Thanks for telling me your thoughts, I really appreciate your time.

Peace,
Dan

I don’t say this to mean there is no truth. I am only acknowledging the failures of the human mind to see it, be we atheists, Christians, scientists, or whatever. I do believe there is a Truth to events that have transpired. But our ability to understand is small.

Thanks for the explanation.

“…discovering facts and perhaps truth.” What do you see as truth, then, if it’s not exactly the same as facts?

I don’t believe in the supernatural. I do believe that the human tendency toward supernatural beliefs is an innate coping mechanism.

I believe humans have the potential and capability to solve the world’s major problems. Over the last few hundred years we have solved an unthinkable amount of them. We have also created many of them. But in time and through our fumbling we will continue to solve them.

I believe that life is short and ends at death. Therefore I believe it is precious and sacred. Of course, the word “sacred” will raise your eye brows. It has its own meaning to me. I hold things sacred if they are most valuable to me, most precious, involve life, are fragile and could be lost from me or someone else: namely, family and life.

I believe the scientific method is the most accurate method known to humankind so far for discovering facts and perhaps truth.

I believe humans want to be happy. I believe it is good to contribute to our own happiness and that of others. I believe it is bad to purposely hurt others unnecessarily.

While I commit the human folly of thinking I “know” things that I really don’t, I try to acknowledge that my understanding is provisional and that new understanding could show me to be wrong. This is why I call myself agnostic although my beliefs are one hundred percent atheistic.

Mainly, what I call my “beliefs” are the way I view the world and understand it to be.

The phrase “differing beliefs” interests me. Do you see yourself as someone who has beliefs? My impression was that you wanted to gain knowledge only through science, and as such wouldn’t want to have beliefs. Please explain if you like, or if you have time.

Peace,
Dan

Thanks, Dan, I wish the best for you and your family as well. Thanks for your interest and considerate comments/questions despite our differing beliefs.

You’re an excellent writer, and that takes time and mental energy. I think we both agree that family should come first. At present, my interests are changing, so I might not be around or comment in the future.

In case I don’t “see” you again, may things go well with you and your family.

Dan

For various reasons, I have not have as much blogging time as I used to. That may or may not change with my children’s new schedule. Either way, I do plan to respond in one of the next posts. Sorry I didn’t explain that earlier! Thanks for being patient.

Shall we consider the conversation ended? Did you want to respond to my questions/comments on # 12? Are you waiting for me to write more?

Peace,
Dan

“I’ve found you can find happiness in slavery.” – Trent Rezner

And, did you see the recent paper by the research group in England who found a picture of eyes tends to make people more honest? Discussion in the Dallas Morning News religion section today: “Sight Unseen: Are we wired to serve God?” here: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/religion/stories/DN-eyeswatching_05rel.ART0.State.Edition1.2be46c0.html

Good and evil relative to the individual is the simple view that only works if the individual lives in isolation. Societies play the much bigger role in defining our good and evil from the smallest societal bonds of family to larger bonds of countries and humanity as a whole. Our good and evil depend greatly on situations and a consensus view of right and wrong.

Morality is indeed relative in my opinion. Your infliction of pain example is another case of this. There are people, as few as they may be, that derive happiness from physical pain. As twisted and weird as most of us think this is you can’t even use freedom from pain as an absolute “good”.

I also can’t use the blanket statement that we have no right to deny a person their happiness and freedom because some people’s happiness and freedom can be harmful to society. We willingly deny criminals their freedom and happiness in the best interest of society. So what is good for most can never end up being good for all. This is another reason why I believe society plays the bigger role in defining morality than the individual’s singular view of right and wrong.

Thank you for the post. You make a lot of interesting points; I don’t know how far I’ll get, but starting from the beginning:

(from Pinker) “Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs.” (pg. 142) There is variation among physical organs, I suspect the same would be true of any mental organs.

(Pinker) “…all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common.” Why is this an assumption? If there is evidence for it, I would think it would be a conclusion.

(Pinker) “No one likes being enslaved.” No, but examples from history seem to indicate to me that some people certainly enjoy enslaving others.

I believe that, yes, everything about the human experience is material. Everything MUST be material, because that’s just the way the universe works: everything has a law or equation, and things interact with each other according to those laws or equations. There’s no room for anything “supernatural”, because then life would be chaotic and unpredictable to some degree–which, ultimately, regardless of our own scientific abilities, I don’t see to be the case. There is an order to everything, and this order is indicative (in my opinion) of a closed system of a material nature; nothing more than that.

Your comment about spirituality being located in the brain goes to my point. If spirituality WEREN’T in the brain, and really was this supernatural element that we could never really study or know… then there wouldn’t be much point to it. Because it would be a vague, intuitive, supernatural sense operating in a natural universe; it would be a foreign object, in a sense, and things would just be confusing.

