A trend is evident.
With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing.
Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon reason.
In his "The Mind and the Cosmos" chapter, Douthat attempts to demonstrate that our current knowledge about how the mind works points to divinity, albeit in a circuitous fashion.
For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI). What he says here is correct. Referencing a 2023 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Douthat writes:
At the heart of their wonder was the technology's air of mystery, its oracular quality, the way it seemed to break with the patterns of Enlightenment science, in which sequences of replicable experimental processes are supposed to yield results that are trustworthy and verifiable because we can see, step by step, how the entire process works.
With AI, by contrast, the systems can be so complex that we don't always understand how they are generating answers to our questions… There's a black box at the heart of the machine, a hard-to-pin-down element inside the algorithms.
So far, so good. However, he then goes off the rails by saying:
But the quest to build an artificial intelligence also represents a place where the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project.
This is Douthat doing his God of the Gaps thing, as I've noted in previous posts about his book. Just because it is impossible to tell exactly how AI arrives at its answers to problems doesn't imply that because it also is impossible to tell exactly how the human mind operates, something supernatural must be lurking behind the scenes.
Douthat correctly says that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is still a mystery, though some persuasively argue that the hard problem of how conscious selfhood arises isn't really a problem at all, but a failure of looking upon the mind/brain correctly.
For all the advances in brain mapping, the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself… If reading an argument makes you angry, if reading a novel makes you sad, if reading a poem stirs a sudden childhood memory, there is no material account of how that happens, how the outward act generates the inner experience.
Okay, I generally agree. But there's no immaterial or supernatural account of how that happens either. So I find Douthat's criticism of neuroscience to be unfair, in that he's equating a current gap in scientific knowledge about the mind/brain with a fatal flaw in the materialist outlook on reality.
In the end, the emperor is always naked: redescribe as you will, reduce as you may, nobody has any idea how or why the physical inputs that go into conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves.
Yet he also acknowledges the obvious fact that physical causes affect our experience.
Of course consciousness exists in some kind of dynamic relationship to physical reality; nobody who's encountered alcohol or pot or caffeine doubts that the experience of selfhood can be altered by conducting chemistry experiments in your bloodstream or your brain.
I kept waiting for some convincing argument from Douthat about how the mind isn't just the brain in action, but is a link or emissary from a supernatural realm, but that argument never materialized. About the best he could do is roll out a weak argument that because it feels to us like the mind is something immaterial, it must be.
Which is to say that after five hundred years of scientific discovery, consciousness still looks just as supernatural in the colloquial sense — meaning "super-material" or "super-physical," not just another arrangement of atoms but a distinct irreducibility of some kind, acting on physical reality without being physical itself — as it did in the era of Descartes or Leibniz.
As he often does, in this chapter Douthat falls back upon a weak argument that despite science's best efforts, there is still a strong element of mystery about the brain/mind, this shows that religiosity is a better way of understanding reality.
In the end, the idea that we have available some clearly more rational or more scientific alternative to a "naively" supernatural understanding of the mind is itself fundamentally naive. Whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, it self-evidently has its own integrity, its own being, which is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions.
We all know this, at some level, because we cannot not know it; the attempt to refuse the knowledge is itself a manifestation of the very thing that's supposedly being refused or overthrown. Mind cannot reduce mind; consciousness cannot explain itself away. The soul may not be exactly as ancient religions imagined it, but under any conceivable paradigm it will always be very much alive.
I'm confident that Douthat is wrong. I say this because his attitude is just like those who long ago couldn't conceive that thunder and lightning could be anything other than the acts of gods; and who not so long ago couldn't conceive that the speed of light could be constant and that light doesn't require a medium to propagate, or that natural processes could result in the evolution of species over hundreds of millions of years.
Words like "self-evidently" favored by Douthat can't substitute for the fact that often science overturns self-evident conceptions of reality. I'm highly confident that he is wrong about the mind being an exception to the rule that whatever science seeks to know, it makes steady progress in gaining that knowledge — certainly to a much greater degree than religions do.
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>> I’m highly confident that he is wrong about the mind being an exception to the rule that whatever science seeks to know, it makes steady progress in gaining that knowledge — certainly to a much greater degree than religions do.<< Well reading made me think that science like many other activities develops according an tangent curve like the development of sound quality in amplifiers and speakers ...in the beginning much was gained with relative little effort and cost but to enhance today the quality of sound enormous amount of money must be invested to be able to hear the differences with a previous level ...they have hid a wall so to say This can stand as a metaphor for the progress of science. One should not ask the question where consciousness, mind etc can be finally grasped but what the reach of science is in terms of theory and research. Simple said everything related to science is ..restricted ... is finite, ...it has to be. AI ...is not an advantage as it carries the same limitations of the material that it was trained with....restricted. And yes these things are all self evident .....as in aikido ...the power one has control over can be describe with moving the arms in circles. ...at the end of the f.inger tips there is no power left. Everything of form ....form being also an concept .... is restricted .... science is form in all its aspects ... these books as he does should not be written as it should be common sense to understand that science cannot step outside its own natural limits of form and the fact that he wants to prove something means that he has not yet arrived at the point that science has just to stand on his own legs and as such is an help for humanity to ajust to nature, in its many forms.
