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Martin Rees

The tone of the recent attacks (see here and here) on Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal for having accepted the Templeton Prize might seem to indicate a certain lack of detachment on the part of those who are disparaging the eminent theoretical astrophysicist.

In comments made last year, Richard Dawkins referred to Lord Rees, an atheist, as “a compliant Quisling” because, according to Dawkins, he is “a fervent ‘believer in belief’”. This is, to say the least of it, intemperate language.

Lord Rees said in an interview in The Guardian newspaper that he was “not allergic to religion”. In fact, as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he attends chapel as part of what he refers to as “as traditional ritual”.

Rees demonstrates a refreshing modesty about  claims to understand reality. As he told The Guardian:

Doing science made me realise that even the simplest things are hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they’ve got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality.

What I find troubling about all this – apart from the intemperance of the language used by Rees’s critics – is that some scientists seem to believe that Lord Rees’s acceptance of the Templeton Prize somehow risks undermining the entire enterprise of science.

Really? If we accept that science is, as Dawkins et al assert, the ultimate rational activity and the only route to reliable knowledge, it would be very strange if it were so vulnerable as to be undermined by one scientist’s action in accepting a prize from a foundation that seeks to reconcile science and religion.

The “new atheist” critics of religion caricature religion as comprising unprovable beliefs, ridiculous rituals, and destructive conduct. Having set up this straw man,  they adduce fallacious arguments to demonstrate that the totality of religion is necessarily in conflict with science: science is the right way – indeed the only way – to establish reliable knowledge; ergo religion is anti-scientific and a block to the development of knowledge.

It seems to me that the new atheists’ reaction to Lord Rees’s acceptance of the Templeton Prize undermines their claims to be dispassionate investigators of reality. As a Bahá’í I find it very strange that scientists, who should surely be committed to open-minded investigation of the physical realities of the universe, are in fact resolutely committed to denying, a priori, the possibility that religion could also contribute to our understanding of non-material aspects of the universe.

The Bahá’í position is that science and religion are both essential systems of knowledge, each with its own proper sphere of activity and each complementing the other. Both are committed to promoting an unprejudiced and open-minded investigation of reality.  Religion is nothing like the straw man so vigorously attacked by Dawkins and others, and there are limits to what rationalism can tell us about ourselves.

In his blog, Everybody Means Something, Pete Hulme, points out that some concepts are beyond the reach of rationality:

In fact, the concept [of God] is inherently beyond proof or disproof in rational terms. It is a question of faith, and disbelief is as much an act of faith as theism. That’s a trap in reality from which there’s no escape, no matter how desperate reductionists of all kinds are to have us believe otherwise. We must choose what we believe: there is nothing there outside our minds that will compel us to believe one thing rather than the other on this issue. It is, though, imperative that we make this choice wisely. I have to leave it to you to decide what wisdom is in this case.

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Barney Leith

This is the second of a two part series on human reality.

Neuroscience – the latest fashion

What’s fashionable now? How about neuroscience? Brain-scanning technology is now advanced enough to allow scientists to observe changes in blood flow to different parts of the brain under varying conditions. So it would be rather easy to suppose that we can identify mind and consciousness with brain functioning. However, this can take us from science to “scientism”, as retired physician and clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis writes in a recent article in NewStatesman:

“The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness – from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self – is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between human life in the library or the operating theatre and animal life in the jungle or the savannah are more apparent than real: at the most, matters of degree rather than kind.

“These beliefs are based on elementary errors. Just because neural activity is a necessary condition of consciousness, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of consciousness, still less that it is identical with it. And Darwinising human life confuses the organism Homo sapiens with the human person, biological roots with cultural leaves.” [Emphasis added.]

Reductionism fails

As important as such scientific advances are, this kind of reductionism cannot begin to account for what it means to be human in the kinds of ways that we humans would recognize as being truly ‘us’.

For a start, reductionism fails to engage with the centrality for human beings of meaning.

Meaning and humanity

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Influential Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel homes in on just how central meaning is to the human condition:

“Human being is never sheer being; it is always involved in meaning. The dimension of meaning is as indigenous to his being human as the dimension of space is to stars and stones.” (Heschel, A. J., Who is Man? Stanford University Press, 1963, p. 51)

Heschel explains that we need to look at the totality of man and that this cannot be accomplished by scientific study only of aspects of human life:

“We are concerned with the totality of man’s existence, not only or primarily with some of its aspects. Vast scientific efforts are devoted to the exploration of various aspects of human life… Yet any specialized study of man treating each function and drive in isolation tends to look upon the totality of the person from the point of view of a particular function or drive. Such procedures have, indeed, resulted in an increasing atomization of our knowledge of man…” (p. 4)

Self-knowledge, says Heschel, is an inseparable part of our being.  We cannot be without that knowledge. Not to know is to know falsely, says Heschel.

“Ignorance about man is not lack of knowledge but false knowledge” (p. 6)

And man’s authentic existence “goes on in an inner space” (p. 7), a dictum that reminds one immediately of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s statement that:

“The reality of man is his thought.” (Paris Talks, p. 17)

None of this is to say that the scientific study of humans and our humanity is unimportant. Far from it, as Heschel points out when he says that there is “no substitute for the work done by the various sciences dealing with man.” (p. 8)

“Yet there is an urgent need for an approach seeking to identify what is unique about the humanity of man, a task beyond the scope of the sciences mentioned above.” (pp. 8–9)

Empirical intemperance

But the risk in the reductive, positivist approach to scientific studies of human functioning is what Heschel refers to as “empirical intemperance, the desire to be exact, to attend to ‘hard’ facts which are subject to measurement.” (p. 9). This, Heschel claims:

“…may defeat its own end. It makes us blind to the fact behind the facts – that what makes a human being human is not just mechanical, biological, and psychological functioning, but the ability to make decisions constantly….

“A human behavior pattern is not a monument to a life that is gone, but a drama full of life. It is a system as well as a groping, a wavering, a striking forth; solidity as well as outburst, deviation, inconsistency; not a final order but a process, conditioned, manipulated, questioned, challenged, and guided by a variety of factors.” (pp. 9–10)

Meaning and the rational soul

'Abdu'l-Baha

The human spirit, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá teaches, “distinguishes man from the animal” (Some Answered Questions, p. 208). It is the “rational soul”, that part of us which, according to Socrates, perceives the world in a spiritual manner and sees the essence of things. Self-knowledge is a precondition for knowing the world in this way. Hence the Socratic injunction to “know thyself”, to know who you truly are.

And who we truly are must encompass the rational soul, that part of us which, says ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

“…discovers the realities of things and becomes cognizant of their peculiarities and effects, and of the qualities and properties of beings.” (SAQ, p. 208)

But, says ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

“The human spirit, unless assisted by the spirit of faith, does not become acquainted with the divine secrets and the heavenly realities. It is like a mirror which, although clear, polished and brilliant, is still in need of light. Until a ray of the sun reflects upon it, it cannot discover the heavenly secrets.” (SAQ, p. 208–9)

The mechanistic philosophy underlying much 19^th century and aspects of 20^th century science – what One Common Faith (Bahá’í World Centre, 2005) refers to as “the iron dogma of scientific materialism” – has given us access to important knowledge about our parts. But it omits what is most important about our humanity: our conscious self-awareness, our capacity for reflection, our need for meaning, our yearning for transcendence – precisely the areas addressed by religions and spiritual traditions over the millennia.

But, when mechanism slides from being a useful framework for science to being an “iron dogma” about human reality, science and religion part company.

Reality is one

‘Abdu’l-Bahá teaches that reality is one. What we have dichotomized in our Cartesian way as body and mind, matter and spirit, are reflections of a single reality. To understand this one reality in all its diversity – indeed, to understand the reality of our humanity – we need both science and religion.

The elements of my grandson’s learning of language can be studied and accounted for by neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists. But what counts for him and those around him is that language empowers him to examine the realities of all things, to search for meaning, to connect with the transcendent realm, to become fully human.

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This is second part of the 10th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

This is the first of a two part series on human reality.

Exeter, October 1966, and my first lecture in the introduction to psychology course.

I’d just started my first undergraduate year at Exeter University and I’d managed to locate the premises of the psychology department, which were, for some reason, down in the town rather than up on the hill with the rest of the campus.

“What do you know about psychology?” The meshing of the lecturer’s black polo-necked sweater and beard made his head look as if it was sitting in an egg-cup.

The word “Freud” was hardly out of my mouth before the lecturer sneered and began to put us freshers straight about the realities of psychology.

A mechanistic theory of learning

We quickly learned that this was a department of behaviourists and positivists. The rule was, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. You cannot measure your thoughts, the argument went, ergo thought doesn’t exist. All that counted was stimulus and response.

Operant conditioning, we were told, was how animals – pigeons, dogs, monkeys, humans – learn. What went on in the black box between the S and the R, if anything, was irrelevant. Thus the beautiful complexity of animal and human behaviour and cognition and emotion – let alone notions of soul and spirit – were deleted tout court.

B.F. Skinner

Sigmund Freud

As I came to understand later, neither Skinner nor Freud turn out to be reliable guides to human life and behaviour. Skinner denied the inner reality that makes humans what they are. Freud, perhaps, made too much of it.

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The young child’s joy in learning language

Conditioning, an attempt to mechanize human learning, could never get anything as complex as language off the ground. When he was an infant my grandson developed his language skills willy nilly. Yes, his parents and grandparents spoke to him – had been speaking to him since he was born – and responded to his vocalizations. They applied stimuli, if you will. But no thought was given to systematic applications of stimuli and monitoring of responses, nor was there any schedule of reinforcement.

What happened was a joyous, chaotic process, full of errors, misunderstandings and achievements. It was a dynamic, social, complex process. My grandson learned language for the fun of it – behaviourism could never account for fun.

And now, at the age of five, he is a reasonably skilled exponent of linguistic skills with a rapidly growing vocabulary and a deeply embedded sense of how to use different tones of voice to get what he wants. Yes, he knows how to use language to wheedle and manipulate and to negotiate.

But that’s not all.

He is increasingly using language to make sense of his world, to grapple with meaning.

His rate of learning surely far exceeds what could have been accomplished by the use of operant conditioning, even had it been possible to use such a simplistic model to generate such a complex set of behaviours.

We’ll come back to meaning and humanity shortly. But I just want briefly to explore the tendency to apply reductive explanations to human complexity.

Human as mechanism

Descartes

I’ve long observed that the latest technology often becomes the fashionable explanatory model for human behaviour. For example, Descartes, familiar with the automata that have fascinated philosophers and scientists from ancient times and particularly in 17^th century France, proposed that the bodies of animals were nothing but complex machines. He did try to preserve a place for mind as an autonomous area of human activity, but inevitably, following where Descartes reluctantly led, mechanism became the standard ‘scientific’ explanatory theory. Mind came to be considered by some philosophers as an epiphenomenon, as “steam above the factory” of the mechanistic functioning of the brain.

Automata in the Swiss Museum CIMA

In the 19^th century, as photography developed, eyes were held to be cameras. In the first half of the 20^th century, information transmission between humans was likened to radio. By the second half of the 20^th century the human brain was explained as if it were a programmable computer.

Our fascination with technology has repeatedly led us to try to use the latest gizmos as our explanatory tools, even to the extent in some cases of insisting on a functional equivalence between the explanandum of human functioning and the explanans of  technology.

