May 31 2012

Cosmology, Religion, and Reason: Part 5

Category: cosmology,Epistemology,Reasoning,religion,science — James Rogers @ 8:00 pm

This is part five of a series. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is here.

In the last post, I talked about the “Practical Approach” to religious claims. In this concluding post, I expand on this further and talk about adopting a reasonable approach to religion.

Toward Reasonable Religion

When you follow the practical approach, you accept that no matter what church you belong to, it is important to update your religious views to be fully compatible with our modern understandings of the world – to move toward more reasonable religion. Reasonable religion integrates the wisdom of the ages about morality, spirituality, and enlightenment with our modern scientific understanding of the universe and reality. It means adopting a reasonable approach to religion within whatever religion you practice. We should never be afraid to change our beliefs in the face of new evidence. We should never be afraid to reject religious teachings that are contradicted by new discoveries and better information.

At the same time, even in our modern age, we need not limit religion to an empirically based, scientific undertaking. Questions of feelings and finding beauty and meaning in life are important too. One of the main values of religion is cultivating a sense of wonder and peace, an understanding of our human frailties and imperfections, and a respect for the mysteries of the universe. Human reason and rationality are responsible for the amazing advances in our culture, knowledge, and standards of living. But our brains are finite and surprisingly predisposed to irrationality. What this means is that all of us – even the smartest and most rational among us – have hidden biases and predispositions that we cannot perceive. This human trait affects both the brains of the religious and the atheists. Reasonable religion means trying to clarify our thinking and act more rationally, but it also means having some humility about our conclusions and beliefs and not losing sight of the importance of feelings and human relationships.

Reasonable religion acknowledges at least the possibility of a higher power and the unseen world, but it even more enthusiastically encourages man’s attempts to further understand unseen forces and unknown domains by using our rational understanding. Reasonable religion lauds the benefits of rationality, but acknowledges that we as humans are incapable of perfect understanding. Our ability to perceive is limited, as is our capacity to understand. Reasonable religion is not concerned with the unprovable, such as the existence of God or with questions about life after death. Instead, it is a tool that we use to make things better here and now.

Whether or not the supernatural claims of religions are true (and based on their track record of being wrong about the things that we can prove, it is not unreasonable to treat them with some skepticism), religious teachings about morality and spiritual practice can lead us to concrete benefits apart from their supernatural teachings. Yoga is a good example of this. Yoga has become so popular in the United States that it is considered a completely mainstream activity. But yoga was originally a Hindu religious practice. Many western yoga practitioners derive significant benefits from their practice and many, if not most, of them consider yoga to be little more than a form of exercise. Few of them accept many (if any) of the supernatural teachings of Hinduism. Meditation is another example of a religious practice that has become accepted for its practical benefits by many people who reject the original supernatural reasons for the practice.

The archeological evidence shows that religion has co-evolved with us since even before behaviorally modern humans emerged 50,000 years ago. Most scientists agree that our tendency for religious behavior evolved early in our history. There are two explanations for how religion evolved. The first is that religion itself serves an adaptive purpose that confers a selective advantage and that it thus arose through natural selection. The second view is that religious behavior is merely a byproduct of other adaptive traits, such as agent detection, theory of mind, and understanding causation.1 Based on the ubiquity of religion in every human culture, and the many cross-cultural similarities in religious belief and practice, I think that the first explanation is probably correct: religion evolved through natural selection because it conferred selective advantages.

Religion probably evolved because it serves three important practical purposes:

  1. Serenity: to assist people attain enlightenment, which means achieving sustained periods of emotional states of serenity, peace, transcendence, elevation, and gratitude;
  2. Morality: to provide a moral code and framework for our interactions with each other and the world and provide outlets to exercise moral goodness towards others;
  3. Sociality: to encourage group cohesiveness and provide a social outlet for people to interact, become acquainted, learn from each other, and support one another in their lives and beliefs.

Just like almost every human trait, our religious tendencies can become unhinged, turn maladaptive, and lead to negative outcomes. And just like any human trait, each person’s natural religious tendencies vary in the same way that every human trait varies. Some people are more naturally angry or happy than others and some people are naturally more religious than others and some people are naturally areligious (although they seem to be a small percentage of the population). But because religion is an evolved part of human nature, for most of us it is nearly impossible to completely remove our natural religious inclinations. It is easy to see innate human religious tendencies even among the ostensibly non-religious. In our modern Western societies, many secular people who have eschewed religion unknowingly adopt quasi-religious attitudes about the norms and beliefs of their peers and surrounding social groups. Two obvious examples are 1) the strident self-righteous piety of the New Atheists2 and 2) the concern for ritual purity of environmentalists.3 I don’t mean this as an attack on atheism or environmentalism; both movements have strong arguments to support their positions. The point is that for psychologically healthy and normal human beings, it is difficult for us to escape religion, no matter what church we do or don’t go to. Whenever a social group coalesces around strongly held beliefs or ideas, their religious natures usually emerge, whether it be around Christianity, sports, or Star Trek.4.

Reasonable religion recognizes our innate religious nature and seeks use it to our benefit. The three purposes of religion can be fulfilled by taking the useful and reasonable parts of religion and jettisoning the unreasonable and cosmologically suspect parts. Everyone, even the religious fundamentalist, does this. It is impossible to believe in most major religions without picking and choosing which parts to believe in and practice (indeed, sacred works like the Bible are filled with contradictions5 which make it impossible to literally believe everything they contain). Rarely, though, do we do this consciously and systematically.

Determining our religious beliefs in a casual and ad hoc fashion frequently leads to suboptimal results. Without thinking deeply and carefully, too often we end up keeping the bad parts and jettisoning the good ones. We end up with suboptimal and inconsistent belief systems that do not maximize the potential benefits our religion can bring to ourselves and others. We should each consider our religion (whether it is an explicit denomination or merely the core practices and ideals we have adopted from our peers and social groups) and jettison the bad parts, keep the good parts, and study the religions of others so that we can co-opt their useful parts and practice them ourselves. This should be an ongoing process – it is easy to fall into a rut and develop bad habits and rely on our past conclusions; reasonable religion is a lifelong approach of continual reevaluation, a never-ending accretion of positive religious practices and outlooks. Religion evolved because it conferred real benefits. Reasonable religion means thinking carefully and acting wisely to maximize those benefits.

So what is the best way to practice reasonable religion? Study the wisdom of the ages; compare, think, and explore; integrate what you find with modern scientific knowledge. Make the effort to discover and synthesize truth. Different, valuable approaches and perspectives often develop outside of your “group” that often end up being better than what you find within your normal range of experience. If you only ever look within your own tradition and social groups, insularity and groupthink will often lead you astray into false beliefs and conclusions. Don’t get stuck in an echo chamber: read and experience teachings and traditions outside your occupation, your field of study, or your religious tradition – you will find new insights and knowledge unattainable without venturing outside. Keep the good you already have, and look for more wherever you can get it.

