I would be interested, Kara, if it is a treatment of philosophical dualism.
JLN, I'll let you tell me if it is. But I think you and I would find it a discussion of pragmatic or functional, rather than philosophical, dualism.
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September 10, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Duel Between Body and Soul
By PAUL BLOOM
New Haven ?- What people think about many of the big issues that will be discussed in the next two months - like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the role of religion in public life - is intimately related to their views on human nature. And while there may be differences between Republicans and Democrats, one fundamental assumption is accepted by almost everyone. This would be reassuring - if science didn't tell us that this assumption is mistaken.
People see bodies and souls as separate; we are common-sense dualists. The President's Council on Bioethics expressed this belief system with considerable eloquence in its December 2003 report "Being Human'': "We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies)."
Our dualism makes it possible for us to appreciate stories where people are liberated from their bodies. In the movie "13 Going on 30,'' a teenager wakes up as Jennifer Garner, just as a 12-year-old was once transformed into Tom Hanks in "Big.'' Characters can trade bodies, as in "Freaky Friday,'' or battle for control of a single body, as when Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin fight it out in "All of Me.''
Body-hopping is not a Hollywood invention. Franz Kafka tells of a man who wakes up one morning as a gigantic insect. Homer, writing hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, describes how the companions of Odysseus were transformed into pigs - but their minds were unchanged, and so they wept. Children easily understand stories in which the frog becomes a prince or a villain takes control of a superhero's body.
In fact, most people think that a far more radical transformation actually takes place; they believe that the soul can survive the complete destruction of the body. The soul's eventual fate varies; most Americans believe it ascends to heaven or descends into hell, while people from other cultures believe that it enters a parallel spirit world, or occupies some other body, human or animal.
Our dualist perspective also frames how we think about the issues that are most central to our lives. It is no accident that a bioethics committee is talking about spirits. When people wonder about the moral status of animals or fetuses or stem cells, for instance, they often ask: Does it have a soul? If the answer is yes, then it is a precious individual, deserving of compassion and care.
In the case of abortion, our common-sense dualism can support either side of the issue. We use phrases like "my body" and "my brain," describing our bodies and body parts as if they were possessions. Some people insist that all of us - including pregnant women - own our bodies, and therefore can use them as we wish. To others, the organism residing inside a pregnant body has a soul of its own, possibly from the moment of conception, and would thereby have its own rights.
Admittedly, not everyone explicitly endorses dualism; some people wouldn't be caught dead talking about souls or spirits. But common-sense dualism still frames how we think about such issues. That's why people often appeal to science to answer the question "When does life begin?" in the hopes that an objective answer will settle the abortion debate once and for all. But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul.
And it is not a question that scientists could ever answer. The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in the brain. This is starkly demonstrated in cases in which damage to the brain wipes out capacities as central to our humanity as memory, self-control and decision-making.
One implication of this scientific view of mental life is that it takes the important moral questions away from the scientists. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, the qualities that we are most interested in from a moral standpoint - consciousness and the capacity to experience pain - result from brain processes that emerge gradually in both development and evolution. There is no moment at which a soulless body becomes an ensouled one, and so scientific research cannot provide objective answers to the questions that matter the most to us.
Some scholars are confident that people will come to accept this scientific view. In the domain of bodies, after all, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, and consist of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that dualism, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken.
I am less optimistic. I once asked my 6-year-old son, Max, about the brain, and he said that it is very important and involved in a lot of thinking - but it is not the source of dreaming or feeling sad, or loving his brother. Max said that's what he does, though he admitted that his brain might help him out. Studies from developmental psychology suggest that young children do not see their brain as the source of conscious experience and will. They see it instead as a tool we use for certain mental operations. It is a cognitive prosthesis, added to the soul to increase its computing power.
This understanding might not be so different from that of many adults. People are often surprised to find out that certain parts of the brain are shown to be active - they "light up" - in a brain scanner when subjects think about religion, sex or race. This surprise reveals the tacit assumption that the brain is involved in some aspects of mental life but not others. Even experts, when describing such results, slip into dualistic language: "I think about sex and this activates such-as-so part of my brain" - as if there are two separate things going on, first the thought and then the brain activity.
