In Search of Comity

Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great

"Atheists with Attitude" is Anthony Gottlieb's review, in the May 20, 2007, New Yorker, of one of several prominent recent books promoting atheism. Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything now joins Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith on the freethinkers' must-read list of screeds disparaging faith.

In the title of Hitchens' book, the first word is spelled with a small "g": god. That's how in-your-face Hitchens would be toward those who believe the Deity deserves a capital letter. Gottlieb says that, with reference to the books listed above, this one is "both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot":

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

Sam Harris, says Gottlieb, is almost as bad. Harris maintains

that religious belief not only aggravates [armed sectarian] conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows.

Whence such an absence of comity among today's "atheists with attitude"? Their quarrel is not with any particular religion, but with religion in general. Hitchens' polemic is a case in point, says Gottlieb:

The tangled diversity of faith is ... no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms — Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point — are helping to sustain the whole.

It is my belief that what militant atheists like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett are really on about is power — specifically, the abuse thereof by churches and religions since time immemorial. (Gottlieb mentions Voltaire, "one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power," as a notable early freethinker.) Whenever a theology or a theocracy hitches the name of God to an earthly agenda, that yoking together can all too easily become justification for coercion.

Sometimes the coercion manifests itself externally, as when Christian Europe marched (or sailed) to wrench the Holy Land from infidel control during the Crusades. At other times, coercion is internal, as when the Inquisition burned Europe's heretics at the stake. Obviously, the two forms of coercion can go hand in hand.

As I have mentioned recently in To Reason Is Divine, The Pope of Reason, and The Pope and Islam, the current leader of the Roman Catholic faith, Pope Benedict XVI, has gone out of his way to show that reason, friendly persuasion, and comity are actually the heart and soul of Christian tradition — despite the all-too-frequent historical lapses. For, as papal explainer George Weigel has put it, "the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion," is of paramount concern to this pope.

The way the Holy Father talks about rationality makes it clear: to him, reason and coercion are so mutually exclusive, God so intrinsically rational in his very nature, that God's work and Word simply cannot be spread by force. The papal prescription for the future of Western religion is at once a return to tradition and a radical break with home-grown trends that demote reason in favor of the subjective and the downright irrational. If the pope has his way, people in the West and elsewhere will come to their senses and reason thoughtfully together in comity and grace — and the valid objections of atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett to theological abuses of power and religiously "justified" urges to sectarian violence might simply melt away.

The Future of Abortion

Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

"Justice Kennedy: The Highly Influential Man in the Middle" appeared on Sunday, May 13, 2007, in The Washington Post and piqued once again my interest in the question of whether the Supreme Court is going to — or ought to — overturn its 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand. (I last took up abortion in any depth in
Roe, Casey, and Originalism in July 2005.)

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Post article says, was the key "man in the middle" on several cases that were heard during this 2006-2007 term of the court and which were decided by 5-to-4 votes split otherwise along liberal-conservative ideological lines.

The '06-'07 court under still-new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has achieved an impressive number of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions. It has also decided a fair number of close 5-4 cases that had no clear ideological cast — with Kennedy casting the swing vote in most of them. But in the several 5-4 cases involving a sharp ideological divide, Kennedy has cast the decisive fifth vote in all of them.

This makes Kennedy's vote the sine qua non of close, ideologically based decisions which the view of recently retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor used to be. O'Connor's replacement, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., typically sides with the conservative Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer usually line up on the liberal side. In many key cases, whichever cadre can earn Kennedy's support wins.

It came as a surprise to many court watchers that it was the conservative bloc which won Kennedy's support in the recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, in a case concerning the late-term abortion procedure reviled by critics as "partial-birth" abortion. Kennedy himself wrote the April 2007 decision upholding the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of the U. S. Congress. (The full text of the decision, along with its concurrences and dissents, can be read here.)

When the Carhart decision was handed down in April, the Post reported in this article:

"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote. He said the ban on the controversial method for ending a midterm pregnancy is valid because other abortion procedures are still available.

Kennedy had (per the first-mentioned Post article) spoken some perhaps contrasting words from the high bench in 1992, in handing down the decision he himself had jointly written with O'Connor and Souter in another key abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On that day, as a decision basically upholding Roe was being issued, he said that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existing, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of life."


And there we have the nut of the abortion issue which continues to divide America: the woman's right to assert her "own concept" of moral right and wrong versus society's "profound respect for the life within the woman."

If Mork from Ork or E.T. the Extraterrestrial asked you to give an accounting of the proper, objective way to resolve the tension between those two ethical claims among Earth's populace, would you be able to comply? I don't know that I would.

I do believe the question needs to be debated again in the political arena, not the judicial one. That's one of the reasons why I hope Roe gets overturned. If that happens, the laws of the 50 states concerning (generally outlawing) abortion would once again come into force. These laws are presently held in abeyance under Roe, at least to the extent that they prohibit abortion outright in certain stages of pregnancy.


Those laws that make few or no exceptions to a state's general ban on abortion would surely become the focus of intense political efforts to change the law, given that polls show most Americans wanting abortions to be mainly illegal but with broad exceptions to protect a woman's life and health and to permit abortions in the case of rape or incest.

There might also be efforts to pass federal laws establishing abortion rights legislatively at a national level, and/or a movement to make abortions either unconstitutional or constituti0nally guaranteed, via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

So there would surely be a massive debate, during which a whole generation of citizens who weren't even alive when Roe was decided would have to confront the issue directly, stripped of any obfuscating questions of whether the Supreme Court's now-vacated pronouncements in favor of abortion rights were properly decided or not.


Another reason why I favor such a back-to-square-one debate is that we know more about how a fetus develops in the womb than we did in 1973. Some (admittedly disputed) scientific evidence now suggests that the fetus is able to feel pain in the first trimester, for instance. We didn't have much of a basis for validating such a claim of early fetal sentience in 1973. Modern diagnostic and imaging procedures now offer us such a basis.

Although we knew prior to 1973 that the heart of the fetus begins to beat in the fourth week after conception, at a juncture when a prospective mother may not yet know she is pregnant, that fact was still relatively new to the general public consciousness.

The human brain begins to form in the same early week of pregnancy and is formed enough to produce brain waves by six weeks — just two weeks after brain formation begins — which means that most abortions destroy a human brain that is in some sense functioning. We apparently weren't aware of just how early the fetal brain starts to function back in 1973. (I am drawing on "Science and Abortion," a religiously oriented pro-life tract, for some of this information.)

10mm human embryo, about five weeks old

By about five weeks into pregnancy, an embryo (the fetus-to-be is still called an embryo at this stage) is only 10mm in size (see this Wikipedia article), yet it already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. Images such as the one to the right were groundbreaking at the time of the Roe decision. (This one is from an ectopic pregnancy, outside the uterus.) Images of this type are commonplace today.

Obstetric ultrasonography — ultrasound — is routinely used during pregnancy these days. Real-time ultrasound technology in which moving fetal images may be viewed by the patient as well as the doctor or technician as they are being gathered was not, as far as I can tell, widely available in 1973. (See this article on the history of real-time scanners. See this video at YouTube.com for a scan of 13-week-old fetus.)

If nothing else, the pervasiveness of this kind of imaging today has made the general public aware that a recognizably human life form is present in the womb well before the time of pregnancy at which many abortions are performed. That awareness is new since 1973.


