David Brooks on Neural Buddhism
As I write this, an article on Buddhism, atheism and neuroscience is the top emailed article on the NY Times website.
In it, he makes a couple of interesting claims about the so-called “New Atheism” debates and where they’re probably headed. First, he thinks that “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.”
Second, he seems to suggest that a form of emergentism or supervenience theory will challenge our views on the mind: “the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism” because “squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking.”
Third, he thinks that the argument won’t center around the existence of “God” per se, but around panentheism versus revealed religions’ personal God: “The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”
Now, Brooks has muddled up a lot of difficult debates in philosophy of mind and religion all together in this article, so I’m not pointing it out as a piece that clarifies anything. His description of “materialism” and the role of emotions, for example, is very thin and doesn’t do justice to the discussion of physicalism in the current literature. I’ll talk more about Jaegwon Kim in connection with this, hopefully tomorrow.
However, it’s always exciting to see references to one’s academic interests in mainstream media. Further, I think that Brooks is correct in isolating the role of revealed texts in this debate. This is where the division lies, not between God-believers and atheists. Many Unitarian Universalists, United Church of Christ members and other liberal Protestant groups are close to atheism and agnosticism, even if they call it something else.*
The question is really about where our most certain knowledge comes from: experience or revelation. Thus, epistemology, not metaphysics or mind, is central in these discussions. The metaphysics and view of the mind come second, for religious believers whose knowledge is informed by revealed texts.
Universality of human traits may be what we see through observation, but revelation draws thick lines between groups. Mystical experience may tell us that we are one with the reality we like to term “god” or “the divine”, but only revelation can tell us what content there is to those two fuzzy terms since such experiences are, by their very nature, content-less.
Brooks concludes, “In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.” I don’t think this is unexpected, however. Religious believers who have prized mysticism have been concerned with empiricism and science for a long time. Within religion, divides between the mystic and the theologian are well-known.
Despite Newberg and others writing about religion, I see little evidence that science is reinforcing religion and vice versa. Rather, science is continuing to do what it’s done: study human reality. Scientists are not seeking to back claims about the reality of nibbana or Brahman, but to translate experiential description into (sorry, Brooks) materialistic terms. Mystics are embracing the latest scientific discoveries in order to back their particular religious interests.
And, looking askance, revealed religion’s theologians are outside of the debate, proud of what Hitchens and Dawkins disdain: the impossibility of subjecting their claims to any empirical test.
*Dawkins and many other “New Atheists” suggest that the term “God”, when applied to nature, to things like mystery, human love and community, etc., is not the being which they are rejecting. Liberal Protestantism, having rejected revelation as an infallible guide to reality, can characterize God in ways that are more amenable to these views. The “God of Einstein” is the description you often will hear in atheistic texts, meaning a God which is impersonal and without agency, even amoral.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Also, via Pharyngula, I found this discussion of the article. It has a lot better critical analysis than mine in terms of how badly Brooks misconstrues the finding of science.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
[...] though I earlier suggested that David Brooks was mashing together all kinds of ideas in his editorial, I do contend that [...]