Continue reading »]]> The persecution of young and innocent children whose parents are unjustly imprisoned due to their religious beliefs is a brutal expression of the violation of human rights.

May 19, 2013.  Barmaan was only one month old when his mother began serving a 23 month termi, in July 2012, in the overcrowded and oppressive women’s prison of Semnan, a city in northern Iran.  The crime of this young mother and her husband was belief in the Baha’i Faith, a religion which seeks nothing but peace and unity for humankind. His deplorable plight began earlier when his mother was about seven months pregnant with him.  After a harsh raid by guards on his family’s home, his mother was so emotionally affected by the disturbing situation that she gave birth to Barmaan two months prematurely.  His father had also been previously imprisoned in another section of the prison for men so the baby had to be taken into prison with his mother.  It was as if a cruel and unjust world had no room for him except in the confines of a terrible prison.[i]  One may wonder why a young mother was forced to endure prison with a nursing baby in her arms?  When she is released Barmaan will be two years old.

Science and psychology consider the first two years of the life of a child to be vital in its development.  Being deprived of proper care and nutrition as well as a safe environment are but a few of the hazards imposed by prison life for a child of this age.  Babies who are born in prison or brought into this kind of detention centre after birth may face dire consequences from malnutrition, infectious diseases, emotional problems as well as developmental challenges.  Jailed mothers are often subjected to psychological and physical insults and brutality.  But how long can mothers and infants survive in such an oppressive environment?

Entrance to the Citadel of Semnan

In recent years, in Europe and the United States, facilities have been developed for women prisoners.  However in Semnan and other cities in Iran it has been reported that there is hardly any space for women, let alone Baha’i women with babies.  In the case of Barmaan he had to face all the negative impact of such an environment as well as being born prematurely which certainly made him more vulnerable than babies born at term.

However, Barmaan is not the only baby of Baha’i parents to be serving a prison sentence with their mothers.  Two other infants are suffering the same fate.  At one point during 2012 there were seven babies under two years of age including four of Muslim mothers who were incarcerated with 70 women, some of whom are violent.  Because of limited space for so many women, some of the Baha’is sleep on the floor, which, for those with babies, is unsafe and intolerable.[ii]  And what is happening to the Baha’i and other women prisoners is not unique to Semnan. It also occurs in other Iranian cities.

The persecution of young and innocent children whose parents are unjustly imprisoned due to their religious beliefs is a brutal expression of the violation of human rights.  According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency of Iran (HRANA)  a 12 month-old Baha’i infant, Rassam who lived with his mother in prison developed a serious respiratory infection which required treatment in hospital.  Earlier, his mother had requested several times that he be sent for medical treatment outside of prison but the authorities ignored her pleas for help.  She too was imprisoned due to false accusations that she had been “teaching against government” and had been practicing her religion which included the education of children.  She was sentenced to 20 months in prison.  HRANA also reported other instances of prison atrocities which have had physical and emotional impact on women prisoners in Semnan.  In April 2013  many of them found pieces of broken glass in the meals served to them and therefore refused to eat that food.  Consequently, many nights they went to bed hungry as they were not allowed to buy food from the prison store.  Imagine what effect this would have on a nursing baby?  Furthermore, it was recently reported that a foundation that supports women and children decided to donate, on the occasion of Child’s Day (Rooz-e-Koodak) some money for each child in prison.  However, children of Baha’is were barred from receiving such aid because of their religion.  Although this deprivation was not materially significant, it was psychologically demeaning and discriminatory. [iii]

Imprisonment of women with babies, regardless of religious or political affiliation has been on the rise in the world.  As discussed above, it is creates a cruel and hazardous situation for the babies.  However, leaving babies or young children with caregivers is also fraught with many difficulties.  When children are separated from their mothers at a young age, they may be scarred for life by emotional isolation, depression, insomnia and suffer developmental consequences unless that are properly cared for and looked after.  The mother and child bonding and relationship takes place during the first two critical years of life when infants form a strong attachment to their mother.  Through this bond, a sense of security and trust develops and children learn about their need to love and be loved.  A forced separation of mothers and babies is a form of violence not only against women but is an abuse of the rights of children for safe and proper care, education and upbringing in a family environment.

Inciting hatred and oppressive persecution against the Baha’is of Iran has taken a new turn during recent years.  The Baha’is of Iran presently constitute the largest non-Muslim minority of Iran whose rights have been violated. Baha’is have been subjected to systematic and widespread attacks individually and collectively.  In some parts of the country their homes have been raided, their property confiscated or vandalized, their stores set on fire and hundreds of them have been arrested and imprisoned with physical and psychological torture and terror.

Although none of this is new in the 170 – year history of the Baha’i Faith in Iran, it seems that targeting individuals for persecution  is no longer confined to the adult population.  School children are discriminated against and ridiculed because of their beliefs.  The doors of universities are shut in the faces of  students for the same reason.  But as if this persecution was not enough, the authorities are now targeting the most vulnerable members of the community, those who are  unable to defend themselves – babies.  This constitutes perhaps one of the most despicable forms of oppression to date.

Since 2008 the Baha’is of Semnan have been targeted with relentless persecution including raids, arrests and imprisonment.  “Their cemeteries have been vandalized, their beliefs have been attacked in the media and from the pulpit of mosques.  Perhaps most ominously their children have been denounced in the city’s schools.” [iv]  In brief, this is a community under fire where, since last year, young mothers with newborn infants have been convicted and sentenced to prison, thus subjecting the latter to hardship and mistreatment, a few examples of which have been presented in this article.

Continue reading »]]> Human beings seem to like to think in binary.

“If not A, then B.”

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” (A statement that, ironically, has multiple meanings.)

“It’s an either/or situation.”

We answer “yes/no” questions.

We decide if we want this or that.

We think in ones and zeroes—literally, if we program computers down to the machine language level.

Yet, in the squishy world of reality, binary thinking is one of the most significant obstacles that we place in the path of human progress. There are issues in which this is glaring apparent.

One is EITHER pro‑choice OR anti‑abortion. That is, either one believes abortions should be available for any reason from dire necessity to “oops” and that it is just another form of birth control OR one believes that no woman should, under any circumstances, have an abortion. Ever.

One is EITHER a gun‑lover OR a gun‑grabber. You are pro‑gun or anti‑gun. You are for the Second Amendment, or you are against it. You either respect gun rights OR you want to take them away from everyone.

One is EITHER a liberal (aka progressive) OR one is a conservative. One EITHER believes in the welfare state OR in individual sovereignty.

One is EITHER a hero OR a villain (or believes someone else is either a hero or a villain).

If you are one side of any of the above binary pairs, you are all that is good; if you are on the other side, you are unmitigated evil. Which is which depends entirely on which side you are on.

It is a zero sum game—there must be an absolute winner and an absolute loser.

This sort of binary thinking is supported by the media in all its forms. For every behavior on the part of a newsworthy individual or group, journalists speculate about and offer opinions on which of two sides they come down on. If the behavior is nuanced in any way, the media cannot allow it to remain so because eyeballs are attracted and ad space sold by conflict. Conflict requires two distinct, opposing sides. Hence, they must determine which column they should sort the individual to: ones or zeroes.

This reached a truly head‑scratching point in a recent article I read that began thusly: “When it comes to his relations with Congress, President Barack Obama, is a man of two minds.”

How so? I thought, and read the article hoping to find out. What was the particular behavior of the POTUS that had puzzled the journalist?

It was—I kid you not—that the President praised Congressional efforts to get things done and criticized obstructionist behavior that led to not getting things done. The journalist didn’t understand why the President should praise his opponents for progress on an immigration bill, say, yet criticize them for a filibuster on another issue. Clearly, he was torn in his feelings for Congress and therefore did not have a consistent attitude toward it. (Which begged the question as to what the journalist expected someone of ONE mind to have done.)

I read the article twice on the theory (and in the hope) that I was missing something. Was the journalist being ironic or satirical? No. The tone of the article was perfectly serious. He saw the president’s behavior (praising effort toward progress; critiquing lack of progress) as anomalous.

I have three kids. I had parents. From both angles, I have observed that generally when teaching a child, one critiques or disciplines for unproductive, obstructive and destructive behavior and praises and rewards productive, cooperative, constructive behavior. In this case, the one and the zero are part of achieving a single positive goal: to encourage productive, cooperative, constructive behavior and to discourage unproductive, obstructive or destructive behavior.

The binary behavior the journalist seemed to expect of Mr. Obama, in this case, was an attitude that he was a one and Congress a zero (or vice versa). Ergo, if Congress were to win (merit praise), the White House must lose. Any merits Congress received gave the President demerits and vice versa. So it seemed puzzling to this journalist that the One should compliment the Zero for a job well done when it detracted from his Oneness … or something like that.

This is a cultural artifact, this binary style of thinking. The culture that preceded ours on this continent did not adhere to it as strictly as we do. During the period of time when Western Europeans were invading America, there were at least three different opinions among the native population as to what should be done. These points of view were espoused by different chieftains. Three of the most influential were Crazy Horse, American Horse and Red Cloud and their solutions to the problem ran the gamut from fighting back to negotiating the sharing of the continent to simply depending on the good will of the invaders. As we have seen in our own recent political history, men who hold diverging opinions are loved by some and hated by others. One is a hero to the group that shares his views and a villain to those who don’t. But our Native American predecessors did not share that binary thought which is why I found the 1939 book Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains by Charles Eastman eye-opening and refreshing. Eastman—a Sioux who acquired a Western medical education and served on the reservations—treats each of the nine native leaders he writes of as heroes, even when their beliefs diverged radically from each others’ and from his own. Reading Indian Heroes, I understood how it was possible for two tribes to fight each other for grazing or hunting land in the summer, yet come together in the winter to share resources. How they could, in fact, come together to form a Federation whose articles greatly influenced the framers of the US Constitution.

From a Bahá’í point of view, if we are to achieve real oneness, real convergence, real progress toward a common goal, if we are to stop living in armed intellectual camps, we must be able to grasp nuance—to see it, understand it and speak it. We must see more colors than black and white, count higher than one; even see that 1 and 0 can equal 10 (which is far greater than the sum of its parts), ask questions that do not accept only yes or no answers.

What does that look like on the ground? It may require that we stop prejudicing our own thinking by framing multiple choice (or essay) questions as if they were true or false. It may mean realizing there are people who are pro‑choice AND anti‑abortion. That there are those who support the rights of gun ownership AND recognize that this right burdens one with an awesome responsibility that not everyone is competent to bear. It may mean that there are those who believe in individual responsibility to contribute to society AND society’s responsibility to contribute to the welfare of the individuals that comprise it.

Binary thinking is easy—okay, I’ll call a toad a toad—it’s lazy thinking. It spares us the effort of forming opinions based on fact, reason and values by insisting that if not A, then surely B. It spares us the embarrassment of admitting that we don’t have a grasp on the nuances of every situation or issue. It saves us the trouble of wading through the facts (and knowing when we have enough of them at hand), weighing the complex issues, understanding the dynamics, weeding out the distractors, and applying the relevant values and principles that go into comprehending what is going on around us.

Binary thinking means never having to say, “I don’t know.” Because you always do know: If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

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Bahram Nadimi

I love science fiction. A few friends and I recently finished watching the highly acclaimed Babylon 5 science fiction TV series. I have been thinking about one of my favorite episodes called: “Here comes the Inquisitor”, in which an inquisitor called Sebastian is summoned to determine if two of the main characters, Delenn and Sheridan, are ready for the challenges ahead. In a cold and dark dungeon, Sebastian interrogates the beaten and chained Delenn and Sheridan, trying to get to the heart of their motives by asking the same question over and over again “Who are you?

During Sheridan’s violent interrogation, Delenn comes to the his defense and says “Your quarrel is with me…if you want to take someone, then take me.”

Sebastian replies: “You would trade your life for his?  I thought you had a destiny!  Is that destiny not worth one life?…No Glory.  No fame. No armies or cities to celebrate your name. You will die alone unremarked and forgotten…”  

Delenn then says: “If I fall, another will take my place, and another, and another….Life is my cause. One life or a billion, they are all the same … this body is a shell, you cannot harm me. I am not afraid.”  

Stunned and surprised Sebastian asks: “How do you tell the chosen ones? ‘No greater love hath a man than he lay his life for his brother’ for one person in the dark, where no one will ever know, or see… When the darkness comes, know this: You are the right people, in the right place at the right time.”

This brings me to the subject of this blog: Do we have invisible heroes now in real life, or is it just reserved for fiction fantasy?

If we look hard enough we will find countless souls who have quietly sacrificed their lives for and out of Love.  Here is a story of seven of these invisible heroes.

Five Years too Many

Exactly five years ago, May 14, 2008, seven Bahá’ís—five men and two women—were arrested and taken to the notorious Evin prison, merely because of their religious belief. They are Bahá’ís.  They were eventually given twenty year sentences—the longest sentences given to any prisoner of conscience in Iran.

Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations stated:

“On 14 May, the seven innocent Baha’i leaders will have been behind bars for five full years, unjustly imprisoned solely because of their religious beliefs… The arrest of the seven Baha’i leaders on false charges, their wrongful imprisonment, and severe mistreatment while in detention are emblematic of the suffering of the Iranian Baha’i community as a whole – and, indeed, the situation of the hundreds of other innocent prisoners of conscience who have been incarcerated for their beliefs… Their long sentences reflect the Government’s determination to completely oppress the Iranian Baha’i community, which is the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority… We are asking people of good will around the world to raise their voices in an effort to win their freedom and the freedom of other innocent prisoners of conscience in Iran.”

It was not only the length of these sentences but the manner which these seven souls were treated, in futile attempts to break them, that has caught the world’s attention.

Encounter with an American Journalist

An American journalist, Roxanna Saberi, shared a cell in Evin prison with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, the two women among the seven Bahá’í prisoners. This brief encounter had a profound effect on Roxanna, and she subsequently wrote many articles about her experiences.  Here is an excerpt of an article in the wall street journal

“For several weeks last year, I shared a cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, two leaders of Iran’s minority Bahá’í Faith. I came to see them as my sisters, women whose only crimes were to peacefully practice their religion and resist pressure from their captors to compromise their principles. For this, apparently, they and five male colleagues were sentenced this month to 20 years in prison… After I was transferred to their cell, I learned that Mahvash had been incarcerated for one year and Fariba for eight months. Each had spent half her detention in solitary confinement, during which time they were allowed almost no contact with their families and only the Koran to read. Recently the two had been permitted to have a pen. Oh, how they cherished it! But they were allowed to use it only to do Sudoku and crossword puzzles in the conservative newspapers the prison guards occasionally gave them” 

She goes on to say “…my cellmates’ spirits would not be broken, and they boosted mine. They taught me to, as they put it, turn challenges into opportunities — to make the most of difficult situations and to grow from adversity. We kept a daily routine, reading the books we were eventually allowed and discussing them; exercising in our small cell; and praying — they in their way, I in mine. They asked me to teach them English and were eager to learn vocabulary for shopping, cooking and traveling. They would use the new words one day, they told me, when they journeyed abroad. But the two women also said they never wanted to live overseas. They felt it their duty to serve not only Bahá’ís but all Iranians… Later, when I went on a hunger strike, Mahvash and Fariba washed my clothes by hand after I lost my energy and told me stories to keep my mind off my stomach. Their kindness and love gave me sustenance”.

