Dualism, Materialism, and Religion as a Language

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the language used by the average western religious person to describe material reality. Typically, if you're around (say) a Christian, and you tell them you are a naturalist, they respond with something like "Wait, so you believe nature is all there is?", or "That sounds pretty depressing, that we're just matter in motion", or, most poignantly, "So we're just atoms in the void?". As I thought about such responses, I began to realize just how important the sort of language we use is in describing a world-view. What follows is a series of unorganized, sometimes disconnected thoughts on this subject, but I hope it will provide a general sketch of an a idea that will serve as an impetus for further thought and research on this topic.

Dualism

As many have pointed out, the West in its thinking, whether consciously or unconsciously, has inherited a generally dualistic picture of the world. The influences on this are most likely multifarious, but one has always been singled out: Plato. The West in a way is built upon two great traditions: Christianity and Greek Thought. Plato, generally thought to be the most important Greek thinker in history, as well as having influenced Christian thought from the very beginning, stands as a vital source for both of these traditions. Plato posited a world of eternal Forms, a world of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, in contrast to the fleeting shadowlands of the sensible world (though the thrust of this idea was not wholly unique to Plato, it had its roots in such 5th century schools as the Eleatics and Pythagoreans). It was only the Forms, Plato said, that could be known. The truly virtuous life was thus constituted by contemplation of these eternal Ideas, and Plato's Socrates gloried at the prospect of returning to this Ideal Realm as he spoke to his students before his execution.

How does all this relate to the sort of language used to describe a world-view? It relates because, I believe, the West has inherited along with Plato's conceptual scheme a specific way of talking about the world. A way of talking that degrades "crude matter", and glorifies the "spiritual world". Of course, this is not meant to be an across-the-board description of contemporary western thought. It is meant to specifically describe the language still used in the more religious elements of our society.

Now, the first thing I want to touch on is the use of certain words meant to draw out particular emotions and senses in the hearer (what speech-act theorists call the "perlocutionary force" of a statement). Consider the statement "So we're just matter in motion?". The term "just" here functions, albeit subtly, to load the statement with a value-judgement. Why is it used? Upon examination, it can be seen that the word "just" is used to convey a sense of meaninglessness, lowliness, and unimportance. The fact that statements such as these are used with such force, however, is seldom questioned or examined. I put the question to you: Instead of "just matter", why not "glorious, wondrous, mysterious matter"? The point here is that the language used to describe material reality, from the traditional western-religious perspective, is intensely value-laden from the outset. Such language needs to be justified before discussions over materialism versus immaterialism can begin to make sense or be fruitful.

So how might what I'll now just refer to as the "immaterialist" justify such language? Presumably, the reason it's used is to convey the fact that matter is just the sort of things that is meaningless, lowly, and unimportant (at least unto itself). Spirit, by contrast, just is the sort of thing that can be meaningful, glorious, and important unto itself. But why is this assumed? I think it's because throughout most of western history, for various reasons, it was assumed that brute matter just wasn't the sort of thing capable of functioning to produce the "higher" elements of human experience (love, beauty, glory, moral sense, etc.). It seemed that those things, if they were to have any reality at all, must be grounded in some other realm (in the soul, the realm of the forms, or "heaven"). And this leads to my first conclusion: There is nothing intrinsic to either matter, or spirit, qua substance that makes it more or less meaningful. Rather, it is what each substance is thought to be capable of producing that makes the difference. Thus, we see the question is not so much about matter versus spirit per se, but rather it is a question about function, and which substance can function in such a way as to produce such things as meaning, morality, or love.

Materialism

Because of the aforementioned assumptions concerning the apparent meaninglessness and etc. of matter, materialism is typically thought to be a sort of depressing world-view, full of despair and pointlessness. This is only partially true, however. Another reason for the apparent despair associated with a materialistic world-view has less to do with matter itself, and has more to do with the loss of God. When you cease to believe that an all-good God is looking out for you and has eternity waiting for you on the other side, it is understandably a despair-inducing situation. So I'm not claiming that the association of materialism with a certain level of despair is completely unwarranted, but I am claiming that any despair resulting from the world-view is only relative to the loss of a benevolent care-taker, rather than having to do with matter itself. The emphasis, however, does tend to be on the unimportance of the material world itself, hence why a Christian will typically assign the property of "being more hopeful" to other spirit-adhering religions even if they lack the idea of an all-good God (such as certain forms of Buddhism).

