As far as I can tell, some are. There are a lot of geneticists out there searching for the gay gene, the altruism gene, the intelligence gene and such. O brave new world!
Yeah, I grew up with 'the gay gene' being a thing. Then I saw the other day it had been debunked. And I feel as though there have been at least half-a-dozen iterations of the schizophrenia gene theory since I was in my early twenties. And a bunch of stuff about facial symmetry and mate selection, once upon a time.
I spent most of last year working as an IT guy in the medical faculty at the university, and I got the strong impression that a lot of researchers were very disappointed in how non-deterministic genes are 'in the wild'. There's epigenetics of course; but in medical research, anyway, there's also been an explosion from genomics into metabolomics, proteomics, ionomics .... there's just so many possible slips between genotype and phenotype that genetics in its 'pure' form tells you much, much less than a medical researcher would like about the organism.
If I'm sounding a bit bitter about this, it's because I briefly fell in love with botany as a student at Uni in the 90s, but was told further study would be entirely genetically based: if I was getting into it because I found plants interesting, I was out of luck, because the future belonged to the combinatoric number-crunchers. So I ran off and did other, and ultimately less satisfying, things. A decade later, however, and the pendulum had swung back again, all the way into ecology as the master-science that would make sense of everything .... but by then it was too late for me ....
@Timo Pax what else would everything end up being? Genes express neurobiology in which behaviour including personal morality emerge. And that ain't reductionism if you reverse it. It ain't linear one way and the other. It's exponentially complex... biology. Anything else? Arguably chemistry (bags of enzymes realizing that they are bags of enzymes; the lab is empty but the chemicals talk), physics, logic down the chain of being. So theoretically (but never really, not as a single human brain is more complex than the entire physical universe and then a few) it could be reproduced in silico.
So what other causes in the chain of being emergent up from logic-biology could there be? Or is there another unnatural layer of existence above we intersect with? Are we antennae for a supernatural field? What? 'Spirit'? What are you and @Doc Tor suggesting? Not that of course, so what?
@Martin54 I think we're agreeing with each other, sort of. I agree that if you draw a sort of complexity-hierarchy with genes at the bottom moving up through neurobiology into morality and agency and so forth, it 'ain't reductionism if you reverse it', and admit causation running down again through society and agency and morality through to neurobiology and gene selection. That's just fine. It's just that it starts getting a bit strange to talk about it as all "just" being 'biology'. And then the language starts getting a bit tangled: if I'm understanding you rightly, you're saying there's "only" biology, chemistry, and physics - which seems to imply that only physical things are "really real" and emergent (as you put it) properties are only ... kind of real? Unreal? Or what?
I'm not even sure what to do with the fact that 'logic' seems to exist alongside all the "really real" things, or what to make of the phrase 'logic-biology' - these are ontological depths that make my head spin. The closest I can get to striking sense out of it is an implicit belief on your part that it's in principle (if only very rarely in practice) possible to reason deterministically about "really real" things and not about levels of complexity beyond that, so the rest of it fits into the weird domain of 'spirit'.
But as I say, I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying.
Sorry for the inarticulacy. The emergent is as real as everything in between. It's like geology as musical chairs, the strata are where the music stopped. Repeatable observations, the determinate do-re-mi stuff of logic, physics, chemistry, biology, are silent strata; we're just reading their music. The emergent cacophonies are in between. Ja get mi? There is the general determinacy of increased complexity on a par with cosmic inflation in leap and the hindsight we bring to that ("so that's why we're bipeds with binocular vision and opposable thumbs"), in seeing such efficiencies, geometries; logic. Logic underpins mathematics underpins quantum physics underpins chemistry etc. And they're all really real. The ground of being is either the previous Planck tick back for eternity or Spirit below that.
Reading de Waal's "The bonobo and the atheist", disappointing as it's so anecdotal. I remember old Bob, a handsome young chimp, who would help old chimps up trees, and give them food, when they were sick or injured. Well, OK, but this is one of the authorities on animal proto-morality in the world, where's the beef?
In one of the above posts, the phrase 'gene selection' was used. As in the phrase 'natural selection', I wish Darwin had thought of a more exact word! Selection does tend to imply a picking of this gene rather than that one and of course the process was not that at all. The DNA replicated itself, including slight or not-so-slight errors. Various mutations happened but all were random, none at all selected, i.e. by anything.
The DNA might replicate itself, but it still requires a vessel to live long enough to get to that stage. We understand that 'natural selection' doesn't involve anything actively selecting anything (unless they have access to a conscious mind and/or a CRISPR), and is the phenonemon of survivors of environmental pressure breeding with each other. Which is how Darwin meant it.
Yes, it's quite hard to find language that doesn't at some level connote agency or design when talking about evolution. But I think even academic geneticists and biologists are pretty relaxed about it, really - as long as it's understood that saying that a particular organ is 'designed' for some function is just a kind of shorthand, and doesn't necessarily imply a designer.
Yes, it's quite hard to find language that doesn't at some level connote agency or design when talking about evolution. But I think even academic geneticists and biologists are pretty relaxed about it, really - as long as it's understood that saying that a particular organ is 'designed' for some function is just a kind of shorthand, and doesn't necessarily imply a designer.
