Thoughts on non-overlapping magesteria (NOM)

[Gideonthenomad]

I've been reading the threads on religion vs science and the debate is fascinating. Before I commence with my post, I'd just like to say I'm an agnostic of the "Well, fairies might exist for all I know" variety. This shouldn't really matter, but I hope it will head off an possible ad-hominems.

Now, my post is sort of an invitation to all interested in exploring/discussing the issue further, argument isn't really my aim though if it occurs, well that's life. I believe there is a way in which science and religion could be considered NOM. Namely, the fundamental aims of science and religion differ. This may seem like a trivial observation, but I feel it's significant for the following reason: While science systematically studies/observes the world in order to make "truth claims" about it, the truth claims of religion are, in a sense, incidental to it. Granted, it's difficult to consider claims such as "God created Adam and Eve" "incidental" to Christianity, but nevertheless I can conceive of a severely stripped down version of Christianity which made no supernatural claims at all but was still *more* than a collection of moral precepts/history/literature/what have you. Exactly what that *more* would be, I'm not sure, but I feel it would be there. This *more* is, I believe, the proper aim of religion. This is very touchy-feely stuff, I know. I'm having a hard time marshaling support for so nebulous a concept. Perhaps a real-world example would be something like Zen, which is very "spartan" i.e. it makes very few "truth claims," it doesn't really offer clear-cut ethical guidelines, knowledge of its history/mythology is considered non-essential to its practice-- and yet it's doing something. I'm not implying that a similarly stripped down Christianity would resemble Zen, or that all religions are the same underneath or any such guff. I'm basically inviting interested posters to give their thoughts.

Hope this fosters some interesting discussion!

[Iain Sparrow]

I'll first say, interesting topic... and I am not in the NOM camp.

If you take the God and Supernatural out of the mainline western religions then I think you're left with a philosophy.

In the same way you find Christian Apologists attempting to give their beliefs a rational foundation in the face of overwhelming science that contradicts biblical teachings, you also have some scientists trying to square science with religious doctrine. I don't know if it's out of political correctness or what, but to me it seems less than heartfelt on both sides.

Most of the history found in the Bible is junk, the science is laughable, bad math, stories borrowed from other cultures, women in submissive roles, institutional slavery that God condones, genocide, etc... it doesn't strike me as even a worthwhile philosophy that anyone should follow. But that's just my opinion.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm not in the NOM camp either, and this article eloquently explains why: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/

The notion of NOM is really an attempt to deflect the negative light that's been cast on religion in the wake of the overwhelming successes of science to understand reality. It's a rather dishonest, IMO, attempt to turn religion into something it never was, mainly just a philosophy that makes no truth claims about reality that are testable or falsifiable. As the above article shows, there are stories in The Bible that use science to prove the Christian God was the TRUE God, and the vast majority of religious teachings still emphasize God's ability to intercede into reality. If you take away religion's statements about reality, or the ability of science to test/study those claims, you're basically left with deism and philosophy, much of the latter of which is quite archaic to modern standards.

[Gideonthenomad]

I'm not in the NOM camp either, and this article eloquently explains why: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/

The notion of NOM is really an attempt to deflect the negative light that's been cast on religion in the wake of the overwhelming successes of science to understand reality. It's a rather dishonest, IMO, attempt to turn religion into something it never was, mainly just a philosophy that makes no truth claims about reality that are testable or falsifiable. As the above article shows, there are stories in The Bible that use science to prove the Christian God was the TRUE God, and the vast majority of religious teachings still emphasize God's ability to intercede into reality. If you take away religion's statements about reality, or the ability of science to test/study those claims, you're basically left with deism and philosophy, much of the latter of which is quite archaic to modern standards.

I'll address your link first, then the points you made subsequently.

