Aquinas and Chopra

Now that I am a bit more familiar with just what was going on in the 13^th century, I can hazard a comparison to today. The comparison will allude to a much broader theme, but use Thomas Aquinas and Deepak Chopra by way of example.

Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic monk, in the Dominican order. The Franciscan monks were more into the whole “born to suffer” thing while Dominicans saw creation as something ongoing. Deepak Chopra is a doctor of medicine and holds titles such as “senior scientist”. He doesn’t practice medicine but he is considered a leader in the field of mind-body medicine. Both of these men have experienced controversy in their lifetime. Both of them were born into a time of change, when new ideas about how the world is ordered were causing rapid change. Aquinas had to fit his ideas into a strict system that could banish or condemn someone who disagreed with it. Chopra lives in a much freer time. Aquinas had to learn the strict doctrine of Christianity and a few writings attributed to Aristotle and Plato. Chopra has many traditions to draw from and more science than one person can possibly know.

In the time of Aquinas, Catholics were in charge. They were the school, the hospital and they were tied to the ruling class. The rediscovery of ancient Greek texts and the early stirrings of science were just starting to put a crack in that power structure. Power is much more diversified today. Although we still have a ruling class, those rulers are expected to make their case with some amount of reason. Aquinas was attempting to reconcile reason with faith and find a way to his God using an exploratory method. Today, most scientists don’t examine the question of God at all. A reputable scientist will say that relying on a supernatural cause is not science. There still are some who are attempting to reconcile science and religion, some in more traditional terms and some like Chopra who use modern ideas of consciousness and quantum mechanics.

Aquinas could not see what the future would hold. The whole world had not been mapped and empires unabashedly held the goal of world domination. Franciscan monks, as many before them, felt that their religion would “win” at some point, both over the idea of “philosophy” and over the real world of Kings and Kingdoms. For them, having the soul tied to the individual and having it be something that would survive to eternity was critical to their vision of heaven of hell. Heaven and hell were critical to how they could win converts. Any rationalizing of these concepts, as Aquinas was dabbling with, threatened that.

Chopra lives in a pluralistic world. Europeans kept going west until they met themselves in the East. The culture of capitalism is “winning”, although not quite how it was envisioned. People are at least studying other religions and sometimes converting. Penalties for apostasy are frowned upon in most of the world and sanctioned most of the time. Chopra only has to sell his ideas to the people, not make them fit with the rulers. He does not have to conform to a traditional vision. He can make his vision broad enough to attract a large number of followers.

Aquinas believed there was a God, but that we don’t fully know him. This was the theology of his time. He said we could find God through reason. He didn’t know for sure, but he was reading about reason and the beginnings of science and trying to bring the two together. This was his great contribution. For a short time he was banned for saying it. It is not clear what he said that offended the church. It may have simply been that they didn’t understand him well enough and needed some time to read it over before deciding if what he said was acceptable. Part of the problem was that he did not come to a conclusion. By suggesting the route of reason, he opened the possibility reason might find that God doesn’t exist. He may have been sure of finding God eventually, but the risk of not finding Him no doubt troubled the Pope. The idea that God could be reached through reason has an inherent risk. If Aquinas was allowed to attempt it, and failed, then they would have had a reasonable argument against God that came from one of their own.

It is sometimes hard to say exactly what Chopra believes. He is more willing to say that we don’t know everything, and in fact capitalizes on that fact. He definitely starts with the premise that consciousness existed before matter, at least the matter that we know about. Instead of taking an existing tradition or a synthesis of all of them and applying science to them to determine their truth, Chopra works backwards. He looks at what science is discovering now, then back at what traditions said and claims the traditions knew it all along.

Chopra says physics is now discovering what mystics have known for centuries. Mysticism is about accepting things as they are. When you do that, he says, your mind is opened to greater knowledge, knowledge comes to you. He then claims to have used this method to gain greater knowledge and writes books telling what he has figured out. However since he acquired it mystically, no one has any way of confirming it. To me, this makes it worthless.

In fact, I think Chopra misses the mark on mysticism. Mysticism is a realization that there is one universe and it is what it is. We can’t affect it or change it. In that sense, science and some traditions agree. Chopra thinks we can affect the universe with our thoughts.  Chopra’s idea about quantum physics is that we can manipulate our chemistry by applying our consciousness to it. Exactly how he thinks this is done is hard to really say. For him, consciousness comes first. Things can’t exist if some consciousness is not experiencing it.