I've thought about that before, how it's almost impossible to find language for evolution that doesn't anthropomorphize nature.
But how about instead of saying eg. "Giraffes necks evolved to make it easy for them to eat from high trees", we say "Giraffes necks evolved in a way that made it easy for them to eat from high trees"? Wordier, but less likely to lead to misunderstanding.
Well, linguistic solutions get cumbersome: I mean, even 'evolved' sounds a bit more directed and teleological than the reality ('the animals we now know as giraffes are descended from a quadruped population upon which selection pressures operated to favour animals with extended limbs and, in particular, the neck, who where thereby capable of reaching food sources beyond the reach of their shorter-limbed competitors'?).
I haven't been involved in debates on these things enough to know whether there are a bunch of Creation Science types out there who pounce on every instance of a scientist using anthropomorphising language as evidence for their position. But I would have thought outside that risk - well, it doesn't hurt to blur the linguistic edges a bit for the sake of convenience, does it?
Well, linguistic solutions get cumbersome: I mean, even 'evolved' sounds a bit more directed and teleological than the reality ('the animals we now know as giraffes are descended from a quadruped population upon which selection pressures operated to favour animals with extended limbs and, in particular, the neck, who where thereby capable of reaching food sources beyond the reach of their shorter-limbed competitors'?).
I haven't been involved in debates on these things enough to know whether there are a bunch of Creation Science types out there who pounce on every instance of a scientist using anthropomorphising language as evidence for their position. But I would have thought outside that risk - well, it doesn't hurt to blur the linguistic edges a bit for the sake of convenience, does it?
No, so long as the background knowledge and reality are understood. This is far too often not the case, even for a basic knowledge.
Well, I dunno. I strongly suspect most people walk around with a vague idea that evolution is somehow directed 'by nature' and we're all evolving to a better state. I find this a little odd (I'm always amazed at how little people are fazed by the incredible pitilessness of the evolutionary process, to the extent that I suspect they haven't really taken it in). But I'm not sure what harm that sensibility does, unless one happens to be a biologist or similar.
I think that's correct. Non-religious people quite often seem to see evolution in terms of progress, or see humans as a kind of goal. Maybe a sense of agency dies hard, plus also an unconscious narcissism, i.e., I am the point of the universe.
Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. Wrong-headed though the religious opposition to Darwinism was/is scientifically, I feel like it sometimes grasped the moral problems the process poses quite well. The process really doesn't leave much space for moral sentiments as such - and certainly leaves the idea of a beneficent, Paley-an world designed for mutual flourishing in the dust. Not well-adapted? Then you don't reproduce and your line dies - quite probably after considerable suffering and unhappiness on your part. Insofar as opposition was based on notions of love, compassion, or the goodness of creation rather than biblical literalism, I think it understands Darwin quite well - maybe better than a lot of people who are prepared to accept the thesis but perhaps haven't thought through all the implications.
Or to put it another way ... I've just been reading A Secular Age, and in it Charles Taylor draws a distinction between the 'cosmos' inhabited by Middle Ages Europeans (relatively small, well-ordered, anthropocentric) with the 'universe' we allegedly now live in (incomprehensibly structured, at an immense temporal and spatial scale, impersonal). This has been a problem for religious types ever since the scientific revolution, because so many of them are committed to the former view. But I think people without strong commitments that way often sort of happily bump along assuming their 'cosmos' fits nicely inside the 'universe'. Clever scientists somewhere are working out the details ....
Some atheists distinguish proximate from ultimate issues. The obvious example is purpose, which presumably atheists would say is lacking in the universe, but not in your life (proximate). Morality, hmm, not sure if this works, well, no ultimate morality (famous Dawkins quote, "nature is not cruel ..."), but proximately, social groups and individuals focus on various things, especially, love, compassion, utility, war, etc. Plus, a kind of postmodern chaos.
Or to put it another way ... I've just been reading A Secular Age, and in it Charles Taylor draws a distinction between the 'cosmos' inhabited by Middle Ages Europeans (relatively small, well-ordered, anthropocentric) with the 'universe' we allegedly now live in (incomprehensibly structured, at an immense temporal and spatial scale, impersonal). This has been a problem for religious types ever since the scientific revolution, because so many of them are committed to the former view. But I think people without strong commitments that way often sort of happily bump along assuming their 'cosmos' fits nicely inside the 'universe'. Clever scientists somewhere are working out the details ....
I've gone from the anthropocentric to the impersonal and my faith has followed in fear and trembling. Only today I'm asking the risen Christ what is He now.
I forgot to say, two things I got from Zen, a love of detail in nature, and just love. That seems to make life complete, in the words of the old joke, "what is lacking here?"
Quite some time ago, I began reading this thread and -- freely admitting that I have not kept reading it through the last several pages -- I wanted to ask then what I am asking @Timo Pax now:
I believe you started this thread saying that you have almost unaccountably (that is to say, you yourself have difficulty accounting for how it could happen!)--almost unaccountably coming to a surprisingly strong position of faith. Much of the thread seems to center, however, on what is wrong with or questionable about the faith or, perhaps more accurately, the contemporary church and/or contemporary life. If you were asked to stand on a street corner and explain, or perhaps more appropriately, if you were asked to sit at table with a group of intelligent, well educated, and sensitive others, and try to express how that almost accountable transformation took place, and what it consisted of or entailed, I would be especially interested in hearing that.