All in all, more of us know more about pregnancy and fetal development today than people did in 1973, and most of that new knowledge comes from a revised medical science which makes it harder, not easier, to support abortion-on-demand morally during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Roe prohibited states outright from outlawing first-trimester abortions, based in part on scientific evidence that is no longer generally accepted. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, though mainly upholding Roe, have tried to accomodate more up-to-date science concerning early fetal development in various ways, with varying degrees of success. Still, it's clear to me that if they had it to do all over again, the justices would need to approach at least the first-trimester abortion issue in a wholly different way.

And if first-trimester abortions could be legally proscribed by the states in view of present understandings of early fetal development, what would that say about second- and third-trimester abortions? States would presumably have even fewer constitutional hurdles to jump in outlawing most of them.

So I think our society needs to wipe the constitutional slate clean and hash out such issues in the political/legislative arena. That's why I'll be happy if Roe bites the dust. And if Justice Kennedy casts the deciding vote against Roe sometime in the not-too-distant future, I won't be at all surprised.

The World According to Me

In the last week or so I have posted a handful of articles to this blog which together sketch out a bird's-eye view of what I'm going to call the World According to Me, or WAM.

• In I Am a Camera I said the human mind's consciousness feeds the immortal soul with the "qualia" of our subjective experiences, which the soul (acting as a metaphysical "camera") records and carries into the afterlife.

• In Free Will and Divine Coherence I said "coherence within the universe of reason" describes God's true inner nature, which is why we find ourselves living in a rational, comprehensible universe of God's own creation. Then, alluding to the Incompleteness Theorem of the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, I went on to give reason to believe that we have free will in this rational, comprehensible world specifically because God had to choose between that option and having us be deterministic machines, mere robots with good skin.

Had we been deterministic robots, we would have either been somewhat less smart than we are, or else truly stupid. If the former, we would have lacked the ability to see the truth of (among other things) the "Gödelian sentence," the telltale proposition by means of which Kurt Gödel was able to distinguish between human intelligence and that of all producible formal systems of logic, as embodied by even the smartest machines.

If the latter, we would have had mental capabilities less than that of a simplistic formal system that can do no more than derive the basic laws of arithmetic.

Given that our Gödel-aware brains are not flummoxed by the "Gödelian sentence" G — "G [this proposition itself] is not provable within this formal system of logic" is a true statement, and we know it's true, yet the formal system itself is ineluctably blind to its truth — we had to be other than deterministic androids. Hence, we had to have free will!

• In To Reason Is Divine I said more about the idea that rational coherence constitutes God's inner nature, which is why "creative logos" characterizes God's activity in founding and sustaining our world, according to the Christian Bible. Pope Benedict XVI has made a point of emphasizing this aspect of Christian theology, as over against views which hold that God is so "other" than us that his will is not constrained by rationality, or anything else

Though the pope has implied that just such an anti-rational view of God's nature besets the religion of Islam, at least according some of its interpreters, he has also pointed out similar strains of anti-rationalism in Western Christian thought over the last few centuries. He believes we in the West need to get back to our patrimony of truth-seeking reason if our culture is to be able to "give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society."

To which I can only add, "Hear, hear!"

• Finally, in Esse Est Percipi I championed a metaphysics, based in part on that of the early-18th-century philosopher and Church of Ireland bishop George Berkeley, which holds that "to exist is to be observed" — seen or perceived by an agent with a conscious mind.

I alluded to a real-world test that confirms a thought experiment dreamed up by quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler: which of two equiprobable paths a photon follows to this planet from a galaxy millions of light years distant is not determined until we train our attention on one path or the other!

While it is not universally agreed that the photon's arrival has to be observed by a conscious agent, as opposed to merely recorded by a non-sentient mechanism, there are physicists who believe the former. If they are right — and I like to think they are — then observational consciousness somehow produces material actuality.

Hopping back to the thought of Berkeley, I then hypothesized that the material reality of the universe is sustained in its existence by God's observational consciousness.


God, soul, afterlife, free will — all are longstanding topics of theological and philosophical inquiry. So, too, are questions of human consciousness — what it is, how it arises — and of mind in general — is it real, is it distinct from the physical, material world? In WAM, the World According to Me:

• God
• the soul
• the afterlife
• human free will
• human consciousness, and
  
• the actuality of mind, as distinct from matter

are all real.

The four posts just mentioned show how these questions interlock together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I could also have introduced into the puzzle picture the question of Darwinian evolution, which I also believe in. In fact, I believe that particular puzzle piece latches directly to the piece concerning human free will. If our lives are not determined by an ineluctable destiny, then neither is the life of the world. Our planet is free to evolve as it will.

Another puzzle piece would seem to be that which represents the lawfulness of the universe — i.e., the pervasiveness and reliability of the laws of nature which science discovers. Without that lawfulness, graceful evolution would have been impossible. The laws of nature themselves are evidence of a Creator who is rational to his core.

Thus, the tenets of WAM, the World According to Me.


My purpose in going to such lengths to sum up WAM as it stands at present is partly to delve into the subject of personal bias.

I clearly have a bias in favor of the sort of worldview WAM represents. Perhaps my sort of worldview is best characterized by what it isn't. It isn't religious fundamentalism, and it isn't anti-religious atheism. I'm biased against both of those.

By religious fundamentalism I mean the sort of "conservative" religious outlook that upholds creationism or "intelligent design," the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and a radically personal or individual style of faith that de-emphasizes collective reason and ecclesiastical teaching authority. I'm afraid I have to be upfront about this: I think many "evangelical" Christians are simply wrong in some of their foundational beliefs.

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

I am equally nonplussed by the foundational beliefs of outspoken atheists like the British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose latest book I expect to read soon: The God Delusion. Dawkins is presently one of the more eloquent spokespersons for a strictly materialistic worldview which allows for nothing either supernatural or metaphysical to exist.

Inflected into the realm of questions of consciousness and the separateness of mind and body, this materialist/physicalist worldview is argued for by Daniel Dennett, the noted philosopher of mind. In the area of more abstract philosophy, it is represented by the school of thought known as positivism.

I do not mean to imply that all these anti-religious thinkers and views are in total sync. There are positions which metaphysically assert that everything that exists has a physical property, for example, which others, such as that of philosopher A.J. Ayer, claim that metaphysics per se is bunk.

Still, all seem to have in common that there is, and can be, no God, no soul, no afterlife. If there is a mind apart from matter, it in some way arises out of matter. If consciousness is not an illusion, it is merely a side effect of the workings of our physical brains.


My WAM mindset asserts exactly the opposite on all these questions. That I am prone to such a worldview reflects, I am sure, the deep-seated biases of my particular style of temperament.

Oh, WAM is (I fully believe) an outlook that is eminently reasonable to support — now that I have managed to develop a rational way of accounting for and upholding its tenets. Not that my arguments to date are conclusive, or even complete. I imagine they establish at best a sort of sketchy, prima facie case for the World According to Me. Still, I humbly suggest that WAM — God, souls, consciousness, and all — is plausible because

1. it explains the facts at hand
2. it does so simply and elegantly
3. it does so without disenfranchising vast areas of human experience

1. Among the "facts" which WAM "explains" is (in addition to the customary scientific explanations of the physical world) the presence of mind-slash-consciousness, which strictly materialist outlooks have to relegate to the unexplainable and/or call an illusion. According to WAM, God has (or is) a mind — a rational mind which is reflected in our own rational, conscious minds. Existence per se is conferred by the observational activity of such minds.