To paraphrase the writer as I understood him/her, religion (Christianity specifically) is a compendium of factual claims about the nature of reality, not an account of "subjective" religious experience (this is how I understood the bit where the writer says something to the effect of there not being a word about "transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe" in the bible, which strikes as paradoxically both a ridiculously specific and strangely vague phrase, which is why I simplified it "subjective religious experience," which seems to me a more useful construct, although still vague), a position which I'd have to say is a simplification. Yes, religions do make (ridiculous) factual assertions about the nature of the cosmos, but the "subjective religious experience" is at the heart of religion, or at the very least not peripheral to it. Of course religion is also tied up with ideology, politics, philosophy, and the like, and it's hard to extricate the self-legitimating myths of religion from the subjective experiences at their core, but hardly impossible. This is where NOM comes into play. While science can (and should) refute the fantastical claims of religion, when a Christian says something along the lines of "I feel God in my heart," there is really no scientific way to tell him he doesn't. You can perhaps take brain readings of the man, do a psychological evaluation, etc., but you will only have explained "the surface" as it were, what David Chalmers calls third-person data. The first-person data of that man's subjective experience of "God in his heart" seems, at least currently, beyond the purview of science proper, although this may not always be the case. On a side note, I found the writer's analogy between the Baal/Jehovah dilemma and a scientific experiment to be amusing, but somewhat facile as most attempts to retro-fit current conceptual models onto modes of thinking long past tend to be.

Onto the points you made.

My idea of NOM is different from the conventional one. I tried to outline it in my OP, although I might not have been entirely successful. I'm not saying that religions doesn't make fantastical claims or that these claims cannot be disproved, only that there is *more* to it than that, that this *more* can be denoted by the somewhat unsatisfactory term "subjective religious experience" and that this *more* is both at the heart of religion and beyond the purview of science. This *more* is not Deism, or philosophy, as you assert. Deism is the philosophical position that God exists but does not interfere supernaturally, and has nothing to do with subjective experience. Philosophy, at least western philosophy, has much more in common with science than it does with religion, i.e. it is the systematic "objective" pursuit of "truths" (as opposed to science's "facts").

Enjoying this discussion, hope you reply!

[Gideonthenomad]

Iain Sparrow, I think my reply to MorpheusSandman addresses your concerns, although I'll reply to you if you feel it doesn't.

[Ecurb]

Religion divorced from the supernatural would no longer be religion. Religion is defined by its supernatural claims and practices.

In addition, religion does not have an “aim”. “Aims” (or “goals”) are attributes of individuals. Instead, religion serves “functions” in regulating and facilitating human society, in helping individual humans cope, etc. It is possible, of course, that some of the “functions” of religion could be served by an institution that abandons any reference to the supernatural. But such an institution would not be a “religious” institution.

There is, then, by definition, a conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism (we’ll wait for YesNo to report on what Plantinga has to say about the conflict between naturalism and science). It seems to me there are prejudices on both sides: clearly the naturalist who says, “Jesus didn’t rise from the dead because it is impossible to rise from the dead,” is putting the cart before the horse. If Jesus rose from the dead, then it is not impossible. The “natural laws” (which we humans have invented) cannot take precedence over the facts. Indeed, we invent the laws to describe and predict the facts.

The extent to which religion is merely a primitive or naïve science, however, is dubious. No doubt the Greeks told stories about Zeus throwing thunderbolts and Poseiden causing earthquakes. We no longer tell these stories except as entertainment. Instead, we tell other stories about thunder and earthquakes, which we call “scientific theories”. Our modern stories are demonstrably more effective at manipulating and predicting events, so if the debate of “science vs. religion” hinges on the question, “which set of stories is more effective?” there cannot be much of an argument. If we accept (as I do) the modern methods of scientific testing, falsification, etc., then clearly scientific stories have virtues that religious ones lack.

Nonetheless, I think the ‘science vs. religion” argument is naïve, because, as gideon points out, there is a lot more to religion than offering supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. Let’s look (for example) at the Five Pillars of Islam:

1) Aver that there is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.
2) Pray five times a day.
3) Fast during Ramadan.
4) Tithe to the poor.
5) Make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Which of these pillars contradicts anything science has to offer? Perhaps #1 suggests a belief in something that is non-scientific in that it cannot be falsified, but even here an avowal does not necessarily indicate a belief.

The Catholic Church offers other ritual behaviors that confirm membership: the sacraments: baptism, confession, communion (and I forget what else).

The emphasis in Protestant Christianity in “belief” over “ritual” is what leads to the conflict of science and religion. Protestants (especially Fundamentalists) are required by custom to “believe’ everything in the Bible, and thus protest against Darwinism (and a few other things). This is clearly silly, but it is best explained, I think, as simply another ritual confirming membership – like fasting during Ramadan or taking communion.