She concludes by saying “I know that despite what they have been through and what lies ahead, these women feel no hatred in their hearts. When I struggled not to despise my interrogators and the judge, Mahvash and Fariba told me they do not hate anyone, not even their captors”

These seven Bahá’í prisoners of conscience were imprisoned because of their belief, belief in a better world where love will be the primary animating force. Attempts to break their spirits have not been and will never be successful, because they know that love, including the love of their captors, will eventually conquer hate. This is their enduring legacy; they are immortal martyrs of love.

Sorrounded by dark and thunderous clouds, they are the right people, in the right place at the right time.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

May 13, 2013. Six months ago, I started on a journey of discovery — a journey of learning — a journey of trying to understand where I came from — a journey of learning about the sources of modern thinking and western values. Six months ago, I started writing the blog you are reading on the European Enlightenment.

What I found was an incredible story – a story of small groups of 17th century Europeans sickened and disheartened by a century and half of warfare, persecution, intolerance, fanatical hatred, and base political manipulation conducted in the name of religion. Individually and working together, members of these groups looked to philosophy, to reason, to the study of nature, to tolerance, and to ancient and distant cultures to try to find ways to stitch together what had been broken when western Europe erupted in a fury of violence — violence directed both internally and externally — against those who religious beliefs failed to agree with the desires of the powerful and the power-hungry among the many groups of political and ecclesiastical leaders.

Protestants being burned at the stake for their faith on May 21,1559 in Valladolid, Spain

What those groups discovered was science – they were the people who took the discoveries of Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler and turned them into the modern sciences of today. And they built great system of thought — those of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton being the most influential — that united science and religion for generations of the foremost thinkers of the foremost countries of Europe. And they discovered democracy, modern government, and almost every other modern discipline of study or investigation, be it archeology and study of ancient cultures, or be it natural theology and the natural origins of the religious impulse.

They laid the foundations — scientific, economic, and cultural – of our modern world. And it was all based on the search for the unity of science and religion, of reason and belief — at least it was at first.

A Task Unfinished

But the task that these few, enlightened, and brave individuals started centuries ago remains unfinished. The wounds that tore apart Europe remain — in the main — unhealed. Indeed, in a number of ways the Enlightenment made it worse by creating new sectarians who hated all religion with unbridled fanaticism — and frequently found ways to exercise their hatreds in ways whose effectiveness was technologically enhanced.

And science — this extraordinarily wonderful tool of learning that undermines prejudice and superstition — was twisted into new and invidious forms of prejudice and hatred in the guise of “scientific” racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and the like. These prejudices have delayed — and continue to delay — the advent of racial equality in the United States and around the world to this very day.

The hatred of religion — and the distrust of divine revelation in favor of natural religion — eventually came to permeate later enlightenment thought to the extent that it blocked, and sometimes extinguished, the search for moral and ethical standards for conducting life, giving rise to materialistic philosophies which embraced force, pleasure, wealth, and power as the rewards to strive for and denied the age-old teachings of the need for spiritual growth. One result is a world stratified into the wealthy and the rest, to the great discontent of those who find themselves among the rest.

So, the great tasks of the enlightenment remains unfinished. We need to pick them up, make them or own, and advance them further.

Next

Next week, we start a new series of blogs. I’m not sure what to call it – maybe something like “Finishing the Enlightenment.”

In these blogs, we will look at the great Enlightenment themes we discussed in the last 26 blogs, examining how they are addressed in modern society, by modern religious thought, and also by the teachings of the Baha’i Faith – teachings which directly and powerfully address most, if not all, of the major concerns of the enlightenment and the role of all the world’s religion in the further advancement of humanity.

…………………………

This is the 26th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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Bertrand Russell

“The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass.”

This commentary of Bertrand Russell, with which he begins his Mysticism and Logic essay segment on Time, contains a number of mind‑boggling ideas: 1) that what is ultimately real must be immutable (whatever that may mean to such malleable creatures as human beings), 2) that a cardinal concept of science—such as the conservation of energy and mass—would grant an illegitimate satisfaction and 3) that these concepts are scientific doctrines.

At the time Russell was writing, the term “scientism” had yet to be coined. Scientism—for readers who may not have heard the term before—refers to the belief that science can prescribe even moral behavior and decide social issues. In other words, it treats science like a belief system that has, as its ultimate goal, a clear truth in which human beings can take satisfaction (or have faith). Contrast this with the idea that science is a tool the ultimate goal of which is the discovery of physical laws and the understanding of physical reality.

Russell’s particular emphasis here is on immutability. That is, that there are physical laws that are constant and eternal. He singles out the concept of Time in context with this “scientific doctrine”, but here, he examines the mystical point of view that Time is NOT immutable, but illusory. This is an oft‑debated concept in religious philosophy as well. God, the scriptures suggest, is beyond Time and Place. He is no more bound by the physical laws of the universe than I am bound by the laws I create for one of my books. For this reason, some metaphysicians maintain that Time is an illusion because that ultimate reality, (or God), does not bow to it.

Writes Russell:

“It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in this view. The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. …A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom….

“…Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.”

I’ve been doing much thinking about evolution for some time now. The evolution of the cosmos, of mankind, of religion, of culture, of my own character … of everything. Evolution, of course, is something that occurs over time, and I know that I, for one, failed to grok the significance of that from my own past world view. A world view in which I did NOT try, as Russell puts it, “to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.”

My attitude toward mankind as a species changed when I strove to consider the entire stream of human evolution and recognized that we are still young as a species. At best, we are still grappling with pimply, rebellious adolescence—a time at which, in the life of the individual, the brain is not fully connected, giving us a false sense of invincibility. This, in turn, causes us to indulge in risky behavior at a time when we are largely incapable of gauging risk realistically.

I was raised with the dogma that Time was something that worked against us, not for us. That we had been created in utter perfection but—owing to our naivety and credulity (or ignorance and rebelliousness)—fell into spiritual entropy because a spirit being disguised as a serpent whispered those insidious words, “You will not surely die.”

Don’t get me wrong—the words are insidious, and we whisper them among ourselves and eagerly take them to heart whenever we would behave in ways that, at some level, we know are destructive in trivial and/or hugely significant, earth‑shaking ways. But in some ways we’ve got it backwards: we are not devolving toward an animal state, we are evolving out of one. And that takes Time.

“Something of Hellenism, something, too, of Oriental resignation, must be combined with its hurrying Western self-assertion before it can emerge from the ardour of youth into the mature wisdom of manhood. In spite of its appeals to science, the true scientific philosophy, I think, is something more arduous and more aloof, appealing to less mundane hopes, and requiring a severer discipline for its successful practice.”

The words “arduous” and “discipline” are not favorites with a great many people in our mainstream American culture. In contrast to the prevalent philosophy that effort given to a pursuit increases the value of the outcome—which is captured in the phrase “easy come, easy go”—I observe a great many people who really don’t want to have to put a lot of effort into anything: study, work, relationships, their own behavior. They prefer what my mom would have called “the path of least resistance”.

I sing and I write. I love both pursuits, but I love writing more and value it more deeply because it’s harder. Singing is easy. I open my mouth and notes come out. The less I think about singing, the better I am at it. When I’m really on a roll, it’s effortless. Even when I practice the craft of singing, it seems effortless. I hear harmonies instinctively and unconsciously. Harmonizing with whatever music is happening at a given moment is a reflex; an autonomic response. (So when my 10 year old says, “Mom, don’t sing!” when I do it in public, she might as well be saying, “Mom, don’t breathe!” In contrast, every word I write I weigh and hold and hear and sniff and taste as it comes out onto the page. Singing pumps me up; writing drains me. And I pursue it with ardor and discipline. That is what I hope will cause me to evolve into a better writer.

Russell also takes up the relationship between Time and evolution and relays the thoughts of some philosophers:

“The difference between man and the lower animals, which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with certainty be placed either within or without the human family.

(The philosophy of evolution) A process which led from the am[oe]ba to Man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress—though whether the am[oe]ba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

It is not clear from context, at first, whether Russell accepts the idea that the intellectual gulf between animals and humans is not as vast as it obviously is, or believes in the existence of a “missing link”, or actually credits the amoeba with the capacity for forming an opinion, but here we confront the Question: What capacity makes a human being human, and toward what is that human capacity evolving?

I’m not going there in this post, simply because I’ve covered it elsewhere and it would take us far afield of a discussion of Time.

Time is real. Or at least it is a real necessity for anything that evolves, whether that thing is an organism or an organization, a thought process or a belief system. The very concept of a process is time bound; without Time a process is not a process, it is an event.

It has been said that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience. Krishna likens the soul to the rider of a horse, where the horse is the physical body—including the brain which is, after all, only a mechanism. I know I have been struck repeatedly with the sensation that my mind and my brain are not at all the same thing. The one seeks to control the other in a process—an evolutionary process—that takes Time to unfold. I am not the same person I was when I first committed to become a Bahá’í, for example, and made a decision to consciously evolve in a particular way. It took time for me to evolve to this state from that.

I guess the really cool thing (and the really scary thing) is that while early in human evolution our physical environment shaped our evolution even as we were largely unconscious of it, now we shape our own evolution and can, if we wish, do it consciously—manipulating both our inner and outer environments toward a goal.

Ah, but here’s the catch: because we’re still physically animals, it is frighteningly easy to conflate mind and brain and body and simply bow to the impulses of physical nature: selfishness, greed, lust, envy, anger. “They” say you are what you eat. This is as true of what you put into your head as it is what you put into your stomach. We are sometimes slow to realize that—but then, we are still evolving.

But toward what?

Russell examines the ideals of a philosophy of evolution that holds that:

“Not only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and develop with the course of evolution: there must be no fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse which is life and which alone gives unity to the process.

…The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they carry us along the stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought.”

Religion, in contrast, proposes that there is a fixed goal. Fixed, at least, in the sense that it insists we should strive to be better human beings—more just, more empathetic, more wise. That we are on an upward spiral. The philosophy Russell spotlights in his essay on Time, however, proposes literally going with the flow.

This is not to say that the teachings of religion are fixed. They are not. They, too, evolve, but they evolve with respect to that “fixed goal” of becoming human. But here, too, we impose “fictions” and attempt “imaginary congealings” around the parts of our beliefs we desire to remain stationary. We wish to only make a decision about what is true or false once for all Time, though surely experience shows us this is a chimera.

Alas, Reality does not play nicely with our fictions. Time and evolution march onward and upward and Reality will leave us behind if we do not adapt to it. There is a difference, of course, between being adaptive to reality and being an easy push‑over for every impulse that pops out of the brain. And therein lies the stuff of life.

Russell proposes that such extreme relativism as is implied by this idea that all our beliefs are only situationally true is not real philosophy:

“I do not propose to enter upon a technical examination of this philosophy. I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philosophy.”

“…Philosophy is not a short cut to the same kind of results as those of the other sciences: if it is to be a genuine study, it must have a province of its own, and aim at results which the other sciences can neither prove nor disprove.”

Russell’s primary concern here, really, is history and our penchant for believing that the present is more important (or more real) than the past or future—that the past may be safely forgotten and the future unlooked for, because it will eventually catch us up whether we think about it or not. Oddly, this makes me think of Pete Townshend’s “My Generation”—specifically, the line “I hope I die before I get old.” He didn’t, and neither did millions from that generation for whom an uncontemplated future was suddenly an unprepared‑for present.

If neurologists are correct, the realization that the future is real and approaching day by day dawns upon most of us sometime in our twenties. Townshend seems to have adapted to this reality quite well and (who knows) may look back upon his youthful lyrics with an embarrassed “oops” or at least a philosophical, “Eh!”

At any rate, Bertrand Russell concludes his study of philosophies that deny there reality of Time this way:

“…I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which inspired the denial, the attitude which, in thought, regards the past as having the same reality as the present and the same importance as the future.”

I think his caution is warranted. If we assign Time a station of unreality, relegate the past to the dust bin, and refuse to contemplate what either the past or the present affects the future, then we will fail to evolve consciously. I think it would be a shame for creatures endowed with the capacity to contemplate the past and the future to fail to use that capacity; that beings given the power to evolve consciously would prefer to abdicate that right and privilege in favor of simply being carried unresistingly along the stream of Time.

Or, as I have often heard it put philosophically: What‑ever.

(All Bertrand Russell quotes are from Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, Time)

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 29, 2013. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

The enlightenment theme of freedom resonates as strongly today as it did 250 years.

For citizens of the United States – freedom is a core American value. The first amendment of the US Constitution puts it this way:

Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The founders of the United Nation also held freedom to be a fundamental right and enshrined it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. …

Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance (from the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

Few thinkers are more closely associated with the call for freedom than the great enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778, also see Rousseau in Wikipedia):

The concern that dominates Rousseau’s work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. …

In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest (from the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

In the following, we examine Rousseau’s ideas about freedom. And then – since this is a blog about science and religion – we consider his ideas about freedom of religion.

“Man is born free and yet everywhere he lives in chains.”

Rousseau considers that there are four types of freedom – natural, civil, moral, and “republican.” He considers these most thoroughly in The Social Contract, an extraordinarily influential work of political philosophy.

Natural freedom, for Rousseau, belongs to man in a pre-civilized and “savage” state. For from being vicious and thuggish – as the English philosopher Hobbes famously characterized primitive man – man was physically free and naturally uncorrupted. According to Rousseau, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.” But Hobbesian competition for resources is inevitable:

Natural freedom involves an unlimited right to all things [but] in a world occupied by many interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may be almost nonexistent. This is because any individual’s capacity to get what he or she wants will be limited by his or her physical power and the competing physical power of others. Further, inevitable conflict over scarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so that unhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence and uncertainty, (From the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia.)

But in this state, man is not moral and is good only in a negative sense, meaning that he and she are like animals, innocent and neither good nor bad.

The escape from natural freedom leads to socialization and to civilization, with all of its complexities, power relationships, inequalities, oppressions, and injustices. The challenge, then, is to acquire civil freedom, i.e., freedom acquired through self-restraint from the pursuit of natural freedoms, in a social setting that is naturally despotic and corrupt. But this requires a “very remarkable change:”

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.

Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left … (Rousseau in the Social Contract, Bk 1, Ch 8.)

