Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World

By Eric Dietrich

Flipping convention on its head, Eric Dietrich argues that science uncovers awe-inspiring, enduring mysteries, while religion, regarded as the source for such mysteries, is a biological phenomenon. Just like spoken language, Dietrich shows that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. Science is the source of perplexing yet beautiful mysteries, however natural the search for answers may be to human existence.

Excellent Beauty undoes our misconception of scientific inquiry as an executioner of beauty, making the case that science has won the battle with religion so thoroughly it can now explain why religion persists. The book also draws deep lessons for human flourishing from the very existence of scientific mysteries. It is these latter wonderful, completely public truths that constitute some strangeness in the proportion and reveal a universe worthy of awe and wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231539357

Book preview

ONE

The Traveler to Excellent Beauty

Invited Rather Than Drafted

SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS OFTEN BEGIN unintentionally: the traveler is drafted. Abraham and Moses were minding their own business when they got called into service by Yahweh.¹ Same with Joseph and Mary (though, for her, the call was a bit more personal and intrusive). But the reader’s journey need not begin unintentionally. This chapter, I hope, will function as your invitation. It introduces the reader to the sorts of things the demise of religion clears the way for. I present the invitation as it came to me.

I have a scientist’s disposition. I am naturally drawn to science and fascinated by all of it. I’m educated in it, and I work in it often (but not exclusively). I find it beautiful and, more importantly, I find it truthful. But it is not exactly clear what truthful means. Usually correspondence with facts is considered crucial for truth. So finding science truthful means that I think there are facts—exhibited for all to see and for all to question. And yes, I do think this, as do many, perhaps most, people. But facts can be, as we will see, very strange things.

As a close friend of science, I thought that spiritual journeys didn’t really exist, because spirits didn’t exist. One might think that he or she was on some spiritual quest, but that belief was mistaken. No one had an inner spiritual nature; no one had an inner nature at all. One had inner organs, but no inner nature. One was one’s body. One’s mind was one’s working brain. And the world was everywhere flatly natural.

That all began to change rather rapidly as the millennium came to its end. Though frequently a practicing scientist and scientifically minded, I am a philosopher by training and, often, by trade. In the mid-1990s, something extraordinary happened: the size of the universe doubled. To explain this, I have to do a bit of philosophy, so please bear with me.

Most people believe that their minds are completely distinct from their brains. Your brain is an organ, but you are not just your organs; you are more than your working brain. This belief is widespread throughout the world, and has also been commonly held throughout history. It is a reasonable belief for reasons that, when looked at closely, become very complicated. We can, however, simplify things. The short version is that experiences—say, the experiences you have when eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream—don’t seem like brain processes. Experiences are painful, sad, joyful, mysterious, tart, sweet, red, blue, loud, and so on. But brain processes are none of these things. Brain processes are electrochemical charges racing along neurons. They are fast or slow, distributed widely or narrowly, and relayed and modulated by neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, many of whom didn’t even know the brain was the organ of thought (Hippocrates apparently being a notable exception), thinking and experiencing were considered to be something that a physical organ couldn’t do. So, you seem to be made up of (at least) two different kinds of things, or you comprise two different kinds of properties: experiential, mental properties, and physical, biological properties. This view is called dualism (dual for two). Probably the most famous statement of dualism in Western philosophy is Descartes’s (1596–1650), an important French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes argued that our bodies are machines, which obey the laws of physics (which he was quite unclear on, actually, since, during his life, not much physics was known), but our bodies, he thought, are animated by our minds, which are nonphysical—sort of like souls. So, for Descartes, the material body and the nonmaterial mind interact . . . somehow—the soul drives the machine and gets information about the world via the machine’s sensory apparatus.²

But since sometime in the early twentieth century, most philosophers and most brain scientists have concluded that one’s mind is one’s working brain—experiences are just brain processes. (As is usual, the philosophical arguments tended to follow the scientific ones, in the last century or so.) There is nothing to you, as a person, over and above your working brain. Your personality, understandings, ability to speak and read this book, your capacity to love, your addiction to chocolate, your fear of spiders, your love of Jesus or the Buddha, every bit of you . . . is just a property of your physical brain. This belief is called physicalism or materialism (I’ll use the former since materialism is often used to mean an excessive regard for material goods). Physicalism is a kind of monism: the mind and working brain are really just one thing.