2. If true, that explanation is about as simple and elegant as any could be. There is a supernatural mind — God's — behind it all. God's conscious activity creates and sustains all material existence. The material world recapitulates the mind of God in the conscious minds of creatures who evolve in it freely, albeit according to the firm laws of nature, and who themselves have free will.

3. WAM accordingly carefully avoids disenfranchising empirical science, human reason, or longstanding religious beliefs. WAM is compatible with all three.


What WAM is not compatible with is, as I say, religious fundamentalism in it various guises and atheistic materialism in its various guises. Just as I am aware that WAM, despite the rational arguments I make for it, originates in the biases of my own particular style of temperament, I assume that the fundamentalists and the materialists have their own temperament styles whose biases lead their possessors toward worldviews that differ radically from each other, and from mine.

What I would like to be able to do — but see no way to accomplish at present — is to explain why those three basic styles of temperament exist and accordingly divide us as badly as they do.

Esse Est Percipi

The Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who became Bishop Berkeley after he took Holy Orders in the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland, lived during what was, here on this side of the pond, our colonial period. He eventually gave his name, which was pronounced BARK-lee, to a branch of the University of California and the city that grew up around it, pronounced BERK-lee.

Bishop Berkeley, as a philosopher, objected to some to the ideas that had been put about by John Locke, the British empiricist who was slightly his elder. Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), held that many of the qualities we perceive in the objects around us pertain, not the the objects themselves, but to the "ideas" conveyed to us by means of what we today might better call "sense-data." For example, the redness of a red vase is an "idea" that does not belong to the vase per se but inheres in the sense-data that our eyes receive from the vase. (Remember, this was written at a time when science was just beginning to understand about the wavelength composition of light.)

Locke was thus a "dualist" concerning the "reality" of the objects we see. Some of their qualities, such as their weight, in fact inhered in the objects themselves. Other qualities such as color, and also shape, inhered only in the "ideas" conveyed to us from the objects in the form of sense-data. The latter qualities are in some sense bogus: a coin is only round, not oval, if we look at it face on.

Berkeley, on the other hand, was a "subjective idealist," though he himself referred to his view as that of "immaterialism." Where Locke would have said that sense objects have "real" existence and accordingly persist in existence when no one is looking at them, Berkeley's thesis was esse est percipi, to exist is to be perceived.

The notion that things exist independently of outside observation depends on their being made of some sort of ineffable substance or material, beyond their perceptible qualities such as weight or color or shape. If they have mass or weight, their substance gives it to their atoms. If they have color, it reflects how their atoms or electrons are arranged. Substance, if real, is not what atoms are, it is what they have.

We can talk of atoms and electrons and wavelengths today; Locke and Berkeley could not. But never mind; the metaphysical question of the persistent being of objects by virtue of their substance or material "stuff," independently of their being seen, that is, remains the same — a philosophical one, not a scientific one.

Edwards and Pap's A Modern Introduction to Philosophy

Just as in the 17th and 18th centuries, human beings today start out as "naive realists" who believe implicitly that objects exist, even if unseen, and have "just those qualities which they appear to have" (see the Introduction to the section on "Perception and the Physical World" in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 3rd Edition, by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, p. 568).

Locke in part debunked the second of that pair of beliefs — while still holding that some qualities are real — but Berkeley alone questioned the first. He felt it was

... just as meaningless, or self-contradictory, to suppose that something which is not a mind exists without being perceived, as to suppose the existence of a husband without a wife [p. 571].

In other words, there simply was, for Berkeley, no material substance by which a non-mental object, unperceived by mind, could be said to exist.


Not only does this pronouncement deny our naive realism, it seems to defy our commonsense understanding that the universe was in existence long before any sentient creatures were around to observe it. Berkeley got around this objection in a way I find compelling to the max: he noted that "the material universe has always existed in the divine consciousness" (p. 571, my italics).

I interpret that as meaning that existence is conferred on our material universe by virtue of God's seeing it and observing it. It is in God's mind that the existence of the world and of all the things in it is registered, thereby to be sustained, by an act of conscious observation on God's part. His eye is on the sparrow ... and everything else ... and Berkeley was right: to exist is to be perceived. Or, as I would rather put it, to exist is to be observed.


This seems in fact a corollary of some of the most up to date science we have today. As I reported in Genesis by Observership, a thought experiment dreamed up by physicist John Archibald Wheeler and confirmed indirectly at the University of Maryland shows that quantum events such as photons emitted from distant galaxies don't "choose" which of multiple possible paths to take to the Earth unless and until an observer on our planet aims a telescope at one of those paths, ignoring the others. Another physicist, Andrei Linde, asserts (and here he disagrees with Wheeler) that the act of observation which fixes the photon's path must be done by a conscious observer, not just any mechanical recording device.

If Linde is right, then Berkeley's principle becomes "to exist is to be consciously observed." This, indeed, is my own conviction. I am drawn to it in part because it makes mind or consciousness an equal partner with matter (if not a preexisting, preeminent partner), rather than an illusion of, or an epiphenomenon of, physical activity in a brain.


Furthermore, it squares with my belief in God to think that God's "vision" is fundamentally required if a world is to be created and sustained in existence. It gives a welcome new spin to the religious claim that we conscious humans are made in God's "image" — God possesses a conscious mind, and so do we.

If one act of human observation can "make" a photon choose an intergalactic path that by normal reckoning must have been settled on millions of years ago, there is something going on that our "normal reckoning" boggles at — and our conscious, observing mind is apparently responsible for it. We have an ability that represents some tiny fraction of God's ability to make something "be" just by looking at it.

In future posts I would like to expand upon how a philosophy of esse est percipi, or a modern version thereof, might be able to help bridge the present gaps between philosophy itself, science, and theology.

To Reason Is Divine

As I hinted in The Pope of Reason and The Pope and Islam, I nurture a late-blooming respect for the now-leader of my church, Pope Benedict XVI. For tutelage in his thought, I've turned to the recent writings of Catholic ethicist/author George Weigel, many shorter ones of which may be found here. One of them, "Pope Benedict XVI: The Master-Teacher," does an excellent job of laying out the Holy Father's views on the future of Europe and the Judeo-Christian West vis-à-vis the present threats from Islamic fundamentalism.

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In this article originally written for The Catholic Herald in the U.K., Weigel emphasizes the book which the pope published in 2006 under his birth name, Joseph Ratzinger. In Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, which I have yet to read, the then-cardinal (per Weigel) "distils a lifetime of reflection on the relationship between faith and reason, and on the cultural consequences of a collapse of both faith and reason, into a challenge of prime importance for the entire world — but especially for Europe, in its current crisis of civilisational morale."

This pope is making quite a few pointed assertions these days about rationality and reason being part and parcel of the Christian faith. I'm inquiring into his ideas in part because I'd like to know more about what he means by reason.


Along those lines, Weigel alludes to the lecture Benedict XVI made last year at Regensburg, Germany, in which

... the Pope warned his listeners that an unreasonable faith is a real and present danger to the world — a faith, for example, in which God can be imagined capable of commanding the irrational, like the murder of innocents. But so, the Pope argued ..., is a loss of faith in reason: that, too, is a real and present danger. If, for example, the West limits the concept of "reason" to a purely instrumental rationality, or, in a fit of post-modern self-indulgence, denies the human capacity to grasp the truth of anything with certainty, then the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because it will be unable to give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society.

The Pope seems to feel that cutting our traditional anchor line to divine reason in the Christian West could sap our ability to stave off the forces of unreason in the Muslim East. Historical trends we moderns have inherited from the Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe are sawing away at that line.

