RELIGION AS ATTRACTOR, PROCESS, AND
BIOLOGY
©2003, Ken Bausch
Science and
religion contend for the world’s allegiance.
Often scientists are bewildered by people’s acceptance of some seemingly
irrational values and judgments that are endorsed by religion. They argue strenuously with people about the
common good and systemic consequences of actions, but are often trumped by
religious nostrums. Why?
Science and
religion both arise from our bewilderment with the complexity of our
lives. At their roots they are vital,
necessary, liberating, and complementary processes. So…why the perceived conflict?
Experiences
of universal unity arise naturally in deep meditative states. What does this recently demonstrated
biological fact tell us about our tendencies to religious belief?
Part
One
Religion
as a Static, Indomitable Attractor
There
are many threads of thought that try to explain the origin and social force of
religion. Some of them are:
Expectations
of some sort are essential to our continued existence. Without them, we could not move with
confidence and success into our future.
Even loosely reproducing, non-living chemical polymers use an elemental
form of expectation. Stuart
Kauffman holds that polymers create
models of one another in an attempt to predict one another’s behavior (cf.
1993, p.388 ff.).
Niklas
Luhmann shows how human societies are built upon expectations. We project a tentative outcome, act on it,
and assess the results. With inanimate
objects, this process yields mechanical results: “stones fall,” “light things
are easily moved.” With non-human
living things, the process yields generally consistent results: “plants grow,”
“ dogs can be good pets.” When two
humans try to predict each other’s behavior, however, the situation gets
complicated.
This
situation in which ego tries to model its behavior on the basis of what alter
will do and alter tries to do the same in reverse is called the
situation of double contingency. In
this situation, ego and alter are dependent on each other to
satisfy their self-determined needs, but are unable to depend on (cannot
determine) each other’s actions. Should they meet as utterly uncivilized in a
primordial forest, they would test each other with gestures, feints, and action
and be frustrated in their attempts to predict each other’s responses. In this frustration, ego would
realize that alter is free and even intelligent. With this realization, would also come ego’s
awareness that ego itself is free and intelligent. Alter would come to the same
awareness. This is the archetypal
realization in which ego and alter become persons. In other words, ego and alter create
each other as persons endowed with freedom and intelligence as the basic
social structure in which they generate expectations about each other.
With
the progress of civilization, persons differentiate roles for
each other. Later on, they develop programs,
which are complexes of conditions “for the correctness (and thus the social
acceptability) of behavior” (1995, p. 317).
Still later, they generate social structures of higher abstraction
called values, which are “general, individually symbolized perspectives
which allow one to prefer certain states or events. [They serve] as a kind of probe with which one can test whether
more concrete expectations are also at work” (1995, p.317).
These four levels of abstraction (person,
role, program, and value) provide a graduated scale for assessing
the expectations that are put on human behavior. They enlarge the range of expectations that we can safely have in
the social arena by allowing us to function together without requiring
conformity to one another.
We progress by increasing our levels of
acceptable insecurity. In this process,
we develop cognitive and normative methods for dealing with
disappointment. These methods allow us
to anticipate how we will behave if we are disappointed, using the question,
should I “give up the expectation, change it, or not”? (p. 320). In Luhmann’s lexicon, “expectations that are
willing to learn are stylize as cognitions,[and] expectations not
disposed toward learning [are] norms” (p. 321).
Religion
lies firmly in the field of norms not only in the sense of moral
rightness, but also in the sense of correct thoughts. In that sense, it is opposed to science, which functions best in
the field of cognitions.
Mircea
Eliade and Rudolf Otto pioneered the scientific study of religion especially
its origins in awe-inspiring events.
Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead expanded on this theme. Jurgen Habermas reconstructs Durkheim’s
theory of the sacred derivation of rules (cf. 1989, pp. 48-55) as follows:
In
the early days of human evolution, primates existed in a mostly continuous web
with their surroundings. They had only
signals and a simple symbolic communication system that had not yet progressed
to language. The first symbols were used
to point to awesome occurrences like the frightening appearance of a cave bear
or the birth of a child. Eventually,
the symbol for bear-appearing would encompass the bear itself, the fright
experienced by the primates, the defenses used to fend off the bear, the sacred
relics (claws, teeth, skin) of slain bears, the pride of the tribe in its
mastery of its fear, its reverence for the might of the bear, and its ritual
re-enactments of historic encounters with bears (cf. Bausch, 2001, p. 77).
In
these ways, symbols for totem and natural events produce group solidarity
through a social structure based on communication. Equi-primordially with the symbols, and practically equivalent to
them, are the rituals that accompany the use of symbols. These rituals re-enact how the symbols are
to be understood. In this way, rituals
encode rules for understanding and lay the groundwork for further communicative
action. In the course of human
evolution, this primitive understanding of symbols and rituals developed into
myths, religion, theology, philosophy, science, and even post-modernism, but
the mythic power of religion retains its emotional force.
Rituals
and their accompanying symbols refer back to the foundational time of a
tribe. They express how a tribe was put
together. The rules of ritual and
religion have force because they express the foundations of a tribe’s
existence.
For
Ben Goertzel, belief is “a mental process which, in some regard, gives
other mental processes ‘the benefit of the doubt’” (1994, p.166). In this regard, belief is a variety of
expectation in Luhmann’s lexicon.
A belief system “is a group of beliefs which mutually support one
another, in the sense that an increased degree of belief in one of the member beliefs
will generally lead to increased degrees of belief in most other member
beliefs” (p. 167). Within a belief
system, fragmentary beliefs are not tested on an individual basis. They fit into a system of belief in some way
or else they are discarded.
Belief
systems are learning systems that satisfy the cognitive equation. They contain patterns of mental processes
that support one another in a syntactic and semantic dual network structure. They are “closed under generation and
pattern recognition—as an attractor for the cognitive equation” (p.175). They are mini-minds that set up dialogues in
our consciousness that enable the comparison and virtual activation of
divergent perspectives and programs. In
many ways, belief systems are similar to the cultural cognitive maps
that are the subject of investigation by Ervin Laszlo and his collaborators
(1993).
Goertzel
suggests two properties of successful belief systems:
1.
being an attractor of the cognitive equation
2.
being productive in the sense of creatively constructing new
patterns in response to environmental demands.
A belief system cannot survive unless
it meets both of these criteria (p. 192).
Living
religions (as belief systems), therefore, have to be both conservative and
flexible.
This
raises the question: are the major religious traditions alive? If they are really as inflexible as they
seem to be, one can argue that they are dead.
Yet they have enormous influence in society. How can we account for this vitality?
Here
are examples of some ordinary and extraordinary experiences of connectedness
and transcendence:
Experiences
such as these psychologically require support and explanation, which most
people find in the structures of religion.
In this realm, religion is more open to explaining experience than is
science. To open itself up to normal
connectedness and transcendence, science can revise its epistemology to go
beyond the “objectivity” of the scientific method. The criteria of validity would then include not just coherence,
compatibility with empirical results, openness to test, and ability to predict
results. They would also include (cf.
Bausch, 2001, p.386) truthfulness and rightness (Habermas), respect for alter’s
freedom, intelligence, and personhood (Luhmann), positioning on the edge of
chaos (Kauffman), maintaining a balance between circularity and dialogue
(Goertzel), stewardship of the environment and of future generations
(Churchman, Laszlo et al), comprehensiveness in obtaining input of all the
stakeholders in a situation (Critical Systems Design).
To
consider extraordinary experiences of unity, science can thoroughly investigate
things like variations in functioning of fore and aft brain functioning (cf.
Newberg and D’Aquili, 2001). Regarding
ESP, scientists can improve their openness by humbly conceding the solid
evidence for its existence in some situations.
Then they can document extraordinary happenings in measured terms and
work to understand how they happen.