This Protestant emphasis on myth over ritual is strange and unique. However, even looking at the Bible, how much of it contradicts science? There’s a chapter in Genesis. Then there are quasi-historical reports of miraculous events – but these don’t contradict science (with one or two exceptions, like the sun standing still in the sky in Joshua), they merely report strange events, like virgin births and rising from the dead. The rest of the Bible includes history (mythology), which may or may not be accurate, poetry (the psalms, the Song of Solomon, etc.), biography (the Gospels), parables (Job), and theology (the letters of Paul). Only a miniscule protion of the Bible involves quasi-scientific explanations for natural events.

Religion consists of more than a belief system (rituals, church attendance, hymn-singing, story-telling, etc.). Current scientific knowledge casts doubt on the literal truth of the Creation Story – but it cannot suggest we should avoid singing hymns or tithing to the poor. In addition, philosophers talk about different kinds of “knowledge”, one of which is “experiential knowledge”. A physicist may be able to describe the physics involved in riding a bicycle, but if he has never ridden a bike he lacks the kind of knowledge about bike riding that Lane Armstrong has. Similarly, we science-oriented atheists lack the experiential knowledge about religious experiences that religious people have. The great religious mystics and saints, who have dedicated their lives to meditation and the practice of their religion may (or may not) be deluded – but they clearly know things about religion and faith that we do not know.

[Gideonthenomad]

Ecurb
I agree with much (not all) of what you say, but the first paragraph puzzles me. Religion divested of supernatural claims can still be religion. Your own examples of Islam and mystics attest to this.

In addition, I was using "aims" metaphorically, as in the "why" of a religion, what it exists to do. Perhaps "function" is better. Either way, I wasn't attributing agency to religion.

[Ecurb]

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just clarifying. "Claims" might not be general enough. Religion involves "supernatural statements" -- or, at least, that's as good as we can do in defining it (in my opinion). That being the case, the modern, scientifically oriented person who believes that natural evidence is required to form a "belief" will always find scientific claims more persuasive than religious ones.

But is "belief" the foundation of religion? In one of the most famous theological passages in the Bible, it isn't. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "And though I ... understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing." Of course we modern scientific types DO understand many mysteries, and we have sufficient faith (in our science and technology) that we CAN remove mountains. According to Paul, it "profiteth us nothing".

"And now abideth faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love." So ends the chapter. Yet many atheists want to argue about how faith in science is superior to faith in God, and many Christians (especially Fundamentalists) argue that faith (not love) is the defining characteristic of their creed. Paul, it seems, would disagree.

[Gideonthenomad]

Ecurb

The Pauline quote is illuminating, and I think illustrative of my point.

[Iain Sparrow]

Ecurb

The Pauline quote is illuminating, and I think illustrative of my point.

But you're assuming that Paul really said those things, and furthermore, that the passage was inspired by God. I'm not sure that outside of the Bible we even have evidence that Paul was a real person?

[Gideonthenomad]

But you're assuming that Paul really said those things, and furthermore, that the passage was inspired by God. I'm not sure that outside of the Bible we even have evidence that Paul was a real person?

Doesn't matter if Paul said it. Somebody said it. You can substitute quotes by any number of figures that have the same gist, though perhaps not expressing it so lyrically.

[Iain Sparrow]

Doesn't matter if Paul said it. Somebody said it. You can substitute quotes by any number of figures that have the same gist, though perhaps not expressing it so lyrically.


"I believe in one thing only, the power of human will."

Do you know who we attribute that quote to?.. that would be one Joseph Stalin, mass murderer and psychopath. When you quote someone it matters that they really existed and if so, that the quote is accurate. In the context of biblical scripture, if it wasn't inspired by God than it's rather meaningless.

[Gideonthenomad]

"I believe in one thing only, the power of human will."

Do you know who we attribute that quote to?.. that would be one Joseph Stalin, mass murderer and psychopath. When you quote someone it matters that they really existed and if so, that the quote is accurate. In the context of biblical scripture, if it wasn't inspired by God than it's rather meaningless.

But for our purposes (i.e. talking about people's subjective experiences) it doesn't matter if any particular historical figure had that experience or not, only that someone did. Similarly with Stalin, as long as someone had the subjective experience articulated in the quote, it doesn't matter if Stalin said it or not.