Stripped to its essentials, the story seems to be that denizens of the Christian West at one time believed implicitly in "the human capacity to grasp the truth ... with certainty." Over the last two or three centuries that confidence has eroded into an attitude of skepticism toward the knowability of truth in general and of moral truth in particular. The pope would like us at least to reclaim our patrimony of truth-seeking reason ... even those of us who do not believe in God.

Weigel says the Holy Father "lays down a challenge" to religious nonbelievers today:

"In the age of the Enlightenment, the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that they would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did not exist... [Today], we must... reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe. This does not impose limitations on anyone's freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need."

I suspect the pope believes that living a moral life based on rational principles — living "as if God did indeed exist" — might bring even agnostics under God's spell, since (as I indicated in The Pope of Reason) he feels that reason or logos lies at the very core of God's nature. "Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is," Benedict has written in his book. Logos, the Greek word for creative reason, was the one selected by the evangelist for the prologue to his Gospel of John.

In future posts in this, my "Divine Reason" series, I intend to explore Pope Benedict XVI's ideas about the place of reason in Christian faith and Western thought more thoroughly.

Free Will and Divine Coherence

In recent days I've read two documents which, taken together, seem to have something important to say about human free will in the light of God's inner nature.

One of these documents is philosopher J.R. Lucas' 1961 article "Minds, Machines, and Gödel," the full text of which may be read here. I discussed that monograph in Whither the "Magic" of Mind?. The other is Pope Benedict XVI's September 2006 Regensburg lecture, which I talked about in The Pope of Reason. Its prepared text can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited concerning the supposed difficulty of interreligious dialogue between Catholicism and Islam is here.

The real subject of the Pope's address at Regensburg was the "coherence within the universe of reason" that describes God's true inner nature, as well as that of his creation. Benedict affirms that "not to act 'with logos'" — the Greek term for both "reason" and "Word" — "is contrary to God's nature." In other words, God cannot do anything that is not in keeping with the fundamental coherence at the core of his very being.

Because God is internally coherent, he cannot say one thing and do another. He cannot pretend he wills this and actually will that. He cannot wear a mask for our benefit that belies who he really is. Nor can he create us in our world to be, at the deepest metaphysical level, anything but as rationally consistent and logically coherent as he himself is.


Lucas' "Mind, Machines, and Gödel" is likewise concerned with questions of internal consistency and logical coherence. Lucas' intent is to show that the universal "incompleteness" of formal systems that was proven by Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel in 1931 means that no machine can duplicate the human mind.

A formal system is a system by which a large set of theorems can be proven, drawing on a small set of axioms and rules of inference. For example, a formal system can easily be constructed that will derive all the laws of simple arithmetic that we learn in elementary school.

Gödel took up the question of whether every formal system is intrinsically incomplete. "Incomplete" in this sense means "unable to prove all true theorems about itself." Gödel demonstrated quite rigorously that any system which was at least powerful enough to produce the laws of simple arithmetic was in fact incomplete.

That is, it was logically incomplete as long as the system was internally consistent. An internally inconsistent formal system is one that is able to derive perfectly good theorems that are mutually contradictory. In the most general formulation, "P is true" and "P is false" are the contradictory propositions that coexist within an inconsistent formal system.

In particular, Gödel constructed a proposition, call it G, whose English equivalent is "G [i.e., this proposition itself] is not provable within this system." That so-called Gödelian sentence is the Achilles' heel of any formal system. Gödel showed that, as long as a formal system is internally consistent and powerful enough to derive the laws of arithmetic, a Gödelian sentence G is unprovable within its own system. Yet we who stand mentally outside that formal system can see, by our knowledge of of G's very unprovability, that G is in fact true.

In his paper, Lucas extends Gödel's logic to show that our minds, which can indeed perform outside-the-lines feats of truth divination, could never be fully emulated by machines. Machines, Lucas says, are but "concrete instantiations" of formal systems, and they are as such equally limited by Gödelian incompleteness.


In discussions of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, as the key proposition proven by the Austrian mathematician in 1931 is called, there is an interesting bias. It is simply assumed that formal systems would rather be incomplete than inconsistent.

I find this interesting because the Pope in his Regensburg speech seems to be implying that God, too, prefers incompleteness to inconsistency. But God apparently prefers to both of these possibilities a third possibility: that we, his prized creatures, be free.

When the Holy Father asserts that God by his very nature creates and sustains a cosmos ruled by "coherence within the universe of reason," we are entitled to ask what might constitute the diametrically opposed notion. A God, we might suppose, who is prone to incoherence: an incoherence which equates to the sort of internal contradiction spoken of in the Lucas paper, as it pertains to formal systems.


Put another way, we as God's creatures might conceivably have been created as computer-like beings whose behavior is wholly determined by our programming (akin to a formal system's rules of inference) and our input data (akin to a formal system's axioms). We would then have been deterministic machines in a deterministic world.

True, we would have been unable to divine the truth of the likes of the Gödelian proposition G. We would, that is, not have been as smart or as capable of seeking and finding the truth as we actually are. But there would have been an even worse concomitant: we would lack free will. Deterministic machines are not able to follow paths of intentionality that violate their basic programming.

Of course, if said humanoid machines are capable of harboring logical inconsistency at their inner, most fundamental level, that would change things. Just as with formal reasoning systems, machines with any substantial degree of "processing power" — ones that are roughly as "smart" as we — can be either formally incomplete or logically inconsistent. If they are incomplete, they are blind to the truth of their own Gödelian sentence. Hence they are not as smart as we.

In fact, to be fully as smart as we — to be able to see the truth of Gödel's proposition G — a machine would have to be internally inconsistent, in terms of its ability to derive contradictory truths!


If Lucas is right, though, we are not machines at all. We could never be replaced by a machine, whether it is a formally incomplete one or a logically inconsistent one. We can conclude from this that God made us free in order to avoid having to build rational incoherence into us, at the very base of our being — given that his only other choice was to let us remain as mentally limited as a computer or robot that cannot see the truth of its own Gödelian sentence.

In other words, it seems that smart creatures that evolve in a fundamentally rational world created by a metaphysically coherent, non-capricious God must perforce have free will! Lacking free will, such creatures would have to be mentally deficient machines — either that, or the world in which they evolve would have to have been founded on the quicksand of a radical, through-the-looking-glass logical incoherence.

I Am a Camera

In Whither the "Magic" of Mind?, my latest addition to this blog, I extended a long string of prior posts about the subject of consciousness. I listed in that post some links to many of those earlier posts. Now, more on consciousness.

By consciousness I mean what philosophers of mind sometimes call "phenomenal consciousness" — not "access consciousness," which is "the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain." I gather that access consciousness is, to philosophers, roughly what psychologists mean by "cognition" or the "cognitive states" of the brain. Phenomenal consciousness or "subjective experience," as it is also called, accompanies access consciousness, but — at least to those philosophers who believe that it, in addition to mere cognition, truly exists — it is not the same thing.

Rather, consciousness (I'll henceforth omit the "phenomenal") is a sensation or impression of "what it is like" to be something to which we direct our attention. That "something" is an event which we are witness to ... say, the color red, for example, when we see a red tricycle. Accordingly, when we are cognitively aware of a thing or event that we sense in the external world, these philosophers say, our awareness is typically accompanied by a "qualitative feel." The color of the red tricycle, for instance, evokes in us a certain intangible feel that is different from the one associated with the color of, say, a yellow school bus.