But I don’t believe spiritual experiences happen supernaturally. I believe they must occur naturally, in a material way–even if we’ll never entirely understand the physical properties of it in the brain.

My ultimate stance is that, just because the source of spirituality/emotions/morality/anything else people like to say separates us from the animals isn’t attributed to anything supernatural… that doesn’t mean it doesn’t say something really important about nature itself. And just because those elements of our existence are no longer other-worldly, doesn’t mean they’re not extremely special and poignant for us. And while, according to the materialist view, they don’t separate us from nature or the material world in any way… they do indicate that we are inextricably connected with the material world and that we are a part of nature itself; we are animals, nothing more.

But by coming to this conclusion, I’ve found that I’ve had to go back and change some basic assumptions. It seems to me that in Western thought, people either consciously or subconsciously believe that they are “detached” from Nature… that they are somehow above animals. Thus we have “manmade” objects, and “natural” objects. A house is manmade, a nest is natural; a powerplant is manmade, a beaver dam is natural. On a similar note, I’ve heard it said that “Beauty doesn’t actually exist in nature; humans create it,” or “There is no real purpose or meaning in the universe; humans create that for themselves.”

But I don’t think statements like that really hold up under the reality that we ARE nature… that there’s nothing separating us from the physical world around us. Everything about us is a result and product of certain natural, physical processes in the material world–including our spirituality, emotions, and other such qualities.

When I really thought about that, it forced me to change some past assumptions. It forced me to realize that, while there may not be a “supernature”, there is indeed a nature that is inevitably special in terms of our own sense of beauty and purpose. To put it in a new-agey sense, we ourselves are, in a way, the manifestation of nature’s ongoing, unfolding process of interconnected growth, expansion, whatever you want to call it.

I really wish I could make some acknowledgements here, but I’m running out of time. If I had more time, I would recognize that I’m certainly just poeticizing/romanticizing nature… that perhaps there’s a logical fallacy occuring in my mind here… that I’m basically turning nature into supernature, or something like that… but I actually really have to go… sorry!

Adam

I do not think agnosticism, or even atheism, excludes the possibility of a “consciousness.” But I think materialism does.

I did not derive my materialist standpoint out of a rejection of the western god, nor because of a “bad taste” in my mouth and negative associations to the religious. For me it was a step-by-step process as I examined all the possibilities when I left my religion.

I will address this issue in a separate post, since two other people have requested one on this topic. But to give you a general idea, as I began to learn about neurology and cognition I realized there were biological answers to so many experiences we typically attribute to the supernatural.

Did you know that we can simulate a spiritual, other-worldly type of experience by stimulating an area of the brain? The more a person is prone to spiritual experiences, the more intense the experience they have in these neurological studies.

As the number of biological explanations that came to my awareness increased, I no longer saw a need for supernatural explanations.

I have made the choice to reduce all things to natural and biological experience. I see no reason to trust any other sorts of ideas that I can’t verify.

On the other hand, one of the many reasons I call myself agnostic is because in the tradition of science, it is dangerous to close your mind one-hundred percent to the possibility of being wrong.

If I can comment on your own comment, you communicate with intelligence, and yet I am confused on your ultimate stance. Sometimes you sound like a materialist, sometimes you do not. You seemed at times to reject all things supernatural, yet talked about a “consciousness” that underlies all reality, which seems minimally supernatural to me.

I guess you are in-between? You don’t see this consciousness as being “supernatural” with powers, yet it is something that connects us all within? Within us? or Without us? But not material, right?

And that blank stare. . .yes, I have induced a blank stare from someone recently myself. It is sure askward. I guess we’re a bit of a bizarre group here. Not just because of our take on religion, but because we’re so extremely analytical!

I am sure I have my share of readers that read the post like this one and think, “Who the heck cares?”

I just wanted to clarify that I while I used Steven Pinker almost exclusively as my source, I did not base my overall opinion of this matter on Steven Pinker. I want to give credit where credit is due, (while at the same time bolster my position as not one to rely too heavily on one person!).

My husband was the first, a number of years ago, to bring me the idea of moral and ethical codes having evolved in the psyche. I don\’t know if he came up with the theory himself, or if he got the idea from all the documentaries we used to watch.

Those science documentaries propelled me to the materialist direction and gave me my interest in evolution and the directions to which it extends. It was really Robert Wright who introduced the entire concept of Evolutionary Psychology. He is a scientific journalist and his book, The Moral Animal, is a great introduction where he cites the many, many theories that abound in the field.

It was really from him that I cemented my thoughts on an evolved moral sense. It wasn\’t until the last month or two, when I started reading Pinker\’s book, The Blank Slate, that I realized Pinker was a proponent of Evolutionary Psychology and held the same opinion as me about a moral sense. I had had a lot of exposure to him through recorded speeches we got off the internet, or articles. I hadn\’t quite put it all together, that Pinker was in line with my thoughts, until our recent debate on the subject of morality. I started reading his book at that time (June?).