 

Footnotes

3 Environmentalists’ concerns for ritual impurity and achieving ritual cleanliness merely trades religious objects for a new set of secular objects. Their quasi-religious concern for avoiding “ungreen” products and using ritually pure objects often comes without rationally evaluating their behavior to figure out how they can actually make the most impact. The important thing to them becomes the ritual purity, and only secondarily achieving the most environmentally positive outcome. For example, animal loving environmentalists hold SUV drivers in contempt for their unclean gas-gizzling behavior even though many of those same environmentalists keep pet dogs and cats that have a greater adverse environmental impact than the SUV (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/pet-dogs-damaging-environment-suvs/story?id=9402234). Their attitudes are more shaped by a reverential awe for “nature” than for actually minimizing their environmental impact. Another example is environmentally conscious drivers who gain ritual purity by driving their Prius, even though the energy used to build and operate a Prius may make it worse for the environment other simple gasoline-powered options like the Scion xB ( http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/DUST%20PDF%20VERSION.pdf (PDF)). Many in the environmental movement also display ascetic tendencies that in previous years might have led them to a monastic life: the act itself of sacrificing is what they value most, rather than rationally evaluating the evidence and making the optimal choice. Their environmentalism becomes an excuse to display their innate religious tendencies.

May 22 2012

Cosmology, Religion, and Reason: Part 4

Category: cosmology,Epistemology,Reasoning,religion,science — James Rogers @ 6:01 pm

This is part four of a series. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part five is here.

Last post, started talking about the first three of four possible reasonable approaches to religious claims: 1) the gaps approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the practical approach. In this post, I talk about my favored approach, the practical approach (presentist eclecticism).

The Practical Approach (Presentist Eclecticism)

The practical approach is to take the beneficial parts of religion to maximize its present practical benefit. You do not approach religion trying to find a reason to believe or disbelieve all of the unprovable stuff. Things are neither “true until proven false” nor “false until proven true.” You do not try to pigeonhole problematic religious teachings into a palatable symbolic reinterpretation.

Applying the practical approach, you readily jettison the parts of religion that are demonstrably untrue. You look to science and other fields of intellectual inquiry to learn about the universe and our place in it. But you also do not reject religion either. For the parts of religion that have not been proven false, you search religion and religious teachings for tools to lead you to feelings of elevation, enlightenment, gratitude, peace, and transcendence, and to virtuous acts. Religion has, after all, proved itself quite effective at helping us achieve these states. You take an eclectic approach to religion. You sift out the valuable parts of the world’s religions and leave the rest.

The practical approach also means not worrying about unanswerable (at least at the present) metaphysical questions like the existence of the soul or our fate after death. It means not concerning yourself with questions of future eternal rewards or punishments. In Matthew, Jesus says “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”1 Practitioners of the practical approach take Jesus at his word. They care about the here and now, not abstract, indistinct, and indiscernible futures.

Virtually every religion has a moral core required of followers. Religions generally guarantee future rewards in the afterlife for moral behavior. When you adopt a presentist approach to morality, you approach moral questions concerned with an action’s effects within our current sphere of existence, rather than concerning yourself with how that act will effect some future reward after death.

Conveniently, an approach to morality that is only concerned with our current mortal existence results in a moral code that closely approximates the core moral precepts that we find in all the major religions. Presentism leads to the same moral behavior that the world’s great religions teach as being required to achieve a beneficial outcome after death. Living morally will definitely make your life better now, and if there is an afterlife, it will probably lead to a good outcome after death too. Concerning yourself with religions’ cosmological claims becomes less important, since you get the benefits of the moral behavior either way.

The teachings of the great religions have great value in helping people transform their lives for the better. The parts of religions that do this are the parts that are based on real universal moral principles. They are the parts that help people live more virtuous lives, discern truth, and achieve emotional states of serenity, peace, transcendence, elevation, and gratitude. To derive these benefits of religion, however, we do not need false cosmologies or superstitions based on inaccurate world views.

Some people may argue that the value from religion comes from their cosmologies and superstitions. There are some interesting counter examples that contradict this view. Buddhism is often described as an atheistic religion because it makes no claims about god or divinities. There are hundreds of millions of Buddhists who find tremendous value in their practice of Buddhism. Even more lacking in metaphysics is Confucianism, which makes few if any supernatural claims and makes no theistic claims at all (although there is still debate about whether it should be classified as a religion). Confucianism has been a dominant and positive force in the lives of people in East Asia for mny centuries.

Now, some might claim that good behavior is not enough, that you have to perform the sacred rites of a particular religion, or accept Jesus into your heart, or follow the Five Pillars of Islam, etc. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t – and even if you do, which religion’s practices are right? So long as your religious practice does not prevent you from engaging in objectively moral behavior, it does not hurt to entertain Pascal’s Wager, choose a religion, and follow its rites and requirements. But the practical approach never accepts demonstrably untrue religious claims.

In the next post, I’ll conclude this series with some thoughts on adopting a reasonable approach to religion.

Footnotes

1 Matthew 6:34 (NRSV)

May 21 2012

Cosmology, Religion, and Reason: Part 3

Category: cosmology,Epistemology,Reasoning,religion,science — James Rogers @ 8:00 am

This is part three of a series. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part four is here. Part five is here.

Last post, I talked about the problems with adopting a literal approach to religions’ claims. As alternatives to the literal approach to religious teachings, I listed four reasonable approaches to religious claims beyond just relying on statements from purported authorities: 1) the gaps approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the practical approach. In this post, I talk about the first three approaches.

The Gaps Approach

With the gaps approach, you re-interpret as being symbolic the teachings about cosmology that have been contradicted by modern science, but continue believing in the teachings that have not been challenged by science. You create space for belief out of the gaps that science has not, or cannot, address. For example, you might discount the idea of a creation in six days, but continue believing that God created the Earth using natural processes over millions of years.

The problem with this approach is that as scientific knowledge continues to grow, the space for religious belief continues to shrink. Moreover, it is epistemologically dubious and self-serving to accept as true the parts of your religion that science has not been able to disprove. It requires that you to ignore the glaring problem that in the areas where scientific inquiry has yielded applicable results, it has disconfirmed and rarely (if ever) confirmed any of the religion’s cosmological teachings. But inasmuch as some of religions’ claims will almost always be unprovable, this is a completely legitimate approach. Most educated religious believers in the West, whether knowingly or not, adopt this approach.

The Symbolic Approach

The symbolic approach is to look at all of the cosmological teachings in the religion or sacred text as being symbolic. This is fine as far as it goes, but it raises the issue of the value of devoting time to study teachings that you acknowledge as being untrue. In most cases, the cosmologically suspect teachings were originally put forth as being literally true. Why shoehorn meanings into the teachings that were not even intended by the original authors? There are cultural and social reasons to adopt this approach (if you live in a society dominated by a certain religion, you may have no choice but to remain affiliated and try to make the best of what you have), but it is not ideal. Even so, it is a perfectly respectable way to approach religion and has been applied by many people.

The Rejection Approach

The rejection approach is to conclude that if verifiable religious claims are usually contradicted by scientific discoveries, then perhaps there is not much reason to continue reinterpreting religious beliefs and teachings to retain a faith in the gaps – if the verifiable claims are untrue, then the unverifiable religious claims probably are not true either. Someone applying the gaps approach might conclude “well, since we have proved that there is no heaven directly above us in the sky, it must mean that heaven is somewhere else,” whereas a rejectionist might instead conclude “if the ancients were wrong about heaven being a literal place above the sky, then maybe there is no heaven at all.” While those who apply the gaps approach tend to be theists, rejectionists tend to be atheists. Many intelligent atheists have adopted this approach and it is an entirely defensible approach.