Religion
appeals to our highest yearnings for truth, beauty, greatness, community,
oneness, and service. World traditions
are replete with stories of heroic pursuits, art, philosophy, and philanthropy
inspired by religion. Religions tap our
innate idealism.
Both
science and religion profess to offer us a secure reality on which we can build
our lives. Where science requires
concentrated study and measured differentiations, religion offers simple,
emotionally satisfying solutions to life’s problems. Science abhors emotion and messy life situations that do not fit
its methodology. Religion messes with
the mess. It also offers compelling
stories and a community of support that science cannot match.
Religion
often perverts our need for self-esteem into a “we are better than they are,”
chosen few mentality with its concomitant zealotry and violence. Religious leaders often manipulate our need
for community and security to make us buy into the proposition that: you can
have salvation if “you believe as we do and do what we say,” thus relieving us
of both intellectual curiosity and a large part of our dignity.
Perhaps
because of their millennial histories and mythic forbears, religions offer food
for the whole person that upstart science cannot match. They offer deep poetry in myth, rituals, and
art that enriches our emotional and vital depths. Until science develops a similar holistic approach, it will not
provide a dynamic attractor that can win over the vast bulk of humanity. Religion will be indomitable. The hope for a universally appealing
attractor lies in a softening of ideological positions on the part of religion and
science.
Science and Religion as Social Processes
In
order to survive, social processes have to retain consistency as they
continually reproduce themselves. In so
doing, they provide a sense of security that orients us to nature and to each
other. Orthodoxy in these social
processes arises from the exaggerated pursuit of security that turns vital
processes into rigid, closed structures.
Orthodox
(mainstream) science manifests its rigidity by insisting on reductionist
methods, especially in its denial of any “reality” that does not fit its
Procrustean-bed methodology. Orthodox
(mainstream) religion is rigid in its maintenance of beliefs that run contrary
to good science and human welfare.
Orthodoxies like these mechanically reproduce themselves and thus
survive. Their strength is not being
replenished, however. They retain
relevance only on the basis of extensive integrated structures that derive from
their vital generative years.
Consistency
in their continual self-reproduction is not the only requirement that social
processes need to thrive or even to survive in the long run. Social processes also have to be open to,
and integrative of, new experiences.
Ben Goertzel puts it succinctly.
A successful belief system must be:
1.
an attractor of the cognitive equation
2.
productive in the sense of creatively constructing new
patterns in response to environmental demands.
A belief system cannot survive unless
it meets both of these criteria (p. 192).
Science,
religion, and other social processes are vital to humans surviving and thriving
when they maintain both circularity and openness. When they shrink to mechanical self-reproduction without openness
to environmental diversity, however, they shrink societies and individuals into
straightjackets of conformity, which curtail their thriving and imperil their
survival.
Rigid
orthodoxy will eventually kill any ongoing process, including us as persons,
with the curse of inflexibility. A
mechanical self-reproducing process, such as a stone rolling down a hill, will
eventually come upon a situation where it bumps, grinds, or slows to a
stop. Mechanical processes lack
flexibility. A living process on the
other hand, take a rabbit hopping down a hill, avoids obstacles, grazes on its
surroundings, and generates its own locomotion.
Regarding
religion in particular, as it taps into our connectedness and transcendence, it
is healthy. As it provides us a
practical security for constructive living, it is healthy. As it combines openness to self-transcendence
and solid coherence, it is wonderful.
As
religion lapses into rigid orthodoxies and bureaucracies, however, it
compromises its usefulness. It then
infects healthy transcendent human aspirations with toxins of
self-righteousness, dictatorial authority, and self-demeaning “sheep” behavior. Rigid religious orthodoxy imposes a dominator
model upon our most beautiful human aspirations. For it, the Latin phrase holds: corruptio optimi, pessima.