In the heat of a debate he once said that even the moon is only there because we are observing it. He later recanted, but has not changed his premise. This is a bastardization of the observer affect in quantum physics. The idea that we can manipulate matter with thought via quantum physics was seriously considered in the 1970’s but there is a dissolution affect of quantum reactions as they pass up through the synapses. It was science for a few years, then it was disproven. This is how science works, when a theory has no evidence, nothing to build on, it is discarded. Unfortunately, stuff like this gets picked up by people like Chopra and propagated ad nauseam.  

It is somewhat unclear if Aquinas was supporting the Catholic church or trying to change it. He wrote against the more pantheistic arguments of Averroes but made attempts to use the reasoning skills of Aristotle to discover more about God. He said the soul is something that exists outside of the individual but integrates with us during our life then continues on as part of a larger whole afterwards. He said that God is always creating. God causes events, but those events can cause other events. This means we can act on and affect the world too. He died unsure of how well his ideas were accepted.  50 years later, he was canonized as a saint.

Both were wrong about science. Aquinas can be excused because modern science had not yet developed. His survival was tied to the Christian church and alternatives were not readily available. His study of Aristotle was a great contribution to mankind. His works questioned long held traditions that were holding back progress of Europe. This forced others to consider those questions too. He no doubt hoped people would continue his work, but made no claims to future fame. Chopra could simply google some of his works and could probably afford to test many of them empirically. Or he could just listen to his critics or debate opponents. He depends on people believing that his ideas will be shown to be true in the future, a classic sign of a crackpot. He questions the very system of progress, muddles it and confuses it. This forces others to revisit questions that have already been answered.

In any era, people feel that there is more to life than our short years in our bodies. The mind senses that it is not limited to its cranial home with imaginations far beyond its borders and feelings of other creatures’ pains and joys. There is a fear of anyone or anything that would claim limits on the mind or posit that those feelings are illusions. Aquinas was trying to understand those feelings, Chopra just seems to be capitalizing on them.

Aquinas thought he knew God was the answer and that natural or supernatural means were paths to the same truth. He had some freedom to explore but had narrow boundaries. Chopra can pick and choose easily from either mysticism or science and twists definitions to fit his desires. Aquinas wanted everyone to be at ease with God and used whatever means he had at his disposal. Chopra knows the spiritual need is there and wants to bend science so it is acceptable to those who are uncomfortable with it and so it seems to support his theories. Rather than try to make a religion fit science as Aquinas had to do, Chopra can claim that science is now pointing to what he says religion is. There is no inquisition to correct his errors on either side of the equation.

Aquinas was never ex-communicated, you could say he always did right by his religion. He prayed and studied the Bible and always believed. Chopra, when talking about mysticism or science, gets it wrong. Chopra says we can heal ourselves by meditating and reciting ancient sayings. He says there is a “Law of Attraction” that can be learned and will help you achieve harmony with the universe and maybe make you will live longer. He is very careful to use words like “maybe”. Mystics, the ones we remember like the Buddha, never made such claims. Mystics just wanted to figure how to get through this life. Trying to sell people on the idea that they would be happier if they followed their teaching would have reduced their credibility. Science too, when it was young had its snake oil salesmen who tried to sell their cures for everything, but hopefully we are growing out of that.  

Hopefully.

Timeline Preview

I found a timeline script that I really like. I've plugged a few dates in and a few pictures. More work to be done, but you should get the idea. Eventually I want to compare this to the start of philosophy in Greece, then the current state of things in America.

Timeline of Abbasid dynasty

The difficulty of presenting history is that the only way to paint the complete picture is to tell the entire story of the human race. Any partial story shows your bias. History is usually told as the story of a country or of a life. The history of the philosophy of science spans many lives and many countries. Important inventions were lost at the bottom of the sea for 2,000 years. Writings were hidden then lost then found then misunderstood then expanded upon then argued over.

In this timeline, I take a parts of many stories that usually occur in the middle of other stories. The story is usually told of how something was discovered or first written about in one part of the world, how it passed through Baghdad, then came to its modern form in Europe during the Renaissance. It seems Baghdad just happened to be at the hub of trade, like the central processing station for FedEx. There must of course be more to the story.