In my next post, I’ll discuss my favored approach, the Practical Approach (or Presentist Eclecticism).

May 18 2012

Cosmology, Religion, and Reason: Part 2

Category: cosmology,Epistemology,Reasoning,religion,science — James Rogers @ 8:00 am

This is part two of a series. Part one is here. Part three is here. Part four is here. Part five is here.

Last post, I talked about the great benefits that have come from religion, but also about how many of the great religions’ cosmological claims have been proven false. In this post, I’ll talk about the problem with adopting a literal approach to religions’ claims.

Much of what our ancestors believed about cosmology is plainly contradicted by what we have discovered about the universe. When the teachings of the great religions are based on the premises of a false cosmology, then the teachings themselves should be suspect – there is no reason to believe a conclusion based on a false premise.

Religious believers who take a literal approach to their religion’s sacred books or to the teachings of their religious leaders may appeal to authority and argue that the words of god, as contained in their scriptures (or as transmitted by their holy leaders) are the ultimate authority and therefore modern cosmological claims must be wrong. There are two problems with this approach.

First, believers base their claims about a text or leader’s divine authority on circular and subjective arguments. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority merely because the leader or the text says so is circular: we have no reason to believe in the leader or the text’s claims unless we already believe in their claims – there is no external reason to believe in their authority. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority because of our subjective emotional responses to them is almost equally problematic. As I have discussed before, spiritual feelings are very subjective.1 People from wildly different religions – religions with contradictory and mutually exclusive teachings – describe the same sorts of spiritual feelings confirming their belief in the religion. Some followers may isntead place their trust in stories about a teacher’s or a leader’s miraculous or supernatural abilities. Such stories invariably lack objective verification and are nearly always told second or third hand; I have never seen such stories stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Things like a religious text’s or leader’s own claim to authority, pleasant feelings, or stories of dubious veracity are not be enough to validate the claims to authority of religious texts or teachers, especially when some of their claims are directly contradicted by our modern observations of the world.

Second, it is a logical fallacy to believe in a statement’s truth merely because it was uttered by an “authority.” None of us can know everything. There is nothing wrong with relying on experts. And there is nothing wrong with arguing that a statement made by an authority is true. The problem arises when we argue that something is true because it was uttered by an authority. If something is true, then it is true whether or not it was uttered by an authority. Any statement made by an authority, therefore, should be able to stand up to criticism and independent verification. If an authority’s statements are true, it should be consistent with our knowledge of reality.

As alternatives to the literal approach to religious teachings, I present four reasonable approaches to religious claims beyond just relying on statements from purported authorities: 1) the gaps approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the practical approach. Next post, I’ll talk about the first three.

May 17 2012

Cosmology, Religion, and Reason: Part 1

Category: cosmology,Epistemology,Reasoning,religion,science — James Rogers @ 8:00 am

This is part one of a series. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is here. Part five is here.

Over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, human cultures have developed much knowledge about creating and maintaining good relationships and building communities. In the development of human society over the last 100,000 years, humans moved from simple hunter-gatherer tribes to societies of increasing complexity and size. The large and complex societies of the last few thousand years do not function well without moral principles such as charity, empathy, honesty, and respect for life and personal property.

The great religions of all the major cultures have accumulated insights into human living and interactions over the generations and developed the moral rules that are essential to modern society and as more people more fully live these moral principles, people’s lives have significantly improved. The moral teachings of the great religions have tremendous value in teaching us how to live together, and how to attain enlightenment, contentment, and happiness. Religion even provides much value and meaning to even non-adherents – secular notions of morality originally started from religious ideas about morality.

But in spite of the great value we can derive from religion, the great teachings of the world religions are also intertwined with ancient pre-modern cosmologies (cosmology is the study of the universe and humanity’s place in it) of decreasing relevance to us in light of modern scientific discoveries. The world’s major religions were founded in pre-modern times by people with radically different cosmologies than our modern conceptions. Many of the doctrines, practices, and teachings of modern religions are thus based on pre-modern cosmologies founded on superstitious beliefs and practices; they are based on false premises and assumptions about the world which we now know to be wrong.

For example, at the time of the founding of the great religions of the world, many of those religions’ adherents believed that the world was flat or that it was at the center of the universe. Biblical cosmology presupposes that the Earth is a flat disc floating in water.1 For biblical writers, heaven was a literal place just above the sky and hell was a literal place just below the ground. In Acts in the New Testament when Jesus ascends to heaven, Jesus is going to a literal place just above the sky. When John writes in Revelation about Jesus returning to Earth, he is talking about Jesus descending from a literal place located just above the sky. When the Bible talks about hell, it is referring to a literal place just below the ground that is the abode of departed spirits.2 The Bible presupposes a geocentric model of the universe, in which the Earth sits at the center and everything else, including the Sun, revolves around the Earth.3 Many of these types of passages are now interpreted metaphorically, but their writers’ literally believed them.

Our ancestors based their cosmologies on rudimentary observations of the world around them and then combined their observations with doctrines from religious teachers and culturally-inherited superstitious notions about unseen actors and forces. Modern scientific cosmology is based on fields such as astronomy and physics. The breakthroughs in modern cosmology frequently require advanced math; sophisticated tools, such as telescopes and particle accelerators; and a knowledge of past discoveries (because one lifetime is not enough for one person alone to figure out all the wonders of the universe).

Much of what our ancestors believed about cosmology is plainly contradicted by what we have discovered about the universe. When the teachings of the great religions are based on the premises of a false cosmology, then the teachings themselves should be suspect – there is no reason to believe a conclusion based on a false premise.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about the problems with taking a literal approach to  religious teachings

 

 

Footnotes

2 See, for example, Ezekiel 31:15

3 See, for example, Joshua 10:12-13 and Psalm 104:5

Aug 05 2011

Believers vs. Non-believers: Everyone Gets it Wrong

Category: Epistemology,religion — James Rogers @ 5:45 pm

A friend of mine shared the following video on Facebook, as if it were by itself a damning attack on religious belief:

I think that the research summarized in the video is fascinating, but the video’s creator commits a huge logical fallacy that really undermines its conclusion. The psychology experiments described in the video explain quite well about group dynamics and how we form opinions, but they tell us nothing about how we should react to the majority opinion of a group or how to approach the question of the truthfulness of Christianity.

The studies presented in the video generally involved situations where the study subject was presented with a situation where everyone else in the group (who, unbeknownst to the subject, are all actors and not true study subjects) expressed an opinion that clearly contradicted the study subject’s personal observation. Rather than contradict the rest of the group, the subjects would give answers that they secretly believed were wrong.

This does not perfectly replicate the real world, however. In many cases, the majority of the group will come to the right conclusion (which is probably why we evolved this cognitive bias for group conformity in the first place — probably because in many cases, it may help us arrive at the right conclusion). The internet has proven quite well that the “wisdom of the crowds” can do wonders (just look at prediction markets or Wikipedia) at coming to better answers than one person could come up with by themself.