Well, I dunno. I strongly suspect most people walk around with a vague idea that evolution is somehow directed 'by nature' and we're all evolving to a better state. I find this a little odd (I'm always amazed at how little people are fazed by the incredible pitilessness of the evolutionary process, to the extent that I suspect they haven't really taken it in). But I'm not sure what harm that sensibility does, unless one happens to be a biologist or similar.
That in itself is not a problem, the problems arise when the dominant faith beliefs are indoctrinated into children, who tend to retain them and take their children in turn to be given the faith, i.e. indoctrinated.
That may sound as if it is too strongly expressed, but I can't think of a better way at the moment.
I suspect we're just coming from different backgrounds, @SusanDoris. I grew up in thoroughly secular surroundings in Canada, and now move in thoroughly secular surroundings in the UK. The idea of any 'faith belief' being 'dominant' is very remote, in the world I'm living in, and I suspect almost all of my friends and colleagues are much, much more conversant in Darwin and evolution than they are in the teachings of any religion.
If I lived in the American heartlands, I might feel differently ....
Some atheists distinguish proximate from ultimate issues. The obvious example is purpose, which presumably atheists would say is lacking in the universe, but not in your life (proximate). Morality, hmm, not sure if this works, well, no ultimate morality (famous Dawkins quote, "nature is not cruel ..."), but proximately, social groups and individuals focus on various things, especially, love, compassion, utility, war, etc. Plus, a kind of postmodern chaos.
That's a good way of putting it. I've been puzzled why some Christians appear to be confused when I say I believe in a universe without purpose and ask me if I believe my own life is without purpose.
I think that's correct. Non-religious people quite often seem to see evolution in terms of progress, or see humans as a kind of goal. Maybe a sense of agency dies hard, plus also an unconscious narcissism, i.e., I am the point of the universe.
Actually, I think you'll find that I am the point of the universe
I just remembered an old argument, concerning Dawkins' assertion that the universe is indifferent. I can't see that really. Well, it might feel indifferent, but even that is too anthropomorphic. There's a certain arbitrariness going on, but that is separate. You could say that the universe doesn't care if I fall under a bus, but indifference for me is a human reaction.
I just remembered an old argument, concerning Dawkins' assertion that the universe is indifferent. I can't see that really. Well, it might feel indifferent, but even that is too anthropomorphic. There's a certain arbitrariness going on, but that is separate. You could say that the universe doesn't care if I fall under a bus, but indifference for me is a human reaction.
Agreed. Indifference implies callousness when really something else is going on. Gravity is not indifferent to the effect it has someone falling to their death, it simply hasn't the means to be aware of that person.
I suspect humans are just not very good at understanding things that aren't human. Or at least, our understanding of them always seems to be shaped in human terms. We have calm days. We have furious storms. Bitter winters. Cruel frosts. Everything becomes a projection of ourselves.
It's not so much that we anthropomorphise everything but that we struggle to see anything other than through a human perception.
I just remembered an old argument, concerning Dawkins' assertion that the universe is indifferent. I can't see that really. Well, it might feel indifferent, but even that is too anthropomorphic. There's a certain arbitrariness going on, but that is separate. You could say that the universe doesn't care if I fall under a bus, but indifference for me is a human reaction.
Agreed. Indifference implies callousness when really something else is going on. Gravity is not indifferent to the effect it has someone falling to their death, it simply hasn't the means to be aware of that person.
I suspect humans are just not very good at understanding things that aren't human. Or at least, our understanding of them always seems to be shaped in human terms. We have calm days. We have furious storms. Bitter winters. Cruel frosts. Everything becomes a projection of ourselves.
It's not so much that we anthropomorphise everything but that we struggle to see anything other than through a human perception.
Well, you put that better than me. It's probably impossible to get out of a human point of view. I think Freud used to boast that we'd decentred the earth via Copernicus et.al., we'd decentred human biology via Darwin, and now we'd decentred the ego, thanks to Freud! Maybe. But it's a vertiginous journey from the centre of the universe to the periphery, I guess we are a bit car-sick.
Some atheists distinguish proximate from ultimate issues. The obvious example is purpose, which presumably atheists would say is lacking in the universe, but not in your life (proximate). Morality, hmm, not sure if this works, well, no ultimate morality (famous Dawkins quote, "nature is not cruel ..."), but proximately, social groups and individuals focus on various things, especially, love, compassion, utility, war, etc. Plus, a kind of postmodern chaos.
Hmmmm, I'm curious about this (by which I mean I'm genuinely curious, not that I think it's wrong, so apologies if I'm a bit vague and think-y-out-loud here).
I think there are a couple of senses of the word 'purpose'. One is at the level of intention: my purpose in going to work is to make money, and I guess you can concatenate purposes beyond that ('to feed myself; to feed my family') etc.
Then there's another sense, which is easier to think about in a theistic sense (maybe Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is a secular example?), which is the larger purpose you serve by the fact of your very existence, whether you like it or not. Maybe you live your whole life aiming at various other things, but in fact something incidental you're doing is the key to it all. I guess the plot of It's A Wonderful Life is a sort of model here.