Indeed, just because concepts like mind and consciousness cannot be measured, they are often used to ‘fill the gaps’ in our understanding and as you state “As he often does, in this chapter Douthat falls back upon a weak argument that despite science’s best efforts, there is still a strong element of mystery about the brain/mind, this shows that religiosity is a better way of understanding reality.”
I’ll repeat my usual point that to understand the mind is to understand it in terms of information. Chirapa Ukachoke on his research of the mind phenomenon states: – “Because the mind is a non-material, informational entity, it is not a conventional physical entity (or mechanical entity) like mass, energy, or force; that is why it is so different from the conventional physical entities. But, because information and information-processing processes are physical entities, the mind, which is an informational entity, is also a physical entity.” And adds: – “But just because it is ‘non-material’, it doesn’t negate the fact that it is a product of the brains’ neural processes.”
And consciousness, well, I quite like J. Krishnamurti’s take where he speaks of “awareness as purely being a moment of observing without evaluating and that our fears, anxieties, thoughts, pleasures and constant efforts of bettering etc. etc., comprise the content of human consciousness. Thus, our seeing or listening, or any action primarily comes from the contents of consciousness.”
I’d reckon that the entire body, being an aware organism is involved in interpretating awareness as consciousness – where the mind (brain)gets confused with the cognitive processes of thought, memory, feelings etc. and we end up with the concept of consciousness.
Yep. As you say, straight-up fallacious god-of-the-gaps argument, that. Disappointing, absolutely, given we’d looked for something more …engaging, here.
And his throwing around that word, “supernatural”. What the hell is “supernatural”? Said this before, but should spells and incantations be a thing, then such would also be best explored via the methods of science. To say that something is supernatural, is to simply say that it doesn’t exist at all.
And, haha, yes, he does make that word do a lot of work, doesn’t he? That word, “self-evident”?
Re-reading that bit about consciousness appearing to be “not just another arrangement of atoms but a distinct irreducibility of some kind” : That’s what’s referred to as a false dichotomy, isn’t it?
True, consciousness clearly isn’t “just another arrangement of atoms”. But that doesn’t mean that it therefore has a to be a “distinct irreducibility of some kind”. No, there’s the obvious third option, which of course is what both neuroscience as well as Buddhistic thought points at — that consciousness is not an “arrangement of atoms” itself, but it is an emergent property of such.
That’s …I don’t know, either this man is being deliberately dishonest, or else he’s stupid — even if not generally stupid, but certainly stupid when it comes to his reasoning about consciousness and God, as he presents it here.
Interesting breakdown of this chapter of Douthat’s book. But as per who’s right, seems to me like a stalemate. That’s because if Douthat is only making an insufficient God of the Gaps argument, you’re rebutting it with an Atheism of the Gaps argument.
I guess to that one could counter “But Douthat is the one making the bold claim.” But this universe with life on earth and laws of physics all arising ex nihilo is likewise a bold claim. And so I look forward to seeing how the book progresses before drawing any overall conclusions about either side.
We put 4 pools in the soil, connect them with wire and we have a meadow where we can confine cattle.
There is no “meadow” … in nature …. it is brought into existence.
That is what we do with words, with science etc we bring things into our domain so that we can use them.
We cannot see through objects with the tools available to our system but we can TRANSLATE things that are otherwise “invisible’ into our system ..that way we can use x-ray in medical world and have astronomers access to many activities that are available in the universe.
That is how biologist got an idea of how different animal perceive the world.
That means that there could be an endless array of possibilities to be aware of reality.
and that we are by way of speaking “prisoners of an fixed way open to mankind” otherwise we are ..BLIND.
Science is in that sense just an reductionist way of translation ..make it visible, translate it to our level ..if not discard it.
Maybe, who knows have certaion humans found way to escape that prison
“That’s because if Douthat is only making an insufficient God of the Gaps argument, you’re rebutting it with an Atheism of the Gaps argument.”
That counter-argument betrays a lack of understanding about what atheism actually is. Or else it betrays a lack of understanding about how the burden of proof works. Or maybe a lack of understanding about both.