It gets worse. The conclusion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with the notion that the soul survives the death of the body. It is a much harder pill to swallow than evolution, then, and might be impossible to reconcile with many religious views. Pope John Paul II was clear about this, conceding our bodies may have evolved, but that theories which "consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."
This clash is not going to be easily resolved. The great conflict between science and religion in the last century was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.
Paul Bloom,a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of "Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
I guess this IS about dualism, but a particular application of it, namely the mind-brain division inspired, or reinforced, by Descartes and underwritten for him by the Christian notion of the soul-body division. I like to think of dualism in the sense of epistemological bifurcations of the world into opposing parts in general. This is where the so-called yin and yang of life is seen in terms of opposing divisions rather than complementary facets in which each facet defines the other (as yin and yang do) and together form unities.
The problem with "faith" is that a person expressing "faith" is essentially insisting that a guess about an unknown...
...IS CORRECT!
They make a guess....call it a belief....and then insist it is correct by claiming "to have faith" in the guess.
It really makes very little sense when you examine it stripped of the nonsense.
Agreed, Frank. What I object to most about "faith" is that it is usually presented, by the faithful, as obligatory and virtuous. A "belief" is functional for the guesser or it is not. S/he will give it up when it ceases to serve its (usually psychological or social) functions. But to insist that others adopt it is profoundly objectionable.
-edited
JLN, I have heard the argument more than once that religion is a source of our values: personal, community, national. I don't think the argument refers to one religion but, rather vaguely, to all of them because most religions have similar sets of values or beliefs. I think that non-religious or secular people are suspect because an observer doesn't see them as connected to a value system, or at least one they can identify. So the secular person is an object of doubt and mistrust. E.g., do we know if that secular person believes, for example, in: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not covet. Faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. Etc.
We do not trust the atheist or the secular because we do not know what he believes. If he were a Jew, or a Christian of any tradition, or a Muslim, or a Zoroastrian, we know the tenets by which he lives or is supposed to live. Maybe he doesn't live up to his faith but we assume he is trying. If a person eschews any religion, we do not know where he stands on the great moral questions.
Anent this topic, I read an interesting review by Natalie Angier in last Sunday's NYTimes book review. The book is Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. I'll patch in her review if I can retrieve it from the websit.
September 5, 2004
'The End of Faith': Against Toleration
By NATALIE ANGIER
THE END OF FAITH
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
By Sam Harris.
336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
hen I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
It's not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but ''The End of Faith'' articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity's long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ''We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.' '' To cite but one example: ''Jesus Christ -- who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens -- can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?'' The danger of religious faith, he continues, ''is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.''
Right now, if you are even vaguely observant, or have friends or grandmothers who are, you may be feeling not merely irritated, as you would while reading a political columnist with whom you disagree, but deeply offended. You may also think it inappropriate that a mainstream newspaper be seen as obliquely condoning an attack on religious belief. That reaction, in Harris's view, is part of the problem. ''Criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.''
A zippered-lip policy would be fine, a pleasant display of the neighborly tolerance that we consider part of an advanced democracy, Harris says, if not for the mortal perils inherent in strong religious faith. The terrorists who flew jet planes into the World Trade Center believed in the holiness of their cause. The Christian apocalypticists who are willing to risk a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East for the sake of expediting the second coming of Christ believe in the holiness of their cause. In Harris's view, such fundamentalists are not misinterpreting their religious texts or ideals. They are not defaming or distorting their faith. To the contrary, they are taking their religion seriously, attending to the holy texts on which their faith is built. Unhappily for international comity, the Good Books that undergird the world's major religions are extraordinary anthologies of violence and vengeance, celestial decrees that infidels must die.
In the 21st century, Harris says, when swords have been beaten into megaton bombs, the persistence of ancient, blood-washed theisms that emphasize their singular righteousness and their superiority over competing faiths poses a genuine threat to the future of humanity, if not the biosphere: ''We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation,'' he writes, ''because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.''
