While a kind of temptation exists to accept emergent theory of divine mind wholesale due to its explanatory power, there is a sense where certain difficulties arise. Now while proponents of this theory may agree with me saying that more work needs to be done to smooth out various conceptual details, I do not think that the difficulties they have in mind are the same as those which I will point out.
There may be holes in the theory on its physical, superficial level. That is, there may be physical phenomena that have not been accounted for by emergence theory because more data needs to by examined or because physical evidence is lacking at the moment due to our current technological level. For example, generally speaking, superstring theory posits that there exist these nth dimensional strings that are thought to vibrate the physical world into existence. If one thinks of the universe as a kind of body, superstrings could be said to be the universe's genetic code. Here the question might be in regard to the role emergence theory plays.
While gaps like these may be important to the overall explanatory power of the theory, it is not the kind of gap which I want to indicate as problematic. The difficulty has more to do with the kinds of questions one can ask given what we know about the world. In this sense, it is a grammatical problem. In other words, if the world is said to be this way, the way illustrated given an emergence perspective, what kind of sense can we derive from it regarding the nature or existence of God?
A similar examination is carried out by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. There Philo points out that one can believe it sensible to designate God as the originator of what is thought to be order in the world. But if one takes that perspective, an equal perspective is to say that things happen as they do in a natural way without any cosmic intelligence working behind the scenes. Why would it be more sensible to say that intelligent design makes more sense than random occurrence? What criteria can be brought to bear? In fact, if we take my old philosophy teacher’s method of critical analysis, there is nothing to show that there is anything like a deity behind any order given the lack of evidence.
In Emergence theory, however, it is proposed that there is evidence given the evolutionary feature working in the backdrop. While random events do take place, it is these same random features that ultimately give rise to novel ones with sophisticated attributes, sophisticated enough at one point, to call that something consciousness. In turn, the aggregates of consciousness later give rise, in an emergent way, to divine consciousness. The evidence is one of inference, but inference based upon scientific, well documented theories of evolutionary development as well as philosophical deduction.
The grammatical problem, and what is meant here by grammatical is logical, is that the sense of ‘divine consciousness’ is in question. What is this divine consciousness? What Clayton in his work on emergence theory seems to suggest is that it is supposed to be the explanation of God. If so, a more serious question can be asked: Is this what we mean by God? God is an aggregate of people coming together, cohabiting, dealing, discussing, fighting, playing, and so on, with each other to the point where, on some level, God arises as an emergent property? This is what believers worship and atheists deny? If true, God here is no more than an extension of the human capacities and understanding. And while in one sense God transcends humanity, God is still in another sense subject to it and comprehensible by it. God in this view becomes a kind of analogy of human intelligence and paradigm. And God, in this sense, is not the God of the believers; the one who is worshiped in the life of believers because this God has in a sense arisen from the very natural processes thought to be originally put into play by God. Hume is not silenced here if this is where the matter ends. Indeed, for him, the matter has returned full circle, for his alter ego, Philo, says:
If the whole of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it afford no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no farther than to the human intelligence; and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections which lie against it? Some astonishment indeed will naturally arise from the greatness of the object: Some melancholy from its obscurity: Some contempt of human reason, that it can give no solution more satisfactory with regard to so extraordinary and magnificent a question.[1]
What has been eliminated here is the sense of faith. Its replacement, evolution, is much more instrumental and hygienic, perhaps even more exact, although its exactitude comes at the price of error. Through evolution, be it of physical examples or ideas, God has arisen, unpredictably yet intelligibly, despite the thoughts and conceptions religious traditions have devised of God and despite the brutality that was wrought in God’s name (here are the necessary ‘errors’ that must crop up evolutionarily in history). Without discussion of the moral difficulties that this brings up, the logical difficulties that this poses cannot be dismissed. Here Hume’s question can be revisited and posed with some force. If it is sensible to call this emergent property 'God', then it is just as sensible to say it is not God. All one can say is that science has found what it has found, and what it has found is not necessarily God.
Science, in whatever form one chooses, has one feature particular to it which faith does not. Scientific methodology has implicit in its structure, or mode of inquiry, a falsifiable component. Something is considered theory until a better theory can replace it. Belief in God does not have this same feature. A believer does not hold his/her belief in God in suspense until something better comes along. And while a believer may fall from faith, it is not at all the same thing as a theory falling out of favor with the scientific community. Yet there is a tendency that seems to run rampant in the west that God can be verifiably proven. But what is also true is that it takes more than historical evidence to make a believer into a non-believer. To think otherwise is to question the foundation of that believer’s religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the believer is not like a scientist looking at certain evidence, testing a theory to see if evidential accounts support it, and if the evidences do not fit, s/he is ready to discard the old theory for a new, better theory. On the contrary, as Wittgenstein says in the believer's regard, “Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn't in the slightest influence me.”[2] Some might say of the believer who founds his faith and those of others on scientifically oriented terms that he has finally discarded all those childhood fantasies and that he has gained the ability to see the world for what it really is given the wonders of science. Yet Kierkegaard would see this as a loss, not a gain. In one place he says says:
No, when an old person has outgrown the childish and the youthful, ordinary language calls this, maturity and a gain. But willfully ever to have outgrown the childish and Eternal is spoken of as falling away from God and as perdition; and only the life of the ungodly “shall be as the snail that melts, as it goes” (Psalm 58:8).[3]
[1] David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129.
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 56.
[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1948), 38.
No comments:
Post a Comment