
laughter). Witness the popularity of human satire 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 – we 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 – so we like jokes derived from natural
animal behaviours like the sexual: “dirty” jokes, and we laugh at our 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 are
tickled by the ridiculous dichotomy – the absurdity – of the spiritual self in
a base, animal body? Is that the Truth?
“There is more
logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth.”
– Victor
Borge
Humour proves
nothing on its own, it is just part of a considerable body of evidence that we
have examined on our journey that to be human is to be more than just an animal
body.
We’ve been on
our road for a while now, and we have explored the last place marked on our map.
It feels like we have come a long way, but have we made any progress towards Truth?
The original, once small glimmer, of something up ahead is now just over the
last remaining rise, and seems to have become brighter. Is it the Truth?
Time to consolidate
our discoveries to see what they amount to. Time to scale the last rise on our
Road to Truth and take in what we can see from its vantage?
CONCLUSION – OUR LAST CLIMB
On our Road to Truth we bravely started in a darkling
forest – lit only by our burning bridge – and skirted some dangerous
labyrinths, crossed a lake made stormy by the Intelligent Design debate, climbed
some arduous and controversial hills, 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 to peek into the metaphysical and supernatural labyrinths, wandered in the
quantum mists, had a laugh at the whole existential experience – to arrive here.
Where?
We obeyed Buddha’s injunction to start along the Road
to Truth, but have we managed his other injunction to go all the way? Was it
worthwhile risking all 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 without finding its meaning?
Personally I think examining life (and thereby examining
our comfortable beliefs) is essential if we are to get anything other than an
animal experience out of life. I’m with Socrates’ statement: “the unexamined
life is not worth living” – life is an opportunity, not a test, and to take
the full opportunity it presents to the self it needs to be fully examined.
BUT IS THE EXAMINED LIFE WORTH LIVING?
OK, I may agree with Socrates that the unexamined
life “is not worth living”, but has our exploration found a life that worth
living?
What exactly have we found? On
this journey we found that although we are obviously in (and of) 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 the
materialistic theory of everything – especially when you examine human behaviour.
We have found that there is much in our behaviour that is seemingly “unnatural”
– non-physical, not part of a causally-closed material universe, much that does
not proceed mechanistically but is subject to free choice. For example, we have
chosen of our own free will to come on this journey along the “Road to Truth”.
We have also found that,
while humans observably have an animal body, we just as observably have a
spiritual being. We have found that that being is our self. We have – but we
are not – an animal body.
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. For an originally accidental
machine, which is proceeding spontaneously, our world 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 life – apart from
the fact that anything exists at all – is the fact that such an apparently
accidental, relative, material, random, mechanistic universe is such an
immaculate process of self revelation – and then, if we choose to know the
revealed self, an immaculate opportunity for self evolution. The physical universe
may be mechanistic, a machine – but there is a ghost in the machine – the Self.
SELF EVOLUTION – THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?
The purpose(s) of anything is revealed by the
thing(s) it does. One of the things life does is self evolution through self
knowledge – one of the purposes of life therefore is self/spiritual evolution.
But why? Why should we bother our pretty little heads about meaning and purpose
and go to all that uncomfortable trouble about coming to know our self and
growing our self? Know and grow? – why not just take our dumb, animal luck at
being alive and enjoy life? Enjoying the universe is another thing life
allows/does – one of its purposes?
Life can be enjoyed on a simple animal plane,
but by raising our consciousness of life – and of each other – through our spiritual
evolution we can incorporate the spiritual into our physical/animal pleasures
and en-joy them more – enjoy life more by experiencing ecstasy more often. For
a lot of people life is just about feeding, sex, genetic business, and animal
ego. For others it is about dining (rather than feeding), love-making (rather
than sex), beauty (rather than genetic business), and self-love (rather than
animal ego). Most fall somewhere along the scale between – but all can raise
their spiritual consciousness through spiritual evolution and en-joy life 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 look at life as a
spiritual opportunity rather than an animal struggle (or as a religious test
for our position in heaven – somewhere better) what a much more fabulous
experience it could become – and for all, not just a lucky few.
If we come to accept that we are spiritual selves –
greater happiness is available by coming to truly know those selves, and growing
those selves until we are happy with our selves. Genuine love of true self is
happiness.
WHAT OF SICKNESS, DISEASE, AND EARLY DEATHS?
Some feel the above self-growth purpose of life is invalid
because some lives are blighted by disease and injury, or (like
We saw on our journey that many people who have been challenged/disadvantaged
by disease or circumstance, live incredible lives full of amazing achievements
and daily personal victories – and come to know their selves truly – as
magnificent. Their lives are a real opportunity for self-knowledge and self-growth.
Early deaths surely remove the “know and grow” purpose from a life – but how
many lives does the self/spirit undertake? Both of our “H” Houses must
necessarily hold that we only have one life for their theories of everything to
hold – but, that the spiritual being exists with an animal body once is only
proof that it can happen – not proof that it must never happen again. The
universe teaches us that if a thing has happened – it will again. There is
absolutely no evidence that we (our spiritual selves) must necessarily only
live one life with an animal body – and on our journey we examined quite a bit
of evidence we live many.
