Empiricism

An address given to Golders Green Unitarians on 5 September 2010

Empiricism, according to Alister McGrath, is the idea that 'truth arises from reflection within the mind on what the human faculties experience through sense perception'.  So we experience something through our senses, then we reflect upon it, and from this, truth arises.

According to Karen Armstrong, in The Case for God (which should really be called the case for religion), belief and faith both originally meant loyalty to an evolving tradition; first you did the ritual, and then the teachings were revealed – and they only made sense in the context of the ritual. The ritual was experienced through the senses, and then its symbolism made sense.

In the eighteenth century, rationalists and empiricists sharply disagreed about the nature of truth.  For rationalists, the power to reason was an innate quality of the human mind.  But for empiricists, babies were born as a “blank slate” for experience to write upon – with no innate qualities or faculties.  The conflict continued well into the twentieth century, with the nature versus nurture debate in psychology, which was an argument about whether hereditary traits were more important in the development of the personality, or whether your environment could override your genetic inheritance.

But as far as I can see, it is not a case of either / or – it’s a case of both / and.  We need reason to work things out logically, and to ensure our ideas are consistent with reality.  But we also need experiment and experience.  We do not sit isolated in our ivory towers formulating an abstract theology or philosophy.  We derive our understandings of the world from our experience, the stimuli that come in through our senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight and proprioception (the sense of your location in space, which is governed by your inner ear, and enables you to stay upright and balanced).  We can then compare our experiences with those of others, and reflect upon them.  And we learn new things by experimenting, hopefully in a safe space.  The first time you do a new thing is an experiment – you are testing an aspect of your environment.  And it is by experimenting that we gain experience.  Interestingly in the French language, the word for both experiment and experience is expérience.

Charles Darwin had a long-running experiment with worms, where he put a millstone in his lawn and then measured how much it settled into the earth because it was being undermined by earthworms burrowing underneath it.  I have seen the millstone set into his lawn at Down House in Kent; the experiment is still going on.  Thanks to Darwin’s curiosity and imagination, a tiny puzzle about the way the world works is being solved.

They say that curiosity killed the cat; but on the other hand, fortunately the cat has nine lives.  And in fact, curiosity is not generally fatal to cats.  Curiosity is a good thing, as long as it is balanced with discernment and compassion.  I am sure we can all think of scientific experiments that are not done with sufficient compassion; and of experiments that were not done with sufficient discernment (such as the development of atomic weapons or genetically modified crops).  So we cannot allow curiosity a completely free rein; it must be tempered with wisdom.  It’s not that any knowledge is forbidden to us by divine edict; knowledge must be tempered with wisdom. In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he explores the ideas of Montaigne, who decried education that imparted facts but did not teach people how to live well.  It is the great divorce of science and religion that has allowed this split in awareness to develop – the fact that fundamentalists continue to insist on literal interpretations which are contrary to reason and science, makes scientists dismiss the whole of religion as a waste of space.  But Unitarians steadfastly maintain, and many other religions affirm, that religion is not about beliefs, doctrines and dogmas – it is about values, and about experiencing the world with a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude.  It is about celebrating life, and experiencing it to the full; letting our imagination and creativity play over the vast panoply of nature.

Imagination is also an important quality; it enables us to imagine the world differently.  And this is what liberal religions do, too.  For my MA, I studied the relationship between Pagans and science, including their interest in science fiction. One of the reasons that Pagans like science fiction (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true of Unitarians too) is that it dreams of worlds with different societies, different ethical systems, and different ways of interacting with the planet than our own.  Science fiction is a thought experiment about how things might play out if you had a different set of starting conditions – for example, if people lived in caves with very little living space, how would that affect their sense of space?  They would be agoraphobic and have no sense of personal space.  And if there was another planet that was sparsely populated, they might be claustrophobic and get used to large amounts of personal space.  Now imagine the dramatic possibilities if you transplant the inhabitant of the sparsely populated planet to the cave planet, or vice versa, and how that would affect them.  This is the premise of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel.  The message of the novel is a hopeful one: that people can overcome the conditioning of their home environment – but they have to be willing to try.