(next, Neuroscience – the latest fashion)

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This is first part of the 10th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

This is the 2nd and final part of a two part series on chaplaincy.

Last week I began to look at chaplaincy in the UK’s publicly funded National Health Service (NHS) as a profession that brings religion and science together in particularly interesting and challenging ways. The NHS requires the treatments it offers to be based on evidence of efficacy, a requirement that presses in on chaplaincy.

It is clear that chaplaincy has moved far from the stereotype of a male priest administering blessings to church members in hospital. In our postmodern and relativistic times, chaplaincy can no longer be assumed to be a good in itself. Increasingly people focus on spirituality but do not necessarily have any particular or strong religious affiliation. Chaplains have to find ways of making space for different narratives and of offering something for those who have no particular belief or do not belong to a faith community.

Chapter 5 of Paul Lample’s Revelation and Social Reality (2009, Palabra Publications) is strikingly useful in helping to clarify some of the issues in the philosophy of knowledge that postmodernism raises for chaplains as they cope with the relativistic world of the 21^st century.  Lample uses the terminology of “foundational” and “nonfoundational” approaches to knowledge as the basis on which to develop a Bahá’í approach to the problem of knowledge that may point towards ways of transcending the “religion vs science” dichotomy – a dichotomy which may turn out to be false.

So what does this mean in practice?

Two stories may help to illustrate some of the practicalities of healthcare chaplaincy. Careful reading of the stories will highlight all the elements highlighted by Paul Lample – language, justification, intersubjective agreement and relations of power.

A chaplaincy team leader regaled one of our groups of Bahá’ís training for NHS chaplaincy with a story from one of her hospitals. An elderly female patient had become deeply distressed, crying inconsolably. None of the nurses on the ward could figure out why the tears and distress, so they sent for the chaplain. The chaplain arrived on the ward and went to the patient’s bed.

The chaplain (also a woman) talked quietly with the distressed old lady, calmed her down and asked what was the matter.

It seems that a senior doctor (known in the UK as a “consultant”) on his ward round had discussed the old lady’s case across her bed with a more junior physician. The doctors had made no attempt to bring the patient into the consultation. The old lady had not been able to make sense of what they were saying, but had picked up some words that led her to believe that the doctors considered she was not long for this world.

She panicked and threw the ward staff, who were unaware of the content of the conversation between the two doctors, into confusion.

It took the chaplain, with her knowledge of people’s spiritual needs and her training in communicating with people at times of difficulty, to find out what was really troubling the patient, to check with the doctors what they had actually said, and to reassure the patient that death was not actually waiting at the bedside.

Another chaplain, the Head of Chaplaincy at a large city hospital in the north of England, told some of our trainees about the time he had been called to Accident and Emergency. One of the nurses pointed towards a cubicle.

“The patient in there has asked to see the chaplain,” she said.

The chaplain went over to the cubicle and peered in through the window in the cubicle door. Inside, sitting on the treatment couch was a large, tough-looking man, shaven-headed, tattooed, looking ready for a punch-up.

The chaplain thought about all the other places he’d rather be at that particular moment, but he screwed up his courage and, expecting the worst , went in through the door. “Hello,” he  said, “I’m the chaplain. Do you want to talk?”

The patient looked at him, grabbed his hand and burst into tears.

Not knowing how to respond, the chaplain sat while the man cried, calmed and began to talk. He was, as he looked, the tough guy, always in control, never at anyone’s mercy. But injured and in the strange environment of a hospital’s emergency room he was no longer in control. His life was in other people’s hands and this was an unsettling, even frightening experience for him.

In these two instances the medical staff had neither time nor training to deal with what were not medical problems. The patients, as are so many who find themselves in hospital, were suddenly faced with existential questions, questions about who they were, what was the purpose of their life, where were they going to?

In both situations, the chaplains acted to achieve intersubjective agreement with the patient about what the objective situation was and what their existential fears were. In both cases, the chaplains’ relative powerlessness and, in the latter case, vulnerability allowed them to come alongside the patients and to mediate between the patients and the complexities and power structure of the hospital.

How is the impact of these kinds of chaplaincy intervention to be measured? No X-Ray is able to show a broken heart and no fMRI scan can show what it is like to be searching for the meaning of suffering. It may seem that to demand that chaplains produce evidence of the efficacy of their work is to demand the impossible.

Definitions of spirituality

To begin to see how to measure the efficacy of spiritual care (if that’s what chaplains are understood to offer), it may be important to try to define spirituality. But this is not a simple matter. Mowat (2008) cites the thinking of sociologist Dr Tony Walter (Walter, T, “Spirituality in palliative care: opportunity or burden?” Palliative Medicine 16, 2, 2002, pp. 133-139):

He  wonders, as a sociologist, why there is such a focus on defining spirituality. He offers three explanations. Firstly spirituality and the work of defining it represents a critique of scientific reductionism and church establishment. Spirituality is a concept that cannot be reduced to that which is easily measurable. Whilst this is a problem, as we have discussed, for evidence based practice, it is also a statement that some aspects of human suffering and experience are immeasurable. As a society, he suggests, we have to decide whether the immeasurable is also the unimportant. Secondly he advances the view that the attempt to separate religion from spirituality is an attempt to challenge religion and established church institutions. This reflects a societal mistrust of institutions. (Mowat 2008:34)

In her review of the research literature about chaplaincy, Mowat came across a small-scale phenomenological study undertaken by a UK chaplain, Michael Wright, on the essence of spiritual care. Amongst other things, each of the 16 respondents in the study was asked what they understood by the word “spirituality”. Wright tabulated the responses and identified his respondents’ transcendent understanding or spirituality, “reaching beyond and within the self and the capacity to search for meaning by addressing the big questions of life and death.” (Mowat 2008:34).

Mowat considers that Wright’s conclusions are relevant for chaplains.

He notes that spirituality incorporates intangible and immeasurable features that contrast with the “high-tech” physical care which dominates hospital life.…

He concludes by noting that the lived experience of those interviewed is founded on the belief that all humans are spiritual beings. He expresses the hope that more research can be carried out perhaps using the opportunity of the investment in new information systems on patient spirituality and religious affiliation. (Mowat 2008:35, emphasis added)

Healthcare Chaplaincy

How to measure chaplaincy?

It looks as if the efficacy of what might be considered the real work of chaplains could be impossible to measure.

However, chaplaincy is being increasingly professionalised and is having to compete for funding and recognition in an NHS that is under political pressure to reduce public expenditure. In these circumstances chaplains have to find finding ways of demonstrating that their work is efficacious – for example, by helping reduce the length of hospital stays or the need for pain-relieving medication, or by improving the experience that patients have during their hospital stay – and explaining this to those who hold the purse strings. As Mowat says:

Healthcare chaplains are being asked to show that what they do results in desired outcomes for those they work for i.e. patients, families, staff, organisation, community. This requirement is linked to resource allocation. The question is how does healthcare chaplaincy expedite the healthcare journey for those who are recipients and providers of health care.

Healthcare chaplains are currently unlikely to be able to provide evidence based on the typical gold standard approach. Research that intends to show that an intervention or practice “works” has to produce some outcomes against which to measure the intervention or practice. If the work of the chaplain or spiritual care giver is to be shown to be useful it must show that some agreed and valued outcome is achieved. The problem for healthcare chaplaincy and spiritual care is that outcomes may not

a) be visible

b) be measurable

c) be available in the timescale of the “typical” research project

d) be agreed by all parties

e) be static over time

This does not mean that healthcare chaplaincy practice is not valued or valuable but it does mean that it may be difficult to demonstrate immediate outcomes. A good outcome in a health service is, arguably, to either resolve the health problem which has presented or provide care for those whose health problem cannot be resolved. A good outcome contributes to wellbeing. At times the good outcome causes some distress and anxiety before it is achieved, for instance cessation of smoking or changes in diet and exercise.

The healthcare chaplains or spiritual carers understanding of a “good” outcome will be just as complex given the theological understanding of suffering and ill health. A good outcome for spiritual growth and comfort might be an act of forgiveness which in its process causes great distress and anxiety. In common with other healthcare professions, the outcomes for chaplaincy may not be immediately measurable and have a more long term ripple effect.

There is a complexity in establishing outcome measures for healthcare chaplaincy. This is reflected in corresponding lack of intervention research currently carried out. Currently studies tend to focus on the process of chaplaincy rather than the outcome. (Mowat 2008:21–220

It is not my purpose here to give definitive answers to the questions raised by the need to justify the practice of chaplaincy and its funding from the public purse. The issues raised are too complex to be satisfactorily addressed in a relatively short space such as this post. But I do want to indicate that this is an area in which there is a nexus between religion and science. And the nexus is not a simple one.

Religion & science – dichotomous or coherent?

There would seem, on the face of it, to be a conflict between the understanding that chaplains have of their work being about spirituality and wholeness – a concept closely related linguistically to health – and reductionist demands for demonstrable efficacy (of the kind obtainable from double-blind trials of pharmacological products).

What One Common Faith (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 2002) describes as “the iron dogma of scientific materialism” just will not do when it comes to studying the essentially human and spiritual service offered by chaplains.

This brings us back to the question of what can count as evidence of the efficacy of the work of chaplains. Are double-blind trials the only way to do science, or are there other more qualitative modalities that might be more appropriate when it comes to the studying the intangibles of chaplaincy interactions?

Chaplains can and do gather evidence from their own and colleague’s work. If the scientific method is understood as a systematic knowledge-generation cycle of observation, theorising, experimenting, refining, practising, then most chaplains learn to do this when they are training. What is known as reflective practice is now a central part of chaplaincy. And established chaplains increasingly engage in action research, which is also a form of reflective practice. Such modalities could well be practical examples of “nonfoundational” approaches (see above, Lample 2009) to the generation of knowledge about chaplaincy and its efficacy.

Such processes are familiar to Bahá’ís, for whom processes of consultation, action, reflection, and further action are becoming very much part of their life. Bahá’í understandings of the nature of knowledge and praxis are becoming more sophisticated, as a study of Paul Lample’s book will show, and as the experience of Bahá’ís as they gain experience of how to learn as a community and how to put their learning to work.

Much more research remains to be done. Mowat’s (2008:70) map of the categories that emerge from the literature may be seen as a starting point for this research.

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This is second part of the 9th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

Can the efficacy of a profession that focuses on spiritual care be measured in any way?

I have a particular interest in one such profession, that of healthcare chaplain. I should say at this point that I am not, and never have been, a chaplain. However, I have represented the UK Bahá’í community’s governing body, the National Spiritual Assembly, on one of the UK’s healthcare chaplaincy bodies, the Multi Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy (MFGHC), since its establishment in 2002 – and before that, from 1998, on the Multi Faith Joint National Working Party, the MFGHC’s predecessor body.

I am also one of the two members of the  National Spiritual Assembly’s Chaplaincy Team, which is responsible for recruiting and training Bahá’ís who wish to serve as healthcare chaplains in the National Health Service – but not as chaplains in the Bahá’í community itself, since the responsibility for pastoral care resides with the community’s local and national elected Assemblies.

Evidence-based treatment

Hospitals in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) offer chaplaincy as one of their services for patients. The salaries of chaplains employed whole- or part-time by NHS Trusts are paid from the Trusts’ publicly provided funds, as are the costs of administering chaplaincy and spiritual care departments in hospitals and other healthcare settings.