Philosophers who ponder such things do not often say "qualitative feel," though. Instead, they say quale (KWAH-lay), the plural of which is qualia (KWAH-lee-uh). The cognitive awareness that we gain when we witness a passing yellow school bus gives rise, typically, to the experience of particular qualia. These qualia are the ones we associate with the color yellow, with the hulking size of the bus, with the sound it makes as it drives by our open window, etc. By virtue of these qualia, we form a subjective impression of "what it is like" to be a moving yellow school bus.

Every observable event is, in philosophy, a phenomenon. It will typically have in our subjective experience certain qualia associated with it. The qualia-laden phenomenon can be, but does not have to be, a sensory event based on stimuli received from the external world. It also can be something like a pain in the neck, or a sensation of hunger. It can be a thought. It can be a symbolic representation within the mind — as, for instance, the one psychologists call the "self," whenever it comes into mental focus during the course of our cognitive activity.

Any such phenomenal event can (or must) evoke a subjective experience above and beyond our immediate cognitive state or states. For example, when any of us thinks of his or her "self," each of us summons up his or her own private, inner impression of "what it is like to be me."


Many philosophers of mind who speak of phenomena and qualia are "dualists" who say the conscious mind, so described, is an entity distinct from all the brain states and activities that underlie consciousness. True, consciousness arises from the brain and its internal states, but it is more than just another functional state of the brain. It isn't physical, in the way that all the other aspects of the brain's functioning are physical. Hence, the physical activity of the neurons of the brain are not sufficient to explain why we are conscious in the first place.

These philosophical dualists are fond of talking about hypothetical alternative worlds in which each of us possesses a "zombie twin." My zombie twin — I'll call him Z.T. — looks and acts just like me in every respect ... including his ability to report in detail on his inner "conscious" experiences. But Z.T. isn't actually conscious! He's under the illusion that he has subjective inner experiences involving phenomenal events' qualities or qualia, but he really doesn't!

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

According to David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, there must be psychophysical laws of nature in our universe by virtue of which immaterial, nonphysical conscious experiences arise in our brains, but not in those of our zombie twins in the "universe next door." These laws come into force in response to the sheer complexity of our brains' functional organization. In a hypothetical zombie world, however, these "psychophysical" laws would be wholly absent, even though the denizens' brains share the same functional organization as our own. Z.T. would lack conscious experience ... but he would still give the same reports about his conscious internal states as I do!

This anomaly makes sense to Chalmers and others with like takes on the conscious mind; after all, Z.T. and all the other zombie twins in the next universe over behave just like us. Behavior is seemingly a function of the brain's cognitive, information-processing capabilities, which in our zombie twins, by hypothesis, mimic perfectly our own. For us and for our zombie twins, reporting on one's interior states, including one's (illusory, in the case of Z.T.) consciousness, is, after all, no more than a matter of behavior.


Chalmers characterizes himself as a mind-body dualist, but this does not mean he believes that anything supernatural, such as God or the soul, exists. To him, the conscious mind is entirely a natural thing. It arises by virtue of laws of nature: physical laws such as human physicists study, amplified by psychophysical laws yet to be discovered.

My own inclination is to go one step further, and to look for ways in which the immaterial aspect of the mind called consciousness, or subjective experience, can be related to another putative immaterial aspect of our being: the soul.


Historically in Christian thought, there has been a fair amount of disagreement as to what the soul actually is. The standard view today is that the soul is one component of yet another sort of dualism, that of "body/soul."

Part of the reason for the historical disagreement is that the words used in the Old and New Testaments for these concepts vary from passage to passage. The Old Testament, written in Hebrew, uses certain Hebrew words for "body" and "soul," while the New Testament, translated from the Greek, uses others. Within a given Testament, different books and different passages within books employ different words for "body" and "soul."

In some cases in the New Testament, these words form not just a dualism but a triptych: "body," "soul," and "spirit." "Soul" and "spirit" seem, in many of these passages, to be distinct concepts. In other passages, the biblical ideas of "soul" and "spirit" seem interchangeable. Moreover, a word translated as "soul" and/or "spirit" sometimes seems to be better rendered in English as, for example, "life."

It has been claimed that part of the confusion comes from different notions of such matters among the Hebrew-speaking Israelites who wrote down the books Christians call the Old Testament, as opposed to those of the later Jewish and gentile writers of the New Testament, steeped as they were in the Hellenistic world of classical Greek ideas.


Over the course of early and medieval Christian history, luminaries such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas applied their intellects to these biblical concepts. Their ideas about the soul are still with us today. And there have been modern attempts to come to grips with the soul, with diverse results which vary among (for instance) Catholics who adhere to the Roman Church's catechetical teachings, conservative Protestants, theologically "liberal" Protestants, neoorthodox Protestants, and so forth and so on.

As a result of this historical and linguistic mishmash concerning the soul, my attempts to research the theology of the soul in preparation for what I am about to say have resulted in quite a bit of frustration. I am now, I admit, no more certain as to what the soul supposedly "is" from a theological point of view than I was when I started.


All the same, I think I can say with some confidence that we each have a soul, created by God. (I am of course assuming God and the soul both exist.) The body and the soul are compounded together in such a way as to make for the essential unity of who we each are as human individuals — a compound whose form or type is different than it would be otherwise.

An apt analogy is with the chemical compound table salt, or NaCl, which has an entire different nature than sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), or a physical mixture of the two elements. Without their molecular bonds, the atoms of NaCl would not, for example, taste salty. Likewise, without a soul, we could not be said to be made in the "image of God" or to be the "salt of the earth."

That brief discussion represents at least a down payment on speaking theologically about what the soul is. What about what — if anything — the soul does?


One of the main things many theologians say a soul does is ferry our unique individual identities, after we die, into the afterlife. Different Christian denominations and theologians have different takes on the afterlife, in accordance with two promises we seem to have been given in scripture: first, that we immediately, upon dying, join God in some disembodied state of pure spirit or soul ... but, second, that one day in the indeterminate future we will also experience a bodily resurrection, in which each soul will be united with its body once more.

Some theologians have historically put more emphasis on the disembodied life of the soul following death, others on the resurrection. But all pretty much agree that, either way, we will still be who we always were, once we reach the afterlife. All our memories, for example, will be intact. The people we loved on this earth, we will still love. The knowledge we gained, we will not lose.

So my attempt to unify the idea of immaterial mental consciousness with the idea of an immaterial soul begins with trying to see how the soul could possibly ferry the identities we develop in this world into the next.


Start with memory. There is probably no aspect of the functioning of our brains that is more responsible for stabilizing our individual identities over the days and years of our lives than the fact that we remember what has happened to us in the past. Our personal history remains part of us forever — at least until we die.

Modern neuroscience has been able to discover quite a bit about how the neurons that make up our brains store memories. It is pretty clear that memory in the ordinary sense of the word is 100 percent physical. When, say, due to the ravages of a degenerative affliction such as Alzheimer's disease, we lose our ability to form memories, it is because our brain tissue isn't what it used to be. It is accordingly plausible to suppose that when our bodies decay fully after our death, our memories as such are simply gone.

But the soul is said to be able to violate that limitation. It is capable of ferrying our identities, including our memories, into the afterlife with us. How can this be?


Imagine, if you will, that the soul acts as a sort of camera. It contains the wherewithal to record the subjective impressions that we form in our minds when we direct our conscious attention to the various phenomenal events and qualia we bear witness to during our lives.