Brain scientists and many philosophers believe physicalism for the standard scientific reason, which is that the preponderance of evidence points that way (two examples are discussed below), and because of a very serious problem with Cartesian dualism. One of the laws of physics (unknown to Descartes) is the First Law of Thermodynamics (also called the Law of the Conservation of Energy). It says that matter and energy (both physical things, this is important) cannot be created or destroyed, but only moved around and altered into different versions. Cartesian dualism appears to require both the creation of new energy and the destruction (or vanishing) of already-existing energy. To see this, assume dualism is true. When you decide to go get some more chocolate ice cream, your nonphysical mind causes your physical body to move toward the refrigerator. But how? Did your mind use some sort of nonphysical energy to cause your physical body to start moving? That’s impossible, according to the First Law. From a physical standpoint, your body was just sitting there. In order to push it toward your fridge, your nonphysical mind needed to interact with your physical motor neurons. This interaction couldn’t occur unless your nonphysical mind caused new energy to bleed into the universe. This is like starting your car by just thinking about starting it. Dualism requires energy to vanish out of the universe, too. If you stub your toe, it’ll hurt. Physical information (a form of energy) racing along your neurons informs your nonphysical mind of the stubbing and your nonphysical mind feels the pain (or you feel the pain). Where did that neural energy go? It vanished into the nonphysical realm of your mind. As I said, this was fine for Descartes, he knew nothing of thermodynamics. But we do. And such creation and vanishing of energy are not acceptable anymore, and more importantly, we have strong reasons to believe that such creation and vanishing cannot exist.

So, with evidence pulling philosophers and scientists toward physicalism, and the crackup of Cartesian dualism on the shoals of the First Law, physicalism became the preferred view of the mind.

Here are two simple examples of physicalism’s pull:

1. Brain trauma frequently results in cognitive or experiential loss. The simplest explanation of this is that brain processes are mental processes. In fact, you don’t need a blow to your head to see this. Every time you drink alcohol, take an aspirin, get a good (or bad) night’s sleep, and so on you establish further data for the identity of brain and mind: your experiences change for chemical (physical) reasons having to do with your brain.

2. Many thought processes are widely thought to be computational. Using this fact and facts about the behavior of neurons in brains, a theory has been developed of how thoughts and thinking are actually physically implemented in brains. Think of your favorite computer game (a role-playing game is a good example). The game is completely physical (because it is implemented and hence exists only on a physical machine), yet the game can be highly interactive, lifelike, and robust, transporting you to another reality. This mind as very complex computer theory is still in the working hypothesis stage (a stage that can last for decades), but at a minimum, it offers a compelling explanation of how thoughts, emotions, and even our selves could be physical: they are computational processes implemented complexly in brains.

Brain science, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology are young, so scientists studying the mind or the brain (the two require quite different techniques and tools) still do not understand a lot of what happens in the brain, in the neurons, or in the gaps (the synapses) between the neurons. And they do not yet completely understand how brain processes result in thought, in thinking. But every science went through a stage like this. So everyone is very optimistic that, perhaps this century, or maybe the next, we will have a full understanding—a theory—of how the working brain produces a conscious mind. (As we will see in chapter 10, this optimism is unwarranted, yet it shouldn’t be replaced by pessimism.)

So, physicalism is the received scientific and philosophical doctrine. This doctrine is held so strongly that to deny it is a kind of heresy—yes, there is such a thing as heresy even among completely nonreligious philosophers and scientists. At the turn of the millennium, and now in the twenty-first century, dualism is heresy.

As an aside, note that, doctrinally, no religion on planet Earth, not one, embraces physicalism. They cannot, since they are all in one way or another committed to spirits, souls, inner essences, gods and goddess communicating with humans, and so on. (We will return to this topic in chapter 2.) This is just one of the many places where science and religion clash. We will explore many others.

Then, in the mid-1990s, it began to look like physicalism couldn’t be the whole story. Certain aspects of one’s mind appeared to be not physical. Conscious experience itself was reevaluated and seemed to be somehow nonphysical or extraphysical. While deciding to eat some chocolate ice cream was still thought to be physical, experiencing the taste of the chocolate ice cream was reassigned as nonphysical. Dualism was back.