The NHS, like other health services and providers, requires that the treatments it offers are evidence-based. This requirement also increasingly applies to the work of healthcare chaplains.

This raises questions about the relationship between religion and science in this particular context. Chaplaincy has been seen as a quintessentially religious exercise, and the impact of chaplaincy interventions are often intangible and immeasurable, as I shall show. However, no NHS service can be exempt from the requirement to produce evidence of its efficacy, so chaplains and chaplaincy researchers are having to ask themselves such questions as: What kind of evidence can be adduced to show that patients and staff benefit from interventions by chaplains? What kind of interventions should chaplains be offering if their work is to be effective. To put it bluntly, does the work of chaplains help patients get better? And does it help NHS clinical and other staff function better?

It also raises a question about what would count as evidence in this context.

Chaplaincy in the NHS

Before we can measure the efficacy of the work of chaplains, we need to know what it is that chaplains actually do.

Chaplaincy has been a part of the NHS since its inception in 1948. It was assumed before the NHS came into being and in the early years of the health service that chaplaincy was a good in itself and that it needed no external justification. However, as Heather Mowat notes in her substantial and informative review of the – admittedly limited – research literature on chaplaincy effectiveness (Mowat, H., The Potential for Efficacy of Healthcare Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care Provision in the NHS (UK). Aberdeen: Mowat Research Ltd, 2008), UK society has changed considerably since 1948 and the NHS with it.

The NHS is a public service aimed at providing basic healthcare for all as a result of taxes raised through national health insurance. The NHS is a major focus of political policy for all the main parties. The relationship between investment, resource allocation, professional practice, professional power, measurable outcomes and patient voice and votes is part of the picture of the NHS. The NHS is both subject to, and influencer of, the political winds and moods of the UK. Arguably it is a barometer for wider social and cultural relationships. (Mowat 2008: 13)

The increasingly multicultural and multifaith make-up of UK society has led to demands for greater equality among the diverse populations and elements now resident in the UK. Governments have responded by putting legislation on the statute book to outlaw discrimination and to ensure that public authorities treat people equally.

The growth of individualism has also reshaped the health service. When the NHS came into being, just after the end of the Second World War, British people were inured to collective provision of services. As the decades have passed, though, individualism has come to rule the roost and “patient choice” has become a mantra for governments of all stripes. This, linked with a parallel growth in interest in spirituality (as distinguished from religion) has inevitably had its impact on chaplaincy, notably with respect to the development of chaplaincy provision by faith communities who had not previously been involved.

So what do chaplains do?

For many, the stereotyped view of a chaplain is of a priest (male, of course) who comes onto the hospital ward, administers holy communion to the church-goers, gives a blessing and departs. It’s a long time since that stereotype from the time when chaplaincy was assumed to be a good and (in England) to be the preserve of the Church of England has born any relationship to the reality.

The NHS careers website has this job description:

NHS chaplains offer a service of spiritual care to all patients, their carers, friends and family as well as the staff of the NHS. The spiritual dimension of life expresses purpose and meaning.  “The spiritual dimension evokes feelings which demonstrate the existence of love, faith, hope, trust, awe, inspirations; therein providing meaning and a reason for existence. It comes into focus particularly when an individual faces emotional stress, physical illness or death”– Narayanasamy, 1999.

Healthcare chaplaincy occupational standards define the work as that which “enables individuals and groups in a healthcare setting to respond to spiritual and emotional need and to the experiences of life and death, illness and injury, in the context of a faith or belief system.”

The work of the chaplain embodies the spiritual, pastoral and religious care associated with these needs found in the healthcare setting.

The website of the UK Board of Healthcare Chaplaincy describes the chaplain’s role this way:

Chaplains are an integral part of healthcare teams and provide a service to patients, their carers and families. The role of chaplains is focused on the spiritual and religious domains, the way these relate to health and wellbeing, and how they can enable people to cope with the challenges and transitions that accompany illness, injury and suffering. This means that chaplains are highly experienced at supporting people with a wide range of pastoral issues and concerns. They also have an understanding of the clinical procedures that patients undergo and the work of other healthcare professionals.

As challenging as these descriptions show the role of chaplaincy to be, Ann Ulanov issues a challenge (Ulanov, A., The Space between Pastoral Care and Global Terrorism. Scottish Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy 10:2, 2007, p. 12) to chaplains working in an increasingly plural and fractured world:

You who see struggle and sorry in your work as chaplains, who witness the fragility and strength of people reaching for new life in the midst of their old life crumbling around them … see remnants.

Mowat comments:

She [Ulanov] challenges chaplains to act as witnesses to the moment, to hold more than one story or version of events in order that others can learn to do the same and to make links and connections in order to encourage globalism and tolerance. She calls this remnant consciousness. Her view is that chaplains are called to work with this remnant consciousness in order to encourage global perspective which is the only way forward. The alternative is to have a rigid “one story” tyrannizing as the whole story….

Ulanov is making a case for healthcare chaplaincy in the context of more fractured and less “religious” society [than was the case when chaplaincy was assumed as a good]. (Mowat 2008:15)

She continues:

Provision of religious care for patients who practise a religion no longer meets the needs of a society that is declaring itself to be more interested in spirituality than religion.

Hospital chaplaincy therefore is now increasingly concerned not only with serving and supporting those with specific religious beliefs and practices but also those with no religious beliefs and practices. (Mowat 2008:15)

Here, as in other aspects of life in the 21^st century, relativistic post-modernism is playing its part in shaping what can and cannot be said and done in the name of chaplaincy. No kind of fundamentalism is acceptable inside the portals of the NHS.

For a balanced and illuminating Bahá’í perspective on transcending the dichotomy between fundamentalism and relativism in the context of knowledge and truth, it is well worth reading Chapter 5 (“A Problem of Knowledge”) in Paul Lample’s excellent Revelation and Social Reality (West Palm Beach, Fla., Palabra Publications, 2009, pp. 161–189). Mr Lample makes the following points that would seem to be highly relevant to chaplaincy in the 21^st century, especially in light of Ulanov’s challenge:

Knowledge that is nonfoundational is intimately tied to language, justification, intersubjective agreement, and relations of power; it is not something that stands apart from human beings. It is ever-evolving. It is tied to experience and is sensitive to context… The human enterprise is, then, the never ending investigation of reality, the search for truth, the quest for knowledge, and as important, the application of knowledge to achieve progress, the betterment of the world, and the prosperity of its peoples. (Lample 2009:173 Emphasis added)

Language, intersubjective agreement and justification are at the heart of chaplaincy practice, of the way chaplains relate to and interact with patients, other chaplains, their faith communities, and management; chaplains must now justify – to themselves, to the patients, to their faith communities, to the NHS – what they are and what they do; and, inescapably, they stand in relations of power with respect to others.

A suitable metaphor of nonfoundational thought is standing on a raft. There is no anchor for knowledge, so change is a constant. With the generation of new insights and new beliefs, it is necessary to regularly alter some essential elements of understanding – to replace pieces of the raft. However, we cannot revise all aspects of our knowledge at the same time – we need some reliable piece of the raft on which to stand to replace other parts. (Lample 2009:174)

In any case, whatever the merits of relativism in addressing metaphysical concerns, it is nonfoundationalism, not relativism, that most closely correlates with the Bahá’í teachings on knowledge when dealing with the contingent world. A nonfoundational approach to knowledge, like relativism, recognizes the legitimacy of different points of view and the limitations on certainty. Unlike a relativistic approach, however, it permits judgments about inadequacy or error. (Lample 2009:177–78)

To be continued next week …..

……………………..

This is first part of the 9th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

For some years I chaired a public policy group called the Religion and Belief Consultative Group on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights (RBCG). The group comprised representatives of the major churches and non-Christian faiths, the Inter Faith Network for the UK (IFN), a few faith-based social action organisations, and two atheist organisations – the British Humanist Association (BHA) and the National Secular Society (NSS).

Religion & Belief Consultative Group

The RBCG came into being at a time when the UK Government was preparing what became the Equality Act 2006 for its passage through Parliament. The legislation defined six equality “strands”, one of which was “religion or belief” (the others are race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and age).

The RBCG continued its work after the Act came onto the statute book and as the government moved on to prepare what became the Equality Act 2010 for its passage through Parliament.

The RBCG provided both a forum for its members to keep in touch with developments in the equality legislation and a link between the religion or belief strand and the Government. Towards the end of its existence it worked closely with the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

Canterbury Cathedral, Mother Church of the Church of England

The RBCG collapsed in the end because the representatives of the mainstream churches (Church of England, Roman Catholic Church, Methodist and other Free Churches, and the Salvation Army) decided that they no longer wished to sit around the table – which was mostly the EHRC table – to discuss equality issues with organisations whose intention, they considered, was to exclude religion from the table.

As the  churches’ representatives wrote:

For us, the problem lies in the conception that a single body can ‘represent’ the diverse approaches and philosophies brought together under the Religion and Belief strand. Whilst we recognise that Religion and Belief are held together in European as well as British politics and practice, it is our considered view that effective and genuine consultation between the EHRC and faith communities cannot be effectively carried out through a group that expressly includes  bodies whose public commitment is to exclude religious faith from the public square,  There should be consultation, of course, with all those affected  by the religion and belief “strand”, but as the strand includes these mutually incompatible stances, in our view  it is better done another way.

The churches were at pains to stress that this did not signify a refusal to engage in conversation with secularist organisations nor that they were dropping out of inter-faith dialogue.

… we emphasise very strongly indeed that this action in no way reduces our commitment to interfaith dialogue – or indeed to dialogue with other strands of the equality agenda.

Secularist organisations

The existence and modus operandi of the RBCG offer some interesting insights into what the much-loved Bahá’í principle of unity and diversity can mean in practice.

Before commenting on this, however, I need to say something about the two secularist organisations that were members of the RBCG and amongst the most faithful (if I can use this term of those who reject the idea of faith) attenders.

The National Secular Society, which has been in existence since the 19th century, exists to oppose any role for religion in the public realm – “challenging religious privilege”, as its strapline proclaims. It does not, as far as I am aware, lay claim as an organisation to a belief “system”, although its website sets out a number of general principles (which are soon to be replaced by a secular charter).

As a Bahá’í, I disagree profoundly with some of these principles; others of them, on the other hand, I can accept.

The British Humanist Association also has some principles with which Bahá’ís would not have an problem – although, as in the case of the NSS, there are some with which Bahá’ís would profoundly disagree.

The BHA website identifies Humanists as “atheists and agnostics who make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values”. The BHA is…

…the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. We promote Humanism, support and represent the non-religious, and promote a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.

Curiously for an organisation which repudiates religion, the BHA seemed to want nothing more than to be treated as a kind of religion. (They offer what can only be described as pseudo-religious services: wedding and partnership ceremonies, funerals and memorials, naming ceremonies, and chaplaincy.) Their representatives at RBCG meetings constantly complained about what they saw as the privileges accorded to religious organisations, but clearly wanted to be in the same position. The representatives of the various religions, on the other hand, did not accept that they had a particularly privileged position in the scheme of things, but argued that religions, structured and embedded as they are in local communities, were in a position to meet the needs of many more people than could be reached by government schemes. The Humanists, they pointed out, lack that kind of structured and embedded relationship with local communities.

