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Hm, I figured he's just trying to say, some people do have this experience of feeling something invisible outside them, and does it have to matter?

E.O. Wilson says, we've got urgent work to do, we can disagree about why.

"Love the world, sacrifice much to save it" -- do we need to ask, is that an ecologist talking, or a godstruck human being? Does it matter? Or can we get on doing it, first?

Maybe I missed MT's point. That was what I took from it.

I am trying to say that I find the concepts "God" and "soul" useful for thinking about matters that are important to me. It's not, to me, a matter of "belief" as of appropriate definition of terms.

[OK, but in that case you didn't convey it terribly well. Had you said that, I'd have said: fine, your interenal beliefs are what ever they are, and that says nothing about the real world (or the nature of conciousness) -W]

I try to figure out what ancient people were trying to say about religion, correlating it with experiences of my own. I find enough points of contact to be able to gain wisdom from them without requiring literal belief in miracles, other than the one perfectly sufficient miracle that we are here having this conversation at all

Further, I believe that religion is not about physics and is ineligible to make make commentaries about physical reality.

However, I strongly suspect that physical reasoning is also incapable of making useful commentaries about experiential phenomena. In my world view this is important. However, it is a hell of a job even explaining to people what I mean by this. I find the fiercest resistance to it on all sides.

Fortunately my ethic does not require me dropping everything to convince you. I just find it interesting.

[Again, OK, you can belive that, I don't object. However, I did address this very point in my post: even granting your point, that doesn't get you anything religious or spiritual -W]

My point in going public about this is not to win you over. It's simply too hard to get people to consider that some parts of religion are sound and others aren't. I do not insist that your philosophical underpinnings are unsound, I merely insist that I myself am not stupid or confused.

[I don't think you are stupid, and I doubt you are confused. I do think that your post was confused. As I said, you appeared to be mixing up how-to-deal-with-the-religious from the point of view of promoting reality in, e.g., climate change; and the entirely separate point of, well, how-to-explain-conciousness, or mystical experience -W]

I've been pondering this with what I take to be due skepticism for thirtyfive years and find it works rather well. And as someone who finds the concept of God useful to describe a genuine and very important experiential phenomenon I am in a position to assert that you cannot possibly remove that concept from people by rational argument, for reasons that are separate from whether those people are irrational.

[Indeed yes. But this is what I mean when I say you're confusing / mixing two separate matters -W]

If I had never tasted anything spicy-hot, and you had, I might disbelieve in spicy-hotness, but nothing I could do could convince you that there is no such thing. That is because spicy-hotness is not primarily a property of matter (though it may have material correlates) but a property of experience. There is such a thing as religious experience, and to those who have had it, calling it a fantasy is as entirely beside the point as calling spicy-hotness or blueness a fantasy.

[But Paul has already said this. No-one is claiming that "religious experience" is a fantasy; they are (I would) deny that it is caused by God. As I said, I really can't tell what kind of God you do believe in, if at all. What, in your view, causes "religious experience"? -W]

Normally I know better than to discuss these things seeing as I have no intent to convince others or gain followers; one never gains friends by being idiosyncratic and sometimes loses them. The reason I mention it is this. Given how these ideas are key points of reference for me, I can identify better with those who think religiously than other rational people can.

As such, I am offended by the Myers/Dawkins presentation, and can explain and represent exactly how and why without having any particularly superstitious baggage to defend. Which is why I am willing to discuss it publicly.

[Discussing things is good. But in my view, you've failed to separate out things that are different, and you've failed to make yourself clear. I don't have any great interest in converting the religious to materialism, so have paid very little attention to the Dawkins / Myers debate stuff -W]

Having known quite a few scientists and engineers who are deeply religious and having been raised in a religious enough environment that if Eli gets ticked he can tie just about anyone on either side up in knots (when young, Mom Rabett had to drag him away from torturing the bible callers at the door, a sin for which Eli would have to pay greatly in the next life if there was one), perhaps a little white bunny might have a word.

There are two issues. The first is those that insist that everyone must conform to their beliefs, or at the minimum not disagree with them on anything. There are lots of those in the US, more in Texas, and short shrift to them all.

The second is realization that there are issues where observation, discovery and belief are in conflict. This is more difficult. The live and let live position is to each his own but there are areas of public policy where this cannot carry. My position is minimum damage. If someone could tell me why it is necessary to say the Lord's Prayer in school, and in particular the Protestant version in a school filled with Catholics (Ms. Rabett remarks on this often) let alone Jews and others, Eli would be interested. Much of what passes for "prayer in school" is simply the bitch slap school of educational policy. As Tip O'Neill said, as long as there are tests there will be prayer in school. But it will be personal prayer, which is as it should be. England and Bavaria have their own problems.