“Moral freedom” results when one obeys the law of society out of an inner and sincere desire to do so. Here, we “obey only ourselves” because it is here that we can freely and independently choose to abide by the laws of society. In Baha’i administrative procedures, to give an example, we are asked to abide by the decision of a Local Spiritual Assembly or any other administrative assembly even if we believe the decision to be wrong. Though the decision restrains and constrains us, we can choose freely to obey it.

The final form of freedom, according to Rousseau in his private notes, is republican freedom. This “consists, not in my being subject to my own will, but rather in the fact that the law protects me from being subject to the will of any other particular person in the manner of a slave or serf” (reference is the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

This, it seems to me, is the freedom that is provided by a just and progressive society, one without racism, sexism, or inherent intolerance. I take it to be at the heart of both the constitution of the United States of America and the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and the goal of the Baha’i Faith for the whole world.

The question that we will avoid for now due to lack of time and space – but the basic question that Rousseau considers – is how to achieve societies that provide for civil and republican freedom. And is because of his attempts to answer that question that Rousseau is so justly famous.

Rousseau on Religion

Given the critical eye cast by Rousseau friends – Diderot, Hume, and others – towards religion, one might expect Rousseau to also be critical towards it. He is critical of Catholicism and the Christianity of the Gospels – for very surprising reasons – and he seems to endorse a kind of public state religion. But his overall thinking is that there must be religious toleration. But he adds some strange – and foreboding – twists.

He addresses religion in the last chapter of the Social Contract. Basically, he sees three types. One type – the Christianity of the Gospels is his example – is centered on morality and God. This kind of religion is – he thinks – good and true but unfortunately not concerned with the here and now: “Christianity is a wholely spiritual religion, concerned solely with the things of heaven; the Christian’s homeland is not of this world.” This, to Rousseau, means that Christians can’t be good citizens.

Organized transnational religion – think Catholicism – are another type of religion. Precisely because Catholicism is highly organized and different than the state – Rousseau’s basic unit of organization – it is bad. And it is bad because it competes with the state for people’s allegiance, has considerable resources at its disposal, can intervene, and therefore encourages stubbornness and divisiveness.

Civil religion, he thinks, is a good thing. It is “good in that it joins divine worship to a love of the law, and that in making the homeland the object of a citizens’ adoration, it teaches them that the service of the state is the service of the tutelary God.” But, unfortunately, “it is based on error and lies, it deceives men, and makes them credulous and superstitious.” And it is “bloodthirsty and intolerant” as well.

He concludes by recommending that only those religions which are tolerant to other religions are to be allowed, but that there must be religion – preferably a civil religion – as religion is a necessary underpinning of morality and the state.

And then he makes a claim that is astonishing – and foreboding given that we know the evils of state religion of the communist style and the excesses of the French revolution. Here is how the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia characterizes this claim:

Rousseau [then] argues that those who cannot accept the dogmas [of religion] can be banished from the state. This is because he believes that atheists, having no fear of divine punishment, cannot be trusted by their fellow citizens to obey the law.

He goes even further, to suggest the death penalty for those who affirm the dogmas but later act as if they do not believe them.

This – and some other similar related ideas – has led many to see Rousseau as preparing the way for state totalitarianism of the 2oth century variety – and the horrors of the French revolution.

Next

Next week, we change tactics. Rather than further characterizing enlightenment themes and thinkers – and there are many extraordinarily interesting philosophers and topics left to pursue – we will start characterizing themes critical of religion in the writings of the enlightenment thinkers and see how they are addressed in the Baha’i teachings.

…………………………

This is the 25th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]>

As I often seem to do these days, I have once again started a blog series, then found cause to interrupt it for a moment of introspection that only tangentially relates to science and religion. But in the spirit of inclusiveness evinced by my one‑time editor at Analog magazine (Stan Schmidt, who retired this past year), I will maintain that psychology and sociology are, too, science! And that what I’m about to say involves both faith and reason.

I want to consider adulthood.

In a culture where teenagers fight wars and the “mature audiences” warning label really means the content is probably the sort of sophomoric, elementary school bathroom humor that makes even my ten year old daughter cringe, what is adulthood?

There is a nineteen year old boy lying in a hospital bed in Boston right now, under arrest and heavy guard because of the havoc he and his older brother wrought, the death and hurt that they caused a major American city. All week, the authorities have referred to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a man. When I commented in a writer’s group that I didn’t consider a nineteen year old to be a man, a friend responded that when her son was nineteen, he hated being called a “boy” because guys younger than he were fighting and dying in wars.

The question that immediately struck me was: So, which situation needs changing—the idea that a nineteen year old is not yet an adult, or the idea that a nineteen year old should be called upon to fight and die as a matter of course for any cause?

There are days my ten year old insists she’s no longer a child. “I’m not a little girl, Mom,” she says, then moments later, is curled in my arms bewailing the fact that she’s growing up. She is comforted in that moment, by the realization that she still fits in my lap.

When I watch the moment of silence that NPR observes while showing photos of our war dead, my overriding thought is that these kids old should be home with their moms doing  college homework or helping in the kitchen (maybe even cooking dinner), or being nagged to practice the guitar, or debating whether the family will watch Dr. Who or Grimm or Castle tonight, not out dying in a war. Don’t even get me started about what happens to someone at that impressionable age who is repeatedly subjected to the atrocities of war and then is expected to come home and just glide back into what is now an alien reality. I have a dear friend who counsels vets and their families, and the wreckage is horrific.

In this culture, we force our children to grow up suddenly and with few, if any, coming‑of‑age milestones. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard parents say they can hardly wait for their kid to turn eighteen so they are no longer responsible for them and can kick them out of the house. Often it’s said jokingly, but the joke is thin. One author (whose name I have forgotten) wrote a book about how the recent recession has caused families to have to take their kids back in and how rotten that is for the parents who’ve spent all this time working to obtain freedom from their kids. A number of high‑profile magazines (such as Forbes) have run articles on the trend of adult kids moving back in with their parents. There’s even a TV show dedicated to this part of the “American Dream” that tends to view it more as a nightmare. We consider a man who lives at home after eighteen “odd”, weak or a failure, we make slacker jokes about these guys.

Other cultures don’t have this shared obsession about independence. My son (27) and his wife live with us, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, recession or no. As I write this, he sits across the room, doing his homework, having just returned from school where he’s studying to get a teaching credential. My daughter‑in‑law is studying to become a nurse. My middle child is off at college back east and lives with us when she’s off from school. We Skype almost daily and she is not shy about voicing the opinion that while being on her own is okay and all that, she’d rather be home with us. When she is home, she works as a personal assistant for a PR firm CEO. She is not dependent, neither is my son. They have activities and responsibilities outside the family that sometimes make juggling our schedules a challenge.

What they are is interdependent. All of us understand that this model of interdependence is one that works and is, in microcosm, what our communities, our nation, and our world could be in macrocosm if we were not so focused on the American model of independence. A model which seems, in many ways, to have backfired and created a society in which the government is trying to figure out how it can replace the frayed elements of our social structure that we have—for reasons too complex to go into here—severed.

Part of my skepticism about the American model of adulthood and coming‑of-age is that we seem to expect our children to be children until ping! the Coming‑of‑Age Fairy bops them with a high school diploma and confers upon them instant adulthood. There are few, if any, coming of age rituals in this culture and the ones that exist seem to speak to the most ephemeral aspects of growing up (one can drink, drive, and see “adult” movies (oh, baby!). That high school diploma, or a high school pregnancy, or having to get a job because your family can’t survive without it, seem to be the extent of our maturation rites.

From my observations and discussions with other parents, I think a large part of the problem is how casual we are about our children’s education. Oh, not about math or science or other things you can learn by reading or going to school, but about how to think, and behave, and feel like an adult. My ten year old is following in my footsteps by fancying herself a social activist. She has recently moved from chatting with kids her age and younger about characters for their role playing games, to discussing topics such as spirituality, religion, and social issues with kids 12 to 16. She is very happy to share with me everything everyone says and what she says in return—indeed, she even discusses the issues with me—so I’m not too concerned that she will get in over her head. She has a very strong sense of her own identity and that, I think, is something that parents must work at cultivating and, too often, do not.

I think this is why parents are so shocked to discover their child is attending drunken parties, or smoking, or doing drugs, or have committed a crime that they would have thought impossible. Having kids isn’t for the faint of heart, or the uncommitted, or the hedonistic, or the merely distracted. If you want your child to have values, if you want them to value cultivating virtues such as honesty, kindness, empathy, courage, patience, wisdom—in a word, if you want them to have a strong sense of self and personal goals that will serve them no matter what curveballs the material world lobs at them—I believe you have to consciously teach them those things. You cannot assume they will learn it by watching you, or by going to school, or by reading, or by osmosis.

Remember, you are part of a culture that does not believe kids absorb violence from violent entertainment, or sexism from pornography, so if kids aren’t going to pick up vices by osmosis, then why would you expect them to pick up virtues that way, let alone be strongly disposed to prize them? With all three of our kids, we made a concerted and open effort to teach them to be—to be aware of what’s going on inside and outside, to take responsibility for what’s going on inside, to have goals that are focused on what sort of person they want to be, not on what sort of things they wanted to have. We have had a bedtime ritual of reading (fiction and non‑fiction), discussion and prayer with each of our kids and I have been very blunt in letting them know that I was doing it because I wanted them to have the tools to make good decisions and set goals in later life and because it was my job to do this.

It’s a small thing, but we have a series of coming of age rites in our family, starting with the Coffee Ceremony. At age twelve, you get your first cup of real coffee and can thereafter partake of adult conversation (and, in my childhood family, play cut-throat pinocle with the grown‑ups). At fifteen, you get a party at Feast (the Baha’i worship gathering), a Baha’i ring or necklace, a welcome meeting with the Local Spiritual Assembly, and a welcome letter and official Baha’i card from the National Spiritual Assembly. You are now a mature youth. Congratulations. After that, high school graduation and college, learning to drive, getting to vote in your first elections, and possibly being elected to a Baha’i Local Spiritual Assembly are just part of the natural upward spiral. Somewhere in there—at least in our family—you have your first filk and your first filk concert at a convention.

Each of these steps includes more empowerment in the family and community and a new set of privileges and responsibilities. Through it all, the family is there so that, at no point, does the child feel alone in the world … or alone against the world. He or she does not fall through the cracks.

Our eighteen year old children suddenly being expected to be completely independent adults is in some ways uniquely American and of fairly recent vintage. The need for young, vigorous bodies to march into war necessitates viewing boys and girls this young as fully‑fledged adults.

This cultural “norm” has ramifications in other aspects of society that we may not connect to it. Consider, for example, the fact that women in developing countries are finding it easier to juggle motherhood and career than women here in the US. They are not penalized for motherhood as we are by having to make “tough choices” that necessitate putting off childrearing or losing career equity. The reason? In these less modernized countries, the extended family unit has not been shredded as it has here. Women in these countries have a built-in support network that women in the US have to purchase.

This, of course, cascades into the way we structure government-run programs geared to aid the children of working parents. It cascades into the choices that women and married couples have to make about having children as opposed to having careers. It cascades into the fate of the elders in our society and how well or how poorly we care for them and avail ourselves of their hard‑earned wisdom. In fact, I wonder if there is any aspect of society that does not feel the impact of our expectation that young adults—just coming out of the most chaotic years of their lives in terms of bodily and emotional change and disruption—should be ready to be alone in and against the world.

And this brings me back to a hospital room in Boston, where a 19 year old boy, who should be doing his homework and arguing about what movie to go to this weekend, is instead alone against the world and struggling with the reality that he contributed to the deaths of four innocent human beings.

Here is my prayer: that parents will be conscious of their children, and conscious of what they are teaching them every single day.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 22, 2013. According to the `Abdu’l-Bahá – the son and successor of the prophet-founder of the Bahá’í Faith – there are four accepted methods of comprehension. These are sense-perception, reason, tradition, and intuition. None of them is sufficient as a basis for certain knowledge:

[A] man is not justified in saying, “I know because I perceive through my senses,” or “I know because it is proved through my faculty of reason,” or “I know because it is according to tradition and interpretation of the Holy Book,” or “I know because I am inspired.” All human standards of judgment are faulty, finite. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 20).

David Hume (1711-1776, also see Hume in Wikipedia), sometimes called the “most important philosopher ever to write in English,” would have agreed.

Famously skeptical, he viewed philosophical metaphysics and the continental European celebration of reason and rational thought as entirely unfounded.

He was a thorough-going empiricist. Like Locke and Berkeley before him, he believed that knowledge comes only through sense experience. But such knowledge was neither certain nor beyond question. Cynically (or perhaps not, the case is hard to tell) he viewed human conviction as ruled by passion. Human morality – he believed – was founded on a self-interest that colored all attempts at certainty.

Hume had little love for religion, no regard for tradition, and no regard for intuition. Here is how he summarized his case against the three in The Natural History of Religion:

Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

(Understandably, this view won him a formidable reputation as an atheist).

Yet Hume is one of the most delightfully readable of the philosophers, and his philosophical preoccupations have proven very influential, not only in utilitarianism, logical positivism, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, the economics and political philosophy of his friend Adam Smith, but in science as well, where he is regarded as one of the founding fathers of cognitive science.

Hume on Religion

Given the wide range of Hume’s thought, it perhaps best to consider his philosophical perspectives as they relate to religion – our topic. This is an arena where his skepticism seems to have had a powerful impact on the world.

Hume seems to have been an entirely irreligious man. Apparently, he held religion to be entirely based on human needs. Roy Porter, writing in The Creation of the Modern World, his history of the British enlightenment, characterizes Hume’s aforementioned The Natural History of Religion thus:

Hume trained his scepticism against … the Deists, reasoning that their much-vaunted pristine monotheism or natural religion was but wish fulfilment. In reality, all religion had its origins in fear and ignorance, and the first faiths had been crude and polytheistic.

In time, the progress of the mind drew monotheism out of polytheism, clarity out of confusion. Monotheism, however, in its turn bred enthusiasm, defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as ‘a vain belief of private revelation, a vain confidence of divine favour or communication’. … Hume’s strategic distinction between enthusiasm – fanatically intolerant but driving men to assert their liberties – and the superstition which made men law-abiding through cowed objection – was to prove highly influential, notably in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Thus Hume sabotaged Christianity by advancing a naturalistic account of the religious impulse, while equally discrediting the Deist myth of prehistoric monotheism.

Wikipedia – less fervently – summarizes the text as follows:

In this essay, Hume pioneers a naturalist account of the causes, effects, and historical development of religious belief. Hume locates the origins of religion in emotion, particularly fear and the desire to control the future. He further argues that monotheism arises from competition between religions, as believers seek to distinguish their deities as superior to all rivals. The monotheist drive [is] to dominate other beliefs, and to burnish the primitive, emotional core of religion under a veneer of theology. Hume concludes that this yields intolerance, intellectual dishonesty, and unnatural moral doctrines.