Diversity – but where’s the unity?

At some point in the 20^th century the UK discovered diversity.

Britain is a culturally diverse country.

Major influxes of immigrants from former colonies in the years since the end of the Second World War have stimulated irreversible changes to the composition of British society. Not all of the white majority population welcomed these changes and there were some extremely violent reactions against the immigrants.

As the new residents – and ultimately citizens – of the UK found their feet and began to participate in the UK’s political processes, pressure grew on successive governments to legislate to outlaw racism and, over time, other forms of inequitable treatment of various segments of the population.

“Diversity” was the name of the game. Here were all these people who had settled (or whose parents or grandparents) in the UK from many parts of the world. They looked different, they had different religions, culture and customs. Who was to say that one was better than another? Or that the religion, culture and customs of the “sitting tenants” should be privileged over those of the newer residents?

This relativistic post-modern perspective morphed into a political ideology known as “multiculturalism” that came to inform policy decisions made by central and local government. Identity politics ruled the roost and people were (are) dealt with as members of a set of categories – race, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and so on – more than they were as individuals.

One prominent academic and parliamentarian said, approvingly, that Britain was a community of communities. The boundaries of these communities were seen as impermeable. If you were a Bangladeshi migrant living in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, your needs and the treatment you received from government were defined by your membership of that category.

Following disturbances in a number of cities in the north of England in 2001, academics and politicians began to wake up to the problems that were emerging from the kind of segregated living that multiculturalism had given rise to. Government policies had reinforced the human tendency of migrants to live around people “like them”, to reproduce to some extent the lives they had lived in neighbourhoods and villages “back home”. And for many of the migrants, home was still Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nigeria. One result of these “parallel lives” – as one of the reports into the 2001 disturbances referred to them – was that people of one community might never meet people of another. There was truth in the dictum that Britain had become a community of communities.

But this was not a truth to be welcomed – certainly from a Bahá’í perspective – since “diversity” had become the be-all and end-all of social, economic and cultural policy. Local government and voluntary organisations were encouraged to have “diversity officers”, functionaries whose job it was to somehow promote this vision of “diversity”.  Notoriously some local authorities decreed that Christmas would no longer be publicly celebrated, but would be replaced with a “winter festival”. One local authority is reputed – probably apocryphally – to have named this Christmas-replacement “Winterval”.

Ironically, the very people this neologism was meant to placate were the least likely to be upset by overt and public celebrations of Christmas. I, for whom Christmas is not a religious festival, regularly receive Christmas cards from Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Zoroastrian friends.

David Cameron, British Prime Minister

In a recent speech, British Prime Minister David Cameron roundly criticised multiculturalism both as an ideology and as government policy:

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

Unity is the human reality

The all-embracing focus on diversity almost entirely omitted the other crucial element in the human equation, unity.

The Bahá’í International Community’s (BIC) statement to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (a prime example of the snappy conference titles so beloved of the UN), held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, is unequivocal in its condemnation as a mental illusion of the notion that there are separate and incompatible groups of human beings:

At the root of all forms of discrimination and intolerance is the erroneous idea that humankind is somehow composed of separate and distinct races, peoples or castes, and that those sub−groups innately possess varying intellectual, moral, and/or physical capacities, which in turn justify different forms of treatment.

The reality is that there is only the one human race. We are a single people, inhabiting the planet Earth, one human family bound together in a common destiny, a single entity created from one same substance, obligated to ‘be even as one soul.’

Recognition of this reality is the antidote to racism, xenophobia and intolerance in all its forms.

As the BIC’s statement makes clear, human oneness is a reality supported both by religion and science.

The reality of human oneness is fully endorsed by science. Anthropology, physiology, psychology, sociology and, most recently, genetics, in its decoding of the human genome, demonstrate that there is only one human species, albeit infinitely varied in the secondary aspects of life. The world’s great religions likewise uphold the principle, even if their followers have, at times, clung to fallacious notions of superiority. The Founders of the world’s great religions have all promised that one day peace and justice would prevail and all humanity would be united.

And yet it is the mental illusion of separation that has been at the root of the policy of multiculturalism, which was supposed to be the cure for the very intolerance it unwittingly promoted.

Lessons from the RBCG

So what were the lessons learned from the Religion and Belief Consultative Group about unity in diversity?

Mainly this, that even a group of people committed to a frame of reference in which diversity was more important than unity could recognise common concerns and develop a language and a style of discourse in which those concerns could be articulated.

The views of RBCG members were frequently radically opposed to each other, and yet it was possible to have a frank, but not brutal, conversation, which allowed people to say what they needed to say.

Of course, one would not expect the evangelical Christian representatives to find much common ground with the atheists and secularists. And yet the fault lines did not always lie where one might expect. More often than seemed probable, I found myself agreeing with expressions by the representatives of the NSS or the BHA of the importance of certain values and of universal human rights. I did not always resonate with what was said by some of the religious representatives. What religion is – in doctrinal understanding and as a lived experience – for me, as a Bahá’í, is often quite different from what it is for those whose religions conform to the kinds of traditional patterns that are the subject of trenchant criticism by secularists.

I learned a lot from my years of chairing this group. I brought my experience of Bahá’í consultation and of chairing consultative groups to the table. I tried to ensure that all felt free to express themselves frankly but in a dispassionate manner. Many times I failed, but I was happy to develop friendships with people with such diverse beliefs and practices.

Beyond tolerance

And, yet, it was not enough to stop the dissolution that comes from an exclusive focus on diversity – a tolerant focus, albeit – pulling the group apart.

As the BIC’s Durban statement points out:

A proper understanding of this fact of existence [the reality of human oneness] has the capacity to carry humanity not merely past racism, racial and ethnic prejudice, and xenophobia but also beyond intermediate notions of tolerance or multiculturalism – concepts that are important stepping−stones to humanity’s long−sought goal of building a peaceful, just and unified world but insufficient for the eradication of such deeply rooted afflictions as racism and its companions.

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Barney Leith

The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe. – Larry Dossey, MD

… continued from last week …

Stirring up the angular gyrus

Out-of-body experiences (OBE) are distinct from NDEs, although people often report having OBEs as part of their near death experiences.

Back in 2002, University of Geneva Hospital neurologist Dr Olaf Blanke accidentally gave an epilepsy patient an OBE. Dr Blanke and his team had inserted up to 100 electrodes in the patient’s brain in an effort to find out where her epilepsy originated. The patient had no idea which electrode would be stimulated or when, but every time part of her brain known as the angular gyrus was stimulated she reported that she felt she was floating above her body and watching herself.

This experience came as a complete surprise to both patient and the neurological team. However, it was not possible to draw firm conclusions from the event, since it was not part of a controlled study of OBEs.

The angular gyrus is part of a region of the brain, the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), that controls our sense of our own body and its orientation in space. The suggestion is that if the information being sorted by the TPJ becomes scrambled we may experience ourselves as being outside our body.

In 2007 Blanke induced experimental OBEs by fitting subjects with 3-D headsets and making them watch a virtual figure (a picture either of themselves or of a dummy) standing two metres in front of them being stroked on the back. Blanke varied the experimental conditions and found that subjects who had seen the virtual figure, whether themselves or a dummy, being stroked while themselves being stroked can be tricked into subconsciously relocating their sense of self away from where it should have been.

Blanke acknowledged that his illusion did not create full out-of-body experiences. A comment on a neurophilosophy blog draws a distinction between the elements of OBEs that Blanke was able to induce and the full out-of-body experience:

The above article mistakenly described the experiences produced by the research teams as out-of-body experiences. The journal Science and Science News (AAAS) describe that “this week’s issue of Science, two teams of cognitive neuroscientists independently report methods for inducing elements of an out-of-body experience in healthy volunteers.” The operating word is elements. The experiences reported by the volunteers have 3 elements of some out-of-body experiences but they were not in fact out-of-body experiences a distinct state of consciousness and neurophysiology from the normal waking state.

The OBE is characterized by a visceral feeling of being embodied in a more subtle body away from the physical body itself, often with exotic “energetic,” “take-off” and “re-interiorization” sensations. In the virtual reality experiment volunteers did not feel they were no longer present in their body and did not report these other characteristics of the OBE (significantly more numerous than the 3 selected by the researchers).

In an OBE, the individual is not always looking back at the physical body at a few feet of distance (although this can occur in some cases). OBEs are not always a visual phenomena either, as there are OBEs without sight and blind people may have OBE’s. The majority of OBEs also occur mainly when the eyes are closed and when the body is in a more vegetative state with brain wave patterns distinct from even lucid dreaming — let alone the normal waking state of the volunteers.

Scientific materialism doesn’t cut it

Why are the sceptics sceptical? There’s no doubt that the thinking of many scientists is firmly held by a materialist paradigm, what One Common Faith, a document commissioned by the Bahá’í community’s world governing council, the Universal House of Justice, refers to as “the iron dogma of scientific materialism”.

It seems to me that scientific approaches that deny the existence of any kind of life beyond what we can see, feel and touch will never get to the heart of the NDE as an experience. Such approaches exclude the possibility of a non-material, but real, world a priori.

There’s no doubt that death itself will remain a mysterious realm and that we will continue to be fascinated by the accounts of those who seem to have ventured to the borders of that realm and peered over the fence.

Knowledge from the religious realm

Perhaps this is an area in which scientists should acknowledge that religious and spiritual texts include important clues about what happens to us after our bodies die. Science and religion are humanity’s two great knowledge systems. There is a strong case for cooperation rather than confrontation between these two systems when it comes to investigating the reality of near death experiences. This article on the howstuffworks.com website puts it well:

If neurology does come up with the definitive explanation for NDEs, the mystery may still remain. Science could explain the “how,” while leaving the “why” unanswered. Discovering an explanation for NDEs may reveal a door to the metaphysical world, which could possibly be unlocked — and explored — by science.

As physician Dr. Melvin Morse wrote, “Simply because religious experiences are brain-based does not automatically lessen or demean their spiritual significance. Indeed, the findings of neurological substrates to religious experiences can be argued to provide evidence for their objective reality”.

Bahá’í teachings

Now, I have to declare an interest here. I am a believer. I believe that there is a life after death.

Bahá’u’lláh, Whose teachings I strive to put into practice in my life, has revealed more about the life after death than any previous Manifestation of God.

The Bahá’í teachings compare the life we live on this plane of existence to the development of the baby in the womb. Just as the baby in the womb develops the organs, limbs and senses that it will need to live and fulfil its potential out of the womb, so we in this life develop the virtues and qualities of the soul that we will need in the next life.

The soul, which begins its journey in this life, continues to progress in the life after death.

What is the nature of life after death? Bahá’u’lláh teaches that this realm is, and will remain, a mystery.

The nature of the soul after death can never be described, nor is it meet and permissible to reveal its whole character to men.

According to the Bahá’í teachings, souls retain their individuality and consciousness after death. Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, explains:

The possibility of securing union with his beloved in the next world is one which the Bahá’í teachings are quite clear about. According to Bahá’u’lláh the soul retains its individuality and consciousness after death, and is able to commune with other souls. This communion, however, is purely spiritual in character, and conditioned upon the disinterested and selfless love of the individuals for each other.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes it clear that the next life is close to us, perhaps as close to us as we are to the baby in the womb, even though the baby is completely unaware of what is happening a matter of inches away:

Those who have passed on through death have a sphere of their own. It is not removed from ours … but it is sanctified from what we call “time” and “place”.