Harris reserves particular ire for religious moderates, those who ''have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths'' and who ''imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.'' Religious moderates, he argues, are the ones who thwart all efforts to criticize religious literalism. By preaching tolerance, they become intolerant of any rational discussion of religion and ''betray faith and reason equally.''
Harris, no pure materialist, acknowledges the human need for a mystical dimension to life, and he conveys something of a Buddhist slant on the nature of consciousness and reality. But he believes that mysticism, like other forms of knowledge, can be approached rationally and explored with the tools of modern neuroscience, without recourse to superstition and credulity.
''The End of Faith'' is far from perfect. Harris seems to find ''moral relativism'' as great a sin as religious moderation, and in the end he singles out Islam as the reigning threat to humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, Inquisition-style Christianity of the 13th century, yet he never explains how Christianity became comparatively domesticated. And on reading his insistence that it is ''time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,'' I couldn't help but think of Ann Coulter's morally developed suggestion that we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert their citizens to Christianity.
Harris also drifts into arenas of marginal relevance to his main thesis, attacking the war against drugs here, pacificism there, and offering a strained defense for the use of torture in wartime that seems all the less persuasive after Abu Ghraib. Still, this is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.
Natalie Angier has written about atheism and science for The Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
I would probably enjoy Harris's book, except that I already believe most of what appears to be his argument. I don't like to be part of the choir. My position has been for many years that fundamentalism or literalism in religion is both a major threat to the world and not even genuine religion (in the sense of re-ligare: reconnecting us to the Cosmic ground of our being--but that's a long story). At the same time, I don't understand the nature of Harris' condemnation of moderate religion. Does he want moderate believers to attack extremist for their beliefs or only for their actions? I'm sure even moderate Muslims disapprove of the actions of Islamacists already. I do think that within Islam, Christianity and Judaism there SHOULD be an active struggle against the more dangerous aspects of their religions' irrationality, namely the moral absolutism that "justfies" the physical destruction of unbelievers.
I have an anecdote as painful as the one recounted in the review. When my father, an atheist, died,a christian fundamentalist relative whose father, a baptist minister, has been trying for decades to save my soul, while I have been trying to save his mind (we have both failed), wrote to me saying that although my father is now burning in Hell, there is still hope for me. Agh! To me such fantastical beliefs are the stuff insanity is made of.
Faith can be good or bad, it is tied to spirit and courage of your convictions. Who would argue Martin Luther King or Ghandi didn't have great faith and bring great social change and improvements. Is it faith or spirituality. Faith is an anchor that can help you stay your charted course. Of course the plot can be good or bad. Hitler had great faith and courage of his convictions too, and achieved great change too.
Faith maybe isn't the enemy, perhaps empty or mis-placed faith is the malady. I think that a vibrant, questioning faith is a healthy thing.
g...day:
A "QUESTIONING faith" .....? Isn't that
an oxymoron of the most blatant kind ? Wow!!!
No it isn't, its asking only the most obivous of questions - what do you believe in and why? Its peeling back layers of the onion to discern faith from fiction, science from magic.
Most faith systems and all sciences require study and have researchers. I'm surprised that you're surprised!
Right, Alikimr. Don't know how I missed that. That would be like a doubting confidence.
"Faith is the substance of all things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
"Without faith and hope you have nothing, but with it you have everything."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
-Martin Luther King
"We think that having faith means being convinced God exists in the same way that we are convinced a chair exists."eople who cannot be completly convinced of God's existence think faith is impossible for them. not so. Peopl who doubt can have great faith because faith is something you do, not osomething you think. in fac the greater you doubt the more heroic your faith."
indecisive8 wrote: "Faith is the substance of all things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
"Without faith and hope you have nothing, but with it you have everything."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
-Martin Luther King
"We think that having faith means being convinced God exists in the same way that we are convinced a chair exists."eople who cannot be completly convinced of God's existence think faith is impossible for them. not so. Peopl who doubt can have great faith because faith is something you do, not osomething you think. in fac the greater you doubt the more heroic your faith."
Yep...people who are trapped in "faith" sure have a high opinion of it.
So what?