Overcoming group bias is a great thing to strive for — but it is not useful to try to overcome group bias just for the sake of being a contrarian (which is what this video seems to advocate). The video is a great tool to remind us groups can be wrong. But it is a huge leap to then conclude that groups are usually wrong .

The video says that the answer to our tendency to conform to groups is “dissent.” The video presupposes, without providing any basis for doing so, that Christianity is false and advocates that non-believers dissent against the group to give fellow dissenters the courage to also make their true opinions known. But what if Christianity is true? What is the point of “dissent” if your group is already right?

Dissent is probably a reasonable tactic, but only after you’ve come to a valid conclusion that the group’s opinion is wrong. The first step after you learn about the problems with group dynamics and conformity is not dissent. The first step is to figure out a proper approach to epistemology. Read some basic books about the philosophy of science and some basic philosophy on epistemology. Another great book to read is The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Once you’ve nailed down some good approaches on how to know things, you will probably realize that no one can ever really be completely certain about anything. The next step after studying epistemology is to evaluate your personal beliefs and opinions and come to some conclusions about what you think is the most probable conclusion. Only then would dissent be warranted. But even after this, you need to watch out for the big problem of confirmation bias. You should thus keep an open mind and continually look out for evidence that contradicts your current beliefs. Always be willing to reject your beliefs and opinions if you find disconfirmatory evidence, or if you find new ideas or conclusions that better fit the facts.

And in all of this, remember that, as I’ve previously discussed, emotions and spiritual feelings are not a reliable guide to truth.

Jun 20 2011

Consistent and complicated, but still not true

Category: Epistemology,Reasoning — James Rogers @ 7:49 pm

The following is from the book Revelations by Jacques Vallee. The book, which was published in 1992, is about UFOs (it debunks many of the strange conspiracy theories held by UFO enthusiasts and discusses some of the more notable UFO hoaxes). In one section, Vallee discusses the Ummo UFO phenomenon in Europe, which lasted for decades and involved people all over Europe and elsewhere receiving letters from unknown authors claiming to be aliens from the planet Ummo.1 To illustrate how the Ummo hoaxers could have created thousands of pages of internally consistent documents describing the purported civilization and science of Ummo, Vallee discusses a case study which illustrates how someone could construct an elaborate, and internally consistent fantasy, delude himself into believing it, and even convince a psychiatrist who was hired to help him overcome his fantasies that the whole thing was true.

The passage has nothing to do with UFOs – I’m quoting it because it is a fascinating illustration about the power of the human mind to create internally consistent fantasy worlds, and about every person’s susceptibility to being fooled by such fantasies. What’s the moral of this post? The human brain is absolutely amazing; it has an almost infinite capacity for invention, and it can construct believable and consistent stories which are completely false. Always be careful about what you believe; a story or idea is not true just because it is complex or internally consistent. How can you evaluate whether something is true? Think critically and carefully. Apply the scientific method, along with the other methods for discovering truth which I discussed in my five-part series on discovering truth.2 Don’t let yourself get sucked in to the point where you let confirmation bias take over such that you only look for confirmatory evidence. And for your already-held beliefs, watch out for confirmation bias – don’t reject evidence which contradicts your view, and always be willing to change your ideas (even if they are deeply held), when the facts don’t match your beliefs.

If we listen to the adepts of UMMO, like Jean Pierre Petit, a major argument against the idea that a single man, or even a small group, could have manufactured the UMMO material resides in the very weight of the documents. How could one person have manufactured the hundreds of reports, some containing hundreds of pages, which comprise the UMMO corpus? What about the maps, the tables, the mathematical system, the formulas, the codes? Clearly, the believers say, what we have here is the product of an entire civilization.

The people who say this have never studied the psychiatric literature. They have never heard of Kirk Allen.

On a sultry June morning in Baltimore a successful psychiatrist named Dr. Robert Lindner received a phone call that would initiate the most remarkable case in his career, a case he would later summarize in his book The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales.

The phone call was from a government physician at a classified installation in New Mexico, an installation where research on the H-bomb was in progress (although Dr. Lindner does not mention the fact). The physician wanted to refer a patient to him. He was a brilliant research scientist in his thirties who was “perfectly normal in every way” except that he seemed to have acquired an amazing amount of detailed information about another world—a world with which he seemed to become increasingly preoccupied to the point of neglecting his work.

When he was asked by his superiors about the drop in the efficiency of his department, Kirk Allen apologized profusely and said he would “try to spend more time on this planet.” It is at that point that the government decided he needed expert help. They would fly the scientist to Baltimore as often as necessary, all expenses paid.

Kirk Allen arrived in Dr. Lindner’s office three days later.

“Any speculations I had had about him as a mad scientist evaporated when I saw him in my office,” writes the physician. “A vigorous-looking man of average height, clear-eyed and blond, his seersucker unwrinkled despite the long trip and the humidity . . . he looked like a junior executive . . . He spoke with just enough diffidence to let me know that the situation he now found himself in was slightly embarrassing.”

During the first session, Dr. Lindner elicited detailed information about his patient’s background and childhood. He learned that Kirk Allen was an avid reader of science-fiction and had somehow become convinced that a series of stories in which the main character had the same name as himself were really parts of his biography! The stories had to do with the faraway world of other planets. It became an obsession with him to complete this biography, to establish the continuity of his life, to resolve the contradictions between various parts of what he called the “record.” He succeeded in doing it when he discovered that he had the ability to travel psychically to the world of the other Kirk Allen.

Dr. Lindner soon realized two things—first, that his patient was utterly mad; second, that his psychosis was life-sustaining and would be very difficult to manage. He requested that Kirk turn over to him the documents on which his research was based.

It is impossible to convey more than a bare impression of Kirk’s records . . . There were, to begin with, about twelve thousand pages of typescript comprising the amended biography of Kirk Allen. This was divided into some 200 chapters and read like fiction. Appended to these pages were approximately 200 more of notes in Kirk’s handwriting, containing corrections necessitated by his more recent “researches,” and a huge bundle of scraps and jottings on envelopes, receipted bills, laundry slips, sheets from memo pads, etc.; these latter were largely incomprehensible since they were written in Kirk’s private shorthand, while some of them were little more than hasty designs or sketches, mathematical equations, or symbolic representations of something or other: each, however, was carefully numbered and lettered with red pencil to indicate where it belonged in the main script.

In addition to this bulky manuscript and its appendages there were:

1. A glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages.

2. 82 full-color maps carefully drawn to scale, 23 of planetary bodies in four projections, 31 of land masses on these planets, 14 labeled “Kirk Allen’s Expedition to —,” the remainder of cities on the various planets.

3. 61 architectural sketches and elevations, some colored, some drawn only in ink, but all carefully scaled and annotated.

4. Twelve genealogical tables.

5. An eighteen-page description of the galactic system in which Kirk Allen’s home planet was contained, with four astronomical charts, one for each of the seasons, and nine star maps of the skies from observatories on other planets in the system.

6. A 200-page history of the empire Kirk Allen ruled, with a threepage table of dates and names of battles or outstanding historical events.