More interesting, although less political, is whether religious belief should accommodate to discovery. Should one believe in an 8000 (or 12000) year old universe in the face of what we have discovered, or believe that there were seven ages of creation (which is a reasonable translation of the original), each of which could have taken millions of years. Your creation myth may vary. It is interesting that the description of many creations is in the order that science leads us to accept as correct.

To me it is striking that PZ Myers, Arch-Naive-Materialist-New-Atheist-of-Great-Infamy, wrote the following about E.O. Wilson's book :

"Still, though, I agree that Wilson deserves to be awarded a Green Book Award for The Creationâwe can't afford to wait for all the Baptists to commit apostasy before we draft them to support biodiversity. Let's hope he wins many more, and especially let's hope more religious organizations start acknowledging his ideas!"

I think you are right that I could have been clearer. I don't often try to discuss these matters.

Stipulate for the purposes of argument that the question of consciousness is inaccessible to science.

[Sorry to barge in, but this already dilutes a large part of your former position (This in turn draws attention to the phenomenon of experience, and how very feeble and hollow efforts to reduce the phenomenon of experience (formerly, the "soul") to a basis in a physical theory must be.) Do you maintain that previous position, but are writing the above for the purposes of discussion; or not? -W]

Then define God as the union of that which is accessible to science and that which is not. By definition such a "God" exists. Then the question remains as to whether that is doing too much violence to the word, or whether, to the contrary, an attitude of awe and gratitude toward God so defined is appropriate and helpful.

[I would say, this is clearly doing violence to the meaning of the word God. Just to take one example, it is traditional for God to be "good" in some sense; there is no obvious reasaon why a God so defined would be good (even the buddhist non-God is sort-of good, because it judges (correctly, one must assume) for the purposes of reincarnation (insofar as I understand that "religion"). If you want to strech the concepts this far I think you are abliged to invent yourself a new word - this is in no sense "God" -W]

To the concept of "God's infinite mercy" map the astonishing fact that consciousness exists at all, without which the universe wouldn't be worth very much at all, nobody being around to notice it. I consider this quite "miraculous" in the sense that it is impossible for me to imagine a satisfactory argument from empirically derived principles to explain it.

[No, this won't do. This is the "argument from incredulity" that you have dismissed, correctly, as invalid in sci.env more than once (ha. I can find no evidence for this. Oh well, the invalidity remains). However, even that aside, this argument isn't really an argument, it is just the hand-waving that you've accused others of -W]

Imagine to the contrary that a physical correlate to the presence or absence of consciousness exists. (Note that you may have to account for, e.g., the physiological transition to deep sleep. And birth and death. Or maybe not. It's your problem, not mine. I'm just the one saying you can't do it.) What is the test? I have a physical configuration (a lizard, say, or a bug, or a foraminiferum, or a Turing test passing machine) that your test indicates is conscious, and I say, nay, this lizard, bug, amoeboid, machine is merely a machine, no more conscious than a toaster. What possible test can you apply? Even if the subject is intelligent, (a Turing machine) it may "think" it is conscious, but still there may be nobody home.

[I think that probably doesn't read as well when I'm reading it as it must have when you wrote it. Certainly it isn't at all convincing. For a start, suppose I have a test, I'm not clear why you think it is going to fail. Suppose I have such a test and it matches exactly what your "spiritual intuition" or whatever tells you. What then? But stepping back from that, it isn't clear that such a test be possible, even if conciousness is a pure physical property. Analogy: I have a computer, and I want to know if it is thinking about Fish. If I'm not allowed to poke into the interior and read the appropriate memory bus, then I can't tell, unless it prints the word "fish" on the screen. If I've got a debugger I can read its memory and discover that indeed, it has just processed the word "fish". We don't have a debugger for people. Perhaps we never have. But that doesn't provide any evidence at all that conciousness isn't just an emergent property of the brain.
What possible test could there be? Essentially you need to provide an objective test for a subjective experience. The very nature of scientific inquiry precludes the identification of the consciousness one seeks to explain.

BTW, I don't know what you mean by "a physical correlate to the presence or absence of consciousness exists". If you mean, some kind of gland or specific structure, then quite likely not. The obvious commonplace theory of conciousness, which you must be aware of, is the emergent-property theory. That doesn't have a physical-correlate in the usual sense of the word -W]

I realize that isn't much of an objective proof! It seems, oddly, subjectively impregnable without being entirely reducible to logic. (It reminds me of the related Chinese room argument in that way.)

I think you see the problem, even if you are uncomfortable with the consequences. The question is which way the burden of proof lies. If one assumes that science is complete, in the sense that all phenomena are reducible to science, then I am making an extraordinary claim and require a stronger argument. But in fact, I don't think it's me making the extraordinary claim at all.

