Below is an exchange I had with a good friend of mine who I would describe as moderately religious.
Me: Do you believe in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Friend: Yes.
Me: Do you believe that Jesus was the son of God?
Friend: Yes
Me: If humans were ever to contact these aliens, do you think we would find that they believe in Jesus or even know his name?
Friend: [confused smirk]
Being religious is about compartmentalizing one's mind. In order to function in society, and even to have meaningful relationships with one's peers, one must be rational most of the time. Rationality precludes religion, so people simply suspend reason for that tiny area of their life. Asking them this question forces them to confront this contradiction.
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6 comments:
Michael,
This sounds like a bait question, but I think I'll bite.
First, the answer to the question you pose is this: of course aliens would not know about Jesus. Unless of course they had studied human history. If God were to send a special messenger to an alien species, he would be meaningful to them in the same way Jesus is meaningful to us - through their shared species history, physical form, mental capacities, emotional makeup, failings, etc.
Have you ever wondered why Christians make, but don't make, a distinction between God and Jesus? They speak about Jesus like he was God, but then they say he was a human just like us, but then they say God is a supreme being about as far above us as is imaginable for another intelligent life form to be. So what gives? The answer is that Jesus is a special representative that came in a form we could see and hear and touch, and declared - implausible as it may seem - to be able to represent God to us and us to God. This summary skips a whole bunch of extremely dry theology which I am sure you don't really want to review right now - it's just that understanding aliens and Jesus requires an understanding of humans and Jesus. You asked.
Now I don't know if you really want a comment about rationality. To say that religion is not rational is true and not true at the same time. Religion in general transcends the rational faculty - again, a lot of theology, and some heavy duty philosophy, is behind this statement but I won't go into it. In other words, it's not particularly useful to look for rationality in religion, although many people, believers and non, have a tendency to try.
Any religion - with perhaps a few exceptions that prove this rule - is essentially about non-material things, such as the soul, or the life force, or the spirit realm, etc. We have found - some would say we have proven - that rational processes work for material things, such as space travel, nuclear reactors, molecular biology, etc. The religious point of view is that science is not particularly successful at explaining or controlling non-material phenomena, such as amazing examples of human will, miraculous recoveries, accurate dream-like visions, near death experiences, etc.
I would bet that you think you are a materialist - that you can explain all non-material occurrences as the side-effects of some misunderstood physical process, like misfiring brain neurons, and hallucinations. But your belief that what science cannot address, will someday be properly understood, is itself a kind of rationalistic faith.
In my experience, a materialist conviction like that cannot be easily shaken - whether by someone answering a question about aliens and Jesus, or by watching a gorgeous sunset, or by seeing fellow humans die with confidence in their spirit's real continuation after physical death. It will take the direct intervention of spiritual reality into your life to jiggle the gearbox of your brain and make you take a second look at what religion offers the multitude of often fairly intelligent people who believe it. I hope that happens to you.
Before I respond to the specific points you made in your comment, let me clarify the point I was trying to make in the post. The question does not make a logical argument. The point of this line question is to put the person being asked in the awkward position. First, you get them into intellectual/rational mode, then you confront them with their anti-intellectual/irrational beliefs.
Of course they could think up some justification, like that it is possible that the aliens have their own version of Jesus, or they will have yet to hear about him. But when they're forced to say stuff like that, it makes them uncomfortable. They're just looking for excuses. I hopefully they'll come to the rational conclusion that Jesus is just a human invention, a product of culture like Zeus and Apollo.
Moving on...
"The religious point of view is that science is not particularly successful at explaining or controlling non-material phenomena, such as amazing examples of human will, miraculous recoveries, accurate dream-like visions, near death experiences, etc."
Nothing that you listed is unexplained. Any example of "amazing human will" could be explained by Pyschology, that is the study of behavior. There is no such thing as a miracuous recovery. Sometimes the sick recover when the odds of them doing so were very low, but this is just an unlikely occurrence. What about when a healthy person unexpectedly gets a heart attack? Religious people only focus on the positive unlikely occurrences, not the negative ones. Also, these so-called miraculous recoveries are very rare. Much more rare then you'd think. People/the media focus on them so much because they're heartwarming, which misleads people into think they happen a lot more often than they do.
Dream-like visions? Near death experiences? Such hallucinations can easily be recreated in a lab setting. In terms of the accuracy, there is no empirical data to back that up. If there is, please bring it to my attention. I am very interested.
"In my experience, a materialist conviction like that cannot be easily shaken - whether by someone answering a question about aliens and Jesus, or by watching a gorgeous sunset, or by seeing fellow humans die with confidence in their spirit's real continuation after physical death. It will take the direct intervention of spiritual reality into your life to jiggle the gearbox of your brain and make you take a second look at what religion offers the multitude of often fairly intelligent people who believe it. I hope that happens to you."