I don't deny, of course, that outside the very limited context of the issues being discussed in this thread, who said what is extremely important.

[MorpheusSandman]

To paraphrase the writer as I understood him/her, religion (Christianity specifically) is a compendium of factual claims about the nature of reality, not an account of "subjective" religious experienceNo, Yudkowsky says quite explicitly here that: "Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law - before legislative bodies; religion laid down history - before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals - before Women's Lib; religion described the forms of government - before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars. The Old Testament doesn't talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe - it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men's clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era. The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what's left."

Later he calls The Bible a "culture dump," though I'd be more inclined to use your word "compendium." Most religions seem like "compendiums" of every aspect of their culture, of which science is merely one part, but also ethics, history, politics, etc. He's saying that to treat it as if it was JUST about ethics, or JUST about supernatural subjective experiences or JUST about anything is to distort what it is. I think it's dishonest either to state that The Bible never made scientific claims, or to claim that those scientific claims aren't incorrect and haven't been better answered by modern science. Similarly, we need to accept that the morality espoused in The Bible is, mostly, no longer relevant to our modern culture. Religions HAVE to be viewed as imperfect products of their time/culture, rather than "rescued" from modern culture by making claims about them, such as NOM, that simply aren't true.


"subjective religious experience" is at the heart of religion, or at the very least not peripheral to it.That article points out that, before the libraries and "modernism" of the Romans, the OT didn't limit itself to "subjective religious experience" but rather huge, cataclysmic miracles that, if they happened, would've constituted almost unambiguous evidence for an all-powerful supernatural being:
"One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." ...The vast majority of religions in human history... tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened...

"The Roman Empire inherited philosophy from the ancient Greeks; imposed law and order within its provinces; kept bureaucratic records; and enforced religious tolerance. The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn't invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn't just stone them.

"In contrast, the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked."


While science can (and should) refute the fantastical claims of religion, when a Christian says something along the lines of "I feel God in my heart," there is really no scientific way to tell him he doesn't.But equally there's absolutely no authority by which to say he DOES feel God in his heart either; why in the world should we just take his word for it? As I've reiterated numerous times on this forum throughout different threads, that people have such experiences and believe them personally isn't really the issue to me; but when people start thinking that God is talking to them and wants them to vote against same-sex marriage (to use one example), then their "personal" experiences become political and affect others. George Bush, supposedly, went to war after asking God about it, who supposedly replied, "yes, do it." Surely when such personal beliefs begin to affect millions of others the onus is REALLY on the person claiming they're feeling/listening to God, and NOT on science to prove they aren't. Science has already proven countless times that nature, not the supernatural, is behind phenomena we once thought only explainable via the supernatural; what makes anyone think this won't hold true for what we attribute in our hearts/heads to belonging to God?


On a side note, I found the writer's analogy between the Baal/Jehovah dilemma and a scientific experiment to be amusing, but somewhat facile as most attempts to retro-fit current conceptual models onto modes of thinking long past tend to be.Whether one calls that science or not, the point is that the story is used as a way to prove that their God is the true God. They're anticipating some natural event that will prove their hypothesis right. Maybe that's not strictly science in a modern sense, but I think even the ancients had some notion of how such "miracles" would offer evidence/proof of their supernatural beliefs.


My idea of NOM is different from the conventional one...No, I get what you're saying about such subjective experiences, but I nonetheless think it's important to realize that emphasizing such things as being central to religion is probably a modern concept. As my link explains, the OT (and most of the NT) doesn't describe its religion or relationship with the supernatural in such personal, subjective terms, but rather in massive (OT) and smaller (NT) socio-cultural terms. It seems to me that the takeover of science for explaining natural phenomena and modern modes of government and ethics has FORCED religion into being about unprovable, untestable, unfalsifiable things like "subjective experiences." Yet, even there, I ask again why using "God" to explain them would be more likely true than using biology/neurology/evolutionary psychology to explain them?

[MorpheusSandman]

Religion is defined by its supernatural claims and practices. I'm not sure if you can define religion by any one thing; the world religions have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. Like I said, "massive cultural compendiums usually involving supernatural claims about the universe/reality, morality, history, government, etc." seems about as good as one can get.