It is the same with our spiritual life.  If we always do the same old stuff, we might get stuck in a rut; but if we try new things, we might gain new insights.  I don’t necessarily mean that the new thing has to be something scary or difficult – it could just be trying again at something you have failed at in the past.  I thought I was rubbish at meditation until I tried again in a morning meditation session at Great Hucklow Summer School, and something that was said – that you can begin again each moment, and that if thoughts arise, do not follow them – gave me the key to learning to relax and just do it.  Sometimes trying something with a different person in a different context can give a different perspective on it.

Similarly with prayer: I didn’t really understand prayer until I read a book about it by a Russian Orthodox monk called Staretz Silouan.  I would never have come across this book unless I had tried Orthodoxy and been lent the book by an Orthodox nun called Mother Sarah.  So doing something outside one’s comfort zone can sometimes be beneficial.  Ultimately Orthodoxy wasn’t for me, but I learnt a lot while I was involved in it, especially about the differences between Eastern and Western Christian doctrine, which enabled me to read the Gospels in a very different way, and look at the Christian tradition differently.

As the Quakers say, “Be open to new light, wherever it may come from” – a very wise saying, I feel.

Another aspect of an empirical approach to religion and spirituality is its pragmatism.  We can try new things and persist with them for a while – but if they don’t work for us, we can stop doing them.  I can’t imagine Unitarians persisting in doing something unpleasant or detrimental just because it was the custom to do it, or because tradition demanded it.  (Come to think of it, this must be the case, because I can’t think of any Unitarian practices that are unpleasant.)

Of course human beings are always a bit reluctant to try new things – we like our safe comfortable ruts and grooves, our tried and tested ways of doing things.  But remember when your mum and dad got you to try that new vegetable on your plate, and you actually liked it?  Or when you first learnt to ride a bike, the feeling of exhilaration when you realised that your dad wasn’t holding on to the back of the bike any more? It can be pleasurable to experiment with new ways of doing things.

So let us approach the world with wonder and a willingness to experiment. Let’s be willing to try new things – even Brussels sprouts. 

The Enlightenment

A motion was proposed at the UK GA in defence of the Enlightenment. The author of the motion was sitting in front of me, and said that he just wanted to start a conversation about it. What a good idea, I said. So here goes.

The Enlightenment was a complex phenomenon with many strands. One of those strands was the origin of the Pagan revival. Another was the rise of rational religion in the form of Unitarianism, deism and humanism. A further strand was the rise of rationalism, which at the time was in opposition to the empiricism of Locke and others. The rationalists held that reason was a priori, God-given; the empiricists held that we are born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) and acquire reasoning skills by experience. It was only in the early 20th century that a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism was finally achieved. Another strand of the Enlightenment was the concept of the sublime - the experience of awe when confronted by natural phenomena such as mountains, waterfalls and wilderness. This represented a considerable shift in attitudes to nature, and it was out of this that Romanticism emerged. A further aspect of the Enlightenment was the rise of feminism, with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and others. There had been previous feminist writings, but Wollstonecraft represents the beginnings of a movement as opposed to a few isolated individuals. Remember also that evolution by natural selection had not yet been discovered; hardly anyone was aware of the great age of the Earth; science was still called natural philosophy; Oxford and Cambridge were Anglican-only universities and generally not very science-focussed; if you wanted to study science, the best place to go was a Dissenting Academy, like Joseph Priestley.

So the Enlightenment was a multi-faceted phenomenon, a mixture of sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory discourses. It was an intellectual ferment, an explosion of interest in natural phenomena, history, and literature - an awakening.

The legacy of the Enlightenment is therefore also a mixed blessing. Pure rationalism has given rise to reductionism, logical positivism, behaviourism and other scientific dead-ends; but the idea that we should subject all impulses and beliefs to reason before acting on them seems to me an excellent idea. Empiricism - the primacy of experience and experiment - is also a good principle to work by. Always asking, "Yes but does it work? What are the consequences?" is a good test for most situations. And utilitarianism (another Enlightenment idea) is also useful if not carried to extremes. Seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is good, as long as the rights of the remaining few are not trampled.