I feel like atheism deals just fine with the first kind, but the second kind is quite hard to arrive at. And of course an atheist can just say, well, the second type is a comforting illusion, suitable for Christmas movies but not much else.
I feel like the emotional difficulty of this comes when you start thinking about sense 1 in a larger scale - not 'I am doing x for y', but 'everything I do, my life and existence, is ultimately for y'. I think this is quite hard to bootstrap, insofar as if the goal isn't in a sense bigger than me and difficult even to conceptualise by me, it's really sort of a 'preference' more than a 'purpose', and if I try to make it more than that it's sort of into Sartre bad-waiter bad-faith territory (I think?). And then, of course, often our intentions either misfire, fail, or on reflection turn out not to have been so great anyway. At that point it's quite nice to have sense 2 available.
Anyway, I guess my point is that I find it hard to see how to generate individual 'purpose' in a 'purposeless' universe. But maybe that's just a shortcoming on my part.
**********
Also, I have one memory that gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I think of self-defined goals as ultimate purpose. A few years ago I went to a talk (about magazine publishing, curiously), and the speaker launched into an extended story about how he'd been living a fast-paced life in London, putting in sixteen hour days at work, living the Ferraris and cocaine lifestyle on weekends .... when he'd had a near-fatal car crash that put him in a coma for two weeks. When he came to, he realised life was short and precious, that his existence had been empty and meaningless up to that point, and that what he really, really had to do was focus on something important. Which, in his case, was launching his own men's skincare and grooming range.
I suppose a good liberal atheist would simply shrug at this and say, well, who are you, Timo Pax, to be judging this guy's sense of purpose and near-death experience. But really? Really?
I forgot to say, two things I got from Zen, a love of detail in nature, and just love. That seems to make life complete, in the words of the old joke, "what is lacking here?"
Hmmm, how did you get 'just love' out of Zen? I always found Zen quite strong on compassion, but the route there always seemed to lead through transience more than love, as far as I could tell. And I don't remember coming across the word much in Zen texts, though I realise it's a 'separate transmission outside the scriptures', etc.
Yes, individual purpose or direction seems quite fluid or even chaotic. I had several careers myself, but realized in mid-life how much I wanted to write. So I did that for 20 years, reasonably successfully, and then no longer wanted to do it.
But I got from meditation a sense of oneness, which stays with me, but I wouldn't call it a purpose. That seems rather grandiose. As the Zen saying has it, when I'm hungry, I eat.
That's a great story! For some reason, the ending reminded me of Douglas Adams.
I think a good liberal atheist might say you're as free to judge this guy's ludicrous sense of purpose as anyone else is, but deny that you can claim any transcendental justification for condemning it.
Sure, most people prompted to seek a deeper meaning following such a scare probably end up with more conventional answers, but then most people aren't sociopaths. Maybe this is just what you get when you put a sociopath through such an experience. Normal people find the result repellent or absurd, but that's just because they're normal, not because there really is a transcendental purpose this guy is missing. That most people would react differently doesn't mean their attitudes reveal some deeper meaning to the universe.
I forgot to say, two things I got from Zen, a love of detail in nature, and just love. That seems to make life complete, in the words of the old joke, "what is lacking here?"
Hmmm, how did you get 'just love' out of Zen? I always found Zen quite strong on compassion, but the route there always seemed to lead through transience more than love, as far as I could tell. And I don't remember coming across the word much in Zen texts, though I realise it's a 'separate transmission outside the scriptures', etc.
Well, 'how' is a big word. It's what came up for me, regularly. Maybe I was doing it wrong!
snip
Also, I have one memory that gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I think of self-defined goals as ultimate purpose. A few years ago I went to a talk (about magazine publishing, curiously), and the speaker launched into an extended story about how he'd been living a fast-paced life in London, putting in sixteen hour days at work, living the Ferraris and cocaine lifestyle on weekends .... when he'd had a near-fatal car crash that put him in a coma for two weeks. When he came to, he realised life was short and precious, that his existence had been empty and meaningless up to that point, and that what he really, really had to do was focus on something important. Which, in his case, was launching his own men's skincare and grooming range.
I suppose a good liberal atheist would simply shrug at this and say, well, who are you, Timo Pax, to be judging this guy's sense of purpose and near-death experience. But really? Really?
Well, yes. But tbh I am getting the feeling that you are judging. It was there right back in your comment that your work colleagues' moralism "doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything, really".
This man's desire to have his own men's skincare and grooming range isn't so different from someone deciding they want to become a singer, or a writer, or an artist, and no one would question coming to that realisation after a life-changing event. He wants something that he has created rather than just being a well-paid cog in another person's creation and I would assume a preexisting interest in men's grooming products and skincare showed him how he could do that.
That's a great story! For some reason, the ending reminded me of Douglas Adams.
I think a good liberal atheist might say you're as free to judge this guy's ludicrous sense of purpose as anyone else is, but deny that you can claim any transcendental justification for condemning it.
Sure, most people prompted to seek a deeper meaning following such a scare probably end up with more conventional answers, but then most people aren't sociopaths. Maybe this is just what you get when you put a sociopath through such an experience. Normal people find the result repellent or absurd, but that's just because they're normal, not because there really is a transcendental purpose this guy is missing. That most people would react differently doesn't mean their attitudes reveal some deeper meaning to the universe.
