Teleologic Struggles

The Dalia Lama, if he has been correctly quoted, worries that seeing people as "the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes" is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty. In his recent book "The Universe in a Single Atom:", he elaborates, "The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality."

And the Catholic Pope (Benedict XIV) has recently commented: "Each of us is the result of a thought of God."

So, in these statements, where does the poetry end and science begin? It seems this discussion, which gets only louder and more stridorous as the months pass, is about teleology. But who is presenting the "problem" this way?

What we see are disputes about whether religion should be taught in schools. The general answer is "No!" unless the school is religiously funded and not public. No one is wanting to suggest we could have religion or teleology in our schools as an academic subject -- eg, here are all the major religions; here are their beliefs; here are their histories; here is their contemporary importance. Why? Because almost no one endorsing any form of religious teaching wants to support or even inform people of religious options and ideas other than the one they have chosen.

In this situation, objectivity has been demoted for (and by) the religiously empassioned, demoted into an inferior (sometimes even irrelevant) viewpoint . And no one is talking about how religion has, for many more centuries than those since Darwin, been fighting a rear-guard action as science and, more broadly, man's general enquiry have eroded the premises upon which religion has based its power and influence.

Now the point the Dalai Lama has introduced will certainly cheer those who wish for an acknowledgement if not admonition that science has drifted into metaphysics. Most other religious systems across the world have already signed onto the idea endorsing some sort of divine origin and destiny for man. Who else but the atheists contest this option?

Then recently atheism has been co-opted by being labeled a belief system. This strategy of course leaves unlabeled those who declare they don't believe -- period. Previously they were called atheists, but if atheism is a belief, then what to call someone whose viewpoint eschews belief?

The other quite salient point about the evolution/creationism debate involves something science could emphasize, but rarely does: if the evolution model is accepted fully, then this does not remove entirely a creator. It simply displaces that agency into the Big Bang or whatever the initiator of existence as we know it might be called. Of course few if any investigators suggest there might be something that preceded the Big Bang, and fewer yet advocate a viewpoint that our search for an origin may only be some anthropocentric misunderstanding, we being mortal and all (ie, we have an origin and ending). Just because we are mortal and finite, that doesn't mean necessarily the universe is as well. Is the wave the sea?

Perhaps it really is us that is the divinity we are searching for, because we have within us, built-in, certain tendencies. Among these are the capacity to assign being-ness to any sort of aggregate phenomena. The argument goes: this capacity developed to allow us to analyze group behaviors among communities and it appeared long before life took the form of primates. Such a capacity provides us with some benefits, such as a better way to detect a camouflaged predator, and whether we've been noticed as we approach a herd of some creature we wish to kill and eat. And of course being able to gauge the mood of a roomful of people when we enter.

Similarly, our subjectivity is not something nearly as unique as ordinary people would like to believe. Science continues to provide a growing body of evidence that many other creatures have a subjective life.

What is seeming more and more likely, and this is what encourages all who support evolution and science's findings as inferential foundations for postulating a teleology without divinity, is that we may have projected our own sense of self upon the whole of existence, given a name to that projection (God), and then turned around and begun treating it as if it has objective reality. While it is easy to see how that process might have provided a useful framing of ourselves and our world (and destiny) at a time when we lacked any data about our world beyond what our senses could provide directly, it seems obvious we might need to revise that scheme occasionally as we figure out how to explore the world and ourselves in more detail.

Today many refuse to consider the possibility their traditional and ancestral understandings, including beliefs about teleology, might need revision. Compounding this reticence is a recurring confusion about "matteristic" explanations. A common one is expressed thus: All is matter.

This quickly gets expanded into straw-man absurdities like "Thoughts are matter". This mistake typically is combined with a misunderstanding that science has in fact achieved "an explanation for everything". So it seems before any accommodation between the various position holders can be achieved, clarity about both the extent and the specifics of the ideas of every party will need to be known.

While this is not a small task, it largely resides in the "matterist" camps to elaborate these details, since the religions have been expressing their ideas for many centuries.

A few important points fundamental to the science position need to be stated. They distinguish science from belief even without being expanded into specifics. They are:
1. There are thing we don't know. This is not a problem. It is how things are for us now. We can expect growth in our understanding and knowing as time passes.
2. Evolution is not "just random chance". Evolution involves at least two processes working in lock-step -- mutation (genetic variation) and selection. Do one without the other, and nothing happens.
3. Subjective processes appear to be epiphenomena of the function of matter, specifically neuro-matter.
4. Brain size is important but organization is as important.
5. We are not all alike in terms of our subjective natures. In fact we are as different in that way as we are physically. (And there is not much congruence between our physical differences and the differences in our subjective natures).
6. It isn't "Nature or Nuture"; it's "Nature AND Nurture".

The Dalai Lama's statement about nihilism and "spiritual poverty" almost certainly gives voice to a concern most every believer shares. It is the concern of the individual man whose world view has shattered, writ large. Giving great expression to this concern, one might declare: "Will I exist if it does turn out I have no soul?" This conjecture certainly starts to remove the floor from our current world view.

I submit this is our situation, and always has been. That concern about nihilism and "spiritual poverty" the Dalai Lama expressed manifests as a gut-feeling, something so visceral and fundamental it seems certain it must occur to any creature anywhere upon what I'd call "first awakening".