Personally, I find it hard to square Hume’s highly speculative causal argument with his views on empiricism, the importance of avoiding fallacious and simplistic metaphysical arguments, and his skeptical insights. His arguments don’t stand up to his own standards of proof.

It doesn’t seem that Hume trained his brilliantly skeptical mind in the methods of self-aware self-examination that a truly scientific methodology requires. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a skeptic viewed his own reasonings as beyond skeptical reproach.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Hume delayed publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after he died. It is a delightful read. Presented as a dialogue between Cleanthes, Philo, and Demea, it explores the prevailing philosophical views about proof of the existence of God, presenting arguments for and against them. Many of the points Hume made are highly regarded even to this day and continue to provide ammunition for those who hold to the view that belief in God is inconsistent with modern reason.

One of the most important points Hume makes is that the idea of God is – using the modern way of talking about it – contentless. Hume, like Hobbes before him, thinks that human reason cannot comprehend God. Because – Hume believes – all of our ideas are derived from sensory experience (either directly or built up from them) there is no way that we can get real-life empirical proof of the existence of God. And true to his empiricist convictions, he can’t believe in the power of reason to point towards causal proofs.

Hume also attacks the cosmological argument, which in the 18th century was based on two ideas that happen to feature strongly in the writings of `Abdu’l-Baha. This is the idea that “nothing can come from nothing” and that therefore the universe must have a first cause (i.e., God). The grounds supporting this view are two maxims:

• Whatever exists must have a cause or ground for its existence.
• No cause can produce or give rise to perfections or excellences that it does not itself possess.

Hume attacks this position by claiming that the necessary causality hasn’t been proven to hold.  From his point of view, the maxim’s are metaphysical assumptions – and it is entirely possible that something can come from nothing. (Note that this is a conclusion that is inconsistent with scientific accounts of the university which hold that there are laws of nature that hold everything in a kind of cosmic causal thrall.)

The Argument from Design

Closely related is the argument from design, which holds that the universe has perfections that show that it must be designed by an intelligence similar to that of a human mind. Hume puts the following argument into the mouth of Cleanthes:

Look around the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines… All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, exceeds the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed.

This can’t hold true, Hume argues, as the relationship between human and machines is far different from that between the author of the universe and nature. You can’t extend the analogy. Hume has his mouthpiece Philo say:

In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology, by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis.

This, of course, is recourse to empiricism. Nobody has seen the world arising from design, so the evidence is lacking.

Nor can one claim perfection for the world – because it contains evil, it is imperfect. Hume has Philo suggest that the world “is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard … [created by] some infant Deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance … [or] the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated Deity.”

The Problem of Evil

Hume then brings up the problem of evil. As summarized on the Stanford Internet article on Hume and Religion, the problem can be put as questions:

Is God willing to prevent evil but unable to do so? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is God able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so? Then he is malevolent (or at least less than perfectly good).

If God is both willing and able to prevent evil then why is there evil in the world?

Hume denies that bad things that happen in this world are compensated for in the next, the usual answer to this problem. Again, its empiricism. We don’t have any way of measuring it and thus proving it, therefore we have to just accept the idea that the world is imperfect. Therefore, we cannot infer that God is perfect.

Of course, the belief in miracles and the existence of the soul are all met with similar fates. We can not attain true knowledge about God or religion – Hume claims – from these approaches.

A Conclusion

Putting aside Hume’s unreasoned hostility to religion – clearly, not liking it is in his DNA and he has a hard time not thinking of anyone who likes it as a fool – its amazing how strong the correspondence of his thought is with`Abdu’l-Bahá’s analysis of the failure of the four ways of knowing. As far as I can tell, Hume is in total agreement with `Abdu’l-Bahá’s points that sense-impression, reason, tradition, and intuition don’t lead to reliable knowledge.

`Abdu’l-Bahá concludes with a statement about how reliable knowledge is to be found.

Briefly, the point is that in the human material world of phenomena these four are the only existing criteria or avenues of knowledge, and all of them are faulty and unreliable.

What then remains? How shall we attain the reality of knowledge? By the breaths and promptings of the Holy Spirit, which is light and knowledge itself. Through it the human mind is quickened and fortified into true conclusions and perfect knowledge. This is conclusive argument showing that all available human criteria are erroneous and defective, but the divine standard of knowledge is infallible.

I wonder what Hume would say?

Next Time

Next week, we study Rousseau.

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This is the 24th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 15, 2013. Immanuel Kant (for the Wikipedia entry, see Kant) is frequently acclaimed the greatest philosopher of modern times, an equal – or near equal – to Plato and Aristotle.

One reason for this acclaim was Kant’s powerful and compelling solution to the undermining of religion and faith that was the central crises of the Enlightenment. Rather than putting religion and faith on a sound philosophical or scientific footing, as Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz had intended, the Enlightenment had led to the widespread conviction that science – especially the enormously successful Newtonian mechanistic science – denied both the existence of the soul and the fundamental moral and religious beliefs of the time.

Kant argued that this was not so. His system, he claimed, avoided that problem while maintaining the integrity of reason. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes his perspective as follows:

… a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion.

Although convoluted in detail, the basis of his conclusion is simple: both science and religion are products of the mind and must be in accord with the mind’s innate structures. So far, so good.

But Kant held that religion was not based on reason and knowledge – these were the engines of science and philosophy. Rather, religion was based on our moral sensibilities – which Kant argued were of equal importance with our logical sensibilities. By showing that there were limitations to empirical and rational knowledge – the domains of science and philosophy – Kant claimed to show that belief in God was immune to the skepticism of the enlightenment.

Famously, he summarized his view thus:

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

What he meant by this was that there is a higher unknowable moral reality beyond the reach of our rationality or empirical study.

But consider, by way of contrast, how the Baha’i Faith views the relationship between the two:

If we say religion is opposed to science, we lack knowledge of either true science or true religion, for both are founded upon the premises and conclusions of reason, and both must bear its test. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 107)

If valid, the Baha’i view is a far more powerful and effective resolution to the problem than that of Kant.

Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

Kant holds that two kinds of metaphysical systems are possible, the metaphysics of experience (or nature) and the metaphysics of morals. This view – combined with his view of the limitations of reason – underlies his approach to the philosophy of religion (see here and here).

One of the most important consequences of his perspective is his view that there can be no strictly rational proof of the existence of God. Reason does not – indeed, cannot – reach out to the extent needed to make definite proof. So he denies the validity of all the traditional rational proofs of the existence of God.

But, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe in God. There are, he argues, powerful moral arguments for such belief. Because of the need to consider practical moral truths as of the greatest importance, we must “postulate” the immortality of the soul, the existence of purpose in the world, and the existence of God. But at the same time, we must keep in mind the fallacious tendency of the human mind to overstep the limits to reason to create rationalistic systems of thought beyond the realm of evidence.

Radical Evil and the Ethical Commonwealth

On the basis of this style of argument about the importance of moral reasoning, Kant created a rich, deep, full and influential system of moral theology, often reinterpreting traditional Christianity in ways that remain influential in modern liberal Protestant thought to this day. For example, he modifies the Christian concept of “original sin” to that of “radical evil” where we make satisfaction of our own ends more important than doing the morally right thing. To overcome this evil, we need to change our heart – and Christ is the model exemplar for virtuous and moral action that shows us how to do so.

When the overcoming of radical evil is successfully done on a society-wide – or world-wide – basis, it can be expected to lead to perpetual peace among nations as “the highest good” and a political order capable of maintaining that good. But, he holds that organized religion can help perpetuate “radical evil” through ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order.

Some Consequences of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

Kant’ philosophy of religion has been extraordinarily influential (as outlined here and here). One thing it helped launch, of course, was the modern academic field of the philosophy of religion.

Modern Protestant theology – especially liberal theology with its emphasis on moral progress and social reform – has been strongly influenced by Kant.

Modern debates on science and religion also owe a substantial debt to Kant, partly because he was one of the founding fathers of the philosophy of science and wrote extensively on the relationship of science to religion, but also because of his view that religion is a moral phenomena rather than rational phenomena. The eNotes website entry on Kant describes the impact of the distinctions he drew:

Kant’s position, then, radically separated science from religion, as if the two subjects contained no common ground. … Religion becomes morality while science becomes Naturbeherrschung, mastery of the world. …

Most recently something of a Kantian position on the relationship between science and religion has been advocated by the noted American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941000) who, without ever naming Kant, introduced the notion of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) as a means of dealing with the realities of science, which is concerned with the factual construction of nature, and religion, which concerns itself with moral issues about the value and meaning of life.

Despite Kant’s enormous influence – and the pronouncedly moral character of his work – its hard not to ask some critical questions. Is it true that religion has only moral content? Is it to be fenced off from the rigor and analytic qualities of reason and science? Does it need that protection? And hasn’t Kant diluted – rather than strengthened – religion by making it so vague and unanchored so as to be a plaything of philosopher-theologians (some well-intentioned, to be sure, some not). Given the loss of influence – and the over-philosophical character – of much of liberal theology – and its antagonistic feuds with other branches of Christianity – would it be amiss to think that Kant inherited much of the Enlightenment’s antagonism to revealed religion?

Next Time

There are still some influential Enlightenment thinkers we haven’t looked at – most notably Hume and Rousseau. We will remedy that next time by starting with the skeptical Hume.

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This is the 23rd in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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Bertrand Russell

One of the most convincing aspects of the mystic illumination is the apparent revelation of the oneness of all things, giving rise to pantheism in religion and to monism in philosophy. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, “Unity and Plurality”

Thus Bertrand Russell begins a chapter on Unity and Plurality in which he explores the metaphysical or mystical concept of “oneness”.

The words “unity” and “oneness” are much-used in both religion (or mysticism) and philosophy, but are also prominent in science. As Baha’is believe in the unity of God and the oneness of mankind, physicists seek a “grand unified theory”, a principle of everything, as they seek the origins of the Universe we inhabit. It would be easy to argue that these two related terms do not mean the same thing within these disciplines. Easy, but possibly inaccurate.

Russell comments that:

An elaborate logic, beginning with Parmenides, and culminating in Hegel and his followers, has been gradually developed, to prove that the universe is one indivisible Whole, and that what seem to be its parts, if considered as substantial and self-existing, are mere illusion. The conception of a Reality quite other than the world of appearance, a reality one, indivisible, and unchanging, was introduced into Western philosophy by Parmenides, not, nominally at least, for mystical or religious reasons, but on the basis of a logical argument as to the impossibility of not‑being…. (ibid.)

The first sentence of that comment seems to me self-evident and leads, inexorably, to a place where several blind men sit arguing the reality of an elephant. To suppose that any part of the Universe is self‑existing is to suppose that one can have a trunk or a leg or an ear without the rest of a living elephant being present. It seems to me that the semantical tangle occurs around the word “illusion”.

I am told that my name, “maya”, means “illusion.” But when I research the word in Sanskrit, I find it to be far more nuanced that that simple English word implies. It refers to the creative power through which God (the first Cause) created Life, the Universe, and Everything. The illusory quality of this (like the illusory quality of the independence of an elephant’s trunk) is relative. The trunk seems to have a mind of its own, but it doesn’t; the elephant’s massive brain is driving its movements, in addition to the movements of the rest of the elephant. Our galaxy seems to be doing its own thing off in its splendid little corner of the cosmos, independently of other galaxies, but “seems” is the operative term. Its independence is limited and relative. It is responding to the larger movements of the rest of the Universe—the Milky Way is not not dancing alone.

Krishna’s warning about mistaking His “divine maya” as the substance of reality has to do with mistaking the external manifestation of a thing as its ultimate reality. In practical terms, it’s like assuming the candy shell on the outside of the M&M is the substance of the candy. To bring this point home in as visceral a way as possible, imagine that a candy-seeking mammal—assuming the exterior of his M&Ms to be their ultimate reality—licks off the shell and tosses the creamy chocolate interiors into the trash.

‘Nuff said.

Humans make this mistake in much more significant ways all the time. We chronically judge books by their covers or human beings (including ourselves) by our external appearances or lowest commonalities. We assign worth to people based on how physically pretty or sexually attractive they are, how much wealth they command, how well they dress or on credentials that proclaim them to be well-versed in certain disciplines.

Russell notes that:

Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses arises with irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source of most mysticism, and of most metaphysics. While such a mood is dominant, the need of logic is not felt, and accordingly the more thoroughgoing mystics do not employ logic, but appeal directly to the immediate deliverance of their insight. But such fully developed mysticism is rare in the West. (ibid.)

I guess so, because in writing that paragraph above about the movement of our galaxy, I employed reason to explore the intuition that the galaxy—which seems to be a self-contained whirligig floating in the emptiness of space—is a separate, independent, self-existing entity. Reason, by walking into the room with the blind dudes and the elephant and circumambulating them, reaches a different conclusion: that the seemingly diverse bits of elephantine splendor are part of one indivisible Whole. Ditto, the galaxy.

My question is, why do we attach such dogmatic zero sum score‑keeping to the concept of unity and  plurality? Why is this even a binary question: Is the Universe / God / mankind one OR is it a collection of federated parts / aspects / units?

If that’s the question, then it seems to me the answer is “Yes, it is.”

Krishna is quoted in the Bhagavad Gita as saying that:

“Others follow the path of jnana, spiritual wisdom. They see that where there is One, that One is me; where there are many, all are me; they see my face everywhere.” — Bhagavad Gita 9:15, Easwaran translation)

The Gita describes the mystical Moment in which Arjuna intuits (or sees through jnana) that “within the body of the God of gods, Arjuna saw all the manifold forms of the universe united as one” (ibid 11:13)

This Moment—which is expressed in a rapturous metaphor—leads the Avatar’s cousin to exclaim: “You are the Lord of all creation, and the cosmos is your body.” (ibid 11:16)

To a Baha’i, this oneness is a given, but it should not cause the believer to become “malicious” (a word that Russell borrows from philosopher George Santayana) of the “divine maya” or the physical cosmos that results from it. Nor, I should add, is there reason for the believer to be malicious of the study of that physical reality; in a word, science.

Krishna speaks of a God that pervades and upholds Its creation. Likewise, the Torah asserts that:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. — Psalm 19:1-4

The Baha’i sacred texts echo this:

“Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth is a direct evidence of the revelation within it of the attributes and names of God, inasmuch as within every atom are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that Most Great Light. Methinks, but for the potency of that revelation, no being could ever exist. How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop! To a supreme degree is this true of man, who, among all created things, hath been invested with the robe of such gifts, and hath been singled out for the glory of such distinction. For in him are potentially revealed all the attributes and names of God to a degree that no other created being hath excelled or surpassed.” — Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh

It is not surprising that the impulse to acquire knowledge about our universe and ourselves has been felt so strongly in the religious community or that religious sacred texts propose a rigorous detachment. We should, Krishna says, approach this knowledge with neither “attachment or aversion.” To this, Bahaullah adds:

“He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth” — idid. 