I don't see anything absurd or repellent about wanting to start your own men's grooming and skincare company and implying he is a sociopath is more than a bit libellous. What would you consider to be more conventional answers?
@Dave W: Oh, yeah, I wasn't trying to imply 'God hates that guy' or anything. It's just the vignette that comes to mind every time I encounter that kind of pop-existentialism (which I think is a lot of people's commonsense intuition) that we all define our own meanings in our lives. I don't have a strong argument *against* that really, even if I suspect the real existentialists did. But I just feel like ... well, that can go quite wrong!
I'm not implying he's a sociopath, I'm speculating that he might be. There's no implication at all, I'm saying exactly what I mean. (And I'm pretty sure you can't libel an unnamed person from someone else's anecdote.)
By more conventional answers, I mean things like devoting oneself to spending more time with family and loved ones, or to charitable works to aid the disadvantaged or poor. I think these would be more commonly associated with typical reactions to near-death experiences as described in this Wikipedia article:
NDEs are associated with changes in personality and outlook on life.[3] Ring has identified a consistent set of value and belief changes associated with people who have had a near-death experience. Among these changes, he found a greater appreciation for life, higher self-esteem, greater compassion for others, less concern for acquiring material wealth, a heightened sense of purpose and self-understanding, desire to learn, elevated spirituality, greater ecological sensitivity and planetary concern, and a feeling of being more intuitive.
I find the idea that an experience causing such changes led this guy to start a men's skincare and grooming company to be as incongruous as it appears Timo Pax does; but I don't think that our common feeling that it falls short as a greater purpose is grounded in the actual existence of a real transcendental purpose in the universe.
@Colin Smith Well, first, to be clear, I wasn't really judging my colleagues. Or if I was, it was ambivalently. At times I admire their sense of purpose and, frankly, their ability to get things done while I'm stewing over various internal conundrums I've set myself. OTOH there are times when they start getting in a lather over something and I start thinking - well, I think you need something a little more thought-out to justify this level of anger and/or self-righteousness.
As for judging other people's meaning-of-life epiphanies ... well, yeah, I'm absolutely judging this guy for having such a shallow and trivial ending to his big-revelation story. How would I feel had it been more 'conventional'? Well, I suppose it depends on the person. A lot of people feel driven to create artistically because they feel they have something profound and important inside them they need to release and that's something I would hesitate to judge. OTOH I have an acquaintance who is desperate to sing in a very 'Pop Idol' kind of way, because she desperately craves adulation and celebrity - and if she were to emerge from a near-death experience with that craving intact, I would think it was sad.
And then of course there's another kind of 'meaning' narrative which is about bettering the world, helping others, and other social ends.
Sure, we can't all be Greta Thunberg. But maybe that's a problem - and maybe a stronger sense of human dignity and focusing less on superficialities in the society at large would help that, in a way I suspect men's grooming products tend not to foster.
@Dave W: Oh, yeah, I wasn't trying to imply 'God hates that guy' or anything. It's just the vignette that comes to mind every time I encounter that kind of pop-existentialism (which I think is a lot of people's commonsense intuition) that we all define our own meanings in our lives. I don't have a strong argument *against* that really, even if I suspect the real existentialists did. But I just feel like ... well, that can go quite wrong!
I would have said the opposite - that most people's commonsense intuition is that life does have a transcendental meaning. But I think that religion is a consequence of that (IMHO) mistaken belief, not a reflection of its truth.
As to whether a belief in the necessity of self-determination of one's own purpose can go quite wrong - well, even if so, that an idea might have negative consequences isn't really an argument that it isn't true. And in any case history is replete with examples of people who invoke higher external purposes to justify their horrific deeds. God has apparently told many, many people to do (what I would consider to be) some very, very bad things.
I was just baffled by the story and implied judgment. As noted above, what's wrong with developing skincare?
Oh, there's nothing wrong with it per se. It just seems laughably banal as a conclusion to a life-changing experience.
Do you not find anything strange about it? It's as if Moses came down from the mountain and revealed that God had told him to found a chain of convenience stores. Nothing wrong with convenience stores! They're very convenient! But they seem somewhat less than satisfying as an answer to life, the universe, and everything.
I would have said the opposite - that most people's commonsense intuition is that life does have a transcendental meaning. But I think that religion is a consequence of that (IMHO) mistaken belief, not a reflection of its truth.
Hmmm. I guess it depends what’s meant by ‘transcendent’. I feel like most people I know would say to be meaningful, action needs to be social, not just self-gratifying, so in one sense we’re ‘transcending’ the individual ego. But I think that’s where it stops: there’s nothing ‘above’ the social to transcend to. Religious people might disagree - but who’s religious anymore? Besides me, anyway :-).
BTW, I wasn’t hoping off the back of that story to build some case for the superiority of ‘transcendent purpose’, which indeed has a tragic history. My vague intuition is that one of the criteria for something to be transcendent is that it’s beyond or other to what we normally think of as ‘purpose’. I just think there are some shortcomings to an unreflective ‘it’s whatever I happen to say it is’ approach.
