Is John Polkinghorne a Possibilian?

Here's an article that insists that the physicist/priest/writer is indeed uncertain on everything, including his religious beliefs.

I've enjoyed his work ever since I saw him at the Gustavus Adolphus College Nobel Conference in 1990.  He, along with Ilya Prigogine and Benoit Mandelbrot, gave talks to a crowd of science students, teachers, and ordinary folks like me interested in science.  His talk was on the relationship between science and religion.  That year's topic was chaos theory and fractals.  A fascinating weekend for me in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Here's a sample from the article:

But even people who don't normally think about these things have a hard time pinning down what they know for sure. Scratch just a little below the surface of most of us, and you'll find very few things on the list of what we really know. What do any of us know for certain? Not much.

Polkinghorne's level of comfort with uncertainty has its roots in reading the Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, who used the term "motivated belief," and who called into question the idea that scientists deal in objective facts.

"Complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal," Polanyi wrote in the 1950s. In other words, we're all coming from some kind of vantage point — always. Facts always come with interpretation. People of science are motivated to believe certain things as they proceed with their experiments, and people of faith are motivated to believe certain things as they proceed with their beliefs. Living with doubt leaves one open to additional discovery, both in science and faith.

Polkinghorne points to the example of what scientists once knew about light. For years, scientists proved that light was a series of particles. Later, scientists proved that it was waves. Then scientists proved that light acted like waves some of the time and particles some of the time. "If there is motivating evidence, you have to change your view of rationality," Polkinghorne said.

Possibilianism

David Eagleman invented the word Possibilianism in response to the certainties he had problems with in religious belief and atheism.

I take it he's very close to my take on agnosticism:  the philosophical agnostic has studied much in the way of science, religion and human limits, and has realized as a result that we humans will never be absolutely certain about anything.  We can be reasonably certain about a number of our beliefs, but never absolutely certain.

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in “Sum,” as bits of networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial organism, or any of a thousand other possibilities, and then test those ideas against the available evidence? “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

A garden-variety agnostic might have left it at that. But Eagleman, as usual, took things a step further. Two years ago, in an interview on a radio show, he declared himself the founder of a new movement. Possibilianism had a membership of one, he said, but he hoped to attract more. “I’m not saying here is the answer,” he told me. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” The announcement was only half serious, so Eagleman was shocked to find, when he came home from his lab later that night, that his e-mail in-box was filled, once again, with messages from listeners. “You know what?” most of them said. “I’m a Possibilian, too!” The movement has since drawn press from as far away as India and Uganda. At last count, close to a thousand Facebook members had switched their religious affiliation to Possibilianism.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger#ixzz1WuNhGIYd

We Created the Gods

I think this is true.  But it didn't happen deliberately...a bunch of atheists sitting around a campfire, making up a god.  I think it happened gradually, in an evolutionary manner, over the centuries and millennia.  Very much as described in the essay.  What do you think?

Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.
Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.
In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.
Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.

Do We Live in a Secular Age?

And what does a secular age mean?

Charles Taylor addresses the question in his monumental work, A Secular Age. Here is an outtake, taken from a New York Times book review:

Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?

In “A Secular Age,” Taylor answers with a resounding no. He argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”

Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.

Perhaps his question about doubt summarizes our true secular age much better than the works of science, technology, and philosophical agnostics (such as me) and atheists (such as Dawkins).

The idea of doubt about our past and our nature is a powerful one. His point about secularity driving much deeper than political issues on the separation of church and state is another. We haven't merely become less religious, or more scientific, we've also become profoundly uncertain.

Science supports us in our uncertainty as it describes the fundamental fuzziness of the quantum universe and the fundamental chaotic nature of apparently orderly systems, such as river systems, weather fronts, and trees. Knowing that we know is no longer a possibility. But knowing we can learn and change me prove to be a more than fair exchange for us.

If philosophers are right about the fact that philosophy consists of only a long series of questions, a conversation of questions, then philosophy is truly not dead and may even revive in our secular age.

I have written an essay on Charles Taylor elsewhere. Please give it a read:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4099635/My-Review-of-Charles-Taylor

Darwinian Conservatism

Larry Arnhart has been writing a superb blog detailing many aspects of how biological evolution and American conservatism mesh very nicely.

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/

For instance, he recently wrote a paper for a political science conference titled, Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: A Reply to Critics. Here is his summary of the paper as posted on August 10, 2011 in his blog:

Some of the material in this paper has been pulled from various posts on this blog.