Intriguingly, Bahá’u’lláh tells us that dreams, “the most mysterious of the signs of God amongst men”, are proofs of immortality. The dream world can be said to be both “within thy proper self and is wrapped up within thee” and a realm which “lieth hidden in the innermost reality of this world” and which the spirit “having transcended the limitations of sleep and having stripped itself of all earthly attachments” traverses.

Verily I say, the creation of God embraceth worlds besides this world…

If the sphere of those who have passed on through death is not removed from ours, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, perhaps some of those who come close to death are permitted a glimpse over the horizon that we see as death. Yes, changes take place in the physical substrate of the brain and its activity, but these changes are not necessarily the whole story.

Over the horizon

Mirza Ali Kuli Khan

Ali-Kuli Khan, a well-born Iranian Bahá’í, was sent to the United States in 1901 by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to act as translator for revered Bahá’í scholar and teacher, Mírzá Abu’l-Fadl, known to all as Mírzá.

Khan would often ask Mírzá about the afterlife, but Mírzá would always smile and evade the question. Eventually, Mírzá told Khan that he would not be able to grasp the answer he would give. Khan, pride piqued, protested that he read Kant and the Greeks. Of course he would understand Mírzá’s answer.

“Yes,” said Mírzá, “but I know you could not understand about immortality. How do I know? The reason is, because you ask. This is a mystery that will not pass into words. It can only be felt in the soul.” (Marzieh Gail, Summon Up Remembrance. Oxford: George Ronald, 1987, p. 219)

Khan was indignant, but Mírzá would not change his mind.

Some years later, Khan was taking a walk on a New Hampshire beach:

That morning on the beach at Portsmouth, enjoying the sunlight on the rippling blue water, Khan noticed some men going into a boathouse nearby. He watched idly as they dragged out a heavy rowboat, launched it, climbed aboard and rowed away. Deep in his thoughts, he kept an eye on the boat, and he saw that the farther it moved on, the smaller it got, until to his surprise, it vanished completely and nothing remained of it but empty blue water and the bow of the horizon.

Mírzá Abu’l-Fadl

Khan said to himself, “What happened to the boat? Where are the rowers gone? Did they melt away into another world, and onto a different sea? Or are they still out there rowing in our world, on this very same sea? And because they are moving and I am sitting on the beach, the limitations of my physical body and the curve of the earth have thrust us apart.”

With these thoughts, Khan felt he had his answer that could not be put into words, and he thanked Bahá’u’lláh for it and blessed Mírzá Abu’l-Fadl… (Summon Up Remembrance, p. 219).

Perhaps my teenage son’s dream of a near death experience vouchsafed him a glimpse over Ali-Kuli Khan’s horizon, the horizon we call death.

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Barney Leith

The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe. – Larry Dossey, MD

“Dad, I had a dream last night.”

I was driving my thirteen-year-old son home from school sometime in the mid-1980s. “Tell me about it,” I said.

“I dreamt I was looking down at myself in bed,” he said. “And then I started to go through a dark tunnel towards a bright light.”

I almost drove off the road. “It sounds like you were dreaming about a near-death experience. I’ve been writing about near-death experiences for the university,” I said.

Ascent of the Blessed, Hieronymus Bosch

At the time I was taking a course on the philosophy of the paranormal – jointly taught by a philosopher and a theologian – as part of my  degree in social psychology and philosophy. I had opted to write an extended essay on near-death experiences, NDEs.

I read much of the literature that was available at the time about NDEs. The questions on many people’s minds were – and remain – do NDEs tell us anything about life after death? Which is likely to give a more reliable account of NDEs: science or religion?

Chris Cherry, the philosopher who co-taught this fascinating course, pointed out that those who reported NDEs had, by definition, not died. Death is most definitely a one-way gate. Discounting the spurious idea of conversations through a medium with the dear departed, nobody who is alive can tell us about life after death.

But some would argue that near death experiences come tantalisingly close

The literature describes a range of experiences from out-of-body excursions around operating rooms to the classic trip through a dark tunnel towards a light, variously interpreted according to the subject’s cultural and religious background. Some who reach the light describe meetings with deceased family members, waiting on the “other side” to welcome the dying one into the post-mortem world, with significant religious figures – including Jesus – or even with God.

At some point on this journey something occurs which sends the person back into their body and they awake with a jolt.

Believers and sceptics

Explanations for these experiences generally fall into two camps. There are those – let’s call them ‘believers’ – for whom the experiences are definitely evidence that there is a life after death, that life after death is a wonderful place or experience, and that they will be welcomed into that world by family or friends, just as the baby that is born into this world is welcomed by his or her parents and relatives.

Then there are those – ‘sceptics’ – who reject entirely the notion that there is a life after death and who posit scientific explanations, or claimed scientific explanations. Anoxia, the cutting off of the supply of oxygen to the brain, was said by some, for example, to be the cause of a dreamlike illusion that people experience as a near-death experience. Or the person claiming to have had an NDE is merely reporting half-heard conversations and partially seen sights during a hypnagogic state – hearing, it seems, is the last of our senses to switch off as we become unconscious and the first to switch back on as we regain consciousness.

The believers see the sceptics as attempting to explain away what they have rejected a priori, the notion that there is life after death. The sceptics see the thinking of the believers as equally shaped by their a priori belief in life after death.

When posed as in these adversarial terms, the questions about near death experiences would seem to be insoluble.

Pam Reynolds

One of the most striking accounts of a near-death experience comes from musician Pam Reynolds.

In 1991, when she was 35, she underwent surgery for an aneurysm deep inside her brain. To get at the aneurysm the surgical team had, in effect, to put Pam to death. Cardiologist Michael Sabom describes the procedure, known as hypothermic cardiac arrest:

It allowed Pam’s aneurysm to be excised with a reasonable chance of success. This operation, nicknamed “standstill” by the doctors who perform it, required that Pam’s body temperature be lowered to 60 degrees, her heartbeat and breathing stopped, her brain waves flattened, and the blood drained from her head. In everyday terms, she was put to death.

When brought to “standstill” and before surgery commenced, Pam was found to be “dead” by all three of the standard clinical tests for death: her electroencephalogram was silent; her brain stem did not respond to the clicks that played out of  speakers in Pam’s ears; and no blood flowed to or through her brain.

After her return to consciousness Pam gave detailed and accurate descriptions of surgical instruments, such as the bone saw, that had been kept out of her sight until she was at “standstill” and she was able to recall things that were said by the doctors and nurses in the operating room, despite having “clickers” in her ears to block out any external sounds and to test for brain-stem response.

Pam’s NDE took her through the classic dark tunnel into the light. She reported that she’d met her grandmother and other deceased members of her family, who, she said, “were specifically taking care of me”.

She wanted to go on into the light, but she had children to care for, and she knew that she had to go back. Her uncle took her back through the tunnel and, as she describes it, gave her push back into her body. Reentry was like jumping into a pool of ice water. “It hurt,” Pam said.

You can read Pam Reynolds’ description of the experience here. Sadly, she died of heart failure on 22 May 2010.

Gustave Doré's depiction of the highest heaven as described by Dante Alighieri in the Paradiso

Real or imagined?

So was Pam Reynolds’ experience the result of changes in the chemical and electrical activity in her brain, as some scientists theorise? Or was it a real experience – whatever “real” might mean in this context?

Neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick, a leading British authority on NDEs considers that changes in brain activity cannot alone explain all the facts. He described the state of a brain during an NDE in a documentary:

The brain isn’t functioning. It’s not there. It’s destroyed. It’s abnormal. But, yet, it can produce these very clear experiences … an unconscious state is when the brain ceases to function. For example, if you faint, you fall to the floor, you don’t know what’s happening and the brain isn’t working. The memory systems are particularly sensitive to unconsciousness. So, you won’t remember anything. But, yet, after one of these experiences [a NDE], you come out with clear, lucid memories … This is a real puzzle for science. I have not yet seen any good scientific explanation which can explain that fact.

An article in The (London) Times in October 2006 describes Fenwick’s own journey from sceptic to believer that human consciousness survives death. After listening to a patient who described a near death experience that took place during cardiac surgery that went wrong, Fenwick began to collect stories of NDEs:

They tell of dying patients being greeted by dead relatives and of close family members being visited by the patient at the moment of passing — a girl reported “knowing” the moment that her brother had died in hospital on the other side of the city and of being “reassured” by him that he was all right. There were many reports of a bright light floating above dying patients, generally believed to be the soul leaving the body. Patients speak of tunnels leading towards a bright, welcoming light.

Scientists have rational explanations for these phenomena, which include hormonal and neurotransmitter changes in the body as it is closing down, a veridical perception triggered by the heart stopping and the general suggestibility of patients and relatives.

Fenwick is not unsympathetic. “The cognitive neuroscience explanation for the girl’s experience of her brother’s death is that he was expected to die, and she resolved the pain of that internally.” And he is equally in tune with the physical explanation of light phenomena. “But that doesn’t explain the fact that the light is repeatedly and consistently associated with love, peace and compassion,” he says. “It’s this lovely, ineffable quality which distinguishes it.”

However, according to this account, two studies conducted on separate aspects of Pam Reynolds’ experience claim to be able to explain NDEs.

REM intrusions

A 2006 study, done at the University of Kentucky, claims to show that NDEs are actually hallucinations caused by “rapid eye movement (REM) intrusion”, a sleep disorder in which the sleeper’s mind can wake up before his body and generate hallucinations and a feeling of being physically detached from the body. The Kentucky researchers believed that the triggering of REM intrusions in the brainstem – which can continue to function after other parts of the brain have died – by cardiac arrest or other traumatic events – could explain how people can experience sights and sounds after brain death has been confirmed.

To be continued next week …..

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This is first part of the 7th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

Are we ineluctably selfish, as the excesses of the consumer culture and the brouhaha over bankers’ bonuses suggest? Are the neo-Darwinists and positivists, such as Richard Dawkins, correct in claiming that competitiveness and conflict are fundamental and ineradicable drivers of human behaviour?

Does science “prove” that we humans are always selfish even when we are behaving apparently altruistically? Or is there any evidence for altruism transcending our “red in tooth and claw” nature?

Compassion & the Golden Rule

For millennia religions, spiritual traditions and humanistic philosophies have had, at their core, an ethic of reciprocity known as The Golden Rule:

The Golden Rule requires that we use empathy – moral imagination – to put ourselves in others’ shoes. We should act toward them as we would want them to act toward us. We should refuse, under any circumstance, to carry out actions which would cause them harm.

Mother Teresa

When she delivered her TED Prize lecture in February 2008, historian of religion, Karen Armstrong, called for the creation and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, a document that would transcend religious, ideological, and national difference, and that would remind people of this core value in their own traditions and scriptures. In this lecture Armstrong says:

What I’ve found, across the board, is that religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you to do something. You behave in a committed way, And then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.

Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion – the ability to feel with the other in the way we’ve been thinking about this evening – is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call “God” or the “Divine.” It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the Divine.

And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted – has said – and put at the core of their tradition what’s become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” That, he said, was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called ren, human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.