It seems to me there are prejudices on both sides: clearly the naturalist who says, “Jesus didn’t rise from the dead because it is impossible to rise from the dead,” is putting the cart before the horse. If Jesus rose from the dead, then it is not impossible. The “natural laws” (which we humans have invented) cannot take precedence over the facts. Indeed, we invent the laws to describe and predict the facts.This is a muddle. Someone saying "Jesus can't rise from the dead because such a thing is impossible" is relying the absolute consistency of our experience that people don't rise from the dead. They're further implying that a story of such a thing happening is not (or should not be) enough to override that consistency of sense experience. Humans did not invent "natural laws," but we do invent models to describe the natural laws that exist that we observe. If we observe changes then we change the models, yet we've never observed anyone rising from the dead, so it's reasonable to infer that any such stories are more likely fiction, which we have more than enough precedence for.


The extent to which religion is merely a primitive or naïve science, however, is dubious.I'm not really sure how your following paragraph argued that it was dubious... it rather seemed to have supported the notion.


Nonetheless, I think the ‘science vs. religion” argument is naïve, because, as gideon points out, there is a lot more to religion than offering supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. Let’s look (for example) at the Five Pillars of Islam... Which of these pillars contradicts anything science has to offer?As I've said before, I think the biggest conflict between science and religion is in the method by which they form beliefs about how reality works. Yes, there are some conflicts in what conclusions they reach (Creationism VS evolution), but just as often there aren't conflicts at all, as you described in those "Five Pillars." Yet even with those, if there were reasons given why, eg, someone should pray then science might could investigate those claims. If it was "pray 5 times a day and you will live longer and be wealthy and be healed of all diseases" then those are claims science could investigate/study, they would be falsifiable. On the other hand, making claims that are unfalsifiable, like "God wants you to pray," strikes me as rather anti-science, since science relies on such falsifiability to function.


Similarly, we science-oriented atheists lack the experiential knowledge about religious experiences that religious people have. I'm skeptical that people can't have the same experiences the religious have outside of religion. The overwhelming, emotional, transcendental experiences I've had with select pieces of music, literature, and film strike me as the things that the religious would attribute to their being in contact somehow with God. Similarly, reading romantic poetry makes one think that these poets had similar experiences/feelings about nature (MH Abrahms has a book called Natural Supernaturalism about this very thing).


Current scientific knowledge casts doubt on the literal truth of the Creation Story – but it cannot suggest we should avoid singing hymns or tithing to the poor.It's helpful to think of science as a GPS system: a GPS system can't tell you where you want to go, it can only tell you how best to get there. Science is much the same. When people talk about the limits of science they often speak on the "where do we want to go?" level.

[Ecurb]

I'm not really sure how your following paragraph argued that it was dubious... it rather seemed to have supported the notion.
.

Well, yes. I said "The extent to which religion is merely a primitive or naïve science, however, is dubious." Then I outlined some examples of how religion is (or seems like) primitive science.

In addition, when it comes to the Laws of Nature (I said "natural law", but that's unclear because that phrase has another, idiomatic meaning), my thinking is a little unclear. Did humans "invent" or "discover" the laws of nature? I'd suggest that by thinking we merely "discover" them, we are suggesting some Cosmic Clockmaker, who established them in the first place. If nature is purposeless, then the planets proceed on their cosmic dance because of "gravity", not because of "the law of gravity". The law of gravity is a cultural construct we have developed to describe how the planets (and other things) move. It's a minor disinction, but a reasonable one.



I'm skeptical that people can't have the same experiences the religious have outside of religion. The overwhelming, emotional, transcendental experiences I've had with select pieces of music, literature, and film strike me as the things that the religious would attribute to their being in contact somehow with God. Similarly, reading romantic poetry makes one think that these poets had similar experiences/feelings about nature (MH Abrahms has a book called Natural Supernaturalism about this very thing).