For the human race to come up with something as unlikely and counter intuitive as the scientific method required financing, some level of peace and cooperation, and the willingness of people to acknowledge each's others value and admit their own faults. How often do you see those factors come together in one person, let alone an entire empire? Religion plays a role in this story. In the beginning it encouraged the search for knowledge but in the end it became a tool to suppress reason. But as always, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Beginning, End, In Between

I am considering bringing Lausten North to an end. His name indicates a search that is occurring somewhere in the wisdom direction of the traditional Lakota wheel. For me, no search is ever over, but at some point, you have to call it. The beginning for me was a sense of having something to offer, but not being sure what that was. That led to questions about just what science is and just what religion is. That led to the history of the philosophy of science and how and where it first flourished and why it is still struggling and why what happened is not common knowledge. It led to walking away from church and finding more wonder and inspiration in the natural world than I expected. 

Along the way, I think I’ve asked good questions, hopefully not offered too much unsolicited advice and occasionally entertained. At this point, the path is a bit too windy. I’m thinking about straightening it out a bit, like a timeline. If you don’t hear from me, that’s where I am. 

The Irony of Faith

I listened to a debate about god between a Christian and an Atheist recently. Most of them are pretty difficult to listen to and I won’t bore you with the details. One or the other side will usually use an argumentative or condescending tone. The logic will be convoluted and minds are rarely changed in the end. Why do they do it? Both sides will say that the main reason is to get people thinking and hopefully they will come around later. This one was unusual in that the atheist debater, Jeremy Beahan, was very relaxed. By the end of it, he was responding with, “well, I already addressed that point” and sounded like he was sitting there playing games on his iPhone waiting for his turn.

It wasn’t that the Christian was that bad at debating. His arguments were pretty standard and he used a spectrum of classical and liberal arguments to make his point. One of them was that atheist governments have been perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in human history. He used Pol Pot as an example, and Stalin’s Russia, various Marxist regimes and of course, Hitler. Hitler is debatable, but Jeremy didn’t need to discuss that. What he said was, “Does anybody find it outrageous that somebody who believes in a holy book where men, women and children are killed and genocides actually happen would then have the audacity to bring up the example of Stalin and genocidal regimes to try to claim we don’t have morality?”

I had to think about that one for a minute. I know the Bible is full of such things. I have spent the last few years finding them and trying to find explanations for them. But I can still hear this argument against atheism and not find it outrageous like Jeremy suggests I should. Part of that is due to how they are ignored for the most part. When questions come up about them among Christians, they are quickly dismissed as “Old Testament”. Sure, there are a few who say God has the right to smite, but even those people say this in a dismissive way, skipping over the details of just how God directs individuals to kill and who gets killed.

For Jeremy, I think he has spent enough time focusing on these passages and so much less time around Christians recently, that he sees the argument for what it is. If you read one of these passages and you didn’t know it was about the God of the Bible, you would think it was pure evil. If there wasn’t an immediate explanation, some claim of needing to understand the full context, you would never consider this was a benevolent creator that people put their faith in.

This is one of the ironies of faith. “Faith” claims that you need to first accept God is good, then understand the full story to understand any part of it. The killing, whether by Moses or by some holy army in Revelations is all justified if you understand the full story. Except, there is no advanced book of theology that provides that full story. There is only the standard story of The Fall, Exodus, The Kings, separation from God and finally reconciliation through the blood of Christ. It doesn’t matter how you approach it, unjustifiable bad things happen in the Bible. It is only people who will tell you that if you don’t understand it, you have to study some more. And have faith.

The irony appears in other forms. When arguing a contentious element of Christianity, like homosexuality, a topic that is splitting churches all over the world, those who say it is a sin will start out saying that the Bible is very clear on this. If you read the New International Version, it clearly says “…that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God” and lists homosexuals among the wrongdoers. This seems like an attempt to use a logical argument, backed up by a source.

If you read the King James Version, it clearly says “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind”. If you dig deeper and ask which translation is better, you find that the best Greek translators don’t know what was meant by those words. Taking an even more objective view point, you can’t be sure that Paul of Tarsus is the actual author of some of the epistles. If some of his words are forgeries, how can we be sure if they are from God or even inspired by God?

At this point, the person of faith will throw up their hands. If they hadn’t identified you as a non-believer yet, they will draw your faith into question. What started out as a logical argument will return to one of belief. Although some details of the argument may have been won, statements like, “well, generally, looking at the full story of the Bible, it is clear that….” and you can fill in that blank with just about any stance. It doesn’t matter.

The irony is that this is valued. To stand up against logic and base your view on faith is considered an act of strength. That you had to pray, meditate and read theologians to arrive at the faith decision is considered time well spent. This is claimed to be part of the search for truth. The irony is that it is an end of searching. It is the final answer to the difficult questions that we all must live with. Continuing to ask why we are here, where did we come from and how best to treat our neighbors is considered a weakness.

