The excellent Gene Expression blog has a pointer to a Plos Article on the effects of meditation on the brain: after three months practising , people got better at noticing things which in normal life we can’t (very crude summary). This kind of thing raises the prospect that we can lift out “technologies” like meditation from their encrusting superstition and practice them in a wholly atheistic way. Something like that is certainly what seems to be going on with AA. The only two alcoholics I know well who attend it (both, coincidentally, religious affairs journalists) are neither of them exactly believers. But they would be lost without the ability to behave as if they had a personal providence.
Some AA groups are deeply and explicitly religious, and some less so; clearly, the particular form of doctrine doesn’t matter very much. But the social format matters a great deal. You can’t get the desired effect (sobriety) without some combination of belief and practice. Which comes first? I don’t think the question is answerable and I suppose that both must modify each other in practice.
But suppose that it is found that we can’t, so to say, purify the techniques of religion so that they function outside of particular social environments. This suggests that there is some knowledge about the world embedded in them which must remain forever implicit and hidden from us. We can’t know completely why they have the effects on us that they do. They interact with some features of the world which we can’t understand in any other way.
In that case, it seems to me that one must be doubly agnostic: one, in the obvious sense that we can’t know whether these features of the world revealed by eg meditation are those which some descriptions of God are also attempting to describe. Second, we must also be agnostic about whether this situation will ever change. It’s one thing to have a kind of metaphysical research programme that it committed to the idea that all mysteries must eventually yield to the approach of natural science. There are certainly a huge number of mysteries that will. But it’s quite another to assert that we can know that there are none which won’t. I don’t think we should assert that or assume it. This position is related to Colin McGinn’s “mysterianism” about consciousness, of course.
“The excellent Gene Expression blog”?
“Fixed”:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/ — I had put i the quotes which are part of textile, but never got round to adding the link, which wasn’t in front of me.
Long comment. Apologies. My friend Tom just posted your link on our mail list and it struck a chord with some of my recent downtime thinking.
Just to be clear from the off – I am an athiest myself, but not one who rabidly bites the heads off all believers / agnostics 🙂
I’ve been thinking about the role that religion plays for us as a race – and by that I mean all religions, both historical and extant. What you’re describing certainly fits in to the discussion. It’s one that I’m still articulating and I suspect is merely identifying key themes that Philosophy has been grappling with for centuries, and “Deep thought”-like, will never actually be able to answer.
My position at present is forming around the idea that various aspects of religion are formed as a result of the articulation by humans over time of the incomprehensible nature of key eventsthat one takes part in in conscious life. Recently, my Father died, which kick started this thinking, but equally, the birth and early life of children I think can also fit in to this category of events that are cataclysmic life changes. These kind of events are indescribable, and inarticulable for any individual, endowed with literary ability or no. But these are universal events, which we collectively, must come to terms with. I used to think that religions took advantage of people weak with trying to make sense of these events by giving them simple answers. What I think now is that the aspects of religions that deal with death and the beginning of life are in fact borne initially out of a collective desire to find an answer. The answers evolving from te very beginnings of human interaction, and ultimately legitimised (and set in aspic) as part of what becomes the official religion. The orthodoxy. The reason they are so convincing are not as I previously thought, because they play with our deepest fears and desires but because they are in themselves a reflection of those fears. They articulate them, and answer them, and the most convincing religions are vones which seem to have evolved those answers over many thousands of years, almost as if the answers were slowly sculpted by the very people who were asking the questions.
To extrapolate those thoughts away from cataclysmic events and into the more mundane realm of simply “how to live your life” then again, can it not be said that religions are a guidebook, which have evolved in various societies over time, again, sculpted over time – gentle shifts in tone and meaning over time until they are set in aspic (at which point to my mind a whole lot of negativity enters the picture). If they are in some sense mirroring our desires and needs, the answers to those needs (eg: meditation) were never articulated, so much as gently sculpted. So the God angle is not there; what is there is the collective desire and wisdom of a people, distilled in to a format whose origins are relatively unknowable (hence a sense of ‘ooh, blimey’ about them!).
As I say, I’m only really beginning to focus these thinkings and I’m sure they must be reflected far more articulately elsewhere but do you see what I mean? In the context you’re describing, by attributing the unknowable element to the possibility that features of the world and religious “technologies” do contain something of God, you’re ignoring the possibility that for all the faults of an individual generation, it could be that human beings have in fact provided these guidebooks and this spirituality, even if they’ve invented a deity to make sense of the stuff they’ve forgotten that they themselves created! Er. Kind of.
I have to go back and re-read my Philosophy degree texts now. Damn!
I didn’t notice the url was missing. What I meant was, I wouldn’t call them excellent. I’d call them a pack of vile, loony racists.
David – “Them”? Follow the link: you may be thinking of somewhere different.
Cait: welcome! And thanks for a long and thoughtful post.
I would only say that I don’t think I am ignoring the possibility that these are purely facts about human experience. I just don’t think it’s the only possibility, nor do I see how one could, in principle distinguish between that and the possibility that these are also facts about some features of the world independent of humans. That’s what I meant about being agnostic. It’s not just that I can’t decide between the two choices. I can’t see how one could in principle make that decision.
Any permanent facts about the world will also appear to us — if they appear at all — as facts of other people’s experience. There is an excellent quote to this effect that I must run down later. I may even have put it up here a few years ago.
But death, for instance, is undoubtedly a fact about the world, yet one on which all our thoughts — all our possible thoughts are dependent on the fact that it has happened to other people. There is an important sense in which the only deaths we can know are other people’s. That makes it a social fact as well as an objective one.
Confusingly, there’s two versions of GNXP nowadays. Maybe Razib keeps the racism out of the scienceblogs blog. He was always far subtler than his co-bloggers though. He most certainly is a scientific racists though. IQ, bell curves, etc, etc. Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.
I’m reminded of the early experiments – very promising, but of course abandoned – with the use of LSD in therapeutic environments to help alcoholics. Psychedelics can most certainly produce profound psychic experiences laden with spirituality that are outwith religion (although more often tinged with the subject’s existing religious beliefs), and ones that continue to affect perception long after the intoxication’s gone. These can directly touch on the nature of life experiences which we do not control, especially aspects of the self, and in the best case create a new perspective which allows a much more productive and long-term relationship with mystery than fear or denial.
Alan Watt’s famous quote about acid being “mysticism with water wings” still applies (although I believe he later modified his stance, and perhaps he’s not the best person to illustrate this particular discussion!), but I remain convinced that here too are aspects of consciousness, perception and self-knowledge which still have contributions to make to our understanding of religion and its products, like God.
This kind of thing raises the prospect that we can lift out “technologies” like meditation from their encrusting superstition and practice them in a wholly atheistic way. Um. Well, yes. People have been doing just that for a very long time. I’m not sure why you then immediately plop the meditational technology into the context of AA where (if indeed they do meditate) they do so within an extremely clear framework of other activities.
But suppose that it is found that we can’t, so to say, purify the techniques of religion so that they function outside of particular social environments. Do you mean social environments such as AA which you seem to define as a quasi-religious organisation? “Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)”:http://www.mbct.co.uk/ are demonstrably powerful ways of treating depression using meditation techniques.