[You must have missed what I said before: even if conciousness can't be explained by physics, that isn't in any way evidence for it being a non-physical property -W]

So again, imagine that you had a theory of consciousness. What would it look like? What is the "cogitat ergo est" of it all? (Forgive my Latin if I got the third person wrong.) What is the physical distinction between "cogitat" and "non cogitat"? You acknowledge that you don't know and I am unsurprised. What I find striking is that nobody has any way of explaining what such a thing could possibly look like!

[I don't know -W}

Now, you are saying I don't connect this to God. In the end, though, I do. The fact that something exists but is inaccessible to science means to me that I need some sort of meaning for "existence" that is a superset of science; a universe (in the mathematical sense) which constitutes the union the mysteriously connected physical and experiential; the metaphysical universe. That metaphysical universe I choose to call God. In this I am not an innovator. As I understand it, something like this point of view was promoted by Baruch Spinoza, although, remarkably, Spinoza's philosophy seems to be at the root of modern materialist thought as well.

[Here you become mystical and start to blur your terms. As I've said above, when you drift this far from the usual meaning of the word, you are almost certain to mislead people unless you use a jargon-word instead. Further, in your original posting, and indeed in comments here, you've mixed this part of your message with the talking-to-the-religious-folk-of-Texes part, and *those* people will certainly have nothing to do with this use of the word God you've just made - they would probably prefer the aetheists, who at least don't force them to think.

To repeat myself again: one way to see how far you've drifted from any commonplace god is to see that there is nothing "good" about the god you've defined -W]

Anyway, the key point is this. I find it very very very very astonishing that anything exists at all, or more specifically, that anything exists to perceive that something exists. I choose to approach this astonishing fact with astonishment rather than indifference. I find that this helps me cope. I find that this same astonishment maps well onto traditional religious thought. Therefore I do not trivialize religion.

At no point in my analysis did I abandon reason. I simply began with Descartes' subjective observation, the "cogito ergo sum". The fact that I (you) have an experience of the world is the crux of the matter, not a messy detail. Without that, indeed there would be no need of metaphysics to explain anything. But without that, there would be no need of explanations, there being nobody to explain anything to.

[Cogito ergo sum is a wonderful start point, but "doubty" Descartes didn't get much meaningful from it - certainly the far-flung conclusions he drew are not viewed as valid -W]

The reason for all these somewhat lengthy convolutions is this. As a scientist I am required to defer to reason. Any claim to religion leads many scientists to believe one has abandoned reason. My effort is to sketch out the reasoning and evidence that I find not merely plausible but indeed compelling, that religion is vastly more than a relic of a misguided past.

That reasoning begins with treating one's own metaphysical existence as among evidence suitable for reasoning. This is not fair game for science, and should not be, but to fail to consider it as a matter suitable for reasoned introspection strikes me as a tragic loss, presuming of course that you actually are a conscious entity!

Everybody should read Jonathan Haidt's "Happiness hypothesis", http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0465028020 to get some perspective on ethics and religion. Both mt and wmc could find it interesting and acceptable.

Then there is the hard problem of consciousness, or qualia. It has not been solved, but some people like to downplay it and some like to emphasize it. This irritates both sides. The problem of consciousness has little to do with religion, a priori. The qualia problem does not mean consciousness is "supernatural", but this claim has little meaning, except as a way to cool down needless debate.

Science has many limits, some of them philosophical, some practical. They include Gödel-like theorems, the distinction between observer and observed, requirement of objectivity, and more mundane things like problems of making controlled experiments, and problems with resources. Of the big questions like qualia and interpretations of QM and the like, there may be some huge gaps in our understanding where science can contribute, or then not. We just don't know.

IMHO, Christianity as expressed currently in the west is a bad example of "spirituality", or even religion. Buddhism as expressed in the west is much better. Religion can mean many things: metaphysical beliefs, falsifiable beliefs, rituals and habits, ethics, mental technologies, organizations, canonical scriptures, culture, tradition. All this need not to be either accepted or abandoned. One can be selective and sort out the good bits from the bad bits.

Here's my pragmatic take. It's very important for children to be taught science, including biology. Evolution is central to biology. Atheism is orthogonal to understanding evolution. It is harmful to the goal of education for atheism and evolution to be confused. So - for this simple pragmatic reason - I would be happier if the leading popularizer of evolution was not also an atheist ranter. Stephen Jay Gould was a great loss.

Everyone should read ... Peter Watts's _Blindsight_.
Free online: http://www.rifters.com/

Hah! Corollary to Hank's recommendation: everyone who isn't Canadian should just shut up and let us run things. :-)

Seriously, for practical purposes Nick made my point rather well and much more succinctly.