Where the legacy of the Enlightenment has failed us is when we assume that science does not need to be tempered with other approaches. The worst excesses of industry, pollution, eugenics, behaviourist psychology and other extreme science should have been tempered with compassion and humanity.

the beauty of the universe

I have always loved this quote by Carl Sagan - it encapsulates my spirituality quite well, really, as I am fascinated by science (astronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, geology, and so on):

"A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."
- Carl Sagan

(via witches and scientists)

What is a miracle?

Steve Hayes over at the Khanya blog has asked the question "What is a miracle?" and answered it in terms of his own Orthodox Christian faith.

I tend not to use the word miracle very often, but when I do, I tend to mean something like “signs and wonders” rather than a supernatural thing (as I don't believe in the supernatural).

I find Jung’s concept of synchronicity more useful – “the acausal connecting principle” – where two events that have no connection nevertheless occur at the same time, thereby creating an apparent connection.

One example of synchronicity that I have experienced was the day I gave an address on the subject of gay rights, and a gay couple came to the chapel for their first time at a Unitarian service. The reason this was synchronicity, to my mind, was that I had been asked to do the service (Palm Sunday) at the last minute, and was sitting and racking my brains, thinking, argh, what do I know about Palm Sunday? So I went to read the Gospel accounts of it, and it reminded me of the downfall of celebrities, and then of the arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. So I did the service about LGBT rights, but it wasn't premeditated, nor was the topic advertised in advance.

And then there’s the question of the difference between miracles and magic. (I know that the difference is clear in the Christian paradigm, where miracles come from God and magic comes from human or possibly even diabolic agency; but others use the words differently.) I was interested to note that various Orthodox saints are called Wonderworker, Thaumaturgos in Greek, and thaumaturgy was a branch of magic in the 16th century. Miracles are considered to be performed through these saints by God; not by the agency of the saint (though presumably their holiness makes them a fit channel for the miraculous energy of God).

To my mind, magic is a little-understood natural power or a property of nature that can be deliberately wielded by humans (like telepathy, healing, etc.), whereas miracles are events not caused by humans that are still inexplicable and full of wonder. I don’t believe in the supernatural (being a pantheist), so if miracles and magic exist, their source must be inside nature and not beyond it.

Aleister Crowley's definition of magic was "changing consciousness in accordance with Will" (he was quite scientifically-minded really) and various Pagan and occult writers have since defined it similarly. So, in Pagan and occult thinking, magic is a deliberate procedure such as meditation, prayer, healing, visualisation, invocation, evocation and so on, which will result in a change in consciousness. Miracles don't really come into Pagan thought much at all.

Unitarians tend to think of miracles as pretty unlikely - we celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah with emphasis on the renewal of freedom of religion that it entailed, and we celebrate the miracle of Christmas with emphasis on the miraculousness of every birth and the divinity within everyone.

Unitarians do practice meditation, prayer and sometimes visualisation, but it's not referred to as magic. Perhaps just as well, since (for everyone except Pagans) the word is so loaded with connotations of wielding supernatural powers.

There is also a problem with the magical mindset, in that everything comes to be seen as a sign or a portent, even when it isn't. People have forgotten the need for discernment - trying to work out if the apparent omen is actually an omen, or whether it's just a passing phenomenon. This is why we need reason, and to balance open-mindedness and scepticism. I always try to find a natural explanation for something first, and only if one cannot readily be found would I accept it as something magical or miraculous.

Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Larry Niven and others have turned this around and said "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Either way, if science was less materialistic, it would undoubtedly be able to investigate and explain so-called magical phenomena. It has already been demonstrated that meditation works and is beneficial; why not other spiritual practices? There's nothing supernatural about these practices; they have demonstrable psychological and physical effects.

Auras are real

Hurrah! Auras are real (I knew that of course, but it's nice to see science catching up with magic). Humans glow in visible light.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals. The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

(via Geekologie)

I can't see auras but I can feel them as heat.