I'm not certain if I would consider myself a materialist. If by materialist you mean that I don't believe in a "higher" reality than the natural world, then I would say yes I am a materialist. However, if you have any evidence of the supernatural, I would be interested to explore it. I like to keep an open mind.
The type of "conversion" you are talking about is solely based on emotion. Beliefs should not be based on emotion. They are not reliable tools in determining discovery reality.
I hear religious people talk a lot about how beautiful a sunset is as evidence of the supernatural. This is one of the least sensible reasons I've heard for being religious. "beauty" itself does not exist. It is only your subjective conception of it. Just because the world contains things you happen to find beautiful doesn't say much about the world itself. If anything its a statement about human nature. Why do humans find certain things beautiful, and others not? These are interesting questions that academics are exploring everyday. But if you're religious you just stop at "because God loves me!" How anti-intellectual!
Michael,
We ought to be able to agree exactly where we disagree. I think the fundamental disagreement - the one that prevents any further progress on the topic of religion - has to do with materialism - that is, the philosophical viewpoint that only material things exist - closely associated with a belief in the primacy of science. Your entire world view rules out the possibility of real things that cannot be explained by science.
Your answer to my challenge about strange events is totally in terms of scientific reductionism: "Nothing that you listed is unexplained...There is no such thing as a miracuous recovery...this is just an unlikely occurrence...very rare...can easily be recreated in a lab setting...there is no empirical data to back that up..."
I suspect you are merely pretending to be "open-minded" and want "evidence" of the supernatural - you are certain that all the examples of "miraculous happenings" I could possibly give you are entirely explainable side-effects of my delusional belief system. What I would challenge you on is whether you can claim that science understands these things perfectly, or ever can. In other words, if I did survive cancer when I shouldn't have - how could science explain it? It was science that predicted I couldn't survive. If I did have a dream that came true - what would the mechanism for that be? Science does not even seriously try to explain these things - it writes them off as "anomolies" or "statistical quirks" or "unreproducable and unscientific results" which is exactly what miracle means.
I believe in supernatural realities and you don't. If I told you I had experienced supernatural things in my life, you would likely deny my claim and insist that there must have been some rational explanation for it. But, since I am well trained in rational thought processes, and I have already decided pure rationality does not adequately explain my experience, I will not go back to a position I once held - one close to yours, that religion is falsehood.
Instead, I have to do something you have not yet had to do - explore the possibility of a world that contains two halves - a physical, material side, made up of everything a scientist can make good explanations for, and a spiritual, immaterial side, made up of things scientists either can not make much progress on, or deny altogether.
You also say "What about when a healthy person unexpectedly gets a heart attack? Religious people only focus on the positive unlikely occurrences, not the negative ones."
Sure, people don't pray for predictable results - they pray for unpredictable results. But they don't pray for negative consequences (technically that is a curse not a prayer) - they pray for positive outcomes. They don't pray because they understand what happens - they pray because they cannot hope to understand any of it and yet they still dare to try to have an impact.
Unfortunately, whether you and I are both "intellectual" or not, we won't be speaking about the same thing if we try to debate religion. You will be talking about something you think does not exist, and I will be talking about something I have experienced in the undeniable reality of my existence. Until we can get past that we are not likely to make progress, and will get stuck in a childish "yes it is; no it isn't" sort of discussion.
One metaphor you might think of in this case is that of a veteran reporter or soldier who comes back home and talks to someone who closely follows the news of world events but has never actually seen it. The news-hound might say "I hear it isn't really so bad in Iraq. We seem to be winning." To which the soldier might say "You can't understand what a total mess it is until you've been there." It's not just that they have different opinions, it's that they have different experiences to back up their opinions.
One often hears the expression "believing in unicorns" as an expression of what religious people fundamentally get wrong. Or it could be Santa Claus. Those are apt illustrations, since they help religious people understand that to an atheist, God is the same thing as a unicorn or Santa Claus.
The only problem is that, if we can truly claim to be religious, we actually have met what, to an atheist, are unicorns and Santa Claus. It's not that I want to convert you - I can't do it as long as you hold to your intellectual certainty that unicorns don't exist. Anything I say about the invisible reality behind religion will not have any impact on you until you experience that reality.