What is "first awakening"? It is that moment in a creature's history where consciousness "ignites". It is that moment when the creature knows it exists, when both the capability and the capacity to preceive self come "on-line". That moment is a transformation only after which destiny can be considered, and, as well, the question: Am I alone? Before that moment, there is no self-awareness, or only insufficient self-awareness, and/or insufficient capacity to wonder (should we call this self-reflection?). After this change, consequences and destiny come within the grasp of the mind.

This transformation might more simply be called the emergence of mind, and for most discussions that common term will suffice. It should be noted in passing that science has already gathered considerable data making blurry what might now seem to be a clear distinction between those creatures with mind and those without. This aspect of our subject can be addressed elsewhere.

The question that's relevant to this commentary involves what happens when mind first appears. How does mind deal with the nothingness that seems almost a certainty for any creature recognizing that it exists in a place it doesn't understand very well, and with no picture of any future beyond the next few moments and is not preoccupied by hunger or avoiding being eaten. Sometime in our past this was our ancestors' dilemma. And it remains a dilemma today for every person who realizes he exists. In that moment the essential questions appear. Most people have been given a set of answers prior to that moment (church and Sunday school have that purpose), and upon the authority of their source they are adopted, to be carried unquestioningly often for the rest of life (until near death when, not infrequently, their contradictions or fallacies become discomfitting; this is one of the traumas of old age.).

My understanding (to varying degrees supported by science) is that this scenario describes the source of religion. This is the fodder from which religion springs, now and also long ago. At first awareness was so rudimentary even labels were absent. Labeling is a feature of mind's organizing power. Of course part of this story, an essential part, must also be the capacity to pass on to others in one's community what one knows. We see this in creatures as simple as birds (the bigger brained ones), and it certainly is a common (almost ubiquitous) feature in more advanced creatures (mammals). So even if the first creature to awaken didn't manage much with his mind, she (some could strongly argue the female may have been the one to develop this capacity first) passed some portion of it onto her offspring, and so history (pre-oral) began.

One of the major components in this transgenerational transmission was the capacity to facilitate the awakening of the individual. This continues today, so we have children today who are more developed (earlier, and also in terms of the extent or complexity of their subjective natures) than were children centuries ago.

In this way (admittedly a barely skeletal description) we have achieved an understanding of ourselves and our world. Current religions are the repositories of that collective understanding. But it is a mistake (though obviously of some benefit, since it is so prevalent) to view these repositories as static. A truthful examination of these ideas shows they too have been evolving.

We have stories in the Christian tradition and history where the existing dogma was transformed. To some degree, every tradition has such stories. And what they all show is that the repository of human understanding that keeps nihilism and spiritual emptiness at bay (and "at bay" may be a more accurate depiction of the situation than most can accept) is a living repository, not just because it exists in the lives of people, but because it is growing, developing, maturing.

To some extent, current tensions between what might be called the scientific-technological world and the world of subjectivity-religion reflect a time of transition. The passions aroused by this collision indicate friction. Where there is friction, there is heating, and eventually melting and blending. It seems certain such is occurring now. We are living in a time of the spiritual transformation of humanity.

It's interesting the Dalai Lama is expressing reservations about the trends in spiritual thought around the world. Somehow I doubt he is all that much concerned personally. But his public role involves both teaching and voicing people's concerns, and almost certainly his statements about the "spiritual poverty" of science's view of the world strike a raw nerve in many.

The current process seems to be one of cutting away false props people have used and relied upon for a very long time. If we are to enter into this pruning, we will need some resources by which to maintain balance and clarity, and none (to me) seems more relevant than meditation. This of course is something about which the Dalai Lama has great authority. So perhaps he will guide people who might otherwise fall into nihilism or despondency toward that means of having a robust and pure connection with one's subjectivity.

To me having a connection to one's subjectivity (arguably a "funny" way to putting it) is essential to feel comfortable with no God, no soul, and no afterlife.

Now the heat of cultural friction has increased with Cardinal Schoenborn's recent comment: "...evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not [true]. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." What this declaration fails to offer is evidence for the designer (and his phrasing even puts science "on notice" that it is, from his point of view, "ideology").

It seems the ID school of belief has become self-referential to the extent everyone of that persuasion now assumes the evidence for their position exists, just because a couple of scientist have said it is so. Apparently the IDers grant no merit to the far larger body of scientists who declare they can't see that evidence anywhere, let alone see "overwhelming evidence".

Of course the great masses of the uninformed, who look to authority for support in their beliefs because their faith is too weak, accept such declarations as truth. After all, what use is the religious hierarchy if not to provide confidence that one's beliefs are on-target? Perhaps public events such as this one will be steps toward the great disillusionment the faithful will experience when they learn their champions, their authorities, speak without anything but faith. It may be the 21st century's equivalent to priestly pedophilia.

In all this is the "catch-22" of the faith-viewpoint: when faith is weak, evidence (that's fraudulent) is offered; when faith is strong, no evidence will contradict it. Upon such dynamics have religions built their sphere of influence. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for all this, and that is a loss of discrimination and intelligence, manifest as terrorism and stagnation.

Alas.