Let's turn again, then, to the question of function. If the issue really, in part, pertains to what sort of substance could function to produce "higher things", then I think the assumption that only spirit can has been taking on water for several centuries. Ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, both philosophy and science have made great strides in explaining just how such things as morality, beauty, love, and meaning can be firmly grounded in the physical world. Put another way, we have for the most part discovered that material reality is capable of functioning to produce what we call "meaning", "morality", and all the rest. The vast majority of ethicists now see how morality can exist without God (including many Christians, such as Oxford's Richard Swinburne). Similarly, we have seen how such things as consciousness, love, complex ideas like "glory" and etc., can all be grounded in, if not made to be identical with, physical reality. If this is true, and I think it is (not that the issue's settled, but that we've made great strides), then the assumption that only the spirit-world could "matter" (no pun intended) appears bankrupt at worst, and in need of serious questioning at best. Language such as "just matter" and "just atoms" needs to be rigorously analyzed and turned against the users of such phrases. We can use our own value-laden language to say "What, do you mean the glorious matter that produces all the exuberant and beautiful species of Earth? That 'crude' matter out of which the Roman Colosseum was constructed? The 'atoms in the void' that got us to the moon in the spirit of exploration?".

The question of meaning, however, appears more complex. When people use the term "meaningless" to describe the universe, it's hard to see exactly what they mean (again, no pun intended). In what sense is a universe without a God less meaningful than a universe with one? Simple answers to the question don't seem as obvious when looked at closely. For example, one quick response might be "Because if God exists, then he has a plan for the universe". That may be true, but in a way it begs the question. Why should God's plan for the universe constitute it's "meaning"? Is meaning really just identical to a meta-narrative? Is it not possible that there be a meaningless meta-narrative? As a brief thought-experiment, assume that my consciousness has now become disembodied. Further, let's assume that I have attained a perfect knowledge of the universe, that I have attained perfect-power, and that I have nothing but good intentions for the world. Now consider: Does whatever I conceive in my mind as the universe's "goal", it's "purpose", become it's objective meaning? The question is important because in this thought-experiment I have become nearly identical with God. So then, why is it that God's purpose constitutes the universe's meaning and not mine? Someone may say, reasonably, that it's because God created the universe that he has the sole right to determine it's true meaning. That may be true as far as it goes, but it only leaves us with deeper questions: What is it about an act of creation that makes my intention for that entity it's objective meaning? After-all, human artifacts are constantly used for purposes other than those for which they were created, are those not legitimate "meanings", or uses, for the objects? These are not easy questions, and they take us to the most profound question in all of philosophy: What is meaning?

Religion as a Language

What follows, I think, from the preceding discussion is that part of religion's importance and vitality is as a language for talking about the world. Immaterialists can refer, in "high language", to the spiritual realm (or the spirit-imbued universe) as "glorious, wondrous, mysterious". I, with equal right and validity, can refer to a Godless universe as "glorious, wondrous, mysterious". Part of what gives our world meaning is the way in which we choose to talk about it, and hence the way in which we choose to think about it. Using words like love, wonder, and majesty more fully capture, in a beautiful way, some of the very complex aspects of human experience. Religion is vital because it has it's own narrative with it's own language to tell the shared story of the reality of homo homo sapiens, somewhere on a rock lost in the universe. It has its own rituals and rites, which themselves are a kind of language, in order to more fully tell that story. I myself am not religious, but to lose religion would not be to lose some "archaic mythology", but to lose part of what it means to be human: Telling stories in a language all our own, conceiving of things in a space that transcends our historical context, and giving our lives a direction that it may lack without such narratives. All of these issues require further thought, further analysis and exploration, and I hope what I have said serves to stimulate some of that.

Some Thoughts on Prayer and Falsifiability

Lately, for various reasons, I've been thinking about the idea of prayer. As a Christian-turned-agnostic, prayer is of particular interest to me because part of what I'd usually consider the "evidence" for my former beliefs are instances of apparent prayer-answering. The more I've thought about this issue, however, the more I've come to seriously doubt whether prayer could ever serve to confirm/disconfirm religious belief.

My primary reason for thinking this is that prayer is unfalsifiable in a very strong sense. Religious believers all the time talk of this or that prayer being answered, but they seldom mention all the countless prayers made that have gone unanswered. The problem is an epistemic one: How could one know, in practice, the difference between an answered prayer and a happy coincidence? There are as many "unanswered" prayers as there are "answered" prayers. Religious believers will commonly try and explain away all the unanswered prayers by saying "well, God chose not to act in this instance, but he is still listening". That may be true as far as it goes, but the point is (again) an epistemic one: How could know when a prayer is answered and when some event in the world just happened to coincidie with what you prayed for?

Now, my claim is not that prayer is somehow an inherently irrational idea. It makes perfect sense within a Judeo-Christian theistic framework. My claim is strictly evidential: That instances of prayer-answering could never serve as confirmation or disconfirmation for specific or general religious claims. As an agnostic looking at various world-views from a largely neutral (if there is such a thing) perspective, no one could ever say to me "you should consider answered prayer in considering religious claims" as if it could confirm theism. The fact is that the distribution of observations meant to show "answered" and "unanswered" prayer would look exactly the same if God didn't exist. It is in this sense that the hypothesis "prayer is genuine interaction with God" or "Prayer works" appears to be, at least prima facie, unfalsifiable. And it is, all else being equal, ad hoc.