Because I love the way Pinker communicates, there were so many passages of his that I just wanted to use. I actually wrote the above blog entry a month or so ago, but because I had used Pinker as my only source, I never posted it. I didn\’t want to give the false impression that my theory relied on him (exactly the impression you got, Gregg100).

In the end, I have not had time to go back through other sources to get some diversity so I posted it as is. I have to be realistic about the fact that I am a full-time mother, not a full-time science blogger. (Maybe that day will come?).

I might be mistaken, but I don’t think you responded to the first implication on Dan’s list; or rather, you said you didn’t agree with it but didn’t explain why. But this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and I think it’s pretty interesting.

I think that throughout the overarching debate of materialism vs. supernaturalism (am I using the right terms? hopefully you know what I’m referring to), things can get muddled… especially if, like most people, you start out on the supernaturalism side and end up on the materialism side.

When at first we believe in the “supernatural” world, it is inevitable that we view that plain of reality in specific terms as determined by our particular religious upbringing. For example, Fundamentalist Christians have a basic view of the supernatural as being an entity named God who is quite comparable to a large white man in the sky holding a ruler to hit us with when we screw up. But in general, what I would presume to be the most common “supernatural” view of God would be, by definition, “a higher consciousness that sits ‘up there’ (above nature)… something external that created everything and governs everything, either directly or indirectly.”

However, I think that after we go through the gradual process of switching from supernaturalism to materialism, we often don’t do it quite right. Allow me to use an analogy I just came up with:

If we were to move from one country to another and just brought all our money from our homeland… that money would be worthless. We’d go the various stores and shops and that money would simply not be useful whatsoever; no one would accept it. Indeed, it wouldn’t make sense to even hold onto it! But would it really be the best choice to just throw that money away or burn it? Of course not; it would be much wiser to find some kind of international conversion/exchange station where you can exchange your money for the currency of the new country. That way you’re not stuck with any worthless pieces of paper, and you actually have something you can use in your new homeland!

I think the same thing happens in the shift from supernaturalism to materialism. At first we have this philosophical currency that tells us certain things: there is an external Power, and things like love and compassion and morality can be attributed to that Power.” And when we change our worldview to materialism and take a look at these old beliefs, we think they sound ridiculous! So I think oftentimes we just throw them away, thinking they’re worthless. But I’d say that it’s much more beneficial if we exchange them for something of equal value that makes sense in this new philosophy.

So what am I saying we exchange them for? Well, I see it this way: just because we’ve stopped believing in the supernatural realm, doesn’t mean we’ve stopped believing in love, compassion, morality, etc. In the old country, they went in hand–these attributes were directly connected to the fact that there existed a “higher plain.” But after getting rid of the supernatural, we’re still left with these concepts, these vague essences of humanity that are now just floating around without cause or purpose. I think the evolutionary theory discussed in this post is an interesting approach, and I’d like to learn more about it. But for now I can only think about all this in more general terms: I think that if we can’t attribute these human qualities to “supernature”, and if “nature is all there is”, then we must inevitably attribute them to nature itself.

I think I have to cover something else before fully arriving at my now-obvious conclusion. It’s important that we don’t cling to any of our old currency, so to speak. In the old country, and during the trip over to the new country, there was a certain stigma attached to the idea of a “God” or “Deity”… a stigma created by the point of view of people in that old country, so to speak. “God” was virtually a corporeal being, a concrete essence that existed somewhere outside of reality and “thought things out”, planned, intervened, judged and punished. He was basically just another human being in the role of a sort of judge. So this has left many people with a bad taste in their mouths whenever they think of a “God” or “Deity”–they automatically assume that such words refer to a very particular, modern, Westernized, fundamentalist, evangelical, Protestant sort of God.

So when I say that, due to the fact that the qualities of love and compassion and morality are now attributed to nature itself… when I say that, due to that fact, nature is “deified”… I do not mean to say that nature is now that concrete being that judges and controls and is worthy of my “worship.” We can’t understand such a statement in old country, supernatural terms. We have to redefine what a “deity” even IS in the materialistic sense. It’s no longer an external, supernatural being obviously… but I think the fact that humanity is so poetic and lyrical and mystified when it comes to certain qualities of their existence.. really demands logically that we seek to understand the context of those qualities that makes us feel so deeply affected by them. And I think that context has something to do with Dan’s first implication: the idea of the material universe indeed having a kind of “consciousness,” a kind of underlying reality to it that is actually extremely meaningful, if only in an internal, insulated, non-supernatural sense.