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You seem perilously close to advocating for the airhead actresses whom AuntShecky and JHG deplore in the other thread for calling herself, "Not religious, but spiritual." We literary types do have transcendent, overwhelming and emotional experiences triggered by art. Such expereinces mght also be triggered by falling in love, or breaking up with our lovers. But why should that make us pooh-pooh religious experiences? I'll grant that facile religious experiences (from reading the Bible, perhaps) may be similar to experiences derived from reading other books. However, to think your experience of art comparable to that of the Buddhist monk who practices meditation for thirty years and then crawls across the Himalayas on his hands and knees on a spiritual pilgrimage smacks of hubris. Religions have, over the years, developed sophisticated techniques for facilitating mystical, transcendent experiences. The saint who practices these techniques daily for decades, flagellating himself all the while (OK, I just put that in for humor) can surely experience something that you and I cannot. The reason the air-head actress who claims to be "spiritual" is objectionable is that she hasn't studied or practiced the techniques of spirituality. She's a dilettante, and I'll grant, Morpheus, that you are just as spiritual as she is. However, the notion that a non-religious person can be just as spiritual as the Saint (without the practice, faith, or talent for it) is ludicrous. It's like suggesting that an illiterate person can be just as good a poet as Walt Whitman.

Christians think that FAITH (and the transcendent experience that accompanies it) is a gift from God,and that only by asking for His help can one become the new and differant person who can achieve salvation. Even if God is no more than a culural construct, it is certainly possible that there is a great deal of truth to this belief. Why couldn't there be? Why can't careful study of culturally constructed concepts be enlightening?

[MorpheusSandman]

Well, yes. I said "The extent to which religion is merely a primitive or naïve science, however, is dubious." Then I outlined some examples of how religion is (or seems like) primitive science.My bad, I missed the "merely" qualifier. :)


However, the notion that a non-religious person can be just as spiritual as the Saint (without the practice, faith, or talent for it) is ludicrous. It's like suggesting that an illiterate person can be just as good a poet as Walt Whitman. For a naturalistic atheist like myself, "spirituality" is nothing but what we call the ill-understand processes of the brain that produce certain thoughts and emotions; so, to me, the notion that religious people have some kind of special ownership/possession of what they call "religious experiences" is far more ludicrous than secularized people saying they've had the same experience with non-religious, non-supernatural things. You can no more measure or gauge my feeling during Isolde's Liebestod than you can the Buddhist Monk who crawled across the Himalayas, so who or you (or anyone) to definitively say whose experience is more profound?

To me, all you've written about such people "developing sophisticated techniques for facilitating mystical experiences" seems almost laughable; is this similar to the "sophisticated techniques" developed for alchemy? I mean, for Pete's sake, we're talking about subjective experiences here; I have no idea why you think it takes more hubris for me to claim my experiences with art are equal to most religious experiences as it does for you to claim they're not. If anything, I'm far harder to impress than most believers are.


Even if God is no more than a culural construct, it is certainly possible that there is a great deal of truth to this belief. Why couldn't there be? Why can't careful study of culturally constructed concepts be enlightening?Certainly it can be enlightening; I don't know what made you think I implied it couldn't. But it need not be the only culturally constructed concept of God we explore either: Jung saw God as being one with the collective unconsciousness, Blake saw it as being the creator in man, Stevens saw God as embodying all of man's ideals; these are "Gods" I can get behind and believe in, and if I believe in Blake's God, and have, indeed, spent much of my life pondering that idea, who are you to say my experiences aren't every bit as spiritual as those that believe in the Judeo-Christian external deity?

[Ecurb]

For a naturalistic atheist like myself, "spirituality" is nothing but what we call the ill-understand processes of the brain that produce certain thoughts and emotions; so, to me, the notion that religious people have some kind of special ownership/possession of what they call "religious experiences" is far more ludicrous than secularized people saying they've had the same experience with non-religious, non-supernatural things. You can no more measure or gauge my feeling during Isolde's Liebestod than you can the Buddhist Monk who crawled across the Himalayas, so who or you (or anyone) to definitively say whose experience is more profound?

To me, all you've written about such people "developing sophisticated techniques for facilitating mystical experiences" seems almost laughable; is this similar to the "sophisticated techniques" developed for alchemy? I mean, for Pete's sake, we're talking about subjective experiences here; I have no idea why you think it takes more hubris for me to claim my experiences with art are equal to most religious experiences as it does for you to claim they're not. If anything, I'm far harder to impress than most believers are.

?