Under the title "What Nature Has Taught All Animals," I summarize some of the common ground between Thomistic natural law and Darwinian natural right.

I then reply to six objections that have been raised by my critics:

(1) It is said that I fail to see that natural law depends on a divine lawgiver as its source.

(2) Darwinian science denies the natural teleology that is required for natural law.

(3) Darwinian science denies the reality of species as the ground of natural law.

(4) Darwinian natural right denies human freedom by denying the freedom of reason in ruling over the human desires or emotions.

(5) Darwinian explanations of human nature ignore the importance of culture and habituation in shaping human character.

(6) Darwinian naturalism is self-defeating, because in denying that the human mind was created in God's image, and asserting that the mind arose from a mindless process of evolution, it gives us no reason to trust our mental capacity for true beliefs.

My general claim is that by rooting natural law in a scientific conception of human nature, and by avoiding the contradictions that arise from Thomas Aquinas's occasional efforts to elevate revelation over reason, Darwinian natural right is the natural fulfillment of Thomistic natural law.

In short, Arnhart insists that biological evolution permits the development of moral sentiments, and then ethical/legal systems of thought and action in human beings without the necessity of a god planning and then creating human beings. Biological evolution doesn't mandate these developments, but it does indeed permit them.

Read Arnhart's blog. It's excellent.

Were People Nice When They Believed in Hell?

Not that I'd ever noticed, even after a close read of history.

Brian LeCompte responded this way to a post on the riots in London. I then responded as written above:

I believe the problem is a loss of the fear of Hell. Nietzsche predicted that when liberal religion destroys man's concept of good and evil, he will be delivered over to his own irrational appetites. That was in reference to the coming world wars of the 20th century. We have yet to see the outcome in the 21st.

Lots of countries besides the UK have social welfare programs and are not faring so poorly in their moral example. What the UK today lacks is a sense of tribal unity. Its best and brightest are fleeing the country for work abroad. The bonds of ethnicity among the remaining are weathered by the large influx of immigrants. The bonds of religion are broken by the inevitable ennui brought on by liberal theology. Recent articles on the gang culture of UK youth point to an influence by American gang culture, with the same slang, music, and dress code here being appropriated there. American gang culture has always provided a sense of belonging in a world where one doesn't belong. The UK youth must feel adrift and lost.

But blame it first on the loss of fear of Hell, rather than on politics. Without fear of loss of heaven and the pains of hell, you cannot expect a population to be anything other than pagan.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/moments-after-america

One wonders how humans survived the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural evolution. Did the emergent concept of hell get us out of this mess?

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolution/hill_2007_hiwi_mortality.html

Unlikely. The rise of civilizations during the Axial Age and the early formation of related concepts of hell were not known for promoting any resulting civilized behavior between tribes either.

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2010/02/natural-desire-for-war-in-axial-age.html

LeCompte was impressed by the high level of violence exhibited by humans during the 20th century. But mass violence such as that is much more likely to be a result of the power given to humans by industrialization than the loss of an ancient religious belief.

A Humanist's Manifesto

I wrote this manifesto partially in response to the Humanist Manifestos published by the American Humanist Association (I had some major problems with the statist sentiments expressed therein) and partially because I wanted to summarize my own personal belief system in some detail, but in as few words as possible. I got my manifesto down to under 900 words (not including introduction). Enjoy:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3264469/A-Humanists-Manifesto

Did Democracy Actually Grow Out of Christianity?

If so, why did it take 1800 years to do so?

Pope Benedict XVI’s campaign to remind Europe of its Christian roots and to call Europe to a nobler understanding of democracy. As the Holy Father demonstrated in an address in Zagreb, Croatia, in early June, the two parts of that campaign—the recovery of Christian roots and the deepening of 21st-century Europe’s idea of democracy—go together.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/benedict-xvi-on-europersquos-future

The Pope claims democracy derives from Christianity, but considering how many societies over the centuries considered themselves Christian, one might just as well claim that monarchy, theocracy, serfdom, and tyranny also grew out of Christianity.

Democracy in nation-states is a very recent political/historical phenomenon. After discounting ancient developments in Greek city-states, we can confidently assert that there would be no democracy today without 1. Specific cultural tendencies in England that encourage self-government in 2. its American colonies, which then 3. generated wholly new democratic forms out of its frontier experience.

A careful reading of Christian writers dealing with the existence of the then new American Republic showed that they were actually very worried about said Republic, worried that it not foster Christianity, but would in fact destroy Christian culture. The presumption that European "Christendom" was as firmly based upon the divine right of kings as it was on the Bible is a commonplace historical observation. The further presumption that a society tightly organized under its kings and nobles and official clergy would be the only society capable of sheltering Christianity is also well noted in the literature of political thought in the late 18th century through (at least) the early 20th century.