The philosopher at the center of this new dualism and the new controversy was David Chalmers. Why did Chalmers believe dualism was correct? He had a very interesting argument (the philosophical equivalent of a proof in mathematics; we will fully explore a version of this argument in chapter 10).³ The conclusion of Chalmers’s argument was that conscious experience—seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, feeling, emotions . . . all of it—was nonphysical. Yes, what eyes and the vision system in the brain do—process light and information—is physical. But the actual experience of seeing, say, your beloved dog or a glorious sunset or just this book is not physical (same with all the other senses). Did that mean Chalmers thought humans had souls? Far from it. But his argument did force him to commit the heresy: he came out for the view that consciousness is not a physical property of the brain.

With this new dualism, Chalmers doubled the size of the universe. The physicalists claimed that the universe contained only physical stuff (matter and energy and other stuff like dark matter and dark energy [also discussed further in chapter 10]) and physical properties (being heavy, being red, being faster than sound, and so on). Chalmers, however, concluded that the universe comprised not only the physical realm, but the phenomenological or experiential realm, too—the realm of experiencing seeing something red, experiencing running fast, hearing a dog bark, and so on. For every physical property, there was at least the potential for experiencing that property. So there is the physical realm and its associated experiential realm. And this experiential realm was every bit as real as the physical one. Hence, the size of the universe doubled.⁴

Dualism is still a heresy, but perhaps a tiny bit less so nowadays. This heresy had a strong effect on me. For, if dualism is true, then consciousness is beyond the reach of science. Science can only study what is physical because science has to measure things in order to be science, and measuring requires physicality (scientific measuring also requires being public, a property whose importance is impossible to overstate). So, if dualism is true, then there is more to conscious life in this universe than can be explained by science. This isn’t the standard basis for a spiritual journey, but it is quite sufficient, for it opens the door to mystery. And this mystery is real and available to everyone for free. Consciousness is absolutely central to human existence. If it is also essentially mysterious, that changes things . . . rather a lot, really.

PART ONE

Of Spiritual Journeys

TWO

What Is a Religion?

FIRST THINGS FIRST. So we can know what we’re talking about, we need a definition of the term religion, as well as the more general terms spiritual journey and spiritual traveler. The latter two are rather easy to define. I use the term spiritual traveler to include all religious people as well as those who define their spiritual journey more idiosyncratically or esoterically. And a spiritual journey is any seeking after a mystical or transcendent understanding of life.

Spiritual journeys vary widely. A trip to Stonehenge, to Lourdes, to Mecca, to Graceland, to Hollywood and Vine, to Cape Canaveral, to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, to the Burgess Shale in Canada, where unusual fossils from 505 million years ago are preserved better than anywhere else on Earth, could all count as spiritual journeys. They are spiritual primarily because of their destination. But a spiritual destination needn’t be part of a spiritual journey. An aboriginal walkabout is a spiritual quest with no real destination in mind. Disappearing into the wilderness for forty days also counts, as does taking a vow of chastity and being a parish priest for forty years. Or one can deliberately go nowhere, at least visibly, and simply sit under a Bodhi tree thinking and meditating (as did Siddhartha Gautama on his way to becoming the Supreme Buddha). The journey can begin abruptly when one sees the universe in a spider’s web. Or it can begin gradually, starting out as a vague longing or as a poorly understood spiritual crisis, as Saint Francis of Assisi’s did. The journey can end abruptly when, for example, enlightenment suddenly comes to the student of Zen, or it can slowly reach its apogee over decades, only to be discerned in the fullness of old age.

Now to define religion, which is less easy.

All the religions I will discuss have three properties. (I mean to include all the world’s religions, though I will not refer explicitly to each and every one of them; there are far too many for that.) Each is a social system of some sort; each endorses, and actually requires, something that is supernatural; and each has something to do with something holy or sacred.¹ The first of these is the easiest to define. By social, I simply mean that a bunch of people get together to practice/worship in/participate in their religion. Religions are communal, they foster community, and they can help communities thrive. As I use the term, there are no one-person religions (though, of course, each person probably has a personal interpretation of his or her religion). There are plenty of solitary practitioners of religions, but such people still derive their religion from the greater community of their religion, and the community often derives insights and religious depth from its solitary practitioners as well. The social aspect of religion also serves as a potent source for what many consider to be religion’s central contribution to human life: morality. We will return to this point in chapter 3 and in part 2.