7. A series of 44 folders containing from two to twenty pages apiece, each dealing with some aspect of the planet . . . typical titles, neatly printed on these folders, were “The Fauna of Srom Olma I,” “The Transportation System of Seraneb,” “Science of Srom,” “Parapsychology of Srom Norbra X,” “The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Star Drive to Space Travel,” “The Unique Brain Development of the Crystopeds of Srom Norbra X,” “Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I,” and so on.

8. Finally, 306 drawings, some in watercolor, some in chalk, some in crayon, of people, animals, plants, insects, weapons, utensils, machines, articles of clothing, vehicles, instruments, and furniture.

It is a catalog that dwarfs anything in the UMMO literature, anything in Urantia or the other fringe areas of the UFO field. As Dr. Lindner writes:

The reader can imagine for himself my dismay at the sheer bulk of this matter: I do not know if he can appreciate with what misgivings I approached the task of weaning this man from his madness.

The roots of Kirk Allen’s fantasies were evident from the story of his childhood and adolescence. The son of a naval officer who was assigned as governor of a remote Pacific island where they were the only white family, his mother abandoned him to a series of governesses, one of whom seduced him when he was eleven years old before running away with the husband of the island’s only schoolteacher. From then on the boy, who was gifted with unusual intelligence, spent his time reading every book he could find and fantasizing about remote worlds.

Dr. Lindner considered several strategies to try and cure Kirk Allen. He rejected shock therapy as inhumane and extreme. He also rejected the use of hypnosis, a technique he had used often in other situations, for reasons today’s ufologists would do well to consider:

Kirk’s hold on reality was tenuous enough as it was, and I frankly feared to break the thin thread by which his connection with this world was maintained.

Dr. Lindner decided the only alternative was to enter his patient’s fantasy and to try to pry him from the psychosis from that position. By then Kirk Allen had moved to Baltimore. The physician steeped himself in his records and became increasingly fascinated as he worked on them, hour after hour, with Kirk Allen as his mentor. Whenever he would detect some gap in the data, he would “send” his patient to get the missing information psychically. At first this was just a convenient technique for Dr. Lindner—but he became caught in the game and often found himself anxiously awaiting the requested answers.

One day the doctor noticed a major discrepancy in the star maps, which used a scale measured in ecapalim, an Olmayan unit equivalent to a mile and five-sixteenths. They worked on the discrepancy, and Dr. Lindner insisted that Kirk go back to his interplanetary institute to check the original records.

There were several such incidents, in which the therapist sought to displace Kirk’s obsession by sharing it with him. As he did so, however, he found himself increasingly immersed in the fantasy. He actually reversed roles with Kirk, often solving by himself the discrepancies he found in the Olmayan records!

One day when Dr. Lindner was expecting Kirk Allen with special anxiety because he had sent him on a key mission to retrieve more data, he found his patient strangely uninterested in the results. When he queried him eagerly, Kirk shrugged and finally confessed that for the last few weeks he had been lying to the physician.

“I’ve been making it up,” he sputtered, “inventing all that . . . that . . . nonsense!”

“What about the trips?” asked Dr. Lindner with what he describes as a mixture of disappointment and triumph, of concern and relief.

“What trips?” asked Kirk Allen. “Why, it’s been weeks since I gave up that foolishness.”

The patient in this case had continued to pretend that the trips were real for the sake of his therapist, who was now so utterly caught up in a fantasy that was fulfilling a need in his own life.

Kirk Allen returned to his research work with the government, leaving Dr. Lindner with the problem of curing himself. That section of his book is perhaps the most remarkable part of the record:

Until Kirk Allen came into my life I had never doubted my own stability. The aberrations of mind . . . were for others . . . It has been years since I saw Kirk Allen, but I think of him often, and of the days when we roamed the galaxies together.

On long summer nights on Long Island when the sky was filled with stars, Dr. Lindner would look up, smile to himself and whisper: “How goes it with the Crystopeds? How are things in Seraneb?”

And I am similarly tempted to ask: “Is there peace in IUMMA? And are the Ummites truly pleased with the transcendental function of OEMII?”3

Don’t read this and think about how you would never fool yourself into believing the fantasies of someone like Kirk Allen, or spend the time creating elaborate fantasies for yourself. While none of us may go as far as Kirk Allen, we are all susceptible to such cognitive mistakes (just look at Dr. Lindner’s eventual mental immersion in the fantasy), and our brains are very good at deluding ourselves so that we don’t even know we’re making such errors in thinking. The first step to overcoming them is to acknowledge that our thinking is fraught with potential for such errors and recognize the limitations of our minds and our knowledge. Next, we should always seek better evidence and information, and be willing to change our ideas, attitudes, and beliefs in response to new information and discoveries.

 

Footnotes

2 Here are links to the five parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

3 Jacques Vallee, Revelations: Alien contact and Human Deception, pp. 116-121

Mar 07 2011

How Can We Find Truth? – Part 5

Category: Epistemology,Reasoning,religion — James Rogers @ 5:15 pm

Note: This is part 5 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

 

Now that I’ve discussed some of the different ways humans try to figure out trut, which method is best? To recap, I discussed six ways to discover truth: observation, trial and error, common sense, authorities, the scientific method, emotions

Most of us rely on observation, trial and error, common sense, authorities, and emotions to make everyday decisions. Each of these methods can sometimes be wrong, but they are quick, and usually easy to apply. People don’t do peer-reviewed studies to figure out which sandwich they should order for lunch. It would take too much time and cost too much relative to the expected benefit of getting better information about sandwich options. Even scientists generally rely on these five methods to make decisions in their day-to-day lives.

Jesus said “you will know them by their fruits.”1 When we compare the results of each of the six methods, the scientific method has proven itself far superior to anything else at being able to give answers which are reproducible and which allow us to make accurate predictions about the future. That you are reading this blog post right now is proof of that. Computers and the Internet exist because physicists and engineers applying the scientific method made innumerable discoveries about things like the behavior of electrons and photons, mathematics, and the physical properties of different materials which were applied to create computers and communications networks.

It happens far more often that “discoveries” made using one of the other five methods are conclusively proven to be wrong by the scientific methods, than for discoveries made using the scientific method to be proven wrong by one of the other five methods. Scientific discoveries are often proven wrong, but almost always by someone else applying the scientific method. While the scientific method is not always right, it has proven to be far more accurate than anything else humans have been able to come up with.

So what should you do if, when using any of the other five methods, you reach a conclusion that contradicts what has been discovered using the scientific method? It should raise a big red flag. The contradiction doesn’t necessarily mean that science is right and your conclusion is wrong, but more often than not, your contradictory conclusion probably will be wrong.

Some people have criticized science for being amoral – it does not answer moral questions about proper human behavior. This concern has some validity. Since morality often entails making value judgments about the relative propriety of different activities, we can’t make moral judgments without knowing ahead of time what sorts of outcomes and actions are most desirable. David Hume pointed out the “is-ought” problem with science and morality: morality seeks to define what ought to be, whereas science is good at telling us what is.2 Knowing what is does not necessarily tell us what ought to be.