WHAT OF GOD, HEAVEN AND HELL?
What did we discover on our journey about God and
heaven and hell – ideas that have always been part of the human condition? We
discovered some evidence of over-riding order and design – possibly of Divine
origin – and we discovered that there may be higher planes of existence, but we
discovered absolutely no evidence that religious traditions of a male,
human-like God or a hell (apart from experiencing later what we bestowed and/or
inflicted upon others on this temporal plane). In other words we discovered no
evidence that life is a one-off test for eternity in either heaven or hell.
The fact that the spiritual dimensions dreamed up by
our ancient religions are incredible does not stand as evidence against the existence
of spiritual dimensions – it just stands against religions.
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 our default speculation in a world full of numinous
experiences and creative order? I would say only on the basis of wishful
thinking – by people who hope it is so. If all was purely natural (i.e. accidental,
totally self-occurring and mechanistic) science can show it would be chaos – any
accidental order that did occur quickly reduced by entropy. Mathematically the chances
of it being accidentally creative rather than entirely entropic are trillions
upon trillions to one against. While the creative process has a seemingly fair
amount of randomness in it, there are fundamental laws and constants which keep
interesting, creative things happening without any particularly observable
master plan. 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 its purpose
is creativity – because that is what it so immaculately does. It “has organised
its own self-awareness”, and through our awareness of self life allows us to
create our selves “Know Thyself”. Our journey allowed us to see that human spiritual
evolution is an observable fact – indeed “powerful evidence that there is
something going on behind it all”.
SELF AWARENESS IS STAR STUFF OBSERVING THE STARS
Humans are of the stuff of the universe – and the way
that the universe has “organised its own self-awareness” – Sagan’s “Star-stuff
observing the stars”. Not only are we strangely star-stuff observing the stars
but on our journey we discovered that – through our understanding of mathematics
(the language the universe is written in) – we can understand the stars. Using
genetic engineering we have become stardust altering the stars – at one and the
same time, we are – creature and creator, both.
ALL UP, A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF HUMANITY IS
INADEQUATE
Stranger still, we are beings which have strange,
unnatural notions of beauty, shame, dignity, humour, compassion, and right and
wrong – all in a supposedly entirely natural – mechanistic, causal, amoral –
universe. It is pretty much universally accepted that, 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. There comes a time when we
must agree with Davies’ observation that the supposedly accidental,
mechanistic, entirely spontaneous set-up is “fishy” – a time to admit that 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 ideologies similarly
fundamentalist – 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. But we are in trouble because 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 are of our
animal bodies and their fears and wishes – Darwinian, not spiritual.
All people in all societies are united by the fact of
our spiritual beings, but our differing religions are paths only to our
separation. Our spirituality can only come from one Absolute – one Divine
spirit, if you like. When we are moved by spiritual things, it is the Divine
spirit which is moved. When our spirit is moved by our experiences in life, it
is the Divine experiencing the physical universe through us.
We need urgently to increase our spiritual evolution,
to raise our spiritual consciousness beyond what our Darwinian religions allow.
Our best minds need to shed light rather than generate heat – to seek and
contemplate a rational God rather than slaughtering the same sacred cow
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?
Is the glimmer up
ahead 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 light 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, its flanks hidebound by ideology,
and armed with disbelief’s sharp spear of doubt – a monster of meaninglessness
and the arch-enemy of humanity’s survival.
An enemy that humanity one day must slay – 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, brave but trembling, before
the enemy of meaning and purpose. And we have every right to be afraid – we are
facing a Goliath of the absolute armed only with a slingshot – a mind born of
the relative. But it’s all we’ve got and, keeping a wary eye on the enemy, we reach
down to pick up a rock to load our sling. We check it quickly, to see if we
have selected a missile suitable for slaying such a foe.
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: we can see beauty in our physical
world which should be just chaotic matter and energy – in our world’s snowy
mountains; in the smell of a rose; the touch of fur; the taste of a peach; the
sound of a nightingale’s song; and in our own artistic creations. We can see
mysterious things – the mystery of why anything exists at all; the mysterious underlying
laws over-riding our universe’s chaotic beginning; the mystery of our unnatural
understanding of the language the universe is written in; the mystery of humans
being stardust observing and understanding the stars; we see our unnatural
notions like right and wrong; the mysteries of human consciousness; the
strangeness of our understanding human virtues; the existence of human humour; human
compassion for genetic competitors when all should naturally be genetic
imperatives; we see the existence of the spiritual in a universe born solely of
physical forces; we see the infallible process of self revelation and self
knowledge that life is and the immaculate opportunity for self evolution that it
provides. And within our missile we can also see that love is our nature and
our deepest need; that loving our self is the key to human happiness; and finally
– we can see 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 4th March, 2010
EXAMINATION
OF THE HOUSE OF GOD