When I discussed compassion with a group of trainee healthcare chaplains from a number of faith traditions recently, they agreed that compassion was at the heart of their faiths and at the heart of their work as chaplains – as, it should be, at the heart of much of what we do in service to our fellow human beings.

What happened to compassion?

Sadly though, compassion is all too often not part of our daily lives. Politics, business, even education and healthcare often tend to exclude compassion as being too soft, not managerial enough. Compassion does not seem to offer value for money!

The belief that human beings are motivated only by self-interest has long provided the underpinning assumption of psychological and sociological theorisation  about human nature and behaviour. The evidence of our ineluctable aggression seems “obvious”, especially when human conduct is seen and interpreted through the lens of positivist philosophy, Freudian psychology, and neo-Darwinism.

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

‘Compassion,’ says Karen Armstrong in her new book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (London: The Bodley Head, 2011), ‘has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required’.

It even inspires overt hostility. The controversy surrounding Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–97) shows how difficult it could be for a relatively unsophisticated woman, who was making a heroic efforts to address a crying need, to find her way through the labyrinthine and often corrupt world of twentieth century politics. The vitriol of some of her critics not only reveals an uncompassionate tendency in modern discourse … but also a visceral distaste for the compassionate ethos and a principled determination to expose any manifestation of it as “lying, pretence and deceit”.

Ironically, Auguste Comte, philosopher and founder both of sociology and of positivism as a philosophy of knowledge, looked forward to an enlightened age in which cooperation between people would be based on “their own inherent tendency to universal love”. “No calculations of self-interest,” said Comte, “can rival this social instinct, whether in promptitude of breadth of intuition, or in boldness and tenacity of purpose.”

So what about the science?

In their inspiring and informative book, A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage, 2001), psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Farin Amini, and Richard Lannon set out to examine the extent to which science illuminates our understanding of love.

Although science has risen to take its place as Freud’s successor, it has not been able to sketch a framework for love that is both sound and habitable. Two persistent obstacles block the way.

First, a curious correlation has prevailed between scientific rigor and coldness: the more factually grounded a model of the mind, the more alienating….

Science is a newcomer to the business of defining human nature, but thus far it has remained inimical to humanism. Seekers of meaning are turned away at the door.

The second impediment to a wholly scientific description of love is the dearth of hard data….

When he ventures into love’s domain, the uncompromising empiricist is left with little to discuss. A child’s fierce and inarticulate longing for his parents, the torrential passion between young lovers, any mother’s unshakeable devotion – all are elusive vapors that mock objectivity’s earnest attempt to assign them to this gene or that collection of cells.

What is true of the kind of science Lewis, Amini and Lannon are considering, is equally true of dominant strands of Western social and political theory. In The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), political scientist Kristen Renwick Monroe comments:

The Heart of Altruism

Altruism’s significance comes not from its empirical frequency, which is relatively rare, but because its very existence challenges the widespread and dominant belief that it is natural for people to pursue individual self-interest. Indeed, much important social and political theory suggests altruism should not exist at all.

Monroe sets out to present a theoretical framework that could lead to revisions in the dominant self-interest paradigm. As she points out:

The implications for general theory and for the social policies based on the self-interest paradigm can hardly be overstated.

Deep rooted assumptions of self-interest

How is it that scientific arguments and findings that claim to deny the existence of compassion and altruism or that reduce it to an expression of self-interest are so dominant? This has been the normative discourse for so long that it seems “obvious” that humans can only be self-interested. Those who wish to demonstrate the existence of compassion as a fundamental and non-self-interested dimension of human nature and behaviour have to work very hard indeed to overcome the ingrained scepticism of academia, corporations, governments, and the media.

The assumptions and beliefs that scientists hold about human nature inevitably underlie the questions they ask and the kind of findings they expect to arrive at. These assumptions and beliefs shape the kind of work that is regarded as legitimate and which will be supported by the scientific establishment.

This is not to say that there are no studies demonstrating genuine altruism and that there are no scientists who start from an assumption that altruism and compassion are real phenomena, not reducible to self-interest. But they would are in the minority.

Time for a paradigm shift?

Is it time for a Kuhnian paradigm shift? And if so, where would the push for that shift come from? Perhaps the world’s religions and spiritual traditions can take the lead. Perhaps there are scientists who listen to their spiritual sensibilities and who, perhaps, find meaning in poetry and the arts. Will they take their spiritual insights into their science?

This is not a peripheral question. The acknowledgement, the acceptance and the encouragement of compassion by both religion and science have a fundamental bearing on the quality of life of every person on the planet. It will take deep-rooted faith to ensure that this understanding informs decisions taken by governments and businesses and organisations of all kinds everywhere in the world.

If we need an example of one person’s lifelong expression of compassion for the plight of humanity at all levels – individual, families, communities, whole nations – we need look no further than ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Many are the stories of his compassionate response to the materially and spiritually poor. He extolled compassion as one of the great virtues:

Praise be to God, Bahá’u’lláh hath lifted the chains from off the necks of humankind, and hath set man free from all that trammelled him, and told him: Ye are the fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch; be ye compassionate and kind to all the human race. Deal ye with strangers the same as with friends, cherish ye others just as ye would your own. See foes as friends; see demons as angels; give to the tyrant the same great love ye show the loyal and true, and even as gazelles from the scented cities of Khatá and Khután offer up sweet musk to the ravening wolf. Be ye a refuge to the fearful; bring ye rest and peace to the disturbed; make ye a provision for the destitute; be a treasury of riches for the poor; be a healing medicine for those who suffer pain; be ye doctor and nurse to the ailing; promote ye friendship, and honour, and conciliation, and devotion to God, in this world of non-existence.

‘We urgently need,’ says the Charter for Compassion…

…to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarised world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries.

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This is the 6th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and  religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

I beseech in you, the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken

With these words mathematician Jacob Bronowski concluded the 11^th part – on the theme of “Knowledge or Certainty” – of his momentous 1970s BBC TV series, The Ascent of Man, with this quote from a letter Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in August 1650

In the closing sequence Bronowski crouched by a pond at Auschwitz into which had been tipped the ashes of the victims of the Nazi programme to annihilate Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped and others who did not match up to the distorted vision of human perfection that underpinned Naz racial ideology.

Jacob Bronowski

The central argument of Bronowski’s TV series was that science can be, should be, a force for good, that science has been and will continue to be crucial for the ascent of human understanding and well-being.

However, science, he emphasised, is a human undertaking and subject to human weaknesses. One of these weaknesses – to which we may all be prone, whether we are scientists, theologians, politicians or taxi drivers – is that of absolutism, of claiming a level of certainty about what we know – or think we know – that draws us along the path to moral arrogance.

“There is no absolute knowledge,” said Bronowski.

And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man. London: BBC, 1973, p. 353

“When people believe that they have absolute knowledge,” Bronowski continued,

…with no test in reality, this [the annihilation of millions at Auschwitz] is how they have behaved. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. (Bronowski, 1973, p. 374)

In Bronowski’s view, it was arrogance, not gas, that killed the victims of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz is a mind-numbing place, a vast flat area enclosed by wire fences, entered through the gatehouse through which the infamous trains of cattle trucks carried the Jews of Europe to their deaths. Here the gas Zyklon-B, a product of German science, and industrial-scale management efficiency ensured that the combustion products of the first of those selected by the camp doctors to die would be rising into the sky within 20 minutes of their arrival.This was the ultimate outcome of the dehumanising impact of an absolutist ideology. The names of those who passed through the gas chambers and furnaces of Auschwitz were not recorded.

And yet the human spirit survived. One of the “kapos”, a prisoner working in the building where those not sent to the gas chambers but chosen to live in the bleak barracks and to be worked to death were stripped of their hair, their belongings and their personhood, rescued the family photographs that so many of the deported Jews had brought with them in the mistaken belief that they were merely being relocated. The kapo put the photographs in a suitcase and buried it. The suitcase containing the photographs was unearthed after the liberation of Auschwitz, and many of the pictures are on display in this same building.

(l to r) Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and a representative of the Sikh religion. The Veneralbe Bogoda Seelawimala from the London Buddhist Vihara is benind the Archbishop

I visited Auschwitz on a freezing day in November 2008. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, had invited representatives of Britain’s main faiths to accompany them as a symbol of our determination to bring an end to religious intolerance. I was the Bahá’í representative. We were with a large contingent of Year 11 and 12 high-school students.

As we circulated around the rescued pictures of families – children, parents, aunties, uncles, grandparents – enjoying holidays, celebrating weddings and birthdays and festivals, I bumped into Dr Williams. We looked briefly into each other’s eyes and I knew immediately that he felt the same intense grief that I was experiencing. So much life and happiness, so many relationships, so much potential, annihilated by what Jacob Bronowski calls “the monster in the war machine”.

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts. (Bronowski, 1973, p. 370)

As darkness fell, we – the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop, the religious representatives and the students, gathered around the end of the railway track closest to where the crematoria had stood. The sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn blown by Jews to mark certain religious occasions, blasted into the night; the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop and one of the students recited prayers, and we placed lit candles on the railway track in memory of the “tortured ghosts” who had passed through that place of death.

(Many years ago I had the honour of knowing Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who had himself been interned in Auschwitz and many members of whose immediate family had perished there. Hugo was a man of extraordinary humanity, warmth, openness and humour; he was spiritual and religious in the best sense and a leading advocate of inter-faith dialogue. The human spirit survives, even in the face of such horror.)

Claims to absolute knowledge in science are very likely to be demolished by further research. Claims to absolute knowledge in religious settings are more difficult to shift.

In fact, the mind-set underpinning religious faith has to change. In Revelation and Social Reality (2009), Paul Lample reviews the insights that emerge in Richard J. Bernstein’s book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Bernstein considers that there is a pendulum swing in almost every discipline between what he calls “objectivism” and “relativism”. Objectivism is the view that knowledge must be grounded on an absolute basis; relativism is the view that claims to knowledge, truth and morality exist only in relation to a particular culture. There is a cyclical relationship between these two epistemological positions.

This line of thought embellished over the centuries has led, according to Bernstein, to a “grand and seductive Either/Or.” “Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos.” It is the choice between objectivism and relativism. However, he views this dichotomy as “misleading and distortive.” (Lample, 2009, p. 172)

Is there a transcendent position that will allow us to escape this dichotomy?

Yes, says Lample. It is what he calls a “nonfoundational” approach to knowledge.

In a nonfoundational perspective, reality does exist, but human beings are limited in their capacity for understanding and, therefore, must struggle over time to derive more useful descriptions and insights about reality that can guide more effective and productive action in the world. (Lample, 2009, p. 173)

In other words, what becomes human beings as they search for truth and generate knowledge, is a certain modesty, a humility, a willingness to doubt and question and to “think it possible [we] may be wrong”. We must, as the Universal House of Justice admonishes us, avoid triumphalism. Rather it behoves us to ensure that we develop and maintain a humble posture of learning.

The human enterprise is, then, the never ending investigation of reality, the search for truth, the quest for knowledge, and as important, the application of knowledge to achieve progress, the betterment of the world, and the prosperity of its peoples. (Lample 2009, p. 173)

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This is the 5th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

The first time I read the Kitáb-i-Íqán – The Book of Certitude – in which Bahá’u’lláh sets out that aspect of His teachings so often short-handed by Bahá’ís as “progressive revelation”, I was amazed to find this:

What “oppression” is more grievous than that a soul seeking the truth, and wishing to attain unto the knowledge of God, should know not where to go for it and from whom to seek it?

