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| Sam Harris' The End of Faith |
As I said before, I dispute Harris on the grounds that he doesn't take into account the difference between true religion, which promotes life and love, and its demonic parody, which finds reasons to kill or torture "in the name of God."
I notice that Harris, an atheist, shares certain thought patterns with conservative-fundamentalist religious believers. One of these is the assumption that scripture, be it the Bible or the Qu'ran, ought to be interpreted literally in each and every passage, so when we Judeo-Christians read in Deuteronomy that God orders us to deal mercilessly with believers in other gods, that's it. There's no room for poetic re-interpretation.
That means that this and every other biblical passage are literally true, all in exactly the same way ... or (and this is what Harris actually thinks) they are balderdash. As such, some of the words of scripture may in a sort of by-the-bye way spark in us a glimmer of spiritual understanding, but the bulk of the Bible (or the Qu'ran) ought to go right on the trash heap.
Harris' outlook, frankly, gives me agita — heartburn. For all my ability to argue logically against it (see the earlier posts), I realize the dispute actually runs deeper than logic or reason. We disagree, I think, because our minds circulate in different basins of attraction.
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| Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe |
All dynamical systems move from state to state over the course of time. All are accordingly on some sort of "state cycle," such that eventually they will return to the state that they are observed in at any particular time. If the system is chaotic, it visits every other possible state that exists in its "state space" before it returns to where it began. Its state cycle, being arbitrarily long, seems to produce random results in any finite period of time.
If a system is tightly ordered, its state cycle is short, and it cycles forever among just a tiny handful of the possible states in state space. At the limit, the number of states in the state cycle is exactly one, and the system is frozen in place.
Neither a chaotic system nor a tightly ordered one can evolve gracefully. Chaotic systems cannot preserve new features they happen to stumble on which may be advantageous to their survival. Too orderly systems cannot easily generate new, adaptive characteristics to begin with. The only systems that can evolve gracefully are those that have state cycles that are fairly long, but not too long.
As such they are able to explore fairly large chunks of their state space in search of adaptive characteristics. The downside is that they pretty much are limited to that chunk of state space.
Such a system will often get "perturbed" by various events in its environment, such that it temporarily hops off its state cycle and enters a state that is not on the original cycle. Typically, though, that new, hopped-to state will be "near" the original state cycle. As the system proceeds to yet more new states following that initial perturbation-induced hop, it will tend to gravitate back to one of the states on the original cycle. After that, it will circulate around and around the original state cycle once again, pending another hop-inducing perturbation.
Kauffman calls the original state cycle an "attractor" within the state space of the system. It lies at what may be thought of as the bottom of a "basin of attraction" — in the bottomland of a drainage basin, as it were. As a raindrop falling on the Rocky Mountains, depending on exactly where it falls, will eventually find its way either to the Pacific Ocean or to the Gulf of Mexico, via the Mississippi River, a dynamical system will (following a perturbation) gravitate toward one attractor or another depending on what basin of attraction its current state is in.
Each basin of attraction has its attractor state-cycle. It is as if the attractor holds the system in a particular region of state space. To get the system into another region for wider exploration would require a huge perturbation. If such a perturbation occurred, the system might find itself forever in the grip of a different attractor. Now it would gravitate toward a new set of states which follow one another in a new cycle, never to know its original state cycle, ever again. Such radical changes in gracefully evolving systems are rare, needless to say.
It is speculative on my part, but I would wager a great deal of money that the human mind is like a gracefully evolving dynamical system, in terms of the beliefs it holds. At some level of its operation, a human person's belief system is a collection of state spaces, one for each matter of opinion or topic of belief.
For example, take my belief that the Bible (or at least parts of it) ought to be interpreted loosely, something like poetry. The passage from Deuteronomy which Harris cites as typical of religious scripture — the one that urges God's chosen people to show pagan worshipers no mercy — is, on this view, hyperbole. It is an extended figure of speech which is intended not to be followed literally but to let us know how very, very seriously we are to take our personal and communal commitments to God.
The question I am addressing here is not, however, whether mine is the right interpretation. It is, rather, why I seem to be able to entertain it at all, while people like Harris are not. My contention is that my belief system as it concerns biblical interpretation is simply in a different basin of attraction than Harris' is.
Every time I come across new information about the Bible and how people and churches have interpreted it, what generally happens is that the new information acts as a perturbation. It knocks me out of my comfortable groove for a bit.
This is exactly what happened when I read Harris' claim that the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy — which contains the divine order, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) — marks Judeo-Christian religion as irredeemably bloodthirsty.
But then my basic understanding of what the Bible "says," when taken as a whole, reasserts itself. As the state of my belief about biblical interpretation finds its original attractor once more, I am able to reason that such a command, which seems so counter to everything I hold sacred, cannot be read literally.
But that only begs the question, why do I hold so sacred the notion that Judeo-Christian religion is meant to unite us in life, love, and peace, not set us at one another with swords drawn and stones ready to be slung?
I could give many answers, but the simplest one is that I have always rejected the divisive aspects of religion, even before I believed in God.
When I was 13, I happened to be taken to Sunday School by a cousin I was staying with. I had not been raised by churchgoing parents, and had spent little time in church. This was a new experience for me. That day, the topic of discussion was whether, as young people about to start having dates, we ought to go out with those of other religions.
I was called on first, as the guest in the discussion circle. I had no doubt that I knew the right answer: yes, because it was a good way to get to know families of different faiths.
I was quickly disabused of my foolish assumptions by the Sunday School teacher and the rest of the class. No, going out with someone of another faith was an invitation to disaster. For what would happen if marriage and children ensued? Possibly the children would grow up confused and have no faith at all!
Even as (at that time) a budding agnostic, I simply knew that couldn't be right. Surely God didn't want his children to wall themselves off from one another over disputes of religion. Surely that wasn't the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion had to be to bring us all together in God's eyes, not tear us apart.
I couldn't have stated it in just this way then, but that last paragraph truly reflects my inchoate understanding of what it had to be like to believe in a God on High who made us and loves us, one and all.
Again, my intent here is not to argue the point, but to show that my barely formed understanding of who God is was already in a God-unites-not-divides basin of attraction. Much later in my life, my actual beliefs about God (once I had become religious) encountered the state-cycle attractor they circulate on today. But even then, it was that attractor which was their destiny.
Less directly, that God-unites-not-divides attractor is surely responsible, at least in part, for my belief in liberal, rather than literal, biblical interpretation.
Strictly speaking, my belief concerning universal human brotherhood, with no exceptions whatsoever, and my belief concerning liberal Bible interpretation are, though compatible, separate matters. To prove the point, I need only note that Harris, despite his atheism, agrees with me on the first matter and disagrees with me on the second. In fact, he believes that the only way to serve brotherhood and peace is to abandon religion.
I won't abandon religion so easily. One of the reasons (see An Ever-So-Desperate Need) is that I believe I'll be reunited with my departed parents in heaven someday. That's a belief that I cherish as the result of the earthquake in my soul that occurred at the time my mother died. It was so huge, it put me in an entirely different basin of attraction vis-à-vis the question of the afterlife!
So it seems that the various basins of attraction we find ourselves in in different matters of opinion and belief interact. I am in the yes-there's-an-afterlife camp but also in the God-loves-us-all-equally camp ... so it's no wonder that I'm in the find-a-way-not-to-take-
Deuteronomy-literally camp. I can't imagine hating anybody's religion so much I expect not to see them in heaven, right beside my mother and father.
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