On God & Morality: Robert Wright & Karen Armstrong

A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray

Two books here on faith and belief: The Evolution of God by Robert Wright and The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Wright holds that evolution deselects aggressive genes, enabling an ascent into greater moral order. Seeking an explanation for this morality, human beings posit God. Of Robert Wright's argument on gracilization (thinning of skulls), the reviewer tells us that "in each society the violent and aggressive males somehow ended up with a lesser chance of breeding. This process started some 50,000 years ago, and, in [primatologist Richard] Wrangham's view, it is still in full spate. And setting gracilization aside, can the later scriptures of West Asia--the Jewish and Christian Bibles and the Koran--be read as the record of a process of human domestication, a further taming and gentling of mankind over time? In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright argues laboriously that they can indeed be so read. . . as natural selection begot cultural evolution and cultural evolution begot successively more comprehensive forms of social organization, 'there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress toward moral truth. It is this moral order that, to the believer, is grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation. . . . And if the believer . . . decides to call that source "God," well, that's the believer's business. After all, physicists got to choose the word "electron".' "

Karen Armstrong writes of apophatic theology--the theology of the original, Greek-speaking Christian church. She calls it a "naysaying" theology. As her reviewer puts the matter, the theology was "a kind of religious language whose difficult task it was to acknowledge in human language the very inadequacy of human language.Armstrong writes the history of how apophatic theology was forgotten in the late Middle Ages; how rational and then quasi-scientific Newtonian theology rose to replace it in early modernity; how, when others were recognizing this as a mistake, fundamentalists tightened their embrace of it; and how, in the wake of the passing of modernity and the failure of both its theism and its atheism, postmodern theology may point toward the recovery of what was lost. A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray, postmodern theology argues, and prayer -- not proof -- is where religion rises or falls." More

Ayn Rand: Bankrupt Intellectually, Morally, & Artistically

"I consider Ayn Rand to be one of the most evil women of the twentieth century, completely morally bankrupt and fortunately unable to see any of her warped philosophy or economic theories gain any credence. If they had, the results would have been every bit as disasterous as Hitler or Stalin. To me, Atlas Shrugged is as despicable and dangerous a book as Mein Kampf." ( Found here.)

Unfortunately, her ideas and theories did gain credence, and in no less a person than Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chief, once her disciple. More about Greenspan near the bottom of this piece.

Almost all American philosophers do not consider Ayn Rand a philosopher or a thinker worthy of studied attention. You will not find her works taught in philosophy departments, except as examples of thought gone astray. You also won’t find her discussed in any standard works on the history of philosophy — either in general or specifically American philosophy. There may be rare instances to prove an exception, but that's all they are.

She doesn’t appear to be in Grayling’s two volume introduction to philosophy, the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, or Kuklick’s history of American philosophy. Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all.

By the time she died, at age 77 in 1982, Rand had delineated what she and her followers insisted was the most significant new philosophy since Aristotle (“objectivism,” which emphasized rationality as the defining characteristic of humanity) and was hailed as the godmother of small-government, pro-freedom libertarians (whom she dismissed as “hippies of the right”).

Ayn Rand was a self-declared “radical for capitalism” who praised the “virtue of selfishness” in Atlas Shrugged upon its publication in 1957. This 1,100-page, densely plotted tale, packed in equal measure with descriptions of rough sex and paeans to capitalist innovation, climaxes in a Castro-length radio address in which the protagonist, John Galt, lauds “the man at the top of the intellectual pyramid [who] contributes the most to all those below” and attacks “the man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude.”

She is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization.

Yet she has become iconic in some quarters. Alan Greenspan admits to having been a disciple, although he allows that he was grossly wrong about objectivism in that he smiled upon unregulated self-interest, which manipulated the financial markets into creatures such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Recently Greenspan publicly admitted he was wrong about his views.

Recent books, Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Goddess of the Market provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as one of the authors writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that.

For more click here, as well as at this site and this one.

The Preachments & Preenings of The New Atheists

"I think I am very close to concluding that this whole 'New Atheism' movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current 'marketplace of ideas' particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys. . . .

And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral 'truths,' their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about 'religion' in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?" More

Antonio Damasio: How Can Somebody Be Both Awake and Not Awake?

In Descartes' Error (1994), neurologist Antonio Damasio argued that we should not try to treat reason and emotion as separate. Rather, both are essential to decision-making. Our choices are not wholly rational.

The classical dichotomy is of head and heart, reason and emotions. Good decisions, according to classical thinking result from good reasoning. Instead, Damasio says good rational decisions depend on feelings.

His patient, Elliot, had prefrontal damage, and was smart, pleasant, and engaging. He scored normal on a battery of personality tests. Yet he made horrible, life-ruining decisions. Why? Because his intellectual capacity was severed from his emotions, so to speak.

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), Damasio takes a different argument--that the key to consciousness lies with the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment. The problem of consciousness, he maintains, has two related components. One is the question of how the "out there," the outside world, finds a parallel imagery in the brain. The other is how a sense of self arises from a "map" that correlates inside with outside.

He gains his theory from practice. His examples derive from real people with serious problems, He wants to understand how we know things about the world through our senses and also how at the same time we are aware of a self experiencing things. This is part of what he calls "the feeling of what happens."

In dealing with patients with brain damage, he developed insight into questions he had. As Damasio puzzled over effects to a patient's brain during an epileptic seizure, he sought an answer to a classic question among scientists and philosophers: What is it about the human brain and its networks of neurons that give rise to consciousness?

In The Feeling of What Happens he concludes that consciousness is layered. At its base lies a vague, animalian sense of self arising from the brain's "diagram" of the body. This proto-self props up the higher layers.

Even snails, have proto-selves, says Damasio, but they aren't really conscious. As to the seat of consciousness, the brain is a parallel processor, designed with redundant neuron networks. No single region of the brain has the seat of consciousness. Consciousness, he says,"is the feeling of knowing that we have feelings."

If his theory gains from practice, his practice was frought with troubled questions over real people. When young, he had a patient who was both there and not there, both conscious and not conscious. The man's consciousness became so empty that he could not respond to his name. At the same time, he recognized a cup of coffee and picked it up to drink it.

"This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them?" More

Spirituality & Health

Sheri Kaplan's faith "is unorthodox, but it's central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the HIV virus at bay, and that her faith is the reason she's alive today.

'Everything starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction,' she says. 'And I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level.'. . .

Gail Ironson is a professor at the University of Miami. Ironson, an AIDS researcher, runs down a battery of questions.

'During this time have you had any HIV- or AIDS-related symptoms?' Ironson asks.

'Nope,' Kaplan says. 'Nothing.'

'What percent of your well-being do you think is due to your own attitudes and behaviors versus medical care?' Ironson continues.

Kaplan laughs: '110 percent.'

Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not progressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS). In the mid-1990s, when having HIV was akin to a death sentence, Ironson noticed a number of patients like Kaplan never got sick. Ironson wanted to know why. And she found something surprising.

'If you ask people what's kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people would say spirituality,' she says. 'It was something that just kept coming up in the interviews, and that's why I decided to look at it.' Ironson calls the finding extraordinary. Ironson was one of the first researchers to connect a patient's approach to God to specific chemical changes in the body." More

Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.

Both Murphy and Brown believe in God but hold that the world can be explained by a physical account of it. Still, they argue that a physicalist account alone cannot make sense of meaning. We find meaning in our lives and in the world, which cannot be explained by a resort to only physical explanations. More