Well, perhaps this particular gem didn’t lodge in my mind on my very first reading of the Íqán, but it certainly brought me up short on subsequent readings – and continues to do so. It is a challenging precept and differs radically from what I am sure most people believe, that the most grievous oppression is deprivation of life and liberty.

But that’s not Bahá’u’lláh’s perspective. What we humans need more than anything is knowledge, in particular knowledge of God.

In its message to the Bahá’ís of the World for Ridván 2010 the Universal House of Justice emphasised the “centrality of knowledge to social existence” as a fundamental concept underpinning social action and reminded those reading the message that:

The perpetuation of ignorance is a most grievous form of oppression; it reinforces the many walls of prejudice that stand as barriers to the realization of the oneness of humankind…

So, how to overcome ignorance and the prejudice that ignorance gives rise to?

I wonder if these four Bahá’í principles and practices can help answer this question:

1.      human oneness and solidarity;

2.      independent investigation of truth;

3.      consultation;

4.      universal participation.

Human oneness and solidarity, expressed in the kind of mutual support of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speaks when He says, “For this reason must all human beings powerfully sustain one another…” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 1.), give rise to a culture of learning in which, as the Universal House of Justice says in its Ridván 2010 message to the Bahá’ís of the world “all consider themselves as treading a common path of service…

…supporting one another and advancing together, respectful of the knowledge that each one possesses at any given moment…

That’s quite a challenge for a culture in which certain kinds of knowledge confer superior status and power on their possessors. Those who have laboured long in the fields of academe to gain degrees and doctorates may not feel inclined to respect the knowledge of the less educated and trained in their particular fields.

Ironically, scientific knowledge is slippery stuff. Earlier today (as I write) I was listening to a reading on BBC radio of the story of Noah from the King James Bible. How curious, I thought, that those who originally compiled this story clearly had no problem with the idea that Noah could be some 600 years old. And for them, the cosmology that described God as creating a firmament to separate the waters above from the waters below – in the Noah story the waters that prevailed upon the earth fell through the “windows of heaven” and welled up from the “fountains of the deep” – was normal.

In the modern age, this cosmology seems bizarre, a curious relic of an age of flat-earth ignorance. Our science-based cosmology, big bang and all, is surely more accurate, superior to the superstitious nonsense of the ancient world.

Schematic of the Big Bang

And yet perhaps our cosmology is at least in part as mythological as that of the ancient Hebrews. There’s a nice Terry Pratchett quote which prompts me to wonder about the big bang:

In the beginning there was nothing, and it exploded.

So how does “nothing” explode? And why? And why at the particular moment at which it apparently did so – setting aside, for the sake of the question, the impossibility of talking in terms of time before the universe came into existence. By definition we can have no evidence of what happened before the big bang; it is vastly difficult and unimaginably expensive to reproduce what happened within seconds of the big bang – as in the Large Hadron Collider; and yet physicists and cosmologists get into acrimonious debates about theories and models for which we may never have anything approaching empirical evidence.

Now, here I am hampered by my ignorance. I don’t even know if my questions make any kind of sense. But what I really want to say is that today’s scientific knowledge stands a good chance of being shown to be too limited or just plain wrong at some point in the (not too distant) future. And what is rejected today may become the accepted standard tomorrow.

Alfred Wegener

One emblematic example of these scientific about-turns was the gradual acceptance of meteorologist Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, first published in 1912 and subject to much scientific opposition. “Drifters” and “fixists” engaged in polarized debate over several decades before the assumption that the earth was solid was replaced by the theory of continental drift as the accepted model for the shapes and dispositions of the continents. Much scientific work had to be done before plate tectonics became accepted as the mechanism underlying continental drift.

While it may not make much difference to our daily lives whether or not the universe came into being as the result of the big bang, scientific controversies can have a dramatic impact on how governments deal with actual or possible threats to security, such as those arising from climate change. Everything will depend on whether the notion that the predominant driver of global warming is human use of fossil fuels is accepted as scientifically demonstrated or not. However, ideological debate has taken over and trust in the objectivity of the scientists and in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been seriously, perhaps fatally, undermined.

Science is prone to corruption, as is religion. Science is a social activity and scientists are subject to social pressures from their peers, their research institutions, governments, the media.

Indeed the very nature of science in some fields is prone to being misunderstood. Farzam Arbab, a physicist who, in 1971, joined an interdisciplinary group concerned with developing integrated approaches to rural development in Colombia, found that there was an extraordinary emphasis, for what was then a relatively new area of knowledge, on a procedural approach to science.

The Lab, the Temple, and the Market (Click for Link to Text)

Why was there … so much emphasis on creating elaborate models, on making precise measurements, and on finding “witness” populations, as if science was reducible to a simplistic application of a few rigidly defined methods?

– Farzam Arbab, “Promoting a Discourse on Science, Religion, and Development” (in Sharon M. P. Harper, ed.,  The Lab, the Temple, and the Market)

In other words, science in this context was being practised almost as a series of rituals rather than as a means of generating knowledge appropriate to the purposes of development.

Instead of providing further scientific rigour – as the interdisciplinary group expected from a physicist – Dr Arbab pleaded…

…for flexibility, for the gradual consolidation of a set of facts, and for seeking insights, rather than formulating grand theories and complex models. (p. 157)

He observed that the development field fell prey to competition between different academic disciplines, each of which wished to shape the field according to its own underlying ideological presuppositions. Development thinking also overemphasized the application of technology but did little, if anything, to advance the scientific culture of the people who were the supposed beneficiaries of development projects.

Development’s focus on tools and procedures led to its ignoring…

…the exigencies of systematic and structured learning, an essential characteristic of any approach that claims to be scientific. (p. 158)

“But,” says Dr Arbab…

…while science can offer the methods and tools of inquiry and learning, it alone cannot set the direction; the goal of development cannot come from within the process itself. The path of development must be illumined by the light of moral and spiritual principles emanating from religion, but religion willing to submit its proposals to the scrutiny of science. (p. 158)

Science clearly needs a moral and ethical context and guidance with which to operate. In the absence of the kinds of principles Farzam Arbab refers to scientists are capable of behaving in monstrous ways, as the Jews who fell victim to the experimentation of Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ of Auschwitz found.

This bring us back to the four Bahá’í principles listed above:

1.      human oneness and solidarity;

2.      independent investigation of truth;

3.      consultation;

4.      universal participation.

Taken together, they provide a framework that will allow science to flourish and be less prone to ideological bias – which some might consider a form of prejudice. They may also encourage different sciences to work together.

Crucially, these principles also underlie this most interesting statement by the Universal House of Justice in its Ridván 2010 message to the Bahá’ís of the world:

Access to knowledge is the right of every human being, and participation in its generation, application and diffusion a responsibility that all must shoulder in the great enterprise of building a prosperous world civilization.

So knowledge is not the sole possession of elites; knowledge should not, cannot, be corralled and used to promote divisive forms of status and power. Each and every person on the planet has the responsibility to contribute to the generation, use and spread of knowledge.

Here, clearly, the head of the Bahá’í Faith is setting out a spiritual and ethical principle that can and should guide science, understood as the systematic generation of reliable knowledge and insights. This would seem to be exactly what Farzam Arbab means when he refers to the illumination provided to the path of development by principles emanating from religion.

It will be interesting to evaluate – in a scientific way, of course – the impact of this spiritual and ethical guidance on the development of science.

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This is the 4th in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

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Barney Leith

This is the third in a series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly. For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

I am opposed to the laying down of rules or conditions to be observed in the construction of bridges lest the progress of improvement tomorrow might be embarrassed or shackled by recording or registering as law the prejudices or errors of today.

– Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Nineteenth-century British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel is one of my heroes. Although small in physical stature, he was a giant in terms of vision, daring and accomplishment. Some of the greatest and most innovative structures of Victorian Britain were his. He worked with his father on the first tunnel under the River Thames, for example, and he designed the flattest, widest brick arch bridge in the world (which is still carrying main line trains, even though today’s trains are about 10 times as heavy as any Brunel ever imagined).

Wharncliffe Viaduct

His greatest achievement was the Great Western Railway linking London and Bristol, which ran its first trains in 1838. He personally surveyed and engineered the route, the bridges, tunnels and many of the stations; and he designed track that would allow his trains to travel more quickly then any other trains of the time.

Great Western Railroad Steam Engine City of Truro

But for Brunel, even the Great Western Railway was not an end in itself; his vision was that a passenger could buy a ticket in London and travel to New York, using the railway to travel to a port and then taking passage in one of the steamships that Brunel had also designed to cross the Atlantic.

Brunel combined vision, imagination, theoretical knowledge, practical skill, readiness to innovate, and a systematic approach to huge projects. He was no desk-bound engineer; he spent much of his time at the supervising the construction of his projects. He learned on the job.

Inevitably for such a visionary and innovator, he did make some spectacular errors, but he was never defeated. Much of his work has stood the test of time and is still in daily use in the 21^st century.

It is worth pondering Brunel’s warning about “the laying down of rules or conditions”. How often do we fall into the trap of “recording or registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”? There are many examples – some laughable, some poignant – in almost every area of human endeavour, including science, medicine, engineering, technology and religion.

One laughable example is that of Dr Dionysius Lardner, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College London, who claimed that a train running away down the gradient in one of the major tunnels on Brunel’s Great Western Railway would reach 120 m.p.h. The passengers, he said, would suffocate. Brunel dismissed Lardner’s absurd claim by showing that his calculations disregarded air resistance and friction, a basic error on Lardner’s part.

Wright Brother's Flyer in 1904

The idea of powered flight by heavier-than-air machines also came in for a certain amount of academic ridicule.

Joseph Le Conte, Professor of Natural History at the University of California, set out a careful argument in the November 1888 issue of Popular Science Monthly to show that “a true flying machine, self-raising, self-sustaining, self-propelling” would be physically impossible.”

Leading nineteenth-century British scientist Lord Kelvin is alleged to have declared in a speech he made as President of the Royal Society at the end of the 19^th century, that heavier-than-air flying machines would not work.

A few years later, the Wright brothers made their first powered flight.

Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum is probably right: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is very likely right. When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is impossible, he is very likely wrong.”

Arthur C. Clarke

However, despite a lack of foresight in some areas, Lord Kelvin – after whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named – certainly had some interesting things to say about science and religion. In one speech at University College London he was reported as saying:

Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonistic, but helpful to Religion.

Sadly, practitioners of religion are amongst those most culpable of making “laws” of past prejudices and errors. For religious zealots, adherence to belief in the inferior status of women, a refusal to accept scientific frames of thought and findings – notoriously in relation to evolution – and denying people life-saving vaccinations and medical procedures (amongst other things) is almost definitive of religious faith.

Even in liberal inter-faith circles the word “tradition” is often used as a respectful synonym for “religion”.  I always squirm when well-meaning inter-faith people refer to “the Bahá’í tradition”; this usage is antithetical to the very being of the Bahá’í community. In His Tablet to Mánikchí Sáhib, Bahá’u’lláh says:

Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.

And what the world needs now is not what the world needed in the past. Bahá’u’lláh calls us to focus on present needs and clearly does not want humanity to head into the future with its eye firmly on the rear-view mirror – a practice much loved by strong defenders of tradition in many faiths.