In terms of its ability to record our subjective experiences, the soul may accordingly be like a digital camera whose onboard memory capacity is very large, in terms of the number of megabytes of storage it contains — large, because it has to contain records of all the countless experiences that shape us during our lifetimes. These "photographic" records of our lifetime experiences are destined to accompany our soul into the afterlife and to form the basis for our continuing identities beyond the grave.

Suppose, also, that the conscious mind functions as sort of an optical mirror, like the ones found in the huge reflecting telescopes that gather light from stars and other objects in the heavens and focus it on photographic plates or human retinas. Such a mirror creates, at its focal point, an image of a scene. The image is wholly insubstantial, but it is nonetheless real.

To extend this admittedly speculative analogy of cameras and optical mirrors, suppose the soul receives from the conscious mind an image not of a pattern of light but a composite of the qualia of an event or phenomenon. It is this "optical" image which embodies the conscious, subjective experience that the soul "photographically" records.

If this extended analogy is correct, then consciousness exists to form phenomenal "images" which the soul somehow records. On this view, consciousness, like the soul, is immaterial, just as philosophers like David Chalmers claim it to be. It may well arise out of brain activity according to psychophysical laws such as Chalmers seeks. But it has a purpose which Chalmers does not entertain: to feed the soul with experiences to be ferried along with our basic identities into the afterlife. It is for this reason that I title this post, not all that tongue in cheek, "I Am a Camera."

Whither the "Magic" of Mind?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

My last "Strange Loops" post was Brains and Thoughts. In it I talked yet again about the human mind — namely, about ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's blockbuster 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

To Hofstadter, that the human mind incorporates a sense of self is a thing that needs to be explained somehow. He explains it by recourse to a "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem."

In Hofstadter's view of the brain, its neurons' activities are organized in such a way as to produce, at a very high conceptual level, a plethora of "symbols." Along with the symbols themselves, there are also paths or patterns by which these symbols become active or are "triggered" in various combinations and sequences. Such a pattern, combination, or sequence of symbol activation constitutes a "thought."

A super-sized combination of symbols that tend to be activated together forms a "subsystem" (see p. 385). More precisely, a subsystem is "a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself." Another term Hofstadter uses for the same idea is "subbrain." A subsystem amounts to a "subbrain" of the entire brain.

Various subsystems or subbrains exist in each of our brains. Some of them, for example, "represent the people we know intimately," says Hofstadter. These subsystems associated with particular individuals constitute models by virtue of which we can understand and predict our friends' reactions to various contexts of experience, insofar as they may differ from what our own reactions would be.

Hofstadter gives the example of how we might know that a certain friend's concept of "mountain" is keyed to that friend's having had "a wonderful hiking experience in the Alps" years ago (p. 386). Accordingly, when we activate the "mountain" symbol in our own brain within the context of the subsystem that represents our Alp-hiking friend, that activation is somehow different from what it would be if it were activated in the context of just our own Alp-less personal experience.

Our own personal activation context for "mountain" — sans Alps, if we have never been there — and other symbols amounts to what Hofstadter calls our "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem." This unique symbol or subsystem of the human mind — though we each have a separate one of them, of course — is "the 'I' inside my brain," says he (p. 385).


I am right with Hofstadter on all the above, but our paths are nevertheless about to diverge. A bone of contention emerges, in fact, as of the "Where Is the Sense of Self" section of his intriguing chapter on "Minds and Thoughts" (see pp. 384-385).

Hofstadter's discussion of the self-symbol or self-subsystem follows closely on the heels of that particular section. In it and what follows he makes what I consider to be a bad mistake — a subtle one, to be sure, but nonetheless bad. He fails to distinguish between the self-symbol and consciousness.

I should have put that differently: he refuses to make a distinction between consciousness and the activity of the self-symbol. In fact, he makes it apparent that he would reject out of hand any proposed model of consciousness that would "elevate consciousness or awareness to [a] 'magical,' nonphysical level."

That resistance to the so-called "magical" seems to amount to nothing short of a bias on his part. True, it looks as if much of the remainder of his book (which I have not yet read) consists of a coherent argument against "magical" conceptions of the mind and consciousness. Yet as of this juncture in my reading, I feel disinclined to accept any such argument, on the grounds that I already have what I think is a well-justified view of consciousness that I imagine Hofstadter would call "magical."

In other words, my bias doesn't match Mr. Hofstadter's bias. Sorry about that.


My own bias when it comes to a philosophical understanding of consciousness is pretty well laid out in my earlier series of posts, which I collectively labeled "Quickening to Qualia":

• Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously
• One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II)
• The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III)
• I and Thou (Q2Q IV)
• The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)
• What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)
• Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)
• Thouness (Q2Q VIII)
• The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)
• "Thouness" and Self (Q2Q X)
• The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)
• Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

That string of posts drew upon, among others, two books that have helped shape my ideas. The first of these is Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book in which the author makes the case that consciousness is extraordinary. In explicating Darwin's theory of evolution as it applies to our human cultures as well as to the natural world, Wright shows that natural selection steadily builds up greater complexity over vast stretches of time, leading to (among other things) brains. But Darwinian natural selection cannot explain why advanced brains should be conscious.

Consciousness is the experience we have of what it is like to use our brains, says Wright. If the use of the brain involves high-level symbols, as Hofstadter believes, then Wright would say that consciousness is the experience we have of symbols being activated in certain sequences and combinatorial patterns.

That subjective experience, however, is something that goes on in addition to the symbol-activation process. Even if there exists a super-symbol or subsystem or subbrain that, in our so-called self-awareness, represents the self, the experience of being self-aware comes on top of the self-awareness per se.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Such a view of consciousness as the experience of awareness, rather than as just awareness per se, is expounded by the second of the two books I just mentioned: David J. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers is a philosopher of mind who makes the case in his book that our knowing "what it is like" to know something is distinct from having the knowledge per se.

Awareness, or knowledge, is of immense practical benefit to us. So is self-awareness or self-knowledge. And (as Hofstadter points out in Gödel, Escher, Bach) it is tough to imagine that creatures as smart as we are could ever make sense of the world to which we relate without a symbol in our brains for the entity doing the relating (see p. 388).

What we are aware of at a conscious level exceeds all that, Chalmers says. We experience the "qualia" of the things in the outside world represented in our brains by Hofstadter's symbols. We also experience the qualia of our own internal states. So what are qualia?

A "quale" (the singular of qualia) is what gives any particular conscious experience its subjective quality. It is that experience's "qualitative feel":

When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing [in the brain], but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience, from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one's experience of selfhood. (Chalmers p. 4)

To Chalmers (and to myself) consciousness is a feeling or aura that surrounds an awareness of what our mind is doing. It goes along with the awareness, but it is different. Our response to the qualitative feel of something is itself incapable itself of "doing" anything in the world, in a practical sense.

If we are aware of a red tricycle, for example, the color red is experienced consciously by us in a certain phenomenal way, above and beyond any psychological reactions we may have to red objects. We simply possess an idea of "what it is like" for something to be red. It is entirely possible that in some imaginary world other than the one which we actually inhabit, that same "what it is like" feeling or aura in the presence of a certain color would pertain not to red but to green.

That "what it is like" feeling or aura, whether it be associated with red or green, is sort of like a sidecar to the motorcycle which is the awareness of the color and of the object which has that color. The sidecar steers nothing, drives nothing, powers nothing. The motorcycle (or its driver) does all that practical stuff. The fellow in the sidecar — consciousness, subjective awareness, whatever you want to call it — simply comes along for the ride.