This is where the power of emotion comes in. As I discussed in Part 43 of this series, powerful positive emotions like spiritual feelings of elevation likely evolved to induce us to act morally. Laboratory studies have shown that participants who were induced to feel elevation were more likely to act altruistically afterward.4 For example, religious people5 are more likely to donate to charity (even when you exclude donations that they make to their own church)6 and are less likely to have had an extramarital affair.7 (I will soon be starting a series of posts discussing morality in more depth). This is where religion and spiritual feelings really prove their value. If we are looking at fruits, emotion and feelings seem to be poor guides to discovering objective truth, but very powerfully help us to internalize moral truth.

Conclusion

Even though we can never be completely certain that we understand objective truth and reality, the business of living requires us to seek truth as best we can and live according to what we discover. Our determinations of “truth” are really based on probabilities. Based on the six methods I’ve discussed, we (usually unconsciously) make a conclusion about what seems most probable and treat it as if it were true. Most of us internalize this conclusion to well that we assume our conclusion is true in the absolute sense. We shouldn’t think this way – none of us have all of the answers. We are all fallible and imperfect. All of us believe things that are wrong.

We can’t improve our thoughts and ideas to more closely match reality if we can’t even recognize that we’re wrong. Even though we treat our high-probability conclusions as being true, we shouldn’t let that make us close-minded. We shouldn’t internalize this feeling of certainty such that we reject anything that contradicts our previous conclusions. It is important to have the mental discipline to internally recognize that our conclusions are uncertain. We should evaluate new claims and ideas on their merit, with an open mind, and be willing to accept new conclusions and new approaches.

We apply all of the six methods I’ve discussed to find truth. The scientific method has proven itself to be the most useful approach we’ve yet found to discovering truth, but positive emotions play an important role in inducing us to internalize moral truth.

 

Footnotes

1Matthew 7:20 (NRSV).

5The relationship between religiosity and these two examples of moral behavior (charitable donations and marital fidelity) do not explicitly show that there is a relationship between feelings and moral behavior. My anecdotal experience, however, is that most people go to church for emotional reasons (seeking spiritual feelings, a sense of community with others, etc.), so I think that these relationships may at least be indicative of the power that feelings can have to induce us to act morally.

6http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6577 .

“The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.”

7See here and here. This relationship appears to hold in Malawi as well.

Feb 18 2011

How Can We Find Truth? Part 4

Category: Epistemology,Reasoning — James Rogers @ 6:48 pm

Note: This is part 4 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5.

Update: added quotes from people describing their feelings during religious experiences. Update 2: added to quotes to include an atheist.

 

In this fourth post of the series of posts on discovering truth, I continue my discussion of different ways we can discover truth

6) Feelings

More often than we’d probably like to admit, we rely on emotion to shape our beliefs. We frequently use our powers of reason to justify our already-held emotion-based beliefs, rather than starting without any conclusions and reasoning our way to the best conclusion based on the available information. Oftentimes, we decide what to believe based on what “feels” right, rather than a conscious application of on any of the other five different ways for discovering truth which I have discussed above.

Eureka Moments

Research and experience indicate that emotions and unconscious flashes of insight can be important in making decisions and discoveries.1 In his 1971 essay “The Eureka Phenomenon,” Isaac Asimov explains that many scientific discoveries are made when the scientist has a flash of inspiration which leads to the solution of a problem. Such “eureka” moments do not come from a rational conscious process, but probably from subconscious processing by the brain. Even after the conscious brain has stopped thinking about a problem, it appears that other parts of the brain continue to work on it. Einstein and many other scientists describe experiencing this effect when making some of their most important discoveries. Indeed, the very term “eureka” originates from a (likely apocryphal) story about the great ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, who had a sudden flash of insight while visiting the public baths; when the insight came to him, he reportedly lept out of the bath, shouted “eureka!” (Greek for “I have found”) and ran home naked because he was so eager to test his discovery.2

There is much that we don’t understand about how our brain works and how we form opinions and make decisions. Each of us would like to think that we understand why we do what we do. We think that we are good at introspection and self-understanding. Much research shows however, that we may not understand our own decision processes as well as we think we do. Research shows that all of us create justifications to explain our decisions or beliefs, even though we do not really consciously understand the real reasons why our brains arrived at that decision or belief.3

Our feelings’ subconscious influence on our thoughts and decisions and flashes of insight are both a part of human cognitive function. They are probably an inescapable part of how we think, and can be quite useful. But our lack of awareness of how these processes work can lead to bias and a false level of certainty in decisions that are not rational. The scientific method has proven itself to be so powerful because peer review requires that other people critique a scientist’s work. Each of us have cognitive blind spots and biases that are impossible to see ourselves, but that others can help us spot.

Religion and Morality

In addition to the way that emotion affects how we think, it also influences our beliefs about religious and moral truth. Frequently, people form religious convictions about a religion’s truthfulness based on personal emotional experiences with the religion. Many Christian churches call this religious emotional experience “the spirit,” “feeling the spirit,” or “accepting Jesus in your heart.” This feeling is often described as a warm feeling in one’s chest; a pleasant sensation which makes a person want to do good; a feeling of peace; or a feeling of light and peace flowing into one’s mind and heart. In the Book of Galatians in the Christian New Testament, it says that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV).4 In the Gospel of John Jesus says that “[w]hen the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—he will testify about me.” (John 15:26 NIV).5

This spiritual feeling has been studied by psychologists. Academics call it this feeling “elevation.” Elevation, as defined by psychologists, involves a desire to act morally and is characterized by a feeling of warmth in the chest.6 Elevation appears to be a universal human emotion just like anger or love – felt by people in all religions. Other religious experiences have also been found to be cause biologically, such as religious visions caused by temporal lobe epilepsy to the “God helmet” (a helmet which projects magnetic fields into certain parts of the brain) causing people to feel God’s presence.7

The behaviors we call “ethical” or “good” are generally the behaviors that make living in human communities successful (an upcoming series of posts will discuss morality and ethics in more detail). Humans who banded together to cooperate, share resources, and provide mutual protection would likely have been more successful than humans who did not band together. Because of their greater success, such bands of cooperative humans would have had the most children and thus passed on their genes to subsequent generations. There thus would have been selective pressure to encourage the spread of genes fostering personality traits like cooperation, group cohesiveness, sharing, and empathy. Elevation likely evolved because it provided a survival advantage – people who feel a positive emotional response when they act morally are more likely to continue acting morally. And such moral behavior is essential for a group of people to be able to survive and be successful. We feel elevation because modern humans couldn’t have evolved without it.

The problem with relying solely on emotional experience when trying to find truth is that our feelings are an imperfect guide. Feeling elevation tells you when you’re doing something moral, or thinking about something moral. But it is not an absolute guide. For example, people are more likely to feel elevation when they help people in their nearby environment – people they can see. This makes evolutionary sense – there would be no reason to develop the ability to feel elevation when helping far-off unseen people, because our ancestors lived in an environment where the only people they knew about and with whom they had interactions were the people in their immediate local environment. For this reason, people in the developed world give money to things like cancer and AIDS research, because these diseases affect people they know. But their money would have a far greater effect to help the lives of other human beings if they gave it to charities that provided clean drinking water, sanitation facilities, and malaria treatments in the third world. Diarrhea and malaria are much bigger problems overall than cancer or AIDS, but they afflict people in far-off developing countries, and it doesn’t make most rich people feel as good to fight them, so they give less money to such causes.