I've been using "transcendent" (or transcendental) to mean that something has its origins beyond mundane human experience - like a sense of purpose or moral sentiments that are believed to come from God or are somehow inherent in the broader Universe - rather than to distinguish between selfish and unselfish.
Someone who finds meaning in (e.g.) helping others may or may not believe that meaning or purpose derives from God or inherent properties of the Universe (what I've been calling transcendental.) I think most people think it does, whether they explicitly subscribe to religious beliefs or not (and there are a lot of people who do in the US and around the world, even if there aren't so many in the UK and Europe these days.) But I suspect the arrow of causation may go the other way; the general evolved propensity to value eusocial behavior has been projected outward onto ideas about God and the Universe.
But I suspect the arrow of causation may go the other way; the general evolved propensity to value eusocial behavior has been projected outward onto ideas about God and the Universe.
If I might join in...for me, my failure to find anything adequate to base my eusociality (eerrgh) upon is part of what leads me to project it outward onto that other well-known self-creating, self-sustaining thingy...God. I have some emotional/spiritual grounds for finding that projection 'real', but nothing I can defend in this kind of rational debate.
Someone who finds meaning in (e.g.) helping others may or may not believe that meaning or purpose derives from God or inherent properties of the Universe (what I've been calling transcendental.) I think most people think it does, whether they explicitly subscribe to religious beliefs or not (and there are a lot of people who do in the US and around the world, even if there aren't so many in the UK and Europe these days.) But I suspect the arrow of causation may go the other way; the general evolved propensity to value eusocial behavior has been projected outward onto ideas about God and the Universe.
Yes, I guess when I say 'most people' I'm implicitly using it to mean 'most people I know' - i.e., overeducated Brits and Canadians on the left of the political spectrum.
In this milieu, 'eusocial' behaviour is mostly rooted ultimately in some form of socialism or Marxism, and religion is at best regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility - meaning 'other-benefitting' behaviour is the *last* thing to be explained religiously. I'm pretty sure whatever religious feeling continues to exist vestigially is at a personal level: some notion of God is what gets you through, personally, when the going gets tough.
I always wonder how prevalent this last is. One always sees surveys saying something like 10% of the population attends church regularly, but 70% have a belief in a supreme being, or whatever. I never know what to make of that.
I wouldn't be surprised that people could be disappointed with the current manifestations of historically contingent religious institutions, but still have some sense of transcendent meaning and purpose they ascribe to the existence of a supreme being. Just means the time is ripe for a new revival! Somebody needs to come along and disrupt the God industry - maybe when the tech bros are finished disrupting the therapy industry (NYTimes link.)
Comments
Yeah, I grew up with 'the gay gene' being a thing. Then I saw the other day it had been debunked. And I feel as though there have been at least half-a-dozen iterations of the schizophrenia gene theory since I was in my early twenties. And a bunch of stuff about facial symmetry and mate selection, once upon a time.
I spent most of last year working as an IT guy in the medical faculty at the university, and I got the strong impression that a lot of researchers were very disappointed in how non-deterministic genes are 'in the wild'. There's epigenetics of course; but in medical research, anyway, there's also been an explosion from genomics into metabolomics, proteomics, ionomics .... there's just so many possible slips between genotype and phenotype that genetics in its 'pure' form tells you much, much less than a medical researcher would like about the organism.
If I'm sounding a bit bitter about this, it's because I briefly fell in love with botany as a student at Uni in the 90s, but was told further study would be entirely genetically based: if I was getting into it because I found plants interesting, I was out of luck, because the future belonged to the combinatoric number-crunchers. So I ran off and did other, and ultimately less satisfying, things. A decade later, however, and the pendulum had swung back again, all the way into ecology as the master-science that would make sense of everything .... but by then it was too late for me ....
So what other causes in the chain of being emergent up from logic-biology could there be? Or is there another unnatural layer of existence above we intersect with? Are we antennae for a supernatural field? What? 'Spirit'? What are you and @Doc Tor suggesting? Not that of course, so what?
I'm not even sure what to do with the fact that 'logic' seems to exist alongside all the "really real" things, or what to make of the phrase 'logic-biology' - these are ontological depths that make my head spin. The closest I can get to striking sense out of it is an implicit belief on your part that it's in principle (if only very rarely in practice) possible to reason deterministically about "really real" things and not about levels of complexity beyond that, so the rest of it fits into the weird domain of 'spirit'.
But as I say, I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying.
...sorry for the inarticulacy.
And who can tell the dancer from the dance?
I've thought about that before, how it's almost impossible to find language for evolution that doesn't anthropomorphize nature.
But how about instead of saying eg. "Giraffes necks evolved to make it easy for them to eat from high trees", we say "Giraffes necks evolved in a way that made it easy for them to eat from high trees"? Wordier, but less likely to lead to misunderstanding.
I haven't been involved in debates on these things enough to know whether there are a bunch of Creation Science types out there who pounce on every instance of a scientist using anthropomorphising language as evidence for their position. But I would have thought outside that risk - well, it doesn't hurt to blur the linguistic edges a bit for the sake of convenience, does it?
I've gone from the anthropocentric to the impersonal and my faith has followed in fear and trembling. Only today I'm asking the risen Christ what is He now.