In
fairness, it should be noted that a religion that does not consistently
reproduce its beliefs also corrupts our highest aspirations. Such a feckless religion offers no guidance,
no security, and only sporadic, if passionate, experiences of connectedness and
transcendence. Such a religion relates
to the real thing in the manner that recurring acid trips relate to caring,
responsible living.
Regarding
religious relation to “God,” I believe there are good psychological and social
reasons for the apperception of God. I
also believe that our linguistic attempts to talk about God, while
understandable and even necessary are futile and potentially dangerous. They are futile because, as Nicholas of Cusa
(14th century) demonstrated with his negative theology, anything we
say about God is fragmentary and contradictory of other
things
that we can say about him/her/it.
Statements that are developed by formal logic from such meaningless
statements are doubly meaningless and false.
Such meaningless and false talk is the mainstay of rigid religious
dogma, morality, and governance.
Such
false talk about God is dangerous because it limits our awe and our ability to
connect with each other and to transcend our embodied situations. It is more dangerous as it generates
divisiveness and hostility between one faction professing one kind of false God
talk and another professing a different false talk.
There
seems to be a universality of wholesome religious impulse. There is a caring even altruistic impulse
evident in many species including our own.
There is evidence from brain scans that experiences of universal oneness
occur naturally during meditation.
Anthropological evidence supports the opinion that all human societies,
even cultures of reductionistic science, hold to some transcendent
beliefs. A belief in some kind of
ineffable oneness is a most comfortable (almost incontrovertible) feeling.
The
Biology of Belief
In
Why God Won’t Go Away, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili establish a
biology of belief in which mystical and transcendent states are natural states whose
occurrences are observable and measurable in brain activity. In brief, they show that the brain withdraws
blood circulation (attention) from lobes and areas of the brain that fix it as
a self in space and time when people engage in deep meditation. This withdrawal
generates an experience of oneness in which space, time, and self are not in
play. The authors proceed step-by-step through brain machinery
and brain architecture to myth-making, ritual, mysticism, and the origin of
religions. In the final two chapters,
they reflect upon the nature of reality and the realness of transcendent
reality.
The
authors are careful scholars and persuasive advocates who have articulated
important scientific insights into the nature of transcendent experiences. Scientific endeavors have always had an
opening to transcendence as evidenced by accounts of scientific study reported
by Descartes, Newman, Poincare, etc. It
now has a new opening to transcendence in the research reported by Newberg and
D’Aquili. This research opens the way
for a positive rapprochement between materialistic science and disciplined
research on transcendent experience.
The
authors make progress toward such a rapprochement on a basic level. They point out that transcendent experiences
stamp religious beliefs with the seal of authenticity. The experiences themselves are ineffable,
but they are described as contact with the divine, immersion into the whole, a
state of no-thingness. Believers, when
they experience transcendent states, find justification for their own cultural
beliefs. In this way,
transcendent
experiences justify all deep religious beliefs while not justifying any one of
them against another. Transcendent
experience is the deep root of religion that exists before the emergence of any
particular religion.
The
authors fail, in my estimation, to reach much more in the way of
rapprochement. In discussing the role
of metaphor in theology and science, they stress the role of metaphors, such as
a personal God, as reifications of otherwise ineffable experience. They also correctly identify scientific
language as an elaborate metaphor for expressing our relationship to the
material world. Using this equivocated
sense of metaphor they fallaciously equate the truth of religious expressions
to the truth of scientific ones. Such
slippery logic does not build confidence and intellectual cooperation. In general, the epistemology of material and
spiritual assertions is not essayed in this book. The sole criterion for truth proposed is a persistent feeling of
authenticity.
On
a more substantive issue, they conclude that human beings of all places and
times have experiences of Absolute Unitary Being. They believe that
The neurological roots of spiritual transcendence show that
Absolute Unitary Being is a plausible, even probable possibility…[And] the
realness of Absolute Unitary Being is not conclusive proof that a higher God
exists, but it makes a strong case that there is more to human existence than
sheer material existence (pp. 171-172).