A Systematic Approach to Spiritual Feelings

We are often wrong when we generalize from our personal experience, because our personal experience is not broad enough to make valid generalizations. Is elevation really a divinely-created emotion which leads us to truth? Maybe. If you feel elevation in a certain church does that mean that the church’s teachings are actually true? Maybe. But how can you definitively confirm this?

You would need at least three things:

1. Peer review: To overcome the problems with confirmation bias and other cognitive problems which may distort your conclusion, you would need to submit your conclusions to testing by others not of your faith, and you would need to be willing to accept their criticisms of your methods and change your conclusions and methods as a result of their criticisms.

2. Experimental controls: How can you know the meaning and import of spiritual feelings you’ve felt from one particular religion, without something to compare it to? You should test a variety of other religions and sacred texts outside of your own faith (in an unbiased way, willing to accept that those texts and religions might also be true) to determine whether they also produce spiritual feelings.

3. Good record keeping: because of confirmation bias it is likely you will remember when spiritual feelings or impressions were later confirmed true, but will tend to forget the ones that were later proven wrong. If you felt a spiritual feeling which seemingly confirmed the truth of a religion, how many times have you interacted with that religion and didn’t feel those spiritual feelings? You should keep track of all of your spiritual feelings and impressions and tabulate their success rate.

A Short Experiment – Comparing Descriptions of Spiritual Feelings from Different Religions

It is interesting to read people’s personal descriptions of religious experience. People from very different religions often use similar words to describe their spiritual experiences.

I’ve collected a sample of people’s descriptions of religious conversion or spiritual revelation. The following twenty quotes are from practicing Atheists, Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, New Agers, Protestants, and Universal Unitarians. Try to guess which quote comes from which religion (some religions are used more than once). I have standardized the language (changes indicated by brackets ), so that differences in terminology between religions will not tip you off (thus, mosque, temple and church are all become a [church]; the Bible and all other religious texts become a [text] or [sacred text]).

Try to match these 8 religions to the following 20 quotes. The answer key is below:

Atheist
Buddhist
Catholic
Hindu
Islam
Mormon
New Age
Protestant
Universal Unitarian

1. “I felt a burning in my heart, and a great burden seemed to have left me.”8

2. “But what can I say? How can I describe an experience so profound and so beautiful? Shall I say that it was the most blessed experience of my life? Shall I say that [God] touched my heart and gave me a feeling of peace I had not known before? Shall I describe the tears that flowed freely from my eyes, affirming my . . . faith, as I . . . beg[ed] [God's] blessings for myself and for those I love?”9

3. “The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express.”10

4. “As I read these books in a . . . bookstore, . . . I felt a burning in my heart that I should come and investigate.”11

5. “[Even as a child], [w]ithout understanding much about the complex [doctrine] . . . he was attracted to [church]. There he often felt a strong feeling of peace flowing through his body.”12

6. “I was praying . . . when I felt a burning shaft of . . . love come through my head and into my heart.”13

7. “I truly [sic] wanted to know [the truth]. After a few weeks, I stumbled onto [texts] which . . . answered my questions in a way that I had not heard of before. I read everything . . .and I even tried the experiment of asking [God] for . . . his divine love. After about 6 weeks, I felt a burning in my chest and a sensation that was unlike anything I had ever felt. It was pure happiness and peace. I knew then that [God] had sent His love to me.”14

8. “A feeling of peace and certitude would tell me when I had found the answers and often after people would help me by pointing in the right direction.”15

9. “We gave up a lot of things. What did I get in return? I received a feeling of peace, hope and security. I no longer lay awake at night worrying. I stopped cussing. I became much more honest in all aspects of my life. [God] has changed my heart and my life. My husband’s heart is changing also. We pray all the time and really feel [God’s] presence in our marriage. My perspective has changed. My view of life has changed about what is truly important.”16

10. “Many women described a feeling of euphoria after they committed to following [God] . . . . One woman described a feeling of peace; she said: ‘It is like you are born again and you can start all over again, free from sin.’”17

11. “A feeling of peace seemed to flow into me with a sense of togetherness . . . . . I felt very peaceful from inside and also felt [warmth] . . . .”18

12. “I felt a burning sensation in my heart.”19

13. “That inner light, that we all have or had at some time in our existence, was nearly burnt out for me. But in the [church] . . . I found a feeling of peace, inner solitude and quietness that I’d also found in reading the [text] and pondering over its meaning and trying to practice what it tells us.”20

14. “For the first time I not only felt accountable for my past sins but I had to fight back tears. I knew that I had let down [God] [and] my family . . . . However, I also knew I was forgiven! [It] gave me a feeling of peace that I have never felt it in my whole life. I felt like I had a huge weight lifted off of me and that I was finally home and free . . . . I felt like a new person.”21

15. “Every time I am there [at the church building], a feeling of peace overcomes me.”22

16. “Every time I was with the [church members], I felt this warm feeling, a feeling of peace and for the first time in my life since my church-going days, I wanted to follow [God] . . . .”23

17. “About 10 years ago, when Jenny and I decided to start a family, we began looking for a spiritual community for our kids. During my first service at [the church]. . . I was hooked. I recall the feeling of peace that I felt when I was attending [services].”24

18. “The power of [God] came into me then. I had this warm and overwhelming feeling of peace and security. It’s hard to explain. I had to . . . stop myself from falling backward.”25

19. “[The religious leader] looked into my eyes deeply for a moment, and I experienced a feeling of peace and love unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”26

20. “[After praying,] [i]mmediately I was flooded with a deep feeling of peace, comfort, and hope.”27

21. “I recently spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. . . . As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. . . . The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles.”28

The answers are in the next paragraph. My point here is not to say that any of these people’s experiences are invalid or that they are not valuable, or that religion is bad (I am an active church-goer myself). Nor am I trying to say that this proves any certain religion to be true or false – just that spiritual experiences are a universal human emotion, and that, just like any emotional experience, they are not enough by themselves to be reliable indicators of absolute truth. This is easy to demonstrate using religious experiences, since the claims of most of these religions are contradictory. Thus, if one of the above religions were true in the absolute sense, many or most of the others would be false. Many or most of the above people’s religious experiences, therefore, could not have been reliable indicators of the truth.

Answers: 1. Protestant; 2. Islam; 3. Protestant; 4. Catholic; 5. Hindu; 6. Catholic; 7. New Age; 8. Islam; 9. Protestant; 10. Islam; 11. Hindu; 12. Protestant; 13. Islam; 14. Catholic; 15. Buddhist; 16. Mormon; 17. Universal Unitarian; 18. Catholic; 19. Hindu; 20. Protestant; 21. Atheist

Conclusions

Most of my conclusions in this section are tentative. I have not been able to find much peer-reviewed research to help me evaluate my reasoning. But my opinion in this section seem to be consistent with our current scientific understanding of evolution and biology. If you are aware of any good research or arguments, which refute or confirm what I’ve written – please share!

