Following the awarding of the Templeton Prize this little piece came up in the Guardian. For the most part it is a rather predictable science and faith back and forth.
But it was this particular section that struck me:
SH: Religious language is, without question, unscientific in its claims for what is true. We have Christians believing in the holy ghost, the resurrection of Jesus and his possible return – these are claims about biology and physics which, from a scientific point of view in the 21st century, should be unsustainable.
To be honest I'm not quite sure why, I suppose it's because I spend a lot of time thinking how do these phenomena fit together as a system (much like trying to make sure all loose ends up are tied up in a narrative plot) without ever really considering the more basic questions of whether these actually seem to relate to real experience. But it's not just that.
I find one of his examples compelling. I have to say that the resurrection and the return of Christ do not particularly interest me- these things involve a physical body interacting in a physical world, I am sure that eventually we could come to at the very least a theoretical physical understanding of how there things are not completely impossible, people always find reasons for everything. If it were done of course it remains at best ambiguous evidence for or against God- if it can happen, does that mean it did to Jesus? If it did happen to Jesus could it have been entirely natural? Yet if the means were natural it doesn't resolve the high coincidentiality of happening to someone who promised they would come back from the dead, surely?
The Holy Spirit is an interesting one though. It just struck me that in the grand religious scheme- divinity interacts with creation. Should it perhaps therefore register in some physical, measurable sense? The idea that that concepts have a physical existence is not totally ludicrous to theology- Augustine of course was of the opinion that Original Sin was a biological phenomenon children inherited through the sexual act leading to conception itself. When the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles it apparently manifested itself in tongues of fire.
Of course this covers a whole range of things about souls, and spiritual senses, demonic possession and so on- what are they interacting with if not our body? And if they are interacting with our body why is there no apparent effect upon it?
Well this doesn't seem to be strictly true- There was an article in The Scientific American which showed how parts of the brain seemed to change when mystics were undergoing a spiritual experience and the final paragraph highlights the ambiguity of the meaning of the results:
"Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe." |
So there was an experience involving religious contemplation, and it did have an effect on the body, and it seems that what the 'truth' of God drawn from this seems to be is entirely dependent what you take it to mean.
Which leads to a return I suppose, to that first sentence. It seems odd by virtue of its sheer banality, of course the language of the bible is unscientific, it never claims that, nevertheless it claims to be 'true'. Of course what Sam Harris means is that it's false because it doesn't match scientific knowledge thus far, but it suggests to me the possibility that language can somehow be 'true' without 'scientific'. Partly because I don't know what a 'scientific language' is meant to be, and because scientific evidence can't speak for itself on these matters- it is interpreted and the conclusion can vary based on one's presuppositions apparently. What's more Science doesn't tend to make metaphysics one of its areas of study- how could science in its current scope assess whether God is Unity or Trinity, one or many for instance? What advice could bring to the table? It could drawn on observations of the physical world, only to be rebutted because God is meant to be fundamentally 'unlike' the physical world.
Just as one might make a distinction between 'Being in love' and the physical symptoms of it. Between 'Hearing Music' and the vibration of the hairs in one's ears of sound.
Religious language is non-empirical, one cannot investigate something like 'God is love' or 'The Holy Spirit dwells within me' - one can't simply observe these things, the words don't actually point to anything, they surely must create meaning when they are used and applied to a real situation. the meaning is lived, rather than self-evident. Lots of language is used in this way, from the everyday metaphor 'she's feeling down in the dumps today.' To the proverbial, 'The heart that loves is always young.'' (Greek, apparently) and much of the arts rely on this- it gives an interpretation of the world that one can pick up upon should they wish, poetry is particularly good at this- how often do we find a poem that we say 'I totally get this, this is me they're talking about, this is how things really happen'.
It can become meaningful. I am aware though that I am not philosophically equipped or read enough to pursue this line of thinking right now. So I may have to come back. The only question that springs up in my mind is that without the tangible, physical referent, how does one piece of meaningful metaphorical language get to claim it is the most meaningful of all articulated ideas, as religious language is apt to do. It wants to claim that it is objective reality, yet it moves by subjective means, just like so many other things. Yet once again I find that physical evidence is counted as ambiguous when interpreted by these subjective ideas.
This is a bit of a brain-itch now. Just how is an individual meant to make an informed choice in these matters?
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