I’ve spent some time recently musing on what the nature of religion might be. There is a reactionary movement within paganism that challenges what is perceived to be the “cherry picking” “my truth” route that many pagan paths appear to have taken… a sort of post modern transcultural unorthodoxy… and this reactionary movement frequently raises the challenge that current pagan paths do not qualify as religion because of a lack of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
While there is a validity to these challenges, there is also something profoundly unsatisfying in defining a religion in terms of a combination of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It seems rather like defining a person as a physical body and their daily routine. It misses something about the essential experience and meaning, and ultimately the purpose, of religion