It is also possible for us to imagine a world of "zombies" who have all the smarts we do but lack conscious experience entirely. Think Lt. Comdr. Data, the android on the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Data, a glorified robot who looked very nearly human, was forever stymied in trying to imagine the feel of the experiences that he knew his biology-based counterparts had. Try as he might, he couldn't experience anything — despite the fact that he was just as capable a starship officer as any of the flesh-and-blood officers were.

As Wright points out in Nonzero, in some imaginable alternative world there might have evolved flesh-and-blood creatures as smart as Data (and as us) who look just like us but are no more clued in to the subjective feelings of conscious experience than Data was.

Along these same lines, Chalmers asks (p. 4), "Why should there be conscious experience at all?" He finds consciousness "metaphysically baffling." His book represents an attempt (which I think is at least partially successful) to show that consciousness, so defined, must arise from laws of nature that are distinct from the ordinary laws of physics.

Speaking loosely, since he has no religious ax to grind, Chalmers says (p. 138) that "God still had more work to do" after he established the physical facts of our world. To wit, he had to add in the natural-but-not-physical laws by virtue of which consciousness would arise when the right type of physical organization — that of the human brain, for instance — emerged.


Such a view is religious only to the extent that you think natural laws, whether or not they happen to be physical laws, come from God. Chalmers happens to have no concern whatsoever about addressing this question. His talk of God as having "more work to do" is purely illustrative of his concept of natural laws as composing a larger category than merely physical laws. Even if there is no God behind the natural world and its scientific laws, his arguments would stand or fall by themselves.

Nonetheless, it occurs to me that Hofstadter might call Chalmers a dirty name: "soulist." In discussing the location in the brain of the sense of self, Hofstadter assumes the latter to be something of a "mechanism which does the perceiving of all the active symbols" in the brain (p. 385). He is about to identify that something as the "self-subsystem" I talked about earlier, but before he does that he takes a swipe at anyone who would "merely assert that the perceiver of all this neural action is the soul, which cannot be described in physical terms, and that is that."

Such a person who calls the brain's internal "perceiver" of its own neural action a non-physical phenomenon is thus lumped by Hofstadter into the category of "soulist," a word he has made up which apparently is the antonym of materialist. Hofstadter himself is such a materialist, or perhaps, better put, a mechanist. The brain to him is akin to a computer, a machine. Its awareness is "a direct effect of all the complex hardware and software" that it is made of (p. 388). End of story.


Just after saying that, he introduces the Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas as something of a foil to his own mechanist views of consciousness. He starts down this path by excerpting (pp. 388-390) a long passage from Lucas' 1961 article "Minds, Machines, and Gödel," the full text of which may be read here. In the passage cited by Hofstadter, Lucas champions a reading of Gödel's incompleteness notions as demonstrating that the human mind cannot be equivalent to a machine, "within the meaning of the act."

That is, if a machine is defined as something that cannot stand outside itself as a formal, mechanical system and see the truth of those sorts of propositions which Gödel said all formal systems ineluctably lack proofs for, then the human mind is no machine. For the human mind can indeed see such truths. It is accordingly, Lucas says, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Why? Because it is of a degree of complexity that has gone, in the analogy Lucas draws to a nuclear reactor, "super-critical."

A machine might someday be built that has such super-critical complexity, Lucas wrote, but if it was built, "it would cease to be a machine, within the meaning of the act." It would be "no longer entirely predictable and entirely docile." It would "have a mind of its own" (can we say it would possess "free will"?) "Even when presented with a Gödel-type question" — i.e., a question that no formal, mechanical system could answer — "it [could get] the answer right."


To be quite frank, when I first began reading Hofstadter, I thought this sort of thing was exactly what he was leading up to. I thought he was going to use Gödelian incompleteness as a springboard to claiming that consciousness exceeds the merely physical workings of the brain, just as what we can know exceeds what we can demonstrate the truth of mechanically and formally.

Now I realize how wrong I was. Instead, Hofstadter is (as of the end of his chapter on "Minds and Thoughts") clearly about to embark on a demonstration of the opposite: that Gödelian incompleteness can be interpreted as supporting a strictly materialistic, mechanistic view of the mind, including the conscious and self-aware aspects thereof.

A clue to this comes from the way in which Hofstadter describes the Lucas paper in his bibliography (p. 751): "A highly controversial and provocative article, it claims to show that a human brain cannot, in principle, be modeled by a computer program. The argument is based entirely on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and is a fascinating one. The prose is (to my mind) incredibly infuriating — yet for that very reason, it makes humorous reading."

Talk about damning with faint praise! I found the prose excerpt from Lucas spoken of above to be anything but infuriating. In fact, I found it chimed with my own views, which means that I found Lucas to be in the same ballpark as Chalmers and Wright on the subject of consciousness.


To be more precise, Chalmers in his book seems to differ with Lucas, albeit in fairly nuanced ways that I frankly admit I am not mentally up to comprehending (see pp. 313-314), even though both writers take non-materialist approaches to the question of consciousness.

At the same time, Chalmers dismisses Hofstadter's views in Gödel, Escher, Bach much more broadly (pp. 30-31): "Hofstadter (1979) has some interesting things to say about consciousness, but he is more concerned with introspection, free will, and the sense of self than with expierience per se." In other words, Chalmers (generously, in my opinion) lets Hofstadter off the hook by reading him as saying nothing much at all about conscious experience as Chalmers describes the phenomenon.

I don't quite agree with Chalmers on this point. I think Hofstadter intentionally declines to address consciousness as a phenomenal, non-material thing, simply because he, Hofstadter, takes for granted that such a thing could never exist. If it did exist, it would be "magical," and it would demand a "soulist" explanation — which, to him, is no explanation at all.

In taking that approach, I think Hofstadter is guilty of artificially excluding a logical middle ground between his mechanistic, material view of consciousness and a true "soulist" view. I take the latter to amount to the standard religious notion of the "soul" as being somehow impressed upon the body by some higher power, call it God or whatever.

But, as Wright, Chalmers, and Lucas all demonstrate, there are various ways to occupy such a logical middle ground without adopting either a mechanical view of the mind or a traditional religious view of the soul.


Even if there really is such a possible middle ground, I have found in my readings of the subject of consciousness that there are a number of smart people like Hofstadter who shy away from it.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker, in his excellent book How the Mind Works, is one of them — see The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI). Pinker agrees with Chalmers and others that consciousness (which he defines as Chalmers does) is bafflingly inexplicable; but he holds that it is like certain other things which he lists that defy all explanation. So be it, he seems to say.

Pinker is on record as being an atheist. As such, he is much kinder to the non-materialist view of consciousness than another well-known atheist who has written on the subject of the mind, Daniel Dennett. I haven't read Dennett, but from what I have read about his books and other writings, I feel confident in saying he does not subscribe to any such notion as a dualist division between the conscious mind and the physical brain.

And so it seems that the more opposed to religion one is, the less one is inclined to believe that the mind or soul is anything more than a direct result of the physical workings of the brain. I find that correlated opposition to two widely held ideas — God and the immaterial mind or soul — curious, to say the least. Perhaps their opponents resist both because both seem "magical" to them.

The Pope of Reason

I discussed the recent (and ongoing) flap over The Pope and Islam in my previous post. Last September, when Pope Benedict XVI addressed the "representatives of science" at the University of Regensburg, Germany, much umbrage was taken at some of his references to Islam. The Holy Father mentioned a dialogue between a Byzantine Christian emperor and an educated Persian Muslim during the siege of Constantinople (the city once called Byzantium) between 1394 and 1402. The thrust of one of the remarks made by Manuel II Paleologus, the emperor, was to note that Mohammed's command in the Qur'an had been to spread his new religion "by the sword" — that is, by force and compulsion, not by reason and persuasion.