This statement is grounded in old
static metaphysics. It portrays
Absolute Unitary Being [AUB] as static and reifies it into a permanent thing
that we might visit in contemplation or ritual.
Mystic Experiences and Life in the Exodus
In a process perspective, the
experience of absolute unitary being is a happening in which we
participate. We do want to reflect on
the meaning of that experience, but we must refrain from calling it a thing,
which it isn’t (and AUB isn’t either).
Reifying AUB “mystifies” it (in the pejorative sense). In reifying the experience we posit a world
divorced from the material world that cannot be talked about except in
poetry. We then assume that we
can merge into an absolute Oneness.
What kind of unity is an undifferentiated whole? Is it more unified that a differentiated
whole? Is a blank stare, for example,
more unified than the Gettysburg Address?
A phenomenology of religious experience
is needed to give some precision to the experiences that arise in the
neurobiology described by Newberg and D’Aquili. We enter varieties and degrees of these experiences in our daily
lives (sleep, dreams, daydreams, flashes of insight, etc.). These experiences, when they are working
properly, refresh us and inspire us to embody our better nature in our
lives. They are interspersed with our
“waking” (externally directed) awareness in ever-recurring cycles.
Hilaire Valiquette locates these cycles
in the architecture of the Exodus, wherein the Jews left Egypt, passed through
the Reed Sea, built tents in Sinai, received the Law from the mountain,
reconstituted themselves as a people, and crossed the Jordan to enter Canaan.
This Exodus experience is portrayed as follows:
/\
/ \
^^^^^^^^ ^ ^ ^ ^ / \ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^^^^^^^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Reed Sea Tents Mt. Sinai Tents Jordan Canaan
Chaos Rebuilding Emergence Rebuilding Chaos Rebuilding
(Adapted from Valiquette)
The waters and the mountain
were disruptive, transcending experiences.
The tents are experiences of grounding and constructing social
reality. Valiquette’s architecture fits
our recurring episodes of destroying-transcending ourselves intermixed with
experiences of grounding.
Experiencing transcendence
then is not some superhuman feat that requires the skills of a Christian
mystic, a fakir, a Buddhist monk, a Zen Master, or a Sufi. We transcend ourselves continually in
everyday events such as leaps of intuition.
I will describe the
interior phenomenology of transcendent experience, as I know it. I believe that my explanation can be
corroborated from extant literature. My
periods of reflection involve several levels of withdrawal from attention to
the external world. At the far end, sometimes
when I blank out, I may be nodding off.
At other times, I have extended periods of unfocused attention that
could be interpreted as experiences of undifferentiated unity. These experiences center me and often spark
creative activity.
More often, I allow ideas
to flit around in my mind without trying to control them. I interpret this as my watching some
activity of my unconscious mind that is sorting ideas to match some situation
that I find myself in. I find that this
kind of reverie is very useful in finding solutions that escape rational
conscious effort.
There are reports in the
literature of ideas that seem to be hanging in the air almost as part of a
Zeitgeist. The independent discovery of
the infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibnitz is a famous example. In my experience
I find that my ideas and matching ideas of others arise in the same time
frame. Is there any grounded scientific
theory that can explain such synchronicity?
There is one. Ervin Laszlo and Karl Pribram advance it, as
do some others. Laszlo argues
persuasively that chance alone cannot explain the evolution of our world, as we
know it, in the narrow time frame of 9 billion years since the Big Bang. Without some minimal (material) memory that
prevents advances from immediately reverting to less differentiated states,
there would be no progressive evolution.
Laszlo’s speculations
indicate that this memory works in the deep-space Zero-Point Field as a
holographic mechanism connecting activities that work on similar
frequencies. A mechanism such as this
would explain synchronicities and other psychic events that are presently
anomalies.
In the understanding of
reality proposed here, our transcendent experiences are continuations of a
universe-long process of material/spiritual reflection. This understanding has the promise and
possibility of unifying material and spiritual reflection.
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