Faith in the Synapse
David Brooks’ thoughts on Neural Buddhism have been getting a lot of attention. He argues that trends in neuroscience no longer support radical materialism, but seem to support a kind of mysticism. This has implications:
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.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’ll check out his reading recommendations, but I’m not even sure Brooks is right on the science. Just because neuroscientists can describe what an ecstatic experience looks like and verify that believers are not lying when they say they are having such an experience doesn’t mean there isn’t a simple material explanation for it.
On the cultural side, I don’t agree that “neural Buddhism” represents some new great challenge to religious belief. It will undermine the faith of people whose spirituality relies exclusively on their ecstatic feelings – and that is a good thing for religion. If science can describe those feelings, it is likely that it can soon induce them in people. Belief that the Holy Spirit is the immediate cause of these feelings will cease, just as belief that God is the immediate cause of drought has ceased.
Ecstatic religious experience could become a part of spa treatments, or some kind of new therapy. Hot stones, deep tissue massage, then the transcendental-therapeutic mask. I find this silly and interesting, not threatening.
If neural Buddhism comes, it will be an invitation for American religion to move away from its emotionalism (and obscurantism) and back to serious theological reflection. I can’t wait.
James Wood wrote a TNR review (‘The Celestial Teapot’) of Sam Harris’ “Letter to a Christian Nation” a while back sort of anticipating the possible appeal of neural Buddhism. He took issue with these words of Harris –
“The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial — at once full of hope and full of fear — of the vastitude of human ignorance.”
– and responded: “But this rational mysticism seems a pretty poor substitute for the grandeurs of religious mysticism, however one judges the latter’s empirical content. Harris is welcome to sit on his floor and get off on his Buddhism; I’ll go and sit in a cathedral.”— Tony · May 14, 06:40 AM · #
It struck me that Brooks is deliberately fuzzy on whether the new science helps to justify a different attitude or if it just might cause one.
As for the science, I’m a bit underwhelmed by Brooks’ list of names, not because they’re not impressive, but because of the tenuousness of their relation to the topic at hand. Brooks is casually lumping together anything that looks like research on moral emotion with research that specifically has to do with the spiritual (as far as I can tell). Of course there’s the Skolnick effect to beware of—anything that has a bit of neuroscience somehow fools us into thinking there’s a real explanation there.
— Justin · May 14, 11:23 AM · #
I slightly disagree with Justin on Brooks’ name-drops. This is a pretty good list, though incomplete. Haidt and Hauser have highly readable books on moral psychology. Domasio is an absolute stud, his book Descartes’ Error rocked my world when I read it in college (Dan Dennett reviews it here). I’ve never read any of Gazzaniga’s solo books, but he’s responsible for The Cognitive Neurosciences III, which continues to kick my ass in the most satisfactory way. And Siegel’s The Developing Mind (summary here) was central in my development of the Myworld/Ourworld interactive dichotomy.
If I had one small nit to pick with Brooks’ article, it’s this: “Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”
I’m sure there are people making this argument, but I would bet $5 that this “totality of the facts”, Wittgensteinian concept of God gets replaced as soon as the implications of 10-dimensional reality sets in (rewatch this graphic, which Peter Suderman linked to here).
In fact, if I had to bet, I would say something like Franz Rosenzweig’s “primevel apodosis”, the “pure Then”, the All that is not Nothing (e.g., “…the affirmation of the non-Nought circumscribes as inner limit the infinity of all that is not Nought”) — I have a suspicion that this will be the ultimate winner in the concept of God. (Read his book Star of Redemption, which — surprisingly or eerily, your choice — anticipates quantum and string theory and offers a metaphysical structure in which they can reside).
God, not as something behind us, but as the Aught in front of us:
“For in front of us there lies as goal an Aught: the reality of God.”
(Note: I’m areligious, but Rosenzweig blew my mind. For the first time, I found a philosopho-theological text that offered terms of immanent connectivity with the most fundamental elements of scientific knowledge — particularly information theory. That’s, ah, unusual, to say the least.)
— JA · May 14, 04:37 PM · #
If science can describe those feelings, it is likely that it can soon induce them in people.
For example, with psylocibin.
— kenB · May 14, 11:54 PM · #
Or maybe even psilocybin. Stupid English orthography.
— kenB · May 14, 11:56 PM · #
“The Mysterious Flame” by Colin McGinn (a British philosopher now at Rutgers, if memory serves) is another good book that relates to what Brooks is talking about, whether Brooks is aware of it or not. McGinn does a pretty good takedown of the hard materialism (for want of a better term) theory of human consciousness, and explores some other possibilities. Definitely worth spending an afternoon or two reading.
— Mark in Houston · May 15, 03:31 AM · #
Rereading my comment, it’s kinda opaque: I meant that Brooks has named an impressive group of cognitive scientists, but the group is not necessarily impressive as a list of thinkers whose work relates to the study of religion. At least so far as I know their work.
— Justin · May 15, 04:50 PM · #
my <a href=“http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/05/neural_buddhism_the_psychology.php”>response</a>.
— razib · May 15, 07:05 PM · #
ok, one more time, here is my response:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/05/neural_buddhism_the_psychology.php
— razib · May 15, 07:08 PM · #