In the absence of good empirical information, I am forced to rely on my personal experience. In my personal experience I have had eureka moments where a sudden flash of insight provided a solution to a problem, but sometimes those eureka insights have been wrong. I have felt spiritual feelings of elevation from a variety of sacred texts from different religions. I think that feelings of elevation are very important and that they usually lead us to act more morally, but they have not had as good of a track record in helping me discover objective truth.

In the final part of this series, I will evaluate all the different methods for finding truth and give some final thoughts.

2 For more information about this, see the Wikipedia article about the Eureka effect: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eureka_effect

6 Haidt, J. “Elevation and the positive psychology of morality,” in C. Keyes and J. Haidt (eds.), Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived. Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association (2003).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Positive_psychology#The_meaningful_life

11 About a famous apparition of the Virgin Mary in the former Yugoslavia.

http://www.medjugorje.ws/en/articles/mark-miravalle/

12 Describing a Hindu guru’s early spiritual experiences.

http://www.nativeplanet.org/health/yoga/swami/swami2.htm

13 A nun describing when felt called to become a nun.

http://www.olivben.org/Novitiate/Our_Newest_Novitiates/

14 The author of this forum post describes learning information from spirits revealing what happens after we die.

http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/1057532-how-can-you-sure-what-happens-7.html

15 Describing conversion to Islam.

http://www.mwlcanada.org/publications/whywe.pdf

18 Descriptions of two different people about their encounter with a guru.

http://www.siddha-loka.org/newsletter2010.html

19 From a Muslim who converted to Christianity, describing the feelings he felt at the start of the the chain of events which would lead to his conversion.

http://www.4marks.com/articles/details.html?article_id=4989

20 Describing her conversion to Islam.

http://www.islamicgarden.com/dressedwhite.html

21 Describing her return to Catholicism.

http://www.ancient-future.net/cbstory.html

22 Describing his feelings at the Buddhist stupa on Dhauligiri in India.

http://www.localyte.com/attraction/11416–Dhauli-Peace-Pagoda–India–Orissa–Bhubaneswar

24 Describing his experiences with meditation to recapture the feelings of peace he used to feel at church, but no longer does because his children make it diffiuclt to concentrate.

http://www.firstparishbeverly.org/LL-102509-1.htm

26 Really neo-Hindu. Describing an encounter with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

http://www.allawaken.net/html/who_am_i_.html

27 An experience of a Protestant who later began the process of converting to Catholicism.

http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=22192

28 Famous Atheist Sam Harris talking about the feelings he gets when he meditates, regardless of the religious situation in which he encounters himself.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/sam_harris/2007/01/consciousness_without_faith_1.html

Feb 03 2011

How Can We Find Truth? Part 3

Category: Epistemology,Reasoning — James Rogers @ 5:56 pm

Note: This is part 3 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5.

 

This is this post in this series on truth, I continue my discussion of different ways we can discover truth.

5) Empirical Rationalism / The Scientific Method.

Empirical rationalism means applying reason and formal logic to our perceptions and experiences to come to conclusions. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and others have discovered and created the principles of formal logic, which allow us to more systematically evaluate our perceptions of the world and make accurate conclusions. Empirical rationalism is different from common sense because it involves the application of formal rules and critical thinking to our perceptions and experience, whereas common sense is based more on intuitive deductions about the world. Empirical rationalism means consciously language and logic to interpret our perceptions; it requires an understanding of logical fallacies and making the effort to avoid such fallacies.

The scientific method involves observation and experimentation. In its most basic application, a person creates a hypothesis using the knowledge they’ve gained from observation, trial and error, authorities, and previous applications of the scientific method. In other cases, scientists will start with a question, not a hypothesis. Either way, they design experiments or tests to disprove their hypothesis or to provide data to help answer the question. They then share those results with other people who examine and critique their methodology and results, and perhaps try out the experiments or tests themselves to try and replicate the results. If the results stand up to scrutiny, and are replicable, then our level of confidence is increased in the validity of the hypothesis. But the hypothesis will always be subject to further testing and attempts to disprove it. If further experiments disprove it, then it is rejected. If it stands up to further experimentation, then our level of confidence in its truth will increase.

My description of the scientific method is simplified. There are other ways of doing science (for example, statistically analyzing other people’s data, doing observational fieldwork to observe and categorize species or geological characteristics). No matter the exact approach, the distinguishing characteristics of science are 1) subjecting the results to other scientists’ review and criticism, 2) an analytic and systematic approach to solving problems and answering questions, 3) rejecting conclusions that aren’t supported by evidence, and 4) basing one’s views and opinions on the evidence, as opposed to trying to force evidence to fit a preconceived notions.

My description of the scientific method is an idealized version. In real life, things don’t happen as cleanly. Scientists can be dogmatic too. They can get set in their ways, refusing to change their opinions in the face of new evidence. Carl Sagan’s quote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” illustrates this point. This quote is often used to imply that a claim which contradicts the current paradigm must be supported by more proof than a claim which accords with the current paradigm. A real scientist wouldn’t require a higher standard of proof for a claim which departs from his world view – to do otherwise means that the scientist is biased. An unbiased scientist would apply the same standard of proof to every claim, dispassionately evaluating the claims and giving credence to the claims which best fit the evidence. This may mean that most extraordinary claims will be rejected because the totality of the evidence better supports the current paradigm, but it will not be rejected just because the claim itself was extraordinary.

There are problems which affect what even gets presented as science in the first place. Because most scientific theories and discoveries are presented in peer-reviewed journals, a new theory will not be disseminated and get widespread acceptance unless it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, even if that theory better fits the data than the old theory,

Scientists expect new claims to stand up to criticism and review, and the system of peer reviewed journals helps provide a system of ensuring that new scientific claims have been examined. The people who decide what gets published in a scientific journal thus have the power to suppress papers presenting theories with which they disagree. These gatekeepers may have an interest in suppressing or minimizing new theories, for example when a new theory contradicts their own scientific conclusions.

The success of the scientific method relies on scientists having intellectual honesty and being willing to allow competing theories to be heard on their merits. Scientists are not pure, selfless, angelic beings. As with any human endeavor, politics, interpersonal relationships, and selfishness play a part behind the scenes. To make sure that others can police the process, good science relies on transparency so that gatekeepers cannot hide potential attempts to suppress competing theories. Having a large number of people involved in the peer review process also makes it harder to suppress research without getting caught by someone else in the reviewing process.

The peer review process can fall short in other ways too. Peer review depends on having people with the right expertise involved in the process. Scientific experiments are often complicated and generate large amounts of data which can be difficult to interpret. Peer reviewers must have the right expertise to distinguish good research from bad. For example, proper statistical analysis of data can be very difficult. Even very smart scientists can easily make mistakes in statistically analyzing their experimental results, which can lead to bad conclusions. If the reviewers of that scientist’s work lack sufficient statistical expertise, they might not catch the statistical mistakes, and will approve the publication of false or flawed conclusions.

Relying on the scientific method also means accepting that we are capable of correctly perceiving and understanding reality, which (as I discussed above) is not necessarily something we can be sure of. But does this mean there is something wrong with the scientific method? Not at all. If we adopt a “by their fruits ye shall know them” standard, the scientific method has proven itself over and over. No other approach to discovering truth has yielded better results.

In part 4, I’ll discuss the use of feelings as a way of discovering truth.

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