The second property is less easy to define, but not impossible. The supernatural can be anything currently considered outside the realm of science (which is vast). Being outside the realm of science means either violating a known law of any of the sciences (say, violating the First Law of Thermodynamics from physics, which, as we saw in chapter 1, says that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed), or being completely unexplainable by any of the theories of science. None of these violations can be flukes; they have to be regarded as standard and repeatable by the members of the religion. The realm of the supernatural includes:

• the existence of all deities (all gods and goddesses are supernatural; for example, Zeus can turn into a swan or, apparently, any other animal; Yahweh existed before time, and some think he is even outside of time altogether);

• the existence of souls or spirits (many religions distinguish between these two) that are thought to make up the essence of a person or human being and that may survive death;

• surviving or coming back from (prolonged) death in any form;

• places like the Christian Heaven and Hell, the Norse Valhalla, and the Neopagan Summerland;

• personal processes like baptism, being absolved of sins, being possessed by a spirit of some sort;

• casting spells, casting out demons, riding brooms, communicating with dead ancestors, deities, trees, or animals (telling a dog to sit doesn’t count, of course; something much more complex is required, like a conversation with said dog about the meaning of life);

• . . . and so forth.

A complicating factor is that the members of a religion need not think of the supernatural aspects of their religion as supernatural. There were and are cultures where the religion and the culture are very closely related—almost indistinguishable. The Amish are a modern example, the Mayans an older one. In such cultures, ordinary daily activities (like eating) and ordinary daily things (like trees and animals) are themselves imbued with religious significance. In these cultures, there is no clean distinction between the natural and the supernatural.

As a good example: there are cultures where it is just obvious that there are inherently evil people who do evil things, and they can do these things using various potions, gestures, and other tools and devices. In English, we always translate the indigenous words for such people as witch.² Witches are often regarded as natural, and not supernatural at all. The same is true of shamans in certain cultures. They cure illnesses using various techniques and skills. Such cultures have a different view of what is natural: magic, for example, is natural.³ Of course science in these cultures is not very advanced. (This is not to deny that the people in such cultures know a lot of intricate details about their environments. For example, plant lore in such cultures is usually extensive and very useful.)

But from outside the culture, what is natural and what is supernatural are clearly distinguishable. Unless you violate what we know about diseases and human perception, you can’t make someone sick (say, making his liver fail) by looking at him a certain way or blowing a certain powder in his direction. So the issue is not whether people regard aspects of their religion as supernatural, but whether or not said aspects are in fact supernatural, whether they are objectively supernatural. For us, here, that means working in a way that is contrary to the way scientists think the world works, which we actually embody not only in our sciences, but also in our other quotidian knowledge. Of course, what we know changes; our sciences change, too. One day, we might in fact discover that we were wrong all along, and in fact you can make someone’s liver fail by looking at him in just the right way. And we might further discover that the right way is hard to learn—a natural gift for witchcraft is required before one can actually learn it (not unlike music or art). But until we do discover these things, evil witchcraft is supernatural—it violates what is known now about how diseases and perception work.

Note that were we to discover that looking at someone in a certain way, using the evil eye, could make his liver fail, we would very probably have a theory of the physical mechanism of such looking (or at least we’d definitely set out to find such a theory). With such a theory we’d know why looking at someone in that way caused his liver to fail. Furthermore, and this is the key, being able to answer the why question with a mechanism would allow us to successfully and repeatedly test our theory—indeed, we could make someone’s liver fail by looking at him in the right way (so, of course, this research would have military applications and hence get a lot of funding). Such mechanistic explanations are the bread and butter of science. So, if we discover that the evil eye can, if done right, make someone’s liver fail, that will show not that magic or witchcraft exists, but that the evil eye is a natural phenomenon, as scientists define the term natural. Our notion of what is natural will have to expand. Such expansions have happened many times in the history of science.

Consider an important contrast here: People who believe in (evil) witches, like the Lugbara in Uganda, also know why looking at people a certain way makes them sick. The explanation is obvious: the person doing the looking is a witch (see the Cognitive Science paper by Legare and Gelman). This is a very straightforward explanation. But it doesn’t actually explain anything. In particular, it fails tests of its truth: the spells are unrepeatable, uncontrollable, not publicly demonstrable, and so on; and without these, not only are the claims rationally regarded as false, the terms witch and magic lose any substantial meaning. . . . This is just another way of saying that witchcraft is supernatural (of course, those who embrace science will say, rather, that this means witchcraft doesn’t exist).

Are UFOs supernatural? Most UFO-ologists think that UFOs are spaceships from other planets and, hence, are at least somewhat natural. And though the aliens that pilot the ships have a grasp of science far exceeding ours, there is no logical or biological or psychological impediment to our one day achieving such an advanced grasp ourselves. Contrast