Haught’s argument with the hardcore scientific naturalists continues first by asking how “life” with its intricacies and complexities, especially life that exhibits “critical intelligence” (I would add life with the intellectual capacity to follow all of this – a capacity I do not have on every page!) got started. How did such complexity and order – life – emerge from lifelessness, from chaos? He does acknowledge that religion might wonder why, if there is a purposive, directing God-force enlivening the process, why it took so long, with so much trial-and-error, not to mention suffering, to get us to this point.
Naturalism says that given blind chance, impersonal selection, and enough time – cosmic time – the earth and us and the universe can be explained. But Haught cites the boatloads of "information" found in each and every DNA molecule and asks where all that information came from. Again, he uses an illustration – this time a pot of boiling water – to say that what is real must be described not in physical terms alone, but personal, internal, spiritual terms too – layers of reality.
The idea of “emergence” is important to him as a clue to there being something outside, beyond the physical world accessible to the scientific method. He posits that there must be some “beckoning” from outside the system - a god perhaps that invites creation to become more, to become more and more complex. The “most dazzling” example of emergence is our own critical intelligence.
Then too “purpose” is another clue that there is more than the merely material world around us. Our brains (remember Barrett) seem to be hard-wired to seek purpose. It is “natural,” he says, for us to look for, long for, seek out purpose, meaning in our lives. Naturalists seem to assume that their lives, thinking, writing, and their pursuit of truth (which Haught commends) has purpose, and s worth pursuing. But where does that “belief” come from? Why believe that there is any purpose for life? Haught says we are “purpose-driven, meaning-seeking, truth-telling” beings and wonders how that can be explained using exclusively materialistic evidence.
Then there is the chapter on “Seeing.” By “seeing” he means “perceiving,” noticing the world, understanding what is real and important. And he returns to his central thesis, that there are multiple “layers” of understanding – including the scientific layer. Scientific naturalists, he argues, have for no demonstrable reason chosen to deny other means of seeing – other layers of perceiving what is real. He cites several philosophers, including Whitehead and de Chardin who argue that “intuition” (Harris liked this word too) is a valid, maybe more valid, means of perceiving the world. It is the primary perception, while empiricism is secondary.
Haught does not wish to denigrate science – he in fact lauds its work. But he faults, as does Harris, I believe, the “physicalists” who would denigrate other ways of knowing and being in the world. He notes that they by their starting assumptions (which they cannot "prove" empirically) preclude seeing more deeply – and they never ask the questions that most people in most places and times have said are the most important questions – purpose, meaning, ethics.
It is in this area – the intuitive, primary perception – that religious language can be used – metaphor, symbol, story that seeks to understand not what is on the surface, the physical world, but what is below, inside, in the spirit.
As Emily Dickinson said . . . (emphasis mine)
Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually.
Haught is arguing that there is an aspect to the universe which is beyond our understanding because it is very essence is separate from the world itself.
ReplyDeleteHe goes about making his case with logic, evidence, reason. Or maybe not (page 54):
"If there is more than nature, it could never be grasped cognitionally in the same way that things in nature are mastered by science. ...religion is less a matter of grasping than of being grasped. ...it makes no sense to suppose that supporting 'evidence' for its claims could ever be squeezed into the domain of things that can be subjected to scientific control."
Maybe this is true, but what is this book if not some sort of 'evidence' for the claims Haught is making? Is this merely a book full of unsubstantiated claims? To me, the fact that Haught has to put this disclaimer in is a huge discredit to what he's trying to say.
Personally I think the whole premise of this book is confusing. The word 'science' is derived from the Latin 'scientia' which means 'to know'. Suppose Haught did convincingly make his case, then wouldn't this new knowledge we have (that some other part of the universe unconceived of prior exists) simply become part of what we now know (aka scientific materialism)? It reminds me of an MC Escher painting.
Anyway, I think Haught does a disservice to reality, as the scientific naturalism worldview already includes so beyond our natural human intuition that if you mentioned it to someone 200 years ago, they'd be unable to discern it from theology.
Think about Einstein's theory of special relativity, which holds that as objects accelerate towards the speed of light, they slow down in time. Or quantum physics, where we can no longer determine the exact location of objects and have to start talking probabilities. These ideas are contrary to human intuition, Newtonian physics, and anything anyone could have dreamt up, had it not been what actually goes on in our universe. Yet as incredible as they are (Stephen Hawking calls this stuff 'the mind of god'), they're not inherently 'unknowable'. I'd recommend Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe for more about these ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions-Ultimate/dp/0375708111/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281763858&sr=8-1
I’m not hearing Haught say that the realities religionists have talked about are beyond our understanding, or inherently unknowable; they are experienced by people (“grasped” by truth, or God, or Spirit), and so are “known” . . . but such experiences, he insists, are not subject to the demands of the scientific method, which I understand to be measurable, repeatable – empirical. They are not less real because they are not subject to the merely empirical way of “knowing.”
ReplyDeleteThe quarks and nutrinos and other things (can we call them “things?”) that Greene addresses in his book you mention (I read the first chapter online at Amazon . . . have a hunch it’s beyond my capacity!) were real long before we had the capacity to detect them. Advances in science and mathematics brought them to our attention, so to speak. Even so, I think Haught would say, things (there’s that word again) of the spirit – religious affirmations, people’s descriptions of religious experience – are also real, but not detectable by empirical means.
And thus he argues that there are other equally valid means of detecting what is real – his theory of “layered” truths that do not contradict but rather complement one another as we try to understand all of human experience, including spiritual experience.
That word “intuition” is an important one, and Harris made much of it too. While intuition, he said, could sometimes be proven to be wrong by scientific experimentation, the intuitive step – the first step – was necessary. The scientific method begins with a “hunch” – a theory – that is then subjected to experimentation to be proven or not.
Some religious intuitions – a feeling, say, that God will heal my child – can also be tested by experience. Either the child is healed or not. Other religious feelings – God is good, and calls us to justice, for example – are not so easily tested by measurable outcomes. But Haught wants to say that does not make that intuitive knowledge less real, or less true.