By now it is no surprise that Russell concurs. He writes, thusly, of the “defects which are inherent in anything malicious.”

“The logic which thus arises is not quite disinterested or candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the daily world to which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally does not tend to the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author simply in order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is just as unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance …” — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

Russell is speaking specifically of the hostility that “metaphysicians” and mystics show toward reason, logic, and the sciences, but his wisdom applies to any subject—whether from the lips of a religious Prophet or an atheist philosopher.

Next time: Russell on Time

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 8, 2013. One of the last – and probably the greatest philosopher – of the important enlightenment thinkers was Immanuel Kant (for the Wikipedia entry, see Kant). To understand his importance, it is worth quoting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.

What did Kant have to say about the all-consuming themes of the enlightenment – philosophy, religion, atheism, science, reason, rationalism, and empiricism? Again, to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia:

He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality.

In short, all understanding – be it of God, of science, of religion, of anything – stems from the structures of understanding built into our mind – “the mind actively structures how we see the world“. So reason and scientific investigation are of central and absolute importance, but, what it reveals – and the limitations of what it can reveal – are determined by how the mind works.

What follows is Kant’s “grand synthesis:”

Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature …

But, like a beautiful California beach covered with brilliant and alluring white sand opening on a crystalline aqua ocean, there are problems in the depths.

On California beaches, it is the deadly undertow and the sneaker waves that can drag the unwary to their death (and, of course, the occasional shark). For the inheritors of Kant’s philosophy – Hegel, Marx, Freud and others – it is that the hidden and unknowable structures of the mind take on a life of their own – powerful and corrosive nationalisms, dialectical materialisms, or hidden and base roots of behavior – and that catastrophic consequences in the moral, political, and financial worlds follow.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution

Kant was born in Konigsburg, in the northern part of Prussia bordering modern Lithuania. He never strayed.

At first a reasonably conservative and popular university lecturer, he taught a mix of the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff – the great German thinkers of the day – and the empiricisms of Newton and the British philosophers, including the famously skeptical David Hume.

But how could these seeming incompatible sources of knowledge – rationalism and empiricism – be reconciled to each other? A big part of the problem was that of the intellect. How could the intellect – and reason – obtain to knowledge? If, as the Enlightenment loudly and often proclaimed – reason and thought was the key to understanding everything, even religion – then how can we understand reason’s ability to work in such powerful and all-embracing ways?

It was Hume’s challenge to the usual understanding of the workings of cause and effect that awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber”,  Describing this awakening, he later wrote:

I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.

Fr. Seamus Mulholland, writing on Kant on the Pathways School of Philosophy website, summarizes Kant’s approach to reconciliation:

As he saw it, rationalism operates in the sphere of innate ideas, with their analytical and therefore aprioristic ideas; this necessity, however, is not based on experience and consequently does not apply to reality itself. On the other hand empiricism starts completely from experience and thus (it seems) from reality, but it arrives only at a posteriori and therefore synthetic statements that lack necessity.

Kant sought to unite the concept and experience; he sought a necessity that extends to the order of objective reality and an order of objective reality that in itself contains necessity.

The Stanford Encyclopedia puts it in slightly different terms. Referring to Kant’s magisterial – and nearly impenetrable – Critique of Pure Reason – it explains his thinking:

However, Kant’s revolutionary position in the Critique is that we can have a priori knowledge about the general structure of the sensible world because it is not entirely independent of the human mind. The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties. We can have a priori knowledge only about aspects of the sensible world that reflect the a priori forms supplied by our cognitive faculties.

In Kant’s words, “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them”. So according to the Critique, a priori knowledge is possible only if and to the extent that the sensible world itself depends on the way the human mind structures its experience.

Kant described his new thinking as his “Copernican Revolution”. When Copernicus couldn’t make sense of the idea of a universe centered on the earth, he flipped things around to see if it made better sense when the sun was at the center of the universe:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.

This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.

The Crisis of the Enlightenment

Kant’s thinking came at the end of the Enlightenment when the attacks on morality and religion – especially from British empiricists and French deists and atheists – was reaching a crescendo. The French revolution was about to happen – and its celebration of reason gone awry was the harbinger of the first of the great world wars. Soon militarism, Napoleonic frenzy, and unrestrained nationalism was to throw Europe and much of the world into chaos. And romanticism – the celebration of passion and elevated states of feeling – was at the door and ready to take over.

The Enlightenment was the celebration of reason – and of science in general and Newtonian science in particular. It opened up vast new vistas of progress. But, how could order and coherence be maintained if everyone were to think willy-nilly just for themselves and not for the general good?

According to the enlightenment, reason was the judge. Kant proclaimed:

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.

But everybody was supposed to think for themselves. And the path forward was unclear. At the heart of the crisis of the enlightenment was the “sovereignty of reason.” Again, the Stanford Encyclopedia:

The problem is that to some it seemed unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities; or whether unaided reasoning would instead lead straight to materialism, fatalism, atheism, skepticism, or even libertinism and authoritarianism.

The Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason was tied to the expectation that it would not lead to any of these consequences but instead would support certain key beliefs that tradition had always sanctioned. Crucially, these included belief in God, the soul, freedom, and the compatibility of science with morality and religion. Although a few intellectuals rejected some or all of these beliefs, the general spirit of the Enlightenment was not so radical. The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the authority of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs.

But if science – especially Newtonian mechanistic science and its clockwork mechanisms that deny the existence of the soul and freedom of choice – is the essence of reason and rationality, what does the Enlightenment really have to offer? And what if “modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason” was the cause of undermining “traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support?”

Kant claimed to have solved the problem. He claims to have proven that “a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion.”

Next Time

But did Kant really solve the problem? Does free rational inquiry – of and by itself – support morality, the need for order, and other human interest? Does reason deserve “the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment?” We address these and other question in fuller detail in the next blog when we look at Kant’s defense of religion.

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This is the 22nd in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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Bertrand Russell

Of the reality or unreality of the mystic’s world I know nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain—and it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative—is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition between instinct and reason… But in fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

Anyone who has ever heard or seen Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak on astrophysics or has read Einstein holding forth on relativity would not doubt, for a moment, Bertrand Russell’s  assertion that “much of the most important truth is first suggested” by insight or intuition. The above sentence, which kicks off his chapter on reason and intuition, about sums up my own sense of the relationship between mysticism and logic, reason and intuition. It also pretty accurately sums up the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith as voiced by Abdu’l‑Bahá.

Every subject presented to a thoughtful audience must be supported by rational proofs and logical arguments. Proofs are of four kinds: first, through sense perception; second, through the reasoning faculty; third, from traditional or scriptural authority; fourth, through the medium of inspiration. That is to say, there are four criteria or standards of judgment by which the human mind reaches its conclusions. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, Talk from 16 August, 1912

Consequently, it has become evident that the four criteria or standards of judgment by which the human mind reaches its conclusions are faulty and inaccurate. All of them are liable to mistake and error in conclusions. But a statement presented to the mind accompanied by proofs which the senses can perceive to be correct, which the faculty of reason can accept, which is in accord with traditional authority and sanctioned by the promptings of the heart, can be adjudged and relied upon as perfectly correct, for it has been proved and tested by all the standards of judgment and found to be complete. When we apply but one test, there are possibilities of mistake. This is self-evident and manifest. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, Talk from 16 August, 1912

Where Instinct and Reason Conflict

“Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict,” Russell continues his thoughts on the matter, “is in regard to single beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.”

Russell continues, echoing Abdu’l‑Bahá:

Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others, for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through very careful disguises. … It is such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself, that reason aims at correcting. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation, that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the spirit which inspires those beliefs, but rather the outcome of this very spirit as applied in the realm of thought.  — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

Practical Preoccupations

Thus, Russell sums up the real problem with dogmatism—it saddles us with “practical preoccupations”. The context in which he makes this observation is interesting to me, as a person of faith. Freedom from these preoccupations, Russell asserts, as well as “impersonal disinterestedness” (detachment), and a “largeness of contemplation” have been inculcated by religion. To underscore the point, he then considers the philosophies in contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson’s volume Introduction to Metaphysics. 

Of Bergson’s theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty, developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed under the stress of practical utility. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic  

What Russell has dug down to, in essence, is that the thing we are studying (the human intellect) and the tool we are using to study it are one and the same. We are using a tool to study itself. And, as Russell posits, if that intellect is misleading, then our appeal to reason alone can only mislead us. It is only by applying all of our evolved faculties to explore our world that we may arrive at anything approaching reality.

In the final analysis, atheist, Bertrand Russell, and faith leader Abdu’l‑Bahá come to the same conclusion: that we are more likely to arrive at a truth consistent with reality if we carefully apply all of our faculties to an issue—even, Abdu’l-Bahá suggests, to religion.

Religion must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. If it be non-progressive it is dead. The divine institutes are evolutionary; therefore [their] revelation must be progressive and continuous. ..Sciences of former ages and philosophies of the past are useless today.  Ancient laws and archaic ethical systems will not meet the requirements of modern conditions…

       In view of this, shall blind imitations of ancestral forms and theological interpretations continue to guide the spiritual development of humanity today? Shall man gifted with the power of reason unthinkingly adhere to dogma which will not bear the analysis of reason? — Abdu’l-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity p. 83

I’ve quoted Bahá’í mathematician William S. Hatcher before on this subject, but I feel his summary of the relationship between reason and intuition—or as Abdu’l-Bahá puts it, the four kinds of proofs—is especially cogent.

It would be a mistake to say that we hold such a statement to be true because of reason, or because of intuition, or because of experience. In the final analysis, we hold something as true only because of everything else which we accept as true, that is, because this something is consistent with our experience and understanding of life as a whole. — William S. Hatcher, The Science of Religion, Association of Bahá’í Studies

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 1, 2013. What was the enlightenment about really?

If you believe Kant, it was about learning to think for yourself. Here is how he says it in his famous – and mercifully readable – essay “What is Enlightenment?”

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.

And in a very real sense, that is indeed what the enlightenment was all about.

More Than Just Thinking for Yourself

But it was about much else too. At its heart were many issues that were the same – or at least very similar – to those that drove Luther and the leaders of the Reformation to break away from the Catholic Church. One of Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg read:

Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the richest of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?

In other words, why does the pope live in such luxury amidst so much riches, wealth, and power while the poor wither away in poverty?

By the end of enlightenment, there was a widespread belief that not only were the church and the priesthood completely corrupt, but also that belief in Christ was a kind of confidence game used to pacify, control, constrain, and extract money from ordinary uneducated people.

A related issue was Luther’s demand that people be allowed to read the Bible for themselves. He held that what the Bible said was more important than the pronouncements of even the most eminent of the clergy. Here is how he said it at the famous Leipzig Debate in 1519:

No believing Christian can be forced to recognise any authority beyond the sacred Scripture, which is exclusively invested with Divine right.

This statement – and the belief of many in the reformation – has had extraordinary and continuing resonance to this day. If all authority is God’s and if it is to be understood as true only when interpreted by an individual through his (or her) reading of sacred scripture, then the authority of religious leadership is without basis. Only understanding obtained through conscientious reading of holy scripture was “invested with Divine Right.”

This denial of the authority of the church was to continue to have consequences. By the time the Enlightenment was coming to a close, the authority of both the monarchical and princely governments of Europe and any and all churches were often denied.

New Sources of Authority

By the middle of the 17 century, religious divisiveness – rather than abating as a result of the new concepts introduced by Luther and other Protestant thinkers – heated up to intolerable levels giving rise to years of wars and multiple scores of violent persecutions and exiles. Rather than settling down to scriptural-inspired agreement, people many times disagreed completely, often claiming their personal interpretation of scripture as the final authority. And the devious and the powerful were clever and determined enough to use this to their advantage.

But there was – as they say in the movies – a new kid on the block. Science! And because science was grounded in learning, abstraction, nature, classical thought (especially that of Aristotle), mathematics and closely related to humanism, it brought philosophy – discarded by Luther – back to the fore.

If religion and obedient attention to scripture couldn’t resolve the problem of determining the truth and uniting society – and it seemed to many in the 17th century to be more highly productive of schism and conflict – then something else was needed and might not that something else be science? or philosophy? or both?

Thus, in the years preceding the enlightenment proper – which stricter historians want to confine to the 18th century – leading thinkers embraced a potent and enervating mix of science, philosophy, and religion as the way forward. One of the results was the scientific revolution – the opening of a veritable treasure-house of inexhaustible wealth of continually growing knowledge. Other results were the embrace of rationalism – the idea that clear and simple thought partook of the nature of divine knowledge due to its similarity to hard-core mathematical certainty. And empiricism, the view that is was only investigation and the senses that led to the truth.

It was these basic ideas that led to Kant’s famous statement that the enlightenment was all about thinking for yourself. Instead of individuals understanding divine truth by reading scripture, truth was to be discovered by thinking for yourself. It followed that superstition – blind belief unmitigated by thought – was a bad thing. Also, blind belief in church authority continued to be a bad thing. Education became one of the highest goods. Doing mathematics, using empiricism, applying science to any and all topics of understanding, and developing political systems of thought that could capitalize on the growing propensity of people to think for themselves all became priorities.

And all of this came into maturity in the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

The Significance of the Enlightenment

And here is the thing. Many – maybe most – of these conclusions were correct, we moderns think. Yes, we all have to think for ourselves, not to blindly submit to superstition or authority. And yes, the power of science is very great and seemingly inexhaustible. And further, many of the criticisms and critiques of religion were correct. Many in the priesthood or the church were there for opportunity and power and were corrupt. And systems of thought that decreed arbitrary interpretative authority or rule of the many by the few violated the lessons of philosophy and science. And so the world changed – it became progressive, it shrank the world into a whole.

It was not without problems even more severe than those of the reformation and the religious conflict that it struggle to supersede. Enlightenment traditions of thinking for yourself were marvelously similar to age-old traditions of scheming for your own advancement. So why not scheme rather than think for yourself.  And yet, clearly there was a difference between the two.

And enlightenment attacks on organized religion and sitting governments morphed rather easily into political movements that literally contemplated world domination. But, something had happened. The world had changed. The genie of science, worldwide expansion, and exploding knowledge had been let of the bottle.

Next

The trick is how to use this genie for the best. For that, next week we go to Kant and his synthesis of the great systems of thought of the enlightenment – he even almost allows God back into the picture, allowing that he might be needed as the ground for morality and happiness.

