[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.
How would you define it then?
This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.
No, I get that. But "a very little bit" is still distinguishable from zero, yes?
Nothing about it seems human decision-like. But that's a prejudice because you happen to be human. See below...
I believe that intelligent aliens could exist (in fact, almost certainly do exist). I also believe that fully intelligent computers are possible, and might even be constructed in our lifetime. I believe that any philosophy worth adhering to ought to be IA-ready and AI-ready, that is, it should not fall apart in the face of intelligent aliens or artificial intelligence. (Aside: This is the reason I do not self-identify as a "humanist".)
Also, it is far from clear that chess computers work anything at all like humans. The hypothesis that humans make decisions by heuristic search has been pretty much disproven by >50 years of failed AI research.
I hereby acknowledge your having pointed this out. But it's irrelevant. All I require for my argument to hold is predictability in principle, not predictability in fact. That's why I always speak of a hypothetical rather than an actual predictor. In fact, my hypothetical predictor even has an oracle for the halting problem (which is almost certainly not realizable in this universe) because I don't believe that Turing machines exercise free will when "deciding" whether or not to halt.
That's possible. But just because incompatibalism is a tautology does not make it untrue.
I don't think it is a tautology. The state of affairs for a reliable predictor to exist would be that there is something that causes both my action and the prediction, and that whatever this is is accessible to the predictor before it is accessible to me (otherwise it's not a prediction). That doesn't feel like a tautology to me, but I'm not going to argue about it. Either way, it's true.
Of course. As soon as someone presents a cogent argument I'm happy to consider it. I haven't heard one yet (despite having read this ).
That's really the crux of the matter I suppose. It reminds me of the school of thought on the problem of theodicy which says that God could eliminate evil from the world, but he chooses not to for some reason that is beyond our comprehension (but is nonetheless wise and good and loving). This argument has always struck me as a cop-out. If God's failure to use His super-powers for good is reliably predictable, then that to me is indistinguishable from God not having those super powers to begin with.
You can see the absurdity of it by observing that this same argument can be applied to anything, not just God. I can argue with equal validity that rocks can fly, they just choose not to. Or that I could, if I wanted to, mount an argument for my position that is so compelling that you would have no choice but to accept it, but I choose not to because I am benevolent and I don't want to shatter your illusion of free will.
I don't see any possible way to distinguish between "can not" and "with 100% certainty will not". If they can't be distinguished, they must be the same.
I already pointed out that your own choice of definition doesn't have the property you claimed (being fundamentally incompatible with determinism). I think that suffices to make my point.
Very true. But if you are claiming that some philosophical proposition is (not merely true but) obvious and indeed true by definition, then firm disagreement by a majority of philosophers should give you pause.
You could still be right, ... (read more)