The Stopped Clock
In his own characteristically simplistic manner, David Brooks picks up on a cultural current that seems to be gaining steam. He writes in this week’s NYT about “Neural Buddhism“, a new mentality among scientists fueled by new thinking in neuroscience. It’s worth a read:
… My guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
…
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.
When science offers more spiritual insight than orthodox religious fundamentalism, the days of fundamentalism are numbered.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Surprisingly enough, I think David “Reagan’s-legacy-was-one-of-optimism” Brooks is onto something here, at least in terms of identifying a cultural current. What is regrettable is that he seems to lack much of the requisite vocabulary and conceptual framework to make the point he’d love to make. His suggestion, for instance that to the new materialists, “the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous” misses the point slightly. It is not necessary to invoke mind-body dualism to simply say that (1) the fact that I am writing this at all implies a self-aware sort of consciousness and (2) as of yet, the empirical study of atoms and matter has not been able to fashion a working model of the structure and ontology of said consciousness. But this doesn’t imply that it would be impossible to create an empirical study of consciousness. It just means that such a study has eluded us so far. To acknowledge that consciousness is still very much a mystery to us–one I am not alone in believing to be quite worthy of both empirical and philosophical investigation–neither depends upon nor implies an endorsement in the belief in anything “supernatural” or otherwise immaterial. It does, however, suggest that physical reality is more complex and multidimensional than that which may be apprehended at any given moment by the limited instruments of the human senses and intellect. This distinction is crucial, and yet the denial (or ignorance) of it seems to underlie much of the militant atheism expressed by some scientists. When we can build our mutual understanding so much as to be able to agree upon this and a few other key flaws in the assumptions of positivism, I think we will find that our disagreements are primarily semantic.Another key point to make is that whether you’re a “neural Buddhist” or athiest, the fundamentalist belief in the literal historicity of religious/mythological doctrine is still, so to speak, Public Enemy Number One. The list of justifications for this statement is vast and has been articulated endlessly elsewhere, so I will simply say that imaginary sky-god religious literalism is problematic, above all, because it subverts and undermines the goals and possibilities of human spirituality. Religious fundamentalism is the enemy of true philosophy. Let us not allow positivist fundamentalism reduce our science to a similar role.