If this were limited to creationism vs evolution or questions about the miracle of Fatima, I wouldn’t bother with it. But it has spilled over into the culture in general. I hear intelligent people saying, “They don’t really know about X, they say they do, there is exception Y or new evidence that suggests Z.” The misunderstanding of “them” is that “they” actually don’t say that they do know for certain. Saying that science can’t prove something to 100% accuracy is a misunderstanding of science. That is not what “they” are trying to do. “They” are the ones who are open minded and on a search for truth. They say they have evidence, they say their theory has been tested, but they are always asking questions and checking each other’s data. We will know when scientists believe they have all the answers when they stop asking questions, when they stop doing science.

There was a study done a while back that showed that there are now more studies that refute previous studies than ever before. The science of diet for example, changes often. You are out to eat with friends and someone wants low cholesterol and someone else wants low carbohydrates, a debate about food ensues and everyone agrees that “they” don’t know, that last year’s claims about wine or chocolate disagree with this year’s. Some state this as a weakness of science. It is not. The claims disagree because more was learned, the questions continued to be asked and new answers were found. It is those with faith that continue to argue that something that was under reported 2,000 years ago actually happened.

Science is accused of looking for finality, but then mocked when a theory is changed or expanded. Religion says it is the search for truth, but supplies pat answers and inserts a miracle when something can't be explained. Faith, by definition is an end to searching. It is an easy answer, but it is valued as if it is a decision that was difficult to arrive at and must be defended. Logic is used to defend faith, but when it fails, falls back on faith.

To download or listen to the deabate, go here, then look for "Is Christianity Rational".

Service

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. 

-Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913. He bridged the cultures between India and the West. 

We need everybody in on this

Another interesting talk at the Madison Freethought Festival 2012 was by Sean Faircloth. He is currently working with The Richard DawkinsFoundation for Reason and Science. Not surprisingly, he talked about science and said we should know our scientific heroes. He showed a slide of Francis Bacon, sometimes credited with sparking the rise of science in Europe. I talked to him about also including a Muslim scientist, for reasons I will explain in my follow-up email to him, included below.

In one of the museums I visited in my recent trip to Ireland, there was a timeline of our advances in science, going back to our use of fire or some such primitive beginning. What was unusual about this timeline is that it included Ibn Al-Rushd. Most timelines include Aristotle and other Greeks then leave a big gap. They might say something about their works being lost in the East for a while. The next thing that happens is Western Europe conquers Moorish Spain and the Greek works are suddenly found! Although unconfirmed, those works may have been lost for up to a century, and certainly the direct line of their teachings and even language was lost, but they were not just put in cold storage in Baghdad.

My letter to Sean:

I’m following up on our brief conversation about the heroes of early science that we had after your talk at the Madison WI Freethought Festival. You mentioned Francis Bacon and I suggested you also include a Muslim. This is not just a token nod to Islam but an important part of the history of how Europeans dealt with the scientific revolution in its early stages. Our ignorance of this history is directly related to the misunderstandings we are experiencing in the science vs. religion debate today.

If I had to pick one Islamic scientist to represent the rest, it would be Ibn Al-Haytham who wrote the Book of Optics in 1039 CE. This book is considered by many to be the first work to involve modern scientific methods like peer review, laboratory experimentation and documentation. Also important is the climate in which it came about. Al-Haytham is quoted as saying, "Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything for its own sake are not interested in other things. Finding the truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough” in his critique of Ptolemy, demonstrating the new idea of doubting the ancient texts handed down to them from the Greeks.

The culture that encouraged this line of thinking included “The House of Wisdom” started by the Caliph al-Hakim. Reading was encouraged by anyone from any race or stature and books were collected from all over the known world. There were religious reasons and motivations for this, but there were few religious restrictions on what could be explored. Much of the knowledge that was accumulated was passed on to the European scientists that we all know. Here is a quick list of some of that. 

This came to an end in the mid 13^th century when the Mongols invaded from the East, destroying much of the works in Baghdad, and the Europeans took back Spain. Muslim Spain (Al-Andalus) was already declining from within so exactly who destroyed information and how much of it was transferred to Europeans is not entirely clear to me. There is evidence that a very different attitude was taking hold and there was some fear of all this knowledge flooding in as indicated by the prohibition of philosophical and theological theses in the Condemnation of 1277 by the Bishop of Paris.