Basically, in my view, there is no longer a Meaningful Supernature and a Meaningless Nature… rather, there is one, Meaningful Nature. There are further implications to all this, especially when you think about it in terms of Determinism and a lack of true free will… but I think this is where I’m going to stop. I don’t have much else to say, because this is the point where people have to bring their own thoughts to the table and let me know if I’ve made a huge error in my thought processes (which, I’ll readily admit, is extremely possible).

I had an interesting conversation with a trainer for the Leave No Trace program in camping last month when I was out with the Scouts in Tennessee. He spent a fair amount of time talking about “outdoor ethics,” and it suddenly occurred to me that this was a set of ethics most religionists don’t like to discuss. I asked the guy afterward what is the philosophical basis for outdoor ethics, and he gave me the blankest look I’ve had from anybody in a long time. It’s common sense. It’s courtesy. It’s the desire to pass things along to one’s own children.

Those roots are separate from most religion, and often antithetical to what the religions tell us (think: Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own child? Was he NUTS?). No wonder the religionists don’t like to discuss that stuff: They can’t claim it all came from God.

Evolution progressed from collections of chemicals that barely fit the definition of “alive” to single cell organisms to multicell organism that have the luxury of dedicating specialized cells to the processes of sensing, processing and controlling the other cells in the organism. These specialized cells make up the nervous system of the organism. The behavior of the organism, in fact every multicell organism, is entirely controlled by the nervous system whether we are talking about a fruit fly or a person.

The genome of multicell organisms contains genes that control the design and construction of the nervous system. The genomes are relatively consistent from generation to generation but there are variations and the variations sometimes have an effect on the way the nervous systems develop and these variations result in variations in behavior of the organism. A simple and well know example would be the case of mice that are born with the tendency to be reclusive or adventuresome. This is a heritable trait that has nothing to do with nurturing. A whole colony of reclusive or adventuresome mice can be developed by selective breeding. Each trait may have an evolutionary advantage. During times of plenty, the reclusive mouse may have the advantage of not being exposed to predators as often as the adventuresome while during times of scarcity the adventurous mouse may have the advantage of finding more food sources. Clearly a mixed population of both types of behavior would be an advantage for the species as a whole. In the total mice population there is a broad range of degrees of reclusive and adventurous behavior sufficient to approximate the Normal Curve or a bell shaped distribution.

While these behavior characteristics, referred to as phenotypes, are heritable there are clearly others that are learned as the organism experiences the environment and these cannot be passed on via genetics to subsequent generations but they can be transferred among members of a single generation.
My point of this is that evolution has resulted in humans that have extremely complex nervous systems and that human behavior is entirely controlled by a nervous system that implements many phenotyes that have been derived from both genetic codes and exposure to environments just as any other multicell organism. In fact, some of the behavior controlling genes in humans are in the same position in the genome as those for even the simplest of organism.

How does all this relate to values and ethics? Let me demonstrate by creating a hypothetical mouse population in which 95% of the population is reclusive and 5% is adventuresome. Somehow the mice know that a time of scarcity is just around the corner. The mice have an opportunity to make “ethical” or “wise” decisions. In this case, “ethical” or “wise” is defined to mean “good for long term survival of the colony”. The “wise” thing to do would be to mate with the adventuresome 5% of the population and try to create a mixed population with a bias toward adventuresome mice. I would call this a “flourishing of the wisest” strategy.

Relating to humans is, of course, far more complex problem but the fundamental concept is there. Is it moral or ethical to engage in practices that contribute to global warming when the species is at risk? Is it moral or ethical to perform genetic engineering of new species of flora and fauna that may benefit or harm our species? Etc, etc.

Let’s continue a little further and recognize the other half of the equation of behavior, i.e., learning. Suppose our mouse colony becomes well populated with adventuresome mice and they are able to locate adequate food sources and the reclusive mice are able to learn the locations of those sources of food and thus survive also. At the same time the reclusive mice have learned the best hiding places to be alone and safe and the adventuresome mice learn these locations too and thus avoid some predators. What has happened here? All members of the population have contributed to the benefit of the population. In doing so, some form of communication took place.

I believe it is educational to extend the analogy to a population of humans. Suppose the human population were to throw away the intelligence of half the population. This is approximated in any culture where the women are reduced to a level equivalent to property to be mentally and physically abused and denied any opportunity to contribute intellectually. Modern life is complex to say the least and every advantage must be taken of every source of wisdom. It is therefore conceivable that a secular value system reveres every source of wisdom or that which expands knowledge. The ethic of education and interpersonal and species-wide communication are logical extensions.

These analogies and extensions to the human species can continue in many directions but I hope the idea is conveyed. The extension to concepts of “meaning of life” or “value of life” clearly invoke the concepts of self development to the limits of ones capabilities so that one can take responsibility for one’s own survival which necessitates liberty to benefit from the fruits of one’s own labor and a sense of happiness that is derived from a feeling of high self esteem for having contributed to the long term benefit of the species.