But, nonetheless, I again want to emphasize that ad hoc explanations are only explanatorily "unvirtuous" given certain epistemic backgrounds. So, to take a famous example from Kuhn, the discovery of Neptune in 1781 represented an had hoc explanation (the postulation of an extra planet in order to account for Uranus's irregularities). Yet, it was not explanatorily unvirtuous, because Newtonian theories of gravity had such great explanatory power across the board, and that was the paradigm Herschel was working within. Similarly, if there is evidence that generally supports Judeo-Christian theism, then the hypothesis of prayer finds itself ad hoc, but not in any irrational sense.

More Camus

Here's another great one: "Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe." -Albert Camus, The Rebel, pg. 22

Camus on the Absurd

"The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe." -Albert Camus, The Rebel, pg. 6

Voltaire

Here's a great little passage from Voltaire's Candide:

"Master Pangloss taught the metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology. He could prove to admiration that there is no effect without a cause; and, that in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and My Lady the best of all possible baronesses.

'It is demonstrable,' said he, 'that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.' "

Probabilistic Arguments in Philosophy

So here's a sort of trivial, but I think interesting, observation about probabilistic arguments in philosophy:

There are two criterion for the soundness of a deductive argument: That its conclusion follow from its premises, and that its premises be true. The former is self-explanatory, but the latter is interesting. Typically, what a philosopher means by the truth of the premises of an argument is really just that the premise(s) be more likely than their negation. In essence, then, the soundness of a deductive argument is partially judged by a sort of loose probability, e.g. the probability of the given premises being true relative to their negations. But then, is there really a significant difference between, say, the following two arguments:

A1.

(1) If the sun has risen every day until now, it will rise tomorrow.
(2) The sun has risen every day until now.
(3) Therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow.

A2.

(1) If the sun has risen ever day until now, it will probably rise tomorrow.
(2) The sun has risen every day until now.
(3) Therefore, the sun will probably rise tomorrow.

The only difference between (A1) and (A2), it seems to me, is the following: In (A1) the question of the probability of the given premises being true is a meta-argumentative issue (you judge whether or not the premises are true apart from the argument itself). In (A2), the question of the probability of the premises is built into the argument itself. When you ask of premise 1 of (A1), "does the consequent in the conditional follow from its antecedent?" you're asking for a judgment that can only be assessed a posteriori, probabilistically. Premise 1 of (A2) just assumes the a posteriori work has already been done. So really, the difference between the two is more in form than in kind.

Of course, this isn't true of all deductive/inductive arguments. In some arguments with conditionals and/or biconditionals, the consequent of the conditional necessarily follows from its antecedent in an analytic way, as in "If one is a bachelor, then one is unmarried". But the point is this: Philosophers tend to use arguments they would think of as deductive just because of their structure, but which would need a posteriori evidence to confirm or disconfirm the truth of their premises. But the fact is that many of these arguments are easily transformed into inductive arguments.

Away

The years have faded since then,
like clouds engulfing the moon.
Over beach-side neighborhoods
adorned with luminous youth,
we held each other in a simple way;
In a way lacking the complexities of age,
reason, and familiarity.

Since then, we've been apart.
I've been here, you've been there,
and we're now distanced by light-years.
Though an electronic signal
would suffice to reconnect,
neither of us make a move.
Like the opening play in a game of chess,
this needs to be well-calculated,
well thought-out,
and worthy of the opponent.
But, nothing short of the infinite
would be worthy of such a reunion.

I still carry you with me.
Like a bag full of bones,
I've tried to distribute you,
hide you away, hide us away,
but the incision remains there,
bleeding out slowly at every turn.

But maybe it's not you,
maybe it's what you embodied,
what you idealized.
How could it be you?
How could what I see now
be at all continuous with who you were?
How could "who you were" have ever been real?
But it was you.
It was you in all your glory, beauty,
contempt, change, betrayal,
loyalty, joy, and silence.
It's you that I lost.
The you of my dreams, the you
lodged deep within by subconscious.
And it's time to realize a simple fact
always known, but painfully ignored.

It was me.
I killed us.
I made you who you became,
I made you leave me,
I made you cut yourself off
like I've cut myself off.
I took out your eyes,
the eyes that saw what we once did,
looking together out of your window,
seeing stars as symbols of something.
Something bigger, something eternal.
Something more than what passes.
Something more than what fades.
That will never again be reflected in your eyes,
and it will never again be reflected in mine.

But it was me.
And it's over.
And this thought,
these words,
are a message in a bottle
lost at sea.