[No, I don't think this will do - well not unless you are radically revising your original position and deleting large portions of it. Nick's point - which I'm happy with - is about how we teach science; or from your viewpoint, its about communicating science. This is rather different to the other point that you've mixed up with this - the true explanation of conciousness, which you believe must have a "spiritual" dimension; and the validity of religion(s) -W]

MT writes:
I consider this quite "miraculous" in the sense that it is impossible for me to imagine a satisfactory argument from empirically derived principles to explain it.
What possible test could there be?
So again, imagine that you had a theory of consciousness. What would it look like?
I choose to approach this astonishing fact with astonishment rather than indifference. I find that this helps me cope. I find that this same astonishment maps well onto traditional religious thought. Therefore I do not trivialize religion.

Is it really astonishing/miraculous fully to the point of being impossible to imagine anyone could provide a satisfactory argument or is it merely that you choose to imagine it to be impossible (because you find your views help you cope)? If someone could provide argument satisfactory to themselves, would you want to hear it or would that turn your life upside down? Would you just find flaws whether such flaws existed or not?

MT, if by "Nick" you mean me, I'm honoured. I don't agree with much of your point of view(*), but I think there's a simple argument to be made for keeping strident beliefs of many kinds, including atheism, out of science.

(*) In particular, I see no reason to suppose I am not a Chinese Room, and I think it very likely that science and materialistic philosophy will develop more-or-less complete explanations and descriptions of consciousness and other complex aspects of human experience during my lifetime. These beliefs of mine do not interfere with my religion, with my experience of the numinous, or with my faith in science.

crandles, it's a pretty huge hypothetical.

I can barely imagine a plausibility argument, but I really can't imagine anything I'd take for a proof. Which I suppose you can take to support your point.

William, Nick's practical point about Dawkins is what motivated me to wheel out my strange theoretical viewpoint. I typically get punished enough for it and on the whole would rather keep it to myself. I'd proselytize it if I knew how, since it's really very useful, but I never seem to get anywhere with explaining it.

I find in general that when you prod people who think for themselves they often have surprisingly idiosyncratic and strange views about how the universe is really put together, actually. But mine is better. :-)

I will be happy to discuss this over beer if the opportunity arises, but I don't enjoy doing it online, partly because I
have bigger fish to fry, I think, and partly because the whole conversation requires plenty of handwaving from my opposition, and it's just more fun to see the arms flailing about in real life.

If I had had my act together, I'd have just written what Nick wrote in no. 9 and left it at that.

[OK, that I can cope with -W]

"Everyone should read ... Peter Watts's _Blindsight_.
Free online: http://www.rifters.com/"

Why? It looks like unreadable drivel. Is there a version for normal people?

BEGIN thought experiment:

If it is assumed that the soul comes from some godly dimension(s), it must interact with matter in the brain anyway since our actions are guided by measurable brain signals that are in the physical world. Such places should be findable with pretty straightforward research.

If there's just input-output action with no extra soul input to be observed at any point, then...

On the other hand, if there is a soul in some astral dimension, that for example gives some small voltages to the brain that can not be from any physical source, then is an object of research. What molecules does it affect in the brain? Can we synthetize those? Can we research the structure of a soul? Or properties of the spiritual dimension(s)?

What has changed since Descartes? Why is nobody even trying research in this regard?

END thought experiment

I really feel like I'm not understanding something specific - I don't understand why it would be somehow horrible to realize we are creatures of ordinary matter. That doesn't change your feelings one bit. I guess I don't understand people who say animals don't have any feelings either.

Well, 'everybody' echoed previous comment, but the attempted irony didn't survive the ASCII. It's a biologist's take on whether we could tell if we were or weren't conscious, or if something else is.

If you don't like science fiction, definitely don't try Watts; if you might, the pro and con columns here may help. If you do download and try reading, I'd suggest starting at the back, with the footnotes.
http://www.rifters.com/real/blurbs_blindsight.htm

Or, heck, read some of the studies cited here: http://www.rifters.com/real/2008/10/understanding-sarah-palin-or-god-is…

The biologists' take on the consciousness question is just messier than the physicists' take, I think. But more fun.

I know I'm late to the party, but this line kinda stuck out for me:

In the end, if you are so foolish as to offer people a choice between love and reason, you shouldn't be astonished if they choose love.

That's just awful. It's exactly the kind of language that sounds compelling and convincing until you happen to use a little reason. That's when you notice that love isn't option A, religion is. You don't need religion to have love and you don't need to jettison love to have reason. In my opinion, this type of argument becomes self-defeating because it shows just how superior one way of thinking is to the other.

In my opinion, this type of argument becomes self-defeating because it shows just how superior one way of thinking is to the other.

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