I say all this because, in large part, that was the case with me. I was educated and trained as a rational scientific person. It was only when I saw that science and reason were inadequate to explain all the weird and disturbing phenomena of life that I looked farther. I explored things like eastern religions, extraterrestrials, and occult wisdom. After becoming completely disgusted with that I began building a super-scientific explanation of everything based on ecology and evolution (following the Gaia Hypothesis - which is a sort of scientific religion). Then I read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which persuaded me that science will always be re-inventing itself over time and, however useful and revealing it may be, cannot attain a complete explanation of everything. Meanwhile, during this entire period of about 15 years, certain very specific things happened to me that convinced me of the truth and reality of supernatural things.
Finally, I started looking at the explanations offered by four millenia of human experience of supernatural phenomena, which is embedded in all religions, but in my opinion has its best expression in the traditional Christian story (I know - how boring). When I actually looked at it, rather than just dismissing it as naive and unintellectual, I found this position to be incredibly well grounded and supported by some of the deepest thinkers the human species has produced. It allowed me to use either the rational side of my mind (to program computers, for instance) and the irrational, spiritual side of my being - to guide me through the horrific fallout of divorce, drug use, depression, and dysfunction I have experienced, and to somehow re-grow a wonderfully well-balanced and positive personal life and close-knit family that feels connected to eternal truths and ultimate authorities, both in life as we know it, and in that state of existence that will follow after our life ends on this material plane.
I do not write such things down very often - it's a lot of work. I am not fanatic about spreading the gospel. I am a big fan of Ron Paul, and that is how I got to your blog. It's all a mysterious coincidence. There are many things I would like to discuss with you about religion - after all, there are a million choices for you after you decide that there really is something besides the visible world surrounding you - but that cannot happen until you break out of the cage of rationality. Good luck.
Damn you wrote a lot! I think we should take this discussion to instant messenger. That'd be fun. Why don't you e-mail me with your info?
mpstanco (at) gmail (dot) com
There's a lot going on in this post, and I don't want to further inflate what might be an already bloated discussion, so I'm going to pick one of Zowns' points out in particular and try to focus on that. Let me start off by quoting Zowns:
"To say that religion is not rational is true and not true at the same time. Religion in general transcends the rational faculty - again, a lot of theology, and some heavy duty philosophy, is behind this statement but I won't go into it. In other words, it's not particularly useful to look for rationality in religion, although many people, believers and non, have a tendency to try."
Religion, so far as I can tell, doesn't really transcend reason so much as violate it. What alternative method of inquiry are you proposing? I'm assuming that, when you say religion transcends the rational faculty, you mean that it has access to truths that cannot be obtained through reason alone. This is a common claim of revelation. Is revelation the method of inquiry you are advocating? Dressed up in pseudo-philosophic euphemisms and ambiguities, revelation puts on a nice show, but I'd like to see if you have the conviction to stand by it in its most articulated, explicit, and insane form. Do you claim to have personally divined information about the nature of the universe, not from empirical observation and experimentation, not from reason, not from argument, deduction or scrutiny, but from "experience" alone? Allow me to quote you again:
"You will be talking about something you think does not exist, and I will be talking about something I have experienced in the undeniable reality of my existence."
Undeniable, indeed! How could I possibly falsify knowledge which, instead of being derived from principle or extrapolated from example, was simply intuited? Are you really proposing that we should accept your right to play without rules? Fine. In that case, I claim that Jesus was an octopus. I don't have to justify my claim: the process that led me to this conclusion transcends reason. It was not observed empirically, nor was it deduced through logic. It is part of the "undeniable reality of my existence". Do you really want to play without a referee, where personal experience is undeniable, unfalsifiable, incontrovertible proof of whatever preposterous stupidity I choose to espouse? I'll bet that, despite your condescension towards "materialism" and reason, and despite your claim to have "undeniable" experiences which transcend those concepts, you will eagerly, hungrily use the tools of reason and evidence at the first moment they appear to favor your side of the debate. If, in some great upheaval and revolution, scientific studies demonstrated the literal truth of Genesis, would you leap for joy, proclaiming a final, irrefutable vindication of your belief system?
Or would you be indifferent and disinterested, having already been in possession of such knowledge through "undeniable" experience? I'll be that when the shit hits the fan, you favor reason over revelation like anyone else. Demonstrate the validity of an alternative method of inquiry. Show me the truths it has unveiled. Then maybe we will play with the net down.
There are most likely aliens, and I'm sure they know who Jesus is. Either from the aliens who were here and saw Jesus themselves or reading about him. I'm not sure what their opinion of Jesus is, I'd have to ask them :P Almost everyone has heard of Jesus, and I think everyone will at some point in their life. I find the supernatural and paranormal very interesting. I love horror and sci-fi movies and tv shows. I even watch Mindfreak sometimes (don't judge me! lol). I really don't get the point about putting your friend in an "awkward" situation, asking them about their beliefs shouldn't be uncomfortable.
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