What got overlooked in the hubbub over that seeming derogation of Islam was that the Pope also noted the injunction of surah 2,256 of the Qur'an: "There is no compulsion in religion."

(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)


The Pope also cited a modern scholar of Islam named Theodore Khoury to the effect that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

Again, what got overlooked was that Pope Benedict's speech expounded how our own Judeo-Christian tradition in the West has, since the late Middle Ages, toyed with similar notions of God not being bound, at the very core of his being, by reason ... or anything else.

The Pope said this image of God as voluntarily having put on a mask of reason as his modus operandi toward Creation, even though there was nothing in his own nature which mandated that choice, was the start of a project — it continues today — to "dehellenize" Christian thought.

Ancient Greek philosophers held that God (albeit not the God of the Old Testament) was intrinsically rational, as was the world which they investigated and experienced. They referred to the orderliness of the universe as cosmos and the principle behind it as logos. Benedict feels that such Greek ideas were part and parcel of the message of the New Testament, right from the start of the Christian Church.

As such, they were not just "a preliminary inculturation" which grafted Hellenic notions onto Jewish ones in order to make Christianity palatable as it was transplanted from the Middle East to ancient Europe. When the Evangelist, writing in Greek, began the Gospel of John with a reference to the Creator God as logos, Word, reason — using "In the beginning" to mirror the first verse of Genesis — he gave Manuel II Paleologus every right to say 13 centuries later that not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's very nature.


I need to make a confession before I proceed any further. Upon reading the Pope's Regensburg lecture, I found myself realizing just how long and how deeply I have been in love with that philosophical project to dehellenize Christian understanding. I couldn't have called it by that name, but virtually every point the Holy Father made about how the dehellenizing of theology has proceeded during the last several centuries rang a bell with me. I'll discuss these points one by one in future posts; for now, let me just say that I stand convicted of having long been a dehellenizer par excellence.

And yet I also recognized, as I read the Pope's text, that I am in some deep sense no longer the dehellenizer I once was. In fact, my biases today are all in the opposite direction: toward reinstating the primacy of reason as the best — nay, only — way to tame the rampant craziness we find ourselves confronted with in today's world.


It's possible to say I'm wrong in all this, and that the Pope's emphasis on reason as indivisible from Christian faith (and vice versa) is actually the exact opposite of the apt prescription for the West today. Such a position is a coherent one as well. That I myself have upheld it with a fair degree of consistency — until now, that is — makes me sure of that.

What we have here, in the Pope's position on rationality as it diverges from the "modern" view of same, is a conflict of two worldviews that differ at a tremendously deep level of abstraction. Great minds — the Pope mentions, among others, that of Immanuel Kant — have for the past several centuries pondered such deep thoughts and come to the conclusion that ancient Greek approaches to rationality no longer make sense as the linchpin of modern philosophical understanding.


The Greeks' basic assumptions lasted in the West until at least the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century — perhaps for the very reason that they underpin Biblical assumptions in holy writ. Then, according to the Pope, Thomas' near-contemporary Duns Scotus contradicted Aquinas with respect to "the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done." Specifically, said Scotus, God acts in accord with reason only by virtue of a voluntary choice made on his part, not because of his true nature.

The Reformation, in the 16th century, "sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word," the Pope asserted at Regensburg, ignoring the fact that Word and logos are the same thing in John's Gospel. "When Kant [in the 18th century] stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole." That was the culmination of the first stage of the modern dehellenization project which Scotus' "voluntarism" had made possible.

The second stage, Benedict said, involved an initiative to bring Christianity "back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God." The New Testament was re-interpreted in such a way as to make of Jesus but a man with a "simple message ... [albeit] a humanitarian moral message." Theology became "something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific," meaning it was no longer joined at the hip with reason. Accordingly, reason no longer took primacy over historical relativism or scientific empiricism.

In an age of science, according to the Pope, "only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty." This approach to the truth left God outside its available radius. It concomitantly dethroned reason, as the Greeks understood the word, as a source of knowledge. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, followed by his Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement, were instrumental in making reason serve as a "practical" tool rather than a pathway to higher truth.

Even so, the Pope says a kind of back-door Platonism, derived from Greek thought, has continued to inform the modern scientific view. Taking the form of Cartesianism, it "presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently."


Lost in the modernist shuffle, unfortunately, has been the idea that every human possesses a soul whose nature is fundamentally rational, and is thus analogous to God's own inner nature. Instead, another analogy, to the voluntarism of Scotus, has made each of us free agents for whom both reason and religious faith are matters of subjective choice, or of personal "conscience." (The quotation marks here are the Pope's.) Sadly, the Pope said, "the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by 'science' ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective."

The Pope, in fact, would like to reinstate "collective reason" as the touchstone of our common life together in a globalized world, in place of the merely personal and subjective. His hope is that the remnant of back-door Platonism that lingers in our scientific worldview — the idea that the world has a fundamentally "mathematical structure" — could become the basis for expanding the sphere of rationality to encompass, once again, the domain of the human spirit.

"Modern scientific reason," he says, "quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given ... ." Translation: nature is rational. So is the human spirit, at its very best ... and so too is the God of the Bible, properly interpreted, with all of scripture's hellenistic allusions still intact. Embracing the rich analogies between those three levels of understanding could propel the West into a newer, greater age.


More than that, it could serve as the basis for real interreligious dialogue with Islam. Before we can challenge Islam to take its "There is no compulsion in religion" mandate more seriously, we had better get straight in our own heads the extent to which we have marginalized reason in our own culture.

The guiding principle of this blog has always been a search for solidarity, by which I mean a coming together of all the disparate worldviews that do battle amongst us today. When I began the blog, I originally called it "A World of Doubt," in view of the fact that there is a culture war going on in America today between (at the extremes) those who claim their religion is definitely true and those who assert that there is no God and that all religions are false. Given that both sides speak with the swagger of certainty, I wanted to explore the possibility that "doubt" — a resolute openmindedness — was a viable middle position that could keep things from flying apart.

At some point I replaced "doubt" with "solidarity" as my goal of goals: seeing whether we all might be able to come together over a stripped-down understanding of religion or, at least, of the Christian one. (Along these lines, see also my now-defunct Jesus before Christianity blog.) I now recognize this paring down to have been an attempt to justify a dehellenized faith of the sort the Pope warned against at Regensburg: a simple, humanitarian message of "love thy neighbor," perhaps.

Today I see that simplifying the message isn't enough. Any formula such as "love thy neighbor," no matter how simplistic, is ineluctably perceived in its relationship to a wider context of thought. For us moderns today, that wider context demotes reason as a fount of truth and replaces it with subjectivity. If the Pope is right about his recognition of that — and I suddenly think he is — then loving your neighbor means little more than rationalizing the gulf between his world and yours as being dictated by the strictures of multiculturalism, or tolerance, or whatever.

But that can't be right, I now see. If he is living in a wholly different world, experientially speaking, then you and he are not really neighbors at all. In that case, the only way to build a bridge between your world and his is by the mutual exercise of reason.

That was the thrust of the Pope's Regensburg lecture. The point was not that Christianity is good, because rational, and Islam bad, because not. The point was not that Christianity and Islam cannot talk, period. It was rather that both religions must re-embrace reason before interreligious dialogue can flower and bear fruit.