I believe you started this thread saying that you have almost unaccountably (that is to say, you yourself have difficulty accounting for how it could happen!)--almost unaccountably coming to a surprisingly strong position of faith. Much of the thread seems to center, however, on what is wrong with or questionable about the faith or, perhaps more accurately, the contemporary church and/or contemporary life. If you were asked to stand on a street corner and explain, or perhaps more appropriately, if you were asked to sit at table with a group of intelligent, well educated, and sensitive others, and try to express how that almost accountable transformation took place, and what it consisted of or entailed, I would be especially interested in hearing that.
That may sound as if it is too strongly expressed, but I can't think of a better way at the moment.
If I lived in the American heartlands, I might feel differently ....
That's a good way of putting it. I've been puzzled why some Christians appear to be confused when I say I believe in a universe without purpose and ask me if I believe my own life is without purpose.
Actually, I think you'll find that I am the point of the universe
Agreed. Indifference implies callousness when really something else is going on. Gravity is not indifferent to the effect it has someone falling to their death, it simply hasn't the means to be aware of that person.
I suspect humans are just not very good at understanding things that aren't human. Or at least, our understanding of them always seems to be shaped in human terms. We have calm days. We have furious storms. Bitter winters. Cruel frosts. Everything becomes a projection of ourselves.
It's not so much that we anthropomorphise everything but that we struggle to see anything other than through a human perception.
Well, you put that better than me. It's probably impossible to get out of a human point of view. I think Freud used to boast that we'd decentred the earth via Copernicus et.al., we'd decentred human biology via Darwin, and now we'd decentred the ego, thanks to Freud! Maybe. But it's a vertiginous journey from the centre of the universe to the periphery, I guess we are a bit car-sick.
Hmmmm, I'm curious about this (by which I mean I'm genuinely curious, not that I think it's wrong, so apologies if I'm a bit vague and think-y-out-loud here).
I think there are a couple of senses of the word 'purpose'. One is at the level of intention: my purpose in going to work is to make money, and I guess you can concatenate purposes beyond that ('to feed myself; to feed my family') etc.
Then there's another sense, which is easier to think about in a theistic sense (maybe Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is a secular example?), which is the larger purpose you serve by the fact of your very existence, whether you like it or not. Maybe you live your whole life aiming at various other things, but in fact something incidental you're doing is the key to it all. I guess the plot of It's A Wonderful Life is a sort of model here.
I feel like atheism deals just fine with the first kind, but the second kind is quite hard to arrive at. And of course an atheist can just say, well, the second type is a comforting illusion, suitable for Christmas movies but not much else.
I feel like the emotional difficulty of this comes when you start thinking about sense 1 in a larger scale - not 'I am doing x for y', but 'everything I do, my life and existence, is ultimately for y'. I think this is quite hard to bootstrap, insofar as if the goal isn't in a sense bigger than me and difficult even to conceptualise by me, it's really sort of a 'preference' more than a 'purpose', and if I try to make it more than that it's sort of into Sartre bad-waiter bad-faith territory (I think?). And then, of course, often our intentions either misfire, fail, or on reflection turn out not to have been so great anyway. At that point it's quite nice to have sense 2 available.
Anyway, I guess my point is that I find it hard to see how to generate individual 'purpose' in a 'purposeless' universe. But maybe that's just a shortcoming on my part.
**********
Also, I have one memory that gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I think of self-defined goals as ultimate purpose. A few years ago I went to a talk (about magazine publishing, curiously), and the speaker launched into an extended story about how he'd been living a fast-paced life in London, putting in sixteen hour days at work, living the Ferraris and cocaine lifestyle on weekends .... when he'd had a near-fatal car crash that put him in a coma for two weeks. When he came to, he realised life was short and precious, that his existence had been empty and meaningless up to that point, and that what he really, really had to do was focus on something important. Which, in his case, was launching his own men's skincare and grooming range.
I suppose a good liberal atheist would simply shrug at this and say, well, who are you, Timo Pax, to be judging this guy's sense of purpose and near-death experience. But really? Really?
Hmmm, how did you get 'just love' out of Zen? I always found Zen quite strong on compassion, but the route there always seemed to lead through transience more than love, as far as I could tell. And I don't remember coming across the word much in Zen texts, though I realise it's a 'separate transmission outside the scriptures', etc.
But I got from meditation a sense of oneness, which stays with me, but I wouldn't call it a purpose. That seems rather grandiose. As the Zen saying has it, when I'm hungry, I eat.
I think a good liberal atheist might say you're as free to judge this guy's ludicrous sense of purpose as anyone else is, but deny that you can claim any transcendental justification for condemning it.
Sure, most people prompted to seek a deeper meaning following such a scare probably end up with more conventional answers, but then most people aren't sociopaths. Maybe this is just what you get when you put a sociopath through such an experience. Normal people find the result repellent or absurd, but that's just because they're normal, not because there really is a transcendental purpose this guy is missing. That most people would react differently doesn't mean their attitudes reveal some deeper meaning to the universe.
Well, 'how' is a big word. It's what came up for me, regularly. Maybe I was doing it wrong!
Well, yes. But tbh I am getting the feeling that you are judging. It was there right back in your comment that your work colleagues' moralism "doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything, really".