…………………………

This is the 21st in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Today’s blog is a departure in a number of ways. First, though it has to do with faith and reason, it is not a matter of science—unless one considers the science of ballistics or perhaps the divine science of building union between human beings. Second, it is not part of the series I started last week. I apologize for the interruption, but since the subject of this blog woke me up early on a morning after a West Wing marathon (important safety tip: never watch a season ender with a cliff hanger when it’s followed by a two part season opener). So, with apologies to readers who prefer strictly science‑related content, I’d like to talk about the human face of ballistics.

I frequently discuss issues surrounding gun violence with friends and other correspondents. Something that comes up repeatedly is the assertion that the face of crime is the face of the career criminal. Such gun legislation as universal background checks and registration will fail to have any impact because criminals are the ones committing the sensational crimes and the “ordinary” ones as well and they will simply not submit to background checks and will find illegal ways of getting guns. So, since no criminals will actually be affected by laws, there is no point to enacting laws. (Which begs the question as to why we have any laws at all, but that’s a different blog.)

Yes, certainly there are shootings perpetrated by career criminals during the commission of a crime of acquisition gone wrong. There are drug‑related crimes and gang‑related crimes, and these, too, take their toll. But we comprehend these crimes to a degree. They happen in the pursuit of a material goal. They are perpetrated by criminals—by THEM not by US.

But there are other shootings that defy comprehension—we cannot make sense of them in any way—in large part because they are not committed by criminals. They are committed by our neighbors—by US.

Many of us see the face of gun crime as young, criminal, possibly a gang member, often black. But that is not the only face of gun crime.

Henry

This is also the face of gun crime.

This is Henry, who last year killed a 13 year old neighbor boy who had lived next door to him with his mother and brother for about a month. The youth was black and, while racial stereotyping may have been what led Henry to assume that his young neighbor, Darius, was guilty of breaking and entering, that is not an established fact of the case.

Darius, who was described by those who knew him as a “good kid”, was in school at the time Henry’s house was broken into, but when Henry sat down for breakfast with his alderman one morning, he did not realize that—or perhaps simply didn’t believe it. In his mind, Darius was guilty. Henry told his alderman that he was upset the police were doing nothing, but that there were other ways of dealing with such things. The method Henry chose was to confront Darius as he was taking the trash cans to the curb for his mother. Henry  pointed a 9 mm handgun at Darius and accused him of breaking and entering. Darius raised his hands to show he was unarmed and denied the accusation. Henry shot him in the chest from five feet away—while his mother watched.

The epilogue to this case isn’t pretty either. Darius’s mother was held in a police car and questioned for two hours while her son’s body lay on the sidewalk and police tore her house apart looking for Henry’s stolen property. They also arrested an older son for a year-old truancy. I have a son. I can’t even imagine what she must have felt. But that’s a different blog.

Here’s a reality check: Darius wasn’t the only victim of this shooting. His mother was a victim, his other family members are victims, the neighbors who witnessed the murder—indeed, their entire neighborhood—are victims. And lastly, Henry is a victim of his own paranoia, anger, and the ease with which he used a gun to deal with a crime committed against him—and reasoned that it was his right to do so.

Henry’s gun was legally purchased. Meaning he had passed a background check. He had no criminal record. He was, until the moment he pulled the trigger, a law‑abiding citizen. Now he is a criminal.

I found the story of Henry and Darius while I was looking for a particular neighbor‑on-neighbor shooting that I recalled from several years ago in which a man shot and killed his next-door neighbor because of where he habitually placed his trash cans. I never did find that story; instead, I found Henry and Darius and many, many others. While the story I was looking for was several years old, these were all fresh—within the last year or so.

I found several stories of folks who shot neighbors because a dog pooped on a lawn (more in which they simply shot the dog), or because the neighbor pulled that old prank of depositing dog poop on their front porch for some perceived offense, or because the neighbor was having a loud party (that one involved two volunteer firefighters), or because rowdy teenagers were hanging out in the street and tipping over trash cans (which one gentleman felt required the use of a Bushmaster 5.56 with which he wounded several of the miscreants). I did find a shooting that transpired because of trash, but it wasn’t the one I was looking for. In this case, the shooter was an ex-policeman.

One of the stories I found was about Jonathan and Donnie. Jonathan was a 23 year old combat veteran from Albuquerque. Donnie shot him because—for unknown reasons—he was observed standing in a neighbor’s driveway holding a handgun. The neighbor called 911, then asked Donnie—who lived on his block—for help. When Jonathan went home, Donnie got in his car and pursued him, though the police were on their way. The two exchanged fire. Jonathan was killed.

Probably the most unexpected story came out of our own neck of the woods—the San Francisco Bay Area. This was the story of Martin, Mike and Doug. They were buddies who stood on different sides of national politics, but who were still close friends. They hung out and watched sporting events together, bickering about everything and nothing. Martin was an ex‑Marine whose wife had died the year before and who had been befriended by Mike. But one day, as they hung out in Mike’s garage, the bickering became serious enough that Martin went back to his house, returned with a gun and shot his two best friends dead on Mike’s front lawn.

Only Martin knows what they were arguing about that was so important it could only be settled with violence. Like the other stories, the effects of this one go beyond the deaths of two men. The act broke their families, destroyed Martin’s life, and shattered the neighborhood.

When we think of gun violence, we tend to think in terms of two affected parties—one random criminal and one victim. We think of them as strangers. But the ripples from these crimes are incalculable.

These cases are also remarkable for the closeness of the shooter and the victim—the man across the street, the one next door, a best friend—saddest of all, a family member. NPR did a piece on medical professionals in Colorado, which state is in the process of working out new gun legislation. There are doctors on both “sides” of the issue. According to polls of medical professionals in the state, about two‑thirds of them are in favor of stronger gun‑related laws; about one‑third are against them. In one of the interviews a doctor told a story of his own about a the human face of ballistics. Several months ago, he treated a woman and her husband. They’d had a fight; the husband accused his wife of cheating. Angry, he grabbed the pistol he had purchased to defend his family, and shattered that family irretrievably: he shot his wife. The doctor couldn’t save her. Her husband, the doctor said, “…made a snap decision, and he realized his life will never be the same, and hers was gone.”

The doctor made a comment that should give all of us pause: He was struck by how often the people he meets in these situations are surprised at the consequences of their actions. They do not expect the outcome of their rage to be permanent. If they had not picked up a gun in that moment of anger, or if they had aimed that gun at a paper target or a tin can, or even the wall, it need not have been.

“I see patients every day,” one doctor said, “that are right on the edge of being unstable and are out there in the environment, and they describe problems with access to medications, problems with access to psychiatric care or substance abuse care, problems with access to homes or to shelter. But they don’t describe problems with access to guns.”

Consequences.

Everything we do, everything we say, everything we think has consequences. It shapes us, our relationships with the people in our lives, and our environment. It determines how people react to us and what they do, say and think in response to what we do, say and think. Sometimes the consequences are mild and we can work them out. A disagreement, an argument, a fight—the consequences might be a frosty night or two in the dog house, the necessity of an apology, possibly—worst case—a broken nose, friendship or marriage. But, when there is a gun in the equation, the consequences can easily be terminal. They cannot be mended, taken back, or apologized for. There is no way to make restitution. And the ripples from those consequences—sudden and awful—reach far beyond the shooter and the victim or victims.

If we were able to divorce ourselves from the emotional baggage and look at this as a case of risk management, what conclusions might we draw? We’ll probably never know. But we need to at least attempt a rational discussion of what constitutes a reasonable, effective, compassionate, just and holistic response to gun violence. A discussion that recognizes the many faces that it wears. A discussion that recognizes that sometimes the consequences of accepting the status quo are too great.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 27, 2013. I wrote last week’s blog – The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #19: Deism, Atheism, and the French Revelation – hurriedly. When I reread it several days later, I was struck by its harsh language. What I said about the French Revolution was:

Enlightenment thought, especially deism – and its rejection of revealed religion – played a central role in … the French Revolution (1789–1799). Deists and atheists competed with each other in the persecution of religion and the slaughter of priests, eventually turning on each other during the orgy of violence that was the Terror.

This week, I have been agonizing. Should I have used such strong language?

Deism and atheism certainly played role in the terrors of the French Revolution. The anti-clericalism of the revolution was certainly couched in the language of deistic and atheistic enlightenment thought. But clearly many other factors were at work, most notably an outpouring of hatred towards the ancien regime – a reactionary mix of authoritarian hereditary monarchism, aristocratic privilege, and Catholic religious political power that had outlived its welcome.

There are larger questions as well.

• Were atheism and deism dominant factors in the repeated and extraordinary outpouring of violence that has characterized the modern world over the last 250 year? Many other factors – nationalism, the emergence of modern technologies and greater military capabilities, or competition for trade, colonies, and political power – are certainly a necessary part of the picture.
• And, isn’t it true that atheism, deism, and the rejection of revealed religion that was characteristic of the enlightenment was a consequence of the decay of religion, its loss of relevance, and the harm it did? Were not the anti-religious philosophes – and their revolutionary followers – reacting to the very real problems that they saw associated with religion?

In other words, aren’t atheism, deism, and attacks on revealed religion symptoms of problems with society and the role of religion in it rather than the cause of those problems?

These questions are increasingly relevant in face of resurgent claims from modern atheists – many identical to those raised by both atheists and deists more than 250 years ago – that religion is responsible for much of the violence of modern world.

So, before moving to the last of the great enlightenment philosophes – the extraordinarily capable and influential Immanuel Kant – let’s briefly consider these questions about the impact of atheism on society.

Atheism, Deism, “Mass Cleansing,” and Claims about the Effects of Religion

Two phrases that I used in my last blog were very strong. Reading them later, they struck me as harsh, uninviting. I wrote of “mass slaughter” and an “orgy of violence” in the French Revolution. Was I being fair?

I tried to find softer, better, easier words. Certainly, there were synonyms that could be used to described the limited bloodletting of the French Revolution (as opposed to, say, the massive bloodletting of Napoleon’s subsequent wars of conquest). But none, in my opinion, fit what was to follow. I could not – in honesty – make it soft.

The Goddess of The Cult of Reason

The more important question, of course, is about atheism and deism. Did these, directly or indirectly, create or contribute to the rise of ideologies and fanaticisms that triggered our multiple modern incidents of “mass cleansing?”

The question is analogous to similar questions that Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, d’Holbach and others raised – and answered – with respect to religion. Religion and “priestcraft,” they held, caused the hatreds, the expulsions, the persecutions that had dominated much of European life in the 16th and 17th centuries. Eliminate religion (atheism), or revealed religion (deism) – they thought – and replace it with Reason, Science, Rationality, Empiricism, or even Natural Religion and everything would be much better. Of course, if atheism and deism, or nationalism, or racism were to result in the same levels of violence of the 16th and 17th centuries – or as the case turned out to be – even greater levels of violence, then the radical anti-religious philosophes would be wrong. Religion per se could not be held to be the cause.

New atheism and its view that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises” (see The rise of the ‘New Atheists’) is in the same boat. Its claims are equally refuted by the lessons of history if instituting the principles of atheism and deism increase, rather than lessen, mass violence.

“Mass Cleansing” and State Atheism in the 20th Century

The French Revolution – and Napoleon’s wars of conquest – triggered nationalist movements across Europe and in European colonies around the globe. But 19th century outbreaks of mass violence by in large were confined to the European periphery – in colonies or in the fight against the Ottoman empire. Conquest or racism – not ideology – was the driving factor.

In the 20th century, things changed. Here is how Daniel Jonah Goldhagen – author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners – summarizes what happened in his important book Worse Than War (see the PBS website Worse Than War):

Our time’s most lethal killers—Hitler in Europe, Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il in North Korea, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong in China and Tibet—have acted from beliefs calling for their societies’ or the world’s thorough transformation. … Hitler killed perhaps 20 million people, Stalin 8 million or more, Mao perhaps 50 million, the dynastic Kims perhaps more than 4 million, and Pol Pot the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.

And they made slaughtering people a constitutive feature of their civilizations, because their ideologies, as varied as they were, un­ceasingly summoned them to eliminate others to preserve the present and create a radically new future.

Atheism – state atheism – was an integral part of the ideologies that embraced mass slaughter (except in Hitler’s nominally Christian Germany where racism, conquest, and a quasi-scientific type of social Darwinism seem to have been the driving forces.) Marx, following Hegel and Feuerbach, saw religion as created by man:

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world …

Religion was the “opium of the people”, but in the sense of the persecuted and misused poor attempting to escape suffering:

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

But, it was Lenin’s interpretation – or more accurately, his misinterpretation – of Marx that became the foundation of Marxist-Leninist state atheism:

Religion is the opiate of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.

This view of atheism, combined with the Marxist vision of class conflict and Lenin’s view that class conflict must be led by “vanguard” professional revolutionaries, gave rise to a vision of religious institutions and religious belief as counterrevolutionary and blocking progress. Much as happened in the French Revolution, it became much easier to kill opponents whose ideologies were viewed as wrong than to rectify their thinking – or to run the risk of them fighting back. And the 20th century context of total war made this much easier.

It is in this sense, it seems to me, that the radical revolutionary aspects of enlightenment thought – and its atheistic and deistic distrust and hatred of revealed religion – became an enabler of mass slaughter. Revealed religion – the radicals among the atheists and deists held – was a means to control and manipulate the masses of people. Those who were manipulated were ignorant fools prey to superstition. Those who manipulated them were hungry for power and influence. Revealed religion – they came to believe – was evil.

Thus the enlightenment – denigrating religion – turned believers and organized religion alike into enemies “within”. And eventually into enemies – among many other class enemies – that had to be ruthlessly eradicated “for the good of the masses.”

So we have answered our first two question. Yes, my strong language – given the history of the 20th century – is justified.

And yes, it seems that atheism is an enabler of tyranny and mass slaughter. It is an enabler in its radical political form – a form that became an important part of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It led to political formulations about enemies within who had to be liquidated. These enemies were often “liquidated”, sometimes on a massive scale.

Next

My third question remains unanswered here. Weren’t the critics of religion reacting to very real issues? We address this question in the next blog.

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This is the 20th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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Heraclitus

Ways of Knowing

I meant to blog about Ian Hutchinson’s book Monopolizing Knowledge, in which he explores the proposition that science is the only valid tool for acquiring knowledge and knowing what is worth knowing about ourselves and our world. Somehow, in the process of researching the article, I found my thoughts about the subject widening to include other sources.

Ultimately, what I want to consider in this article is the core question: What is the nature of scientific thought as a way of knowing things and how does it relate to other ways of knowing things?

“The things that can be seen, heard, and learned,” says Heraclitus (died 475 BCE), “are what I prize the most.”

About this, Bertrand Russell, celebrated 20th Century philosopher and a personal hero, remarks:

This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth. “The sun is new every day,” is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection, and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the night. — Bertrand Russell, “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays.” (Mysticism)

“This theory, though,” Russell concludes, “no longer one which science can accept, is nevertheless scientific in spirit.”