It would be a much more accurate assertion that modern democracy derives from the Enlightenment...American style.

When did Catholic theologians and popes figure out that their predecessors were wrong about the nature of America and of democracy?

More Indications that Life is an Emergent Phenomenon

Note to Creationists: Wherever science looks, science seems to find emergence. Including finding the building blocks of DNA in meteorites.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/09/nasa-finds-dna-components-in-meteorites-says-they-originated-in/

Certainty and Uncertainty, Part 1

Nothing is ever certain. We can be reasonably certain of that. There are aspects of our world that baffle us, others that we think we know, and then learn better. The reasonable certainty of our uncertainty is the attitude we've taken in the last few centuries, which has allowed modern science to sprout, grow and flourish. Instead of a liability, uncertainty becomes an asset. Science uses uncertainty as a tool. We look into the chasm of darkness of our ignorance, learn a bit, spread the light, which then intersects with a much more vast realm of ignorance. This is why we are convinced that we are more ignorant than we ever were. Even though we're not.

That uncanny ability of moderns to learn from our own uncertainty is exactly what leads us to discover. The nature of stars and grass and leaders and food and sex. Things that our forebears knew existed, but couldn't explain. So, naturally, they imputed all sorts of magical nonsense to them.

With uncertainty and science to guide us, we pried at mysterious existence and found less mystery and paradoxically more mystery. The universe became a cat's cradle of entanglements, of unknowable complexity, of emergence, often unpredictable, full of unintended consequences to our planned actions. That most of the universe is this way, unplanned, uncreated, unguided, is something that our ancestors had never guessed. This is not a natural thought to us. Not self-evident at all.

We are fooled by our own intentions. Since we have intentions, we had assumed everything else did, too. The river wills its flow to the sea. The lightning wills its blasting. The birds their flocking. The flowers their blossoming. But even amongst ourselves, only but a small portion of organized human life is the successful fulfillment of intention. The flawless production of the craftsman, the organizers of a hunt. And then the fearful, astonishing, happy, desolate, unintended consequence pops up again to bedevil us.

You can think of this as one reason I'm a philosophical agnostic if you wish.

The Star, the Star Maker, and the Scripted Universe

Sometimes concepts are so tough to wrap your mind around, you need science fiction metaphors to do the work for you. Such is the theological conundrum of a god so powerful that it overwhelms its universe. And such is my problem with the Judeo-Christian model of a god. Wouldn't an all-powerful, all-knowing god automatically run everything in its universe? The short, one-word answer is a resounding YES!

And this essay is my very long answer to the same question. When I read Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" and Olaf Stapledon's landmark novel, "Star Maker," I realized exactly what was wrong with "Christendom's" concept of God. In short, the Scripted Universe. One of the genuinely creepiest concepts human beings have ever come up with. Think of what I describe in this essay as modern science's updated version of the ancient Greeks' concept of Fate. [shudder]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3291257/The-Star-my-essay

The Problem with Certainty

In 2005, in his last homily given to the College of Cardinals before being elevated to the papacy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger famously warned, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/a-dictatorship-of-sentimentalism

There's another problem with certainty that the Pope and other orthodox believers don't address: Human fallibility. They assume that if they get The Word from on High, that they not only get it from an infallible source (very doubtful), but that they understand it infallibly. However, as we've learned to our sorrow over the centuries, even the most devoutedly kind and generous believer can indeed be in error. I don't need to use the most famous examples from history. Just look at your own decidedly fallible life, as I look at mine.

Our own highest goals may or may not be our own desires, but our self-knowledge certainly should warn us against Believing without a care to whether we are actually correct in our beliefs.

Why I Am an American Conservative

Many religious people will find it odd that a non-religious American can be a conservative. In this essay, I attempt to make it crystal clear as to how this can be:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7792584/Why-I-Am-an-American-Conservative

American conservatives seek to conserve a classical liberal order, which includes, among many other good things, freedom of religion and freedom from the requirement to be religious. America is not a command society in any sense. It certainly is the opposite of a theocracy. Thus, any non-religious person who reads carefully and studies American political philosophy will find himself or herself becoming an American conservative.

The Problem with Darwinian Language

In this essay, I explain why evolutionists must use terms indicating intention when describing unintentional, emergent properties of evolutionary theory:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22766943/The-Problem-With-Darwinian-Language