I didn't mean to suggest anything about your personal ability to be moved by art in what seems a "spiritual" way. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that sophisticated techniques for facillitating experiences (which we call "spiritual") can indeed facillitate experiences that differ considerably from those of atheists and laymen. Why wouldn't they? Suppose, instead of spiritual experiences, we were to discuss other experiences that produce particular "thoughts and emotions". A mathematician, for example, may have mental experiences when lost in developing a complicated proof that the layperson doesn't quite understand. It's not that the layperson can't have other experiences that are similar in some ways. However, the level of mental involvement, intellectual complexity, and degree of understanding for the trained mathematician MIGHT (there's no way of knowing for sure) be different in degree (and possibly even in kind) from those of the sophomore geometry student.

If we look around the world at techniques that have been developed to facillitate spiritual experiences, they include: social isolation; fasting; torture; complicated breathing and meditation techniques developed through years of practice; hallucinagenic drugs -- and more. We read about great mystics who have visions, strange dreams, etc. Would Teresa of Avila have experienced her highly sexualized love for Jesus if she hadn't been an abstinent nun? Perhaps, or perhaps her supposed visions were no more "spiritual" than the thoughts of other, non-religious writers. There are dozens of other examples.

I agree with you that there are any number of culturally constituted approaches to the divine (obviously, since there are many religions). What I'm suggesting is that those (whatever their religion) who study diligently, who incorporate their faith wholeheartedly, and who apply the learned, time-tested techniques rigorously are likely to have different mental experiences than those who do not. The same is true for math, art, or music (I imagine). One difference, however, is that the religious mystic or Saint MIGHT give himself more completely to his spiritual quest than the mathematician, the artist, or the musician. I suppose there might be artists who cloister themselves, or deny themselves human company or sexual contact because they think it makes them more single-minded in their quest for artistic enlightenment. From my experience with artists, however, this is rare. Training and technique can change the "thoughts and emotions" of mathematicians and artists. Religious mystics testify to spiritual experiences that differ from those of laymen. I see no reason (even from a naturalistic point of view) to disbelieve them.

[MorpheusSandman]

I didn't mean to suggest anything about your personal ability to be moved by art in what seems a "spiritual" way. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that sophisticated techniques for facillitating experiences (which we call "spiritual") can indeed facillitate experiences that differ considerably from those of atheists and laymen. Why wouldn't they? Suppose, instead of spiritual experiences, we were to discuss other experiences that produce particular "thoughts and emotions". A mathematician, for example, may have mental experiences when lost in developing a complicated proof that the layperson doesn't quite understand. It's not that the layperson can't have other experiences that are similar in some ways. However, the level of mental involvement, intellectual complexity, and degree of understanding for the trained mathematician MIGHT (there's no way of knowing for sure) be different in degree (and possibly even in kind) from those of the sophomore geometry student. That's more reasonable than saying/suggesting that believers have a kind of ownership on such experiences that others can't have in any similar way. That said, I must point out that we're only speculating at this point because we have no objective means of gauging any of these experiences comparatively. I can think of one reason to the question "Why wouldn't they (be different)?" and that's because all brains are far more similar than they are different. Our noticing and exaggerating differences is, in itself, a tendency of the brain, where two things may differ by only 1%, but we'll make that 1% difference all we focus on (skin color may be one such example).

So, even though every brain is wired slightly different, and even though believers and high-level mathematicians may be somewhat different, I'm skeptical that they're different enough to produce experiences that are, for the most part, off-limit to others. Afterall, Einstein listened to music to facilitate the creativity he found necessary to do math. The Bible itself is a work of art. Is a teenager putting up a poster of Britney Spears and wanting to be like her really come from a completely different impulse than the believer putting up an alter to Jesus and wanting to be like him? These are all products of social idealism, and even if they differ in many relevant ways, the primal drive is likely identical and likely constitutes the majority of our feelings associated with each.

[Gideonthenomad]

No, Yudkowsky says quite explicitly here that: "Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law - before legislative bodies; religion laid down history - before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals - before Women's Lib; religion described the forms of government - before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars. The Old Testament doesn't talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe - it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men's clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era. The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what's left."

But this is my point. He says religion does "everything" but then he qualifies that by saying it doesn't talk about wonder and so forth. His argument that the factual claims of religion should be challenged is valid, his assertion that that all it does is lay down the law, as it were, is not.

And the idea of religion in personal, subjective terms is an ancient, not a modern concept. Mystics, shamans, visionaries and what have you, have been around forever. The bible is full of expressions of praise, ecstasy, etc, etc. It's also not a matter of using "god" to explain them. It's that you cant really explain them with science. You can only describe the physical (neural, whatever) correlates of the experience. But you can't scientifically describe subjective experience, as it is by it's nature unobservable. Hence NOM.

