If my faith is in free will, then does not all else become irrelevant, except to choose between either nihilism or hope?My fate in the hands of a scientist. All my thoughts nothing but silent chemical murmurings, heard by nothing.
Progress towards what, and how will I find it if I can't choose it, but must derive it?
Where are Plato's forms? Isn't that which is transcendent, immanent as well?
What powers the formula, if it be not will?
Something from nothing, a long algebraic calculation. The ultimate algorithm. The universe as a computer. Or no, as software, but run on what?
If you were to perform all the calculations on me in a very powerful computer, and tell me what I was bound to do on the basis of your calculations, then would I not do something different, just out of the capricious need to be free?
Values based on what? If it's all in the genes and chemical processes, and these are understood, then am I naught but my own chemical processes telling my own chemical processes what to do? Isn't there at least a hint of paradox in this?
Let's make it easier. Just for the sake of argument, let's say it's all genes. I know that no one is trying to go this far, but it makes the argument easier to see. If I decided to change, say, a gene 152, which we can and will do, then it must be because another gene, say, gene 153 made me do so. But what if in the capriciousness need to be free, I change gene 153 so that I won't want to change gene 152. But that's no help because, actually, gene 137 said that I would do that. Well, then, I'll change gene 137 as well. Well, that's still no help because gene 125 said I'd do that. And so on and so on ... and how far will you take this process? How far can you take it? Till Death?
What is there exactly between cause and effect? How does cause ever reach effect?
How can you build a system of values on something that is in itself malleable and changeable? We can alter our genes. We can alter the chemical processes of our brain. Who knows what "laws" of physics we might dare dream of changing in the future? Do I dare build my values on such shaky foundations.
We lust for foundations, but is not materialism- ahem, I mean- deism just one more totem? One more sacred image for the holy to enter into?
Where is Dostoevsky when you need him? Does anyone still read Notes from the Underground?
Can anyone really answer what numbers are except the apprehension of something other. One. I and it. I and thou. Why?
If it's all a chain of cause and effect then that which exists outside of me might as well exist in me? But then why do I feel so separate? Why do I feel at all? Why is there an observer in me longing for freedom?
Is the conception of the greater Self given in the Upanishads really just another religion to be shot down as we move towards greater enlightenment? Or is it a realization that can be pointed to rationally, but only apprehended intuitively?
The collapsing of a reality wave, the big bang. Are we so sure that these things were not and are not choices?
I'll not give up my freedom, and do all you can with your sciences, I'll help you, science is a good thing. But come to your senses, don't grip too tightly what you'll have to let go of later.
In his recent book, Consilience, Professor Edward O. Wilson expands the compass of Darwinian evolution to include everything built on biology. Not even ethics and religion, the most stubborn redoubts of the humanities, escape Wilson's encircling "consilient knowledge." Cut down to basic biological impulses, the towering oak of religion leaves only a stump -- our instinct for belief. Religion has biological roots and like moral reasoning "is at every level intrinsically consilient with -- compatible with, intertwined with - the natural sciences." The biological reduction of religion brings it into agreement with the established knowledge of the natural sciences. Though most reductionists, Wilson included, think that everything in religion thus reduces, some have thought (e.g., Schopenhauer) that after one cleared the field of the biological the most valuable discoveries of religion appeared. The knot of natural roots at the base of religion's trunk makes biological reduction compelling. What is central to our biological needs can be read out, word for word as it were, in religion. Reading that table of equivalencies, Wilson concludes that religion has an earthly, not a transcendent source and does not offer any alternative basis for human values. All human behavior emerged in the same process that produced all of our fellow creatures' "instinctual algorithms, which are now being deciphered in genetic and neurobiological analysis. Wilson hopes that his consilient reduction of theology to biology will allow us to repair some of the damage attending religious belief.By restricting "religion" to a primitive yet prevalent phase of religious evolution, Wilson overlooks a resource for alternative values that points in a direction invisible to devotional religion or common biologically driven culture. Yet both his ecological vision and his hopes for consilient knowledge are a quest for a firm basis for values that will take humanity through and beyond the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century. His book betrays two causes of this near-sighted vision of religion: a) the predominance of a devotional futurism (a religion of afterlife) throughout the history of Christianity and its continuing prevalence in the fundamentalist Christianity of popular American religion; b) Wilson's own enculturation in fundamentalist Christianity. What Wilson has overlooked, as would anyone whose view of religion is determined by twentieth century Christian fundamentalism, is the heart of religion's alternative value structure. Denial of the self, or better self-transcendence is not explicable as a form of kin selection, operating at the level of the social group. Detachment from the biologically mandated consciousness that governs the vast majority of all our waking moments does not come naturally to biological life forms. It is a singular alternative to the biological lifestyle, attractive to a few and unknown to most. There is no denying that religion has been shaped by biology. But just as there may be some untapped value in discarded religion's greatest discovery, so there is a bit of biology alloying Wilson's purified consilient aims for the future. Wilson says that consilient naturalism is essentially different from the erstwhile religion: "it [theism] is in sharp contrast to the science of biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms." How is it that consilience succeeds when religion failed to escape biological nature, which overcame so much to bring us here and whose success now seems like a run-away train, threatening to barrel right on into an earthly hell? Those genetic algorithms haven't shut down; they are no more respecters of naturalistic consilience in "the modern age" than they were of the sacred precincts of religion. The values and goals of biology and consilient knowers are as tainted as those of naive religionists: both believe that knowledge (religion in the form of revelation) will deliver. Since consilience is a variant of our ancient skill of living by our wits, a skill by which our ancient genetic algorithms were eminently realized, it can only deliver more of the same.
Religion isn't a panacea for the ailments that Wilson hopes to address with consilient knowledge. It isn't even a holy grail for the aesthetics of consilience. But it already holds a more promising option than the combination of a biological ethic and a faux religious mythology based on the evolutionary epic. It should be seen as a complementary avenue, a critical one, among several that must be explored -- not from within the cloister of dogmatism, but in parity with all the consilient avenues of learning and knowledge.
Prof. L. Eslinger, Religious Studies, U. Calgary