That idea of something being scientific in spirit snagged in my synapses for a couple of reasons. One was the realization that observation does not always yield truth. Something more is necessary to arrive at that. Another was that something that was not, itself, scientifically true (such as Heraclitus’s conclusion that the sun is new every day) could be true to the spirit of science. That is, it could be an honest attempt to apply observation and reason to a subject to arrive at a truth. The philosopher fails to reach his destination not because his reason is faulty, but simply because he does not have sufficient information to work with.

Zen and the Art of Lightbulb Replacement

Heraclitus, according to Russell, was not merely an empiricist who believed only in what he could see, hear, or touch. Yes, he did say that “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” But he also said that “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.”

How very Zen! And, indeed, Heraclitus’s statement reminds me of a joke told to me by a Zen Buddhist. (Ahem)

Q: How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two—one to change the lightbulb and one NOT to change the lightbulb.

Russell’s point in picking out these seemingly disconnected statements about rivers is that one is scientific and the other mystical—yet both came from the same mind. He uses these and other statements by Heraclitus to show …

… how intimately the two tendencies are blended in the system of Heraclitus. Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe; and this kind of feeling leads Heraclitus, on the basis of his science, to strangely poignant sayings concerning life and the world…  (ibid.)

What does Bertrand Russell conclude about this blending? He was, after all, an atheist. One that my college philosophy professor employed with the intent of pointing out to the religious members of his class (several Bahá’ís, two followers of Yogananda, and a handful of Christians) the falsity of our theistic world view. (More on that later.)

Russell summarized his thoughts on blending science and mysticism this way:

In such a nature we see the true union of the mystic and the man of science—the highest eminence, as I think, that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought. (ibid.)

Yow. Not what I would have expected from someone my college professor assured me would skewer the irrational ideas inherent in religion (such as he’d learned from his fundamentalist father) on sharp, pointy logic.

This would seem to fit Russell’s concept of a blending of science and mysticism—this idea that there is an “upper world”, as Plato calls it. Not so fast, Russell seems to say, and comments:

An Attitude Toward Life

Russell’s subject in the essay I’m quoting from is mysticism, and he has words to say about that as well. He does not pooh‑pooh it as navel gazing (although he justifiably questions some of its premises). He says of the traditionally—or perhaps radically—mystical path that it holds a “belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses.” (emphasis mine)

Further, Russell explains that ”The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the result of refection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight.”

I find his use of the word “reflection” interesting, because it suggests that the mystic—even though he may be decrying the use of reason and logic—is employing both to consider and meditate upon his moment of insight, thereby to arrive at his beliefs He is, in essence, working in a spirit of science, whether or not he wishes to admit it. This finds a parallel in the idea that scientists work in a spirit of belief, whether or not they wish to admit it.

The mystic must employ reason to study his inarticulate experience; the scientist must believe the universe to be a place that is knowable through sense and reason in order to confidently employ those tools to study it.

Russell takes a moment to throw the mystic’s experience into contrast with the scientist’s:

“The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion.” (ibid., emphasis mine)

Russell continues to discuss some of the perils of radical mysticism—its view of plurality and division as illusory, the unreality of time, the equality of good and evil. But, in the end, he concludes:

“I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude toward life, not as a creed about the world.” (ibid.)

Marriage with the World

A Marriage Made in Heaven

Bertrand Russell thus arrives close to my destination at the conclusion of my last blog. He sees that Mulder and Scully—the scientist and the mystic, the skeptic and the true believer—must somehow come to coexist in the same mental universe in order to have the most holistic, beneficial effect on how human beings view their world. In his concluding paragraph of his opening segment on mysticism, he speaks of “the genuine scientific temper”.

“After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him “not to despise even the meanest things,” and this advice shows the genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the mystic’s apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities. And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren. ” (ibid.)

I swear I’ve heard something like that somewhere before. Oddly enough, it was in a sacred text.

It is incumbent upon every man of insight and understanding to strive to translate that which hath been written into reality and action…. That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. — Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh, p 250

Bahá’u'lláh’s son, Abdu’l‑Bahá, explains what the Prophet means in more detail:

The admission that scientific attainment is praiseworthy does not confer scientific knowledge. … Knowledge of human conditions and the needed remedy for them is not the cause of their betterment. To admit that health is good does not constitute health. A skilled physician is needed to remedy existing human conditions. … His mere knowledge is not health; it must be applied and the remedy carried out. The attainment of any object is conditioned upon knowledge, volition and action. Unless these three conditions are forthcoming there is no execution or accomplishment. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, pp 99‑100 (emphasis mine)

Of course, this reminds me of a parable the Buddha tells (most things do), but I shall here decide that to NOT tell the story is the better part of Zen.

I promised I’d say something more about my philosophy professor and his use of Bertrand Russell to quash the believers in his class. He gave a … er …. impassioned lecture about the inherently destructive nature of religious ideals. Then he played a tape of a Bertrand Russell speech. In the speech, Russell made the point that if everyone actually lived by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the world would be a far better place. My professor glanced up at us, startled, frowned mightily, then left the classroom. We listened to the entire tape, then—when he failed to return—went to our next classes.

I ended up having a very amiable and mutually respectful relationship with this professor, and he mellowed significantly during that year. I will always remember him with fondness for introducing me to Bertrand Russell’s thought-provoking work.

Next time: A further look at the relationship between mysticism and science.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 18, 2013. The European enlightenment came to an end in two extraordinary political revolutions.

One – in the British colonies of North America – adopted the Enlightenment principles of tolerance, freedom of religion, and separation of state and religion as proposed by enlightened religionists, deists and atheists alike, even as it embraced slavery, racism, and campaigns against the native inhabitants of its conquered lands.

The other – in the most powerful country of Europe – initiated the modern era of nationalism, world war, the secular state, and widespread slaughter in the name of purification of society, while at the same time pioneering mass education, widespread political participation, and government reforms that were copied around the world.

Enlightenment thought, especially deism – and its rejection of revealed religion – played a central role in both revolutions. In the American revolution (1763 – 1783), atheism seems to have played little or no role. In the French revolution (1789–1799), deists and atheists competed with each other in the persecution of religion and the slaughter of priests, eventually turning on each other during the orgy of violence that was the Terror.

After the French revolution – and the resulting Napoleonic wars (1803–1815) – the enlightenment pursuit of tolerance, just government, and freedom from authoritarian religion and government through skeptical, philosophical, and rationalist pursuit of the truth lost much of it attractiveness. Romanticism, German Idealism, a revitalized Catholicism, Protestant Evangelicalism, and then the great systems of Marxism, nationalism, materialism, evolutionism, and secularism took its place.

Below, we briefly outline some of the main events of French Revolution and the impact of enlightenment thought on religion in France.

The French Revolution and the Church

In 1789, the French monarch King Louis XVI called a meeting of Estates-General – an assembly of the clergy, the nobles, and commoners that had last met in 1614 – for help in addressing a severe economic crisis effecting the French government. The three parties failed to agree on their respective powers, and a National Constituent Assembly mainly consisting of commoners, was formed. It effectively took control of the French government after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, 1789, issuing the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man – inspired by Enlightenment – six weeks later.

When the Estates-General convened, there were 130,000 members of the clergy, the Catholic church owned 6% of French real-estate, was not taxed, and levied a 10% tithe (see The French Revolution and the Catholic Church). The National Constituent Assembly abolished the tithe, took ownership of church land, abolished monastic vows, and then established the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made the clergy employees of the state. When the clergy were asked to sign an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution, they rebelled. Wikipedia tells what happened:

This led to a schism between those clergy who swore the required oath and accepted the new arrangement and those who remained loyal to the Pope. Overall, 24% of the clergy nationwide took the oath. Widespread refusal led to legislation against the clergy, “forcing them into exile, deporting them forcibly, or executing them as traitors.” Pope Pius VI never accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, further isolating the Church in France.

During the Reign of Terror, extreme efforts of dechristianization ensued, including the imprisonment and massacre of priests and destruction of churches and religious images throughout France. An effort was made to replace the Catholic Church altogether, with civic festivals replacing religious ones. The establishment of the Cult of Reason was the final step of radical dechristianisation.

These events led to a widespread disillusionment with the Revolution and to counter-rebellions across France. Locals often resisted de-Christianization by attacking revolutionary agents and hiding members of the clergy who were being hunted. Eventually, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety were forced to denounce the campaign, replacing the Cult of Reason with the deist but still non-Christian Cult of the Supreme Being. … The persecution of the Church led to a counter-revolution known as the Revolt in the Vendée, whose suppression is considered by some to be the first modern genocide.

Clergy who refused to sign the oath – and those who protected them – were made liable to death on sight. As many as several thousand priests were slaughtered.

Late in 1791, the assembly accepted a constitution that briefly made France a constitutional monarchy. In 1792, the monarchy was abolished and France was declared a republic. Closely thereafter, the Republic went to war with Prussia and Austria, leading to the execution of the King on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy.

By 1794, the republic achieved major victories against its foreign adversaries and had established internal stability, but at considerable expense in lives. In the Vendee, the loss of life was “between 117,000 and 450,000 out of a population of around 800,000.” Mass drownings of priests were part of the suppression by the revolutionary government reprisals The Revolt in the Vendée was triggered by the governments dechristianisation campaign.

Government-sponsored terror and infighting among political factions in The Reign of Terror led to a frsyj tolls estimated as “in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France.” Of those, roughly 3,000 were priests.

An Evaluation

Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, characterizes the effect of the French revolution on religion thus:

The National Assembly was as determined to reform the Church as in everything else. Its plan was to create a national church like in England, but Catholic in doctrine and without the faults evident in the English Church. Gallician Catholics in France had long sought such arrangements, and indeed since the fifteenth century the monarchy had episodically done much to encourage such an outcome.

Yet what was proposed took the most extreme form – it would be a national Church indeed, because bishops would be elected by the entire male population, including the newly emancipated Protestants and Jews. Church lands were confiscated, and the rural labouring classes watched in growing anger as wealthy merchants, office-holders and former officials flush with compensation for lost jobs all used their cash to build up new landholdings. …

Copying the indiscriminate use of force that had characterized religious warfare and persecution 150 years early, the “enlightened” leaders of the new Republic started executing their enemies:

In 1792, spurred by provincial rebellions in the name of Catholic Christianity and the King, the State had begun large-scale executions of its aristocratic and clerical enemies in Paris. The numbers were at first small scale by modern standards of State terror, but they were horrifying at the time, particularly since they included nearly all available members of the French royal family, the King and Queen among them …

When the Vendee rebelled in the name of Catholicism, the republican dictatorship responded in a way that had earned Christian kings their harshest criticisms:

At Nantes there were mass drownings of prisoners, beginning with priests, and the massacres in the Catholic Vendee set standards for later European atrocities in dehumanizing victims in order to make mass slaughter easy and virtuous. Europe’s first single-party dictatorship in the name of the people had emerged. The awful tidy-mindedness of Enlightenment thought bred an insistence on everyone being liberated in ways defined by Revolutionaries – forcing them to be free …

The deist party – the Jacobins – were the most radical of all.

… the Jacobins, most extreme Revolutionaries of the French Republic, radicalized the snickering skepticism of French philosophes about the whole Christian message. They came to regard any form of Christian faith as a relic of the ancien regime which they were destroying, though they had to acknowledge that the people on whom they were imposing liberty, equality and fraternity craved for some sort of religion. The Revolution which had begun with a sincere effort to improve the Church now sought to replace it with a synthetic religion, constructed out of classical symbolism mixed up with the eighteenth century’s celebration of human reason: the Christian calendar of years and months was abolished, religious houses closed, churches desecrated.

And the church survived:

As wars with all France’s neighbours dragged on, the French people became increasingly disillusioned with their masters: the Church had been shattered apparently to no purpose, and, since before the Revolution it had a virtual monopoly on caring for the poor and helpless, the weakest suffered most by the destruction of Church institutions.

Above all else, what this shows is that deists and atheists – those who most strongly rejected revealed religion, religious institutions, and priests – could be as inhumane and unjust as the worst pope or divine monarch.

Later events – the horrific mass slaughters of tens of millions of people by 20th century anti-religion fascist states or socialist states adhering to state atheism – showed that anti-religionists could far exceed the scope of even the most murderous religious institutions in the killing fields.

Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Voltaire, d’Holbach, Diderot – or their modern new atheists counterparts – were and are simply incorrect when they place the blame for persecution and terror on revealed religion.

Next

Next, we continue our exploration of the Enlightenment by studying the critical philosophy of Kant.

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This is the 19th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 11, 2013. In 1911, `Abdu’l-Bahá’, the appointed head of the Baha’i Faith after the death of Bahá’u'llah, visited Paris where he met with many of the prominent notables of the city, including scientists, philosophers, and distinguished leaders of thought. Shortly afterwards, in New York City, he described his impressions:

Paris is most beautiful in outward appearance. The evidences of material civilization there are very great, but the spiritual civilization is far behind. I found the people of that city submerged and drowning in a sea of materialism. Their conversations and discussions were limited to natural and physical phenomena, without mention of God.

I was greatly astonished. Most of the scholars, professors and learned men proved to be materialists. I said to them, “I am surprised and astonished that men of such perceptive caliber and evident knowledge should still be captives of nature, not recognizing the self-evident Reality.” (`Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 16)

One of the reasons we have been studying developments in the European Enlightenment is to find out how the “scholars, professors, and learned men” of Paris and other leading cities of the Europe came to be “captives of nature,” i.e., materialists and atheists.

Our conclusion – to put it simplistically and inadequately – is that western European Christianity imploded on itself. This implosion led to political, military, and ideological conflict in the name of religion, to two centuries of religious warfare, and to intolerance and religious persecution in Europe and then around the world in European colonies.

The reaction to this implosion among leaders of thought was to first attempt to unify religion on the basis of science, reason, and philosophy. Modern science, modern philosophy, and much of modern mainstream religion came out of that attempt. Next, the reaction was to reject revealed religion in favor of what was thought to be an innate “natural” religion, a movement we now call deism. And finally, the reaction was to reject belief in God altogether, leaving behind what we sometimes call humanism or secularism – a belief in a philosophical materialism based on how empiricism, rationalism, philosophical speculation and the new sciences of the Enlightenment interpreted the world. We examine here the views of two prominent Enlightenment thinkers who pioneered this later development.

Diderot

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) ) was the editor, guiding light (along with D’Alambert), and chief writer of the famous French Encyclopédie, almost certainly the most influential publication of the Enlightenment (it had 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations, many now iconic.) The International World History Project summarizes its influence as follows:

Published in 28 volumes from 1751 to 1772, it was a literary and philosophic work that was to have profound social and intellectual effects. Its publication was troubled by strong reactions against it by both church and state.