Of course, there are those, such as the new atheist tendency – not themselves known for setting aside their prejudices about religion – who see this equation of religion and tradition as a damning critique of what they see as religion’s irrationality, rigidity and ineluctable focus on the past.

Independent investigation of reality is a foundational principle in the Bahá’í teachings. It underpins the practice of Bahá’í consultation, the Bahá’í community’s non-adversarial decision-making and conflict-resolution process. It should surely also be foundational to the development of knowledge in science and the arts.

As I commented in my earlier post about Bohmian dialogue and Bahá’í consultation:

The process calls for participants to suspend their assumptions – about the world, about other participants – and to listen deeply to what is going on. The challenge in dialogue is simply to allow multiple points of view to exist alongside each other and not to defend one’s assumptions.

True dialogue depends on openness and, as Bohm points out, everyone – including religious people and scientists – is prone to leap to the defence of their assumptions, thus closing off the possibility of dialogue.

In recent messages to the Bahá’í community the Universal House of Justice has emphasized the importance of the adoption of a “humble attitude of learning”. Building the new civilisation envisioned by Bahá’u’lláh demands an acute awareness “of the inadequacies of current modes of thinking and doing” (Universal House of Justice to the Conference of the Counsellors, 28^th December 2010) and readiness to develop new ways of being, thinking and doing. Crucially, the Bahá’í community is learning to see things in terms of process rather than events and to understand that “Progress is achieved through the dialectic of crisis and victory, and setbacks are inevitable”.

Clearly we cannot allow ourselves to hamper progress in the building of the new civilisation by being “shackled by recording or registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”. We should surely be as bold and visionary as Brunel.

The Earth as Seen from the Sun (Visualization).

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Barney Leith

This is the second in a series of series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its applications by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community and its National Spiritual Assembly.   For more of his blogs, see http://barneyleith.com on Posterous.

‘See ye no strangers’ – the foundation of community building

Probably the most fundamental challenge faced by humanity as we strive to build community in our neighbourhoods and villages is expressed in these words by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

Cleanse ye your eyes so that ye behold no man as different from yourselves. See ye no strangers; rather see all men as friends, for love and unity come hard when ye fix your gaze on otherness.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, #8, p24.)

Why is this so challenging?

Two reasons, I suggest: psychology and politics.

Psychology

Many years ago I took a degree in social psychology, with a focus was on inter-group relations. Reading and my own limited research suggested that humans are programmed to categorise what they find in the world, to attach value to the categories, and then to stereotype groups and individuals on the basis of these valorised categories.

We can see how this might happen. In the days long before Tesco and Walmart, humans faced a world in which they had to assess the potential food value of plants and animals. Some plants were poisonous, some were edible. Some animals were good to eat, and some were a threat to life.

And humans did not – do not – categorise only foodstuffs. They also categorised other humans. Friend or enemy? This would be – and still is, in many cases – the first question one person would ask about another. And if this individual whom I see walking towards my cave is from the enemy tribe, he clearly is a lesser person than I am. I feel good about myself and my tribe because I feel bad about that person – even if I have never met him before – and his tribe.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s challenge to overcome our ancestral social processes is restated by the Universal House of Justice in its message to the Bahá’ís of the world of Ridván 2008:

Only if you perceive honour and nobility in every human being—this independent of wealth or poverty—will you be able to champion the cause of justice.

Seeing no strangers is clearly linked with unity, human solidarity and the achievement of justice.

Politics

However, as we strive to make this a reality, we also face some serious challenges from the political sphere.

In an essay about race, pluralism and the meaning of difference, Kenan Malik writes:

‘It’s good to be different’ might be the motto of our times. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these are regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook. At least in part, the antiracists embrace of difference is fuelled by a hostility to universalism.

Malik continues:

Far from establishing a critique of racial thinking, the politics of difference appropriates many of its these and reproduces the very assumptions upon which racism has historically been based. Most critically, the embrace of difference has undermined the capacity to defend equality.

(Kenan Malik, “Race, Pluralism and the Meaning of Difference”, New Formations, no. 33, Spring 1998.)

In other words, the politically correct multiculturalism of our times serves not to bring about unity and justice but rather to reinforce the kinds of valorised categorisation – whether racial or religious or class-based – that is so much part of our evolutionary heritage.

Diversity politics

Ten year’s involvement as a Bahá’í representative in many UK government consultations about equality and diversity policy and legislation have given me insights into the assumptions on which government policy is based.

The thinking and language of ministers and officials in, for example, the Government Equalities Office, and of representatives of a range of civil society organisations involved in meetings about equality policy and legislation were clearly based on the explicit and implicit celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics, highlighted by Kenan Malik as “as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook”.

I found this focus on difference endlessly frustrating. Any attempts to assert the Bahá’í position on unity as the context within which it is safe to celebrate diversity utterly failed to lodge in people’s minds. Celebration of diversity is “normal” in European “liberal progressive” politics.

Malik considers the pursuit of pluralism and the rejection of a universalistic outlook to be a reflection and acknowledgment of the apparent impossibility of transforming social relations. In other words, it institutionalises inequality and justifies it by using the language of “diversity”.

A single humanity

The Bahá’í texts are clear about the existence (and the need for) universal values.

The Bahá’í International Community’s Statement to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that took place in Durban in 2001 makes it clear that categorisation of humankind into supposedly separate races or peoples is based on a deeply rooted misunderstanding.

I make no apologies for including an extended quotation from this statement, which shows how both science and religion point to the same conclusion.

At the root of all forms of discrimination and intolerance is the erroneous idea that humankind is somehow composed of separate and distinct races, peoples or castes, and that those sub-groups innately possess varying intellectual, moral, and/or physical capacities, which in turn justify different forms of treatment.

The reality is that there is only the one human race. We are a single people, inhabiting the planet Earth, one human family bound together in a common destiny, a single entity created from one same substance, obligated to ‘be even as one soul.’

Recognition of this reality is the antidote to racism, xenophobia and intolerance in all its forms…

A proper understanding of this fact of existence has the capacity to carry humanity not merely past racism, racial and ethnic prejudice, and xenophobia but also beyond intermediate notions of tolerance or multi-culturalism – concepts that are important stepping-stones to humanity’s long-sought goal of building a peaceful, just and unified world but insufficient for the eradication of such deeply rooted afflictions as racism and its companions.

The principle of human oneness strikes a chord in the deepest reaches of the human spirit. It is not yet another way of talking about the ideal of brotherhood or solidarity. Nor is it some vague hope or slogan. It reflects, rather, an eternal spiritual, moral and physical reality that has been brought into focus by humanity’s collective coming of age in the twentieth century. Its emergence is more visible now because, for the first time in history, it has become possible for all of the peoples of the world to perceive their interdependence and to become conscious of their wholeness.

The reality of human oneness is fully endorsed by science.

Human oneness is a universal reality. However, “seeing no strangers” is not a given. It is something to be worked at, to be experienced, to be learned. Each person and community will start this particular journey towards understanding and practice from a different place and may need to travel a different route.

To make this journey safely we will need to enter into open-hearted and open-minded dialogue with fellow human beings whose experiences and mind-sets may be very different. The Bahá’í teachings give us the means to enter into this dialogue. It

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Barney Leith

Today, we are honored to launch a new series of blogs on the unity of science and religion and its application by Barney Leith, a member of the UK Bahá’í community who currently serves on its National Spiritual Assembly. He has been a blogger for several years and currently blogs on Posterous at http://barneyleith.com (an excellent blog, BTW).

Today’s blog, introducing the series, is a meditation on the concept of dialogue in the thought of the physicist David Bohm, known both for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of quantum mechanics, for his concepts of dialogue, and for his wide ranging and pioneering thought on the implications of quantum mechanic on the nature of physical reality (see, for example, his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order).

On Monday, December 27th, Barney Leith’s blog will replace Stephen Friberg’s blog Why We Need Both Science and Religion.

Bohmian Dialogue and Bahá’í Consultation

“Shared meaning,” says renowned physicist David Bohm, “is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has very poor quality cement … The society at large has a very incoherent set of meanings.”

David Bohm

Bohm (1917-1992) was concerned at 20th century society’s lack of coherence. The tacit – unspoken – meanings that underpin the cohesiveness of society were becoming, he thought, increasingly fragmented. He believed that creative and genuinely open dialogue would be crucial to establishing coherence of thought and meaning at a time when incoherence could have dangerous consequences for the world.

Bohm’s thinking about dialogue (see, for example, On Dialogue) has some interesting resonances with the Bahá’í concept of consultation and with the direction in which the Universal House of Justice, the Bahá’í community’s world governing body, is encouraging the Bahá’ís of the world to take in understanding what they are doing.

The notion of coherence is at the centre of both Bohmian and Bahá’í understandings.

Human beings have evolved to divide what they perceive into categories and to place value on those categories. Some things are safe to eat, others are not. Some animals are dangerous, others are not. It’s a kind of map of the world’s phenomena that allow us to navigate through life safely.

However, when we mistake our map for reality and reify our categories, our thinking fragments. It becomes more difficult to see all that we do is part of a larger picture.

Bohmian Dialogue

Bohm argues that dialogue can open up and defragment our thinking. In his model a group of between 20 and 40 people come together without an agenda and without a facilitator. Their purpose is not to resolve problems or make decisions; their purpose is purely to engage in dialogue and, eventually, to arrive at shared meanings.

The process calls for participants to suspend their assumptions – about the world, about other participants – and to listen deeply to what is going on. The challenge in dialogue is simply to allow multiple points of view to exist alongside each other and not to defend one’s assumptions.

Universal House of Justice, Haifa, Israel

True dialogue depends on openness and, as Bohm points out, everyone – including religious people and scientists – is prone to leap to the defence of their assumptions, thus closing off the possibility of dialogue.

Dialogue will also be closed down if participants try to convince and persuade each other of the superiority or truth of what they are saying.

Ultimately dialogue, as Bohm envisions it, leads to coherence of thought amongst those taking part. By coherence he intends that the kinds of fragmentation previously described no longer hold sway and that, “We would be partaking of the common meaning – just as people partake of food together.” We would come to share a common meaning and this would lead to what he calls “a common mind”.

This common mind would not, Bohm thinks, exclude the individual. “The individual might hold a separate opinion, but that opinion would then be absorbed into the group, too.”

Bohmian Dialogue and Bahá’í Consultation

There are interesting parallels between Bohm’s thinking about dialogue and the Bahá’í practice of consultation. Openness, suspension of assumptions, sharing in a flow of meaning, refraining from making cases with a view to persuade or convince others, a focus on reality and coherence are all common features. Both Bohmian dialogue and Bahá’í consultation should lead to a deeper understanding of truth relative to the questions under consideration. Both are non-adversarial processes.

However,  there are points of distinction too.

Apart from differences in process – formal Bahá’í consultation works to an agenda and has a chair or facilitator to ensure that everyone has the chance to speak – Bahá’í consultation focuses on action outcomes. It is a process that leads to decision and the meaning of the decision is in the action that it leads to. Without the action, it is not possible to test the decision and to learn from it. One might say that the point of consultation is to align one’s life and actions so that they become coherent with the processes of individual and collective transformation that enable all to engage in building a new global civilisation.