The rest of your post doesn't actually say anything I disagree with. The mere fact of subjective experience doesn't imply that the experience gives you authority, that would be a sort of is-ought fallacy, wouldn't it?

[Gideonthenomad]

That's more reasonable than saying/suggesting that believers have a kind of ownership on such experiences that others can't have in any similar way. That said, I must point out that we're only speculating at this point because we have no objective means of gauging any of these experiences comparatively. I can think of one reason to the question "Why wouldn't they (be different)?" and that's because all brains are far more similar than they are different. Our noticing and exaggerating differences is, in itself, a tendency of the brain, where two things may differ by only 1%, but we'll make that 1% difference all we focus on (skin color may be one such example).

So, even though every brain is wired slightly different, and even though believers and high-level mathematicians may be somewhat different, I'm skeptical that they're different enough to produce experiences that are, for the most part, off-limit to others. Afterall, Einstein listened to music to facilitate the creativity he found necessary to do math. The Bible itself is a work of art. Is a teenager putting up a poster of Britney Spears and wanting to be like her really come from a completely different impulse than the believer putting up an alter to Jesus and wanting to be like him? These are all products of social idealism, and even if they differ in many relevant ways, the primal drive is likely identical and likely constitutes the majority of our feelings associated with each.

I suspect one quality of "religious experience" is a feeling of self-transcendence, not necessarily social idealism. There does seem to be a difference between the two. Though somewhat dated, an excellent book on the topic is "The varieties of Religious experience" by William James. I'd recommend it, if you haven't read it.

[MorpheusSandman]

And the idea of religion in personal, subjective terms is an ancient, not a modern concept. Mystics, shamans, visionaries and what have you, have been around forever. The bible is full of expressions of praise, ecstasy, etc, etc.I don't think anyone would deny that personal experiences have always been a part of religion, yet, as Yudkowsky points out, most ancient religious stories don't JUST involve the personal, subjective, and unprovable but, indeed, the social, objective, and falsifiable. The vast majority of the OT is involved in cataclysmic, world-wide events that, even when they involve a personal element, like God speaking to Noah about the impending flood, ends in a huge event that affects everyone. So while I wouldn't say that the personal is absent from ancient religion, I would agree that the notion that it is only or primarily personal, subjective, and unprovable is recent because, as you suggest, religion on that level is one that hasn't completely been replaced by better institutions like science.


It's also not a matter of using "god" to explain them. It's that you cant really explain them with science. You can only describe the physical (neural, whatever) correlates of the experience. But you can't scientifically describe subjective experience, as it is by it's nature unobservable. Hence NOM.As long as one isn't using NOM to say that all aspects of religion and science are unrelated then I don't mind it so much, but I think it tends to obscure the major point that so many aspects of religious belief (and the religious method of coming to knowledge) do "overlap" with science can be used to analyze such claims. As for science describing subjective experience, let me put it like this: science can describe physically and biologically most everything that's happening during sex, but such objective description can't replicate the subjective feeling of the experience. But where we have to make a distinction is between the subjective feeling of the experience, and our attempts to explain it. Any time we go from "I felt this" to "this is why I felt this," we are in the realm of science, of explaining the reasons behind phenomena. So when someone says "I had this experience because of God," I do think there's an onus for us to question and analyze the supposed stated clause. That science in its descriptions doesn't replicate our experience shouldn't, in any way, be confused with it being wrong or inadequate. I see no conflict between accepting the purely natural explanations behind why we enjoy sex, while still continuing to enjoy sex without having to attribute it to being a gift from God or a little blind boy shooting arrows.


I suspect one quality of "religious experience" is a feeling of self-transcendence, not necessarily social idealism. There does seem to be a difference between the two. Though somewhat dated, an excellent book on the topic is "The varieties of Religious experience" by William James. I'd recommend it, if you haven't read it.I know of William James but haven't read that book, so thanks for the rec. Anyway, I do think "social idealism" can lead to feeling of "self-transcendence" precisely because one feels that they are a part of the social ideal itself and not just an isolated individual self. The social ideal is USUALLY seen as transcending the self because it's cultural, collective, not just dependent on the individual for its existence.