[Diderot] gathered around him a team of dedicated litterateurs, scientists, and even priests, many of who, as yet unknown, were to make their mark in later life. All were fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge and, by so doing, strike a resounding blow against reactionary forces in church and state. As a dictionnaire raisonné (“rational dictionary”), the Encyclopédie was to bring out the essential principles and applications of every art and science. The underlying philosophy was rationalism and a qualified faith in the progress of the human mind.

The atheism and materialism apparent in some articles enraged many readers. Some of Diderot’s writings foreshadowed the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. He also formulated the first modern notion of the cellular structure of matter.

Illustration from Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Diderot was trained by the Jesuits, but fell away from his training rather quickly to favor the deism of Spinoza, the skepticism of Bayle, and the love of the rational and philosophical pursuit of truth that was the signature motif of the enlightenment. He then embraced the materialistic atheism that was in vogue among many enlightened French thinkers at the time – and usually kept strictly private.

In his 1749 publication Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on Blindness), he went public with his thought, perhaps unwisely. He used the example of blind person coming to grips with his dependence of sense impression to argue the case for a materialistic and atheistic description of human reality. One result was that he was put in prison for three months – and made to sign an oath claiming he would never again criticize religion. Nonetheless, he developed his materialistic views further in several later publications.

A quote frequently attributed to Diderot – “Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest” – has never been verified as coming from him, and is probably too extreme to accurately represent his point of view. Diderot – also a pioneering literary figure and critic – had an atheism that C. A. Sainte-Beuve, a leading 19th century French literary critic, characterized as follows:

Diderot’s atheism, although he flaunts it at intervals with a deplorable flourish of trumpets, and although his adversaries have too pitilessly taken him at his word, can generally be reduced to the denial of an unkind and vindictive God.

Holbach

Paul-Henri Thiry, usually known as Baron d’Holbach (1732 – 1789, also see Baron d’Holbach in Wikipedia) was a German-French philosopher, atheist, and materialist. Very wealthy, he was the author of some 400 articles in the Encyclopedie, author of an attack on Christianity called Christianity Unveiled, penned a very controversial book advocating a thorough-going materialism called The System of Nature, and hosted one of the most important and influential of Parisian salons.

For d’Holbach, all is nature. And nature is matter and motion:

The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects. [The System of Nature, 15]

Wikipedia describes his views thus:

[d'Holbach describes] the universe in terms of the principles of philosophical materialism: The mind is identified with brain, there is no “soul” without a living body, the world is governed by strict deterministic laws, free will is an illusion, there are no final causes, and whatever happens takes places because it inexorably must. Most notoriously, the work explicitly denies the existence of God, arguing that belief in a higher being is the product of fear, lack of understanding, and anthropomorphism.

It wasn’t a widely popular idea at the time (1770). Voltaire argued against it vehemently and Goethe claimed in his memoirs that it permanently turned him away from French philosophy.

According to d’Holbach, ethical principles – how one lives one’s life – should be based on the pursuit of happiness and enlightened self-interest. Ignorance of these ethical principle and ignorance of nature leads to destruction of society through the creation of religion:

The ignorance of natural causes created Gods, and imposture made them terrible. Man lived unhappy, because he was told that God had condemned him to misery. He never entertained a wish of breaking his chains, as he was taught, that stupidity, that the renouncing of reason, mental debility, and spiritual debasement, were the means of obtaining eternal felicity. [The System of Nature, 349–350].

Religion, thus, is the source of vice and unhappiness. According to d’Holbach, it

… has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

His views, at first notorious, became popular among certain political parties in the French revolution and were admired and adopted by thinkers such Karl Marx in the 19th century. For modern defenders of atheism – for example, the French atheist philosopher Michel Onfrey – d’Holbach is a hero.

Next

In retrospect, it is remarkable how naive Diderot and d’Holbach were. Imagining that an embrace of reason and philosophy – and the elimination of belief in God – would eliminate intolerance, fanaticism, ideology, and persecution, they set the stage for atheism as a state religion and a secular belief system that facilitated blood-letting and persecution that far exceeded the worst of the age of the European wars of religion.

And, of course, they were among the first of those “captives of nature” that `Abdu’l-Baha’ met in Paris in 1911.

Next week, we consider the first of the great atheistic blood-lettings – the French Revolution.

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This is the 18th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> This is the last installment of my exploration of the Intelligence Squared debate between four stars in the firmament of science and commentary (scientists Ian Hutchinson and Lawrence Krauss and writers Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer). I’d like to close by taking a look at one of the central ideas that was addressed (though unsatisfactorily, in my opinion) during the debate: the nature of God.

Shermer:

If God is supernatural, that is, outside of the space and time, there’s no way for us to know it. Therefore, whatever God is, it would have to be a natural being or at least some kind of a being that reaches in to stir the particles, and if he does, then we should be able to measure it, because that’s what we do as scientists. We measure the motions of particles. And so far we have no evidence of that. 

Shermer may not be aware of the evidence that God stirs the particles, but that may simply be because he is one of the particles being stirred. I would submit that the very intellect that allows us to ask these questions and attempt to answer them is, itself, evidence of the particles being stirred. The history of science is replete with examples of scientists observing things and describing them erroneously because they didn’t know what they were looking at. There’s an old aphorism that when one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. How one interprets information one receives depends in large part on context.

This is true of something as simple as a word or phrase. Take this headline: “Island Boy Taken by Sharks.” Horrific, right? Not really. The headline was about a Hawaiian youth who was drafted onto the San Jose Sharks hockey team. Context is important because it sets up our expectations for what comes next. Fortunately, the weight of evidence for something can overcome this tendency.

Further evidence of this stirring (shaking, whipping whatever) is in the experience and teachings of such subject matter experts as Krishna, Buddha, Christ, Bahá’u’lláh, etc. Their teachings and the transformation they bring to human lives are a parallel to the motions of particles. Science deals in physical reality; religion deals in spiritual reality. But the two intersect, and the audience question about what we derive from a belief in God (which Donovan didn’t submit to be answered) is apt. In effect, D’Souza answered it when he related that while science can tell us animals feel pain it doesn’t suggest what we should do with that information.

Asa Gray

D’Souza’s closing in part reframed the question about science refuting God:

American botanist Asa Gray wrote Darwin a letter in which he said, “As a Christian, I was very inspired upon reading your book, because I have read in the book of Genesis that God made the world and God made man, but there’s no information about how this might’ve occurred. And when I read your book, I understood not only why God made humans, but why there’s so much suffering in the world. Evolution helps to account for the reason why there’s suffering both for humans, but also in the animal kingdom.” 

Now, we’re debating here has science refuted God? And at some senses, we’ve been talking past each other. If I take a pot of water and put it on the stove, what am I trying to do? I’m trying to make a cup of tea. Now, Lawrence Krauss would come along and say that the molecules are heating up, he could give a full scientific account of what’s going on, but he would’ve completely missed the purpose behind what I’m doing. Scientific explanation doesn’t refute the purposeful explanation, it coexists alongside it, and so it is with God. 

This is the point, I think. And I’d like to take this to a more real-world level. I write books. If you asked me how I did that, I can give you two different types of answers. I can talk to you about inspiration, about characters that talk to me and dictate their behavior. I can talk about how the ideas come together in my head, about ‘aha’ moments and epiphanies and about how when that all comes together, I feel as if I’m doing barrel rolls in an airplane and how the words pour out onto the page with lightning speed and seemingly little effort on my part. Or I can talk to you about sitting down at the computer and typing 100,000 words or so and how the MS goes to my editor and passes back and forth between us before galleys are sent for the final book, and how the book is printed from an electronic file. I could talk to you about what sort of ink is used and what font and size. I can talk to you about the fabrication of the paper, the printing press, the cover art and how the books are packed into boxes and shipped to bookstores.

One explanation is about the how of the physical manufacture of the book you hold in your hand. The other is about how the content was generated. One explanation isn’t right and the other wrong. And indeed, they’re interdependent. That book can’t have come into physical existence without both parts of the process. But here’s the deal: the absolutely critical part of that process is the first one—the imagining and writing of the book. Without that creative act, all the paper and ink in the world would be meaningless. No one would derive any benefit from the ink and the paper without the creative act that preceded it of necessity.

Consider the lady beside me who is writing in this little book. It seems a very trifling, ordinary matter; but upon intelligent reflection you will conclude that what has been written presupposes and proves the existence of a writer. These words have not written themselves, and these letters have not come together of their own volition. It is evident there must be a writer.

And now consider this infinite universe. Is it possible that it could have been created without a Creator? Or that the Creator and cause of this infinite congeries of worlds should be without intelligence? Is the idea tenable that the Creator has no comprehension of what is manifested in creation? Man, the creature, has volition and certain virtues. Is it possible that his Creator is deprived of these? — Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p115 (from a talk at the Hotel Plaza in Chicago, IL, 1912)

When we look for proof that God stirs the particles, I think we often neglect to look at ourselves. This is a puzzling oversight, given how many sacred texts insist that we are created in the spiritual image of God. As Bahá’u’lláh puts it: “He hath known God who hath known himself.”

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 4, 2013. The new atheism espoused by hot-selling authors – Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens being the most prominent – has become a major media and internet success.

Maya Bohnhoff provides an overview of some important new atheist beliefs in a series of blogs on Common Ground (IQ1, IQ2, IQ3, IQ4, IQ5, IQ6, and IQ7). There she outlines the views of Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and a protegé of Richard Dawkins, as presented in an Intelligence Squared Debate “Science Refutes God” recently aired on National Public Radio.

At the core of Krauss’s atheism are three beliefs: One is that science, logic, rationality, evidence, reason, and empirical methodology refute the existence of God. The second is that belief in God is based on vague hopes, fears, and irrational delusions. And the third is that science tells us that there is no purpose to reality. Krauss holds – as do many new atheists – that science not only proves that God doesn’t exist, but that it replaces belief in God and religious faith.

In her analysis, Bohnhoff concludes that Krauss fails to provide evidence or logical support for his beliefs,and that he doesn’t explain how they would in any way be benefit to humanity. Yet, he clearly views his beliefs as logical and true, as presumably do those in the audience who were swayed to vote in his support.

Why does Krauss – and why do so many in his audience – believe as he does?

The short answer is that Krauss’s atheism represents an old and well-entrenched perspective of Western thought that has enjoyed widespread support for more than 250 years and is frequently accepted unquestioningly. Krauss didn’t need to provide proof. People already believe it to be true.

The Preamble to Atheism

In our series of blogs about the Enlightenment vision of science and religion, we have explored many of the intellectual developments in western Europe that underlie our modern secular understanding of religion. What we saw was that a marriage of science, religion, and philosophy – Newtonianism and Cartesianism foremost – proved extraordinarily attractive to thinkers, intellectuals, theologians, and rulers throughout 17th and early 18th century Europe.

What happened next was that the religious part of that marriage started to thin away. Descartes’ idea that rational thought, if it saw things clearly, was powerful enough to acquire certainty about divine truths first came to the fore. It led to the view that philosophy and clear philosophical thinking could lead to an understanding of both physical and spiritual reality. It wasn’t too long before thinkers like Spinoza starting claiming to have insight into both the nature of the world and the nature of God, and his insights conflicted nearly completely with the precepts of the revealed religions known at the time (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).

Secondly, the idea of a “natural religion” started to take hold, especially after the spectacular successes of Newton’s physics and theology. His was the view that humanity could find proofs of the existence of God through the power of scientific and rational investigation. It included a way of thinking, perhaps unique to western Europeans, that originally there was a purely natural religion embraced by the ancients, and that the modern revealed religions were a falling away from that natural religion.

These views came together in what we now call deism, beliefs that the revealed truths of revelation and of the Bible were of secondary importance. And deism promoted the corrosive view that religious practice and religious institutions were an invention by various priesthoods and elites intent on power, control, and influence. Deism – and its attitude towards revealed religion and religious institutions – acquired remarkable sway as a result of the extraordinary religious wars and sectarian struggles of the day, struggles that resulted in widespread carnage and social fragmentation as religious and political elites fought – oftentimes murderously and viciously – over political and spiritual ends. What educated thinkers saw clearly was a game of high-stakes political gamesmanship pursued by means of warfare and persecution where religion, priests, and ideologies served as a kind of football.

What these same thinkers also saw was the collapse of the authority of the Bible as the word of God, as scholar after scholar showed it to be an assemblage of stories penned by various and diverse priestly scribes. No longer could the Old Testament be thought of – at least by educated people – as written by Moses. And the New Testament was starting to be seen as written long after the Jesus had walked the earth – and as composed of various gospels that contradicted each other.

By 1800 or shortly thereafter, widely read thinkers like Pierre Bayle had written so entertainingly, so truthfully, and so skeptically about the iconic religious figures of the past that large segments of fashionable and educated society were willing to ignore institutionalized religion’s claims.

Atheism

After discarding belief in the validity of revealed religion, the next step was discarding the belief in the existence of God – atheism (also see atheism and atheism in the age of the enlightenment in Wikipedia). At first, atheism was discussed furtively due to the social stigma attached to it. Then, it increasingly came out into the open, eventually to be widely embraced in the French Revolution.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors (Traité sur les trois imposteurs) was the furtive publication that seems to have kicked things off. Probably published in the Netherlands around 1710, it was rigorously suppressed. The Enlightenment scholar Margaret Jacobs tells the story:

There, as far as current scholarship can tell, relatively obscure deists and pantheists – Rousset de Missy included – had written The Treatise. The charge that the founders of the three great world religions had been imposters stood out as the most outrageous ever made by advocates of the Enlightenment. …

The book incurred so much hostility from the authorities that most copies just disappeared. Only in 1985 at the library of the University of California in Los Angeles did a scholar, Silvia Berti, discover the first printed copy ever known to have survived the censors.

It was not accidental that Jean Rousset de Missy, the young refugee turning iconoclastic radical and Freemason, had a major hand in organizing, if not partially writing and guiding the Three Imposters into print. Decades after that escapade he would help to lead a revolution in 1747-48 in The Netherlands. The anger against organized religions that he and his work symbolized could also take deeply political directions.

By 1750, however, respectable French and German high society could talk about atheism privately, although public acknowledgement of lack of belief in God was still not allowed. And although they didn’t publish it in their own name, two of the greatest thinkers of the French enlightenment were atheists. One was Denis Didirot, editor and guiding light (along with D’Alambert) of the enormously influential Encyclopédie. The other was the wealthy Baron D’Holbach, author of some 400 articles in the Encyclopedie, a scandalous attack on Christianity called Christianity Unveiled , and a radical, controversial, and influential treatise on materialism and atheism called The System of Nature. D’Holbach also hosted of one of most important and influential Parisian salons.

Next

Next week, we explore the thinking of Diderot and Holbach.

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This is the 17th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.