I’m still working on sorting out this part of thehistory, but here is a summary.

Although the ideas of copyrighting and citing sources were not yet known, it is not hard to imagine that hiding a connection of knowledge to an empire that had just been conquered was deliberate. Especially by an empire that had control of the education system and was under threat by internal and external forces. It was also just bad luck that Arabic was difficult to use in a printing press. Even if it was not deliberate, the result has been that it is the Renaissance in the West that has been credited with the rise of science when in truth it was a combined effort of the cultures of the three major monotheisms with significant input from the Far East.

Support from government, open minded attitudes, encouragement of learning for everyone and a spirit of cooperation started the scientific revolution. War, power struggles, hoarding of information and claims of cultural superiority have worked against it. These forces continue to be at odds today. Hopefully we can learn from the past.

Thanks for your time and work.

P.S. I’m still searching for good scholarly documentation of the above. There are plenty of web links but the books I have found tend to have religious agendas. There is no thesis here that God or Allah encouraged science, only that cultures who worshipped those gods can also be cultures that encourage science. This BBC documentary, by physicist Jim Al-Khalili does the best job of connecting the dots that I have found. 

Let's be reasonable

As you may have noticed, I’m working on some shorter, more concise answers to the big questions that are raised in this blog. This is not a trend toward witty quips. I hate witty quips. They were great in fifth grade, but their place is to give you something to think about, something to start to build a worldview around, not replace one. They are conversation starters. They are conversation enders if someone doesn’t want to know or doesn’t want to talk about how you arrived at your bumper sticker statement, but they are not a final answer. JT Eberhard gave a talk with 66 slides and lots of suggestions for how to respond to many of the objections to atheism this weekend at the Freethought Festival in Madison, WI. If you’re curious, here are a few:

Why argue about this at all? Shouldn’t people be allowed to believe what they want?

Sure, until they believe that they should pray for their child instead of taking them to the doctor when they have a curable illness. It’s fine until a High School student is ridiculed for not participating in a school prayer. This is not as rare as you might think.

Science can’t explain everything.

There are a lot of things that seemed unknowable or undoable in the last few centuries that have now been accomplished. Just because science hasn’t done something doesn’t mean it can’t.

Atheists just worship science.

We all defer to experts all the time. No one person can know everything. Science has built in checks and balances and its findings have been confirmed over generations. It is not a giant conspiracy theory.

It’s possible that [fill in the blank].

Possibility is always non-zero. We teach our children this so that they will strive to create a better world than the one we left them. Plausibility can be zero. We teach our children this so they won’t jump off a building based on; technically it is possible that they can fly.

JT didn’t have time for questions, but I had one more level that I didn’t think he had covered. I live in a small town where there aren’t a lot of people like JT, so I caught him on his way to lunch. My question was, what about the people who say,

I’m not really sure what I believe, theology isn’t really important, it’s more about community. I worship the universe, the mystery, and don’t have any particular image of God.

His answer was that any degree of unreasonableness is unhealthy. That’s the conversation starter. Where it goes from there depends on who you are talking to.

Any issues of health, career, who should be president, how our purchases affect the workers who made the product, what young people in our lives are learning, what cars we buy and how we drive them, what we say at a funeral, any of that, should not be left totally to chance nor should it be left to any unreasonable form of faith. I’m not suggesting that we paralyze ourselves by requiring a complete and thorough analysis of every mundane decision in life. At some point, you have to choose. You can choose to continue to think about it. You can choose not to. Just make your choice reasonable.

I know people that would never join an organization that promotes the official doctrine of their church. They would protest the activities that the organization engages in on a national level. Some of them are actively working to change the official statements of their church. They are members because they see their local church as an exception. They don’t see what they do on Sundays as a part of what their organization does everyday or what it has caused in the past. They compartmentalize the parts of their religion that they don’t like and disassociate themselves from them.

For any one individual, knowing just what they believe can be difficult to pin down. Most people don’t want to pin it down, and that’s fine, right up until I’m told I’m wrong for suggesting something is implausible or unreasonable when there is good evidence for it. I love to hear people’s life stories about how they arrived at their view of the universe, but that doesn’t come into play when you are talking about gravity or the need to breathe to survive. There shouldn’t be anything personally offensive about sticking to evidence on those issues. Applying reason to issues that are not as black and white should not be that much more difficult.

And I’m getting preachy again, so that’ll do it for now.