This man's desire to have his own men's skincare and grooming range isn't so different from someone deciding they want to become a singer, or a writer, or an artist, and no one would question coming to that realisation after a life-changing event. He wants something that he has created rather than just being a well-paid cog in another person's creation and I would assume a preexisting interest in men's grooming products and skincare showed him how he could do that.
I mean, we can't all be Greta Thunberg.
I don't see anything absurd or repellent about wanting to start your own men's grooming and skincare company and implying he is a sociopath is more than a bit libellous. What would you consider to be more conventional answers?
I'm not implying he's a sociopath, I'm speculating that he might be. There's no implication at all, I'm saying exactly what I mean. (And I'm pretty sure you can't libel an unnamed person from someone else's anecdote.)
By more conventional answers, I mean things like devoting oneself to spending more time with family and loved ones, or to charitable works to aid the disadvantaged or poor. I think these would be more commonly associated with typical reactions to near-death experiences as described in this Wikipedia article: I find the idea that an experience causing such changes led this guy to start a men's skincare and grooming company to be as incongruous as it appears Timo Pax does; but I don't think that our common feeling that it falls short as a greater purpose is grounded in the actual existence of a real transcendental purpose in the universe.
@Colin Smith Well, first, to be clear, I wasn't really judging my colleagues. Or if I was, it was ambivalently. At times I admire their sense of purpose and, frankly, their ability to get things done while I'm stewing over various internal conundrums I've set myself. OTOH there are times when they start getting in a lather over something and I start thinking - well, I think you need something a little more thought-out to justify this level of anger and/or self-righteousness.
As for judging other people's meaning-of-life epiphanies ... well, yeah, I'm absolutely judging this guy for having such a shallow and trivial ending to his big-revelation story. How would I feel had it been more 'conventional'? Well, I suppose it depends on the person. A lot of people feel driven to create artistically because they feel they have something profound and important inside them they need to release and that's something I would hesitate to judge. OTOH I have an acquaintance who is desperate to sing in a very 'Pop Idol' kind of way, because she desperately craves adulation and celebrity - and if she were to emerge from a near-death experience with that craving intact, I would think it was sad.
And then of course there's another kind of 'meaning' narrative which is about bettering the world, helping others, and other social ends.
Sure, we can't all be Greta Thunberg. But maybe that's a problem - and maybe a stronger sense of human dignity and focusing less on superficialities in the society at large would help that, in a way I suspect men's grooming products tend not to foster.
As to whether a belief in the necessity of self-determination of one's own purpose can go quite wrong - well, even if so, that an idea might have negative consequences isn't really an argument that it isn't true. And in any case history is replete with examples of people who invoke higher external purposes to justify their horrific deeds. God has apparently told many, many people to do (what I would consider to be) some very, very bad things.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with it per se. It just seems laughably banal as a conclusion to a life-changing experience.
Do you not find anything strange about it? It's as if Moses came down from the mountain and revealed that God had told him to found a chain of convenience stores. Nothing wrong with convenience stores! They're very convenient! But they seem somewhat less than satisfying as an answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Hmmm. I guess it depends what’s meant by ‘transcendent’. I feel like most people I know would say to be meaningful, action needs to be social, not just self-gratifying, so in one sense we’re ‘transcending’ the individual ego. But I think that’s where it stops: there’s nothing ‘above’ the social to transcend to. Religious people might disagree - but who’s religious anymore? Besides me, anyway :-).
BTW, I wasn’t hoping off the back of that story to build some case for the superiority of ‘transcendent purpose’, which indeed has a tragic history. My vague intuition is that one of the criteria for something to be transcendent is that it’s beyond or other to what we normally think of as ‘purpose’. I just think there are some shortcomings to an unreflective ‘it’s whatever I happen to say it is’ approach.
Someone who finds meaning in (e.g.) helping others may or may not believe that meaning or purpose derives from God or inherent properties of the Universe (what I've been calling transcendental.) I think most people think it does, whether they explicitly subscribe to religious beliefs or not (and there are a lot of people who do in the US and around the world, even if there aren't so many in the UK and Europe these days.) But I suspect the arrow of causation may go the other way; the general evolved propensity to value eusocial behavior has been projected outward onto ideas about God and the Universe.
If I might join in...for me, my failure to find anything adequate to base my eusociality (eerrgh) upon is part of what leads me to project it outward onto that other well-known self-creating, self-sustaining thingy...God. I have some emotional/spiritual grounds for finding that projection 'real', but nothing I can defend in this kind of rational debate.
Yes, I guess when I say 'most people' I'm implicitly using it to mean 'most people I know' - i.e., overeducated Brits and Canadians on the left of the political spectrum.
In this milieu, 'eusocial' behaviour is mostly rooted ultimately in some form of socialism or Marxism, and religion is at best regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility - meaning 'other-benefitting' behaviour is the *last* thing to be explained religiously. I'm pretty sure whatever religious feeling continues to exist vestigially is at a personal level: some notion of God is what gets you through, personally, when the going gets tough.
I always wonder how prevalent this last is. One always sees surveys saying something like 10% of the population attends church regularly, but 70% have a belief in a supreme being, or whatever. I never know what to make of that.
... which I guess in a way was what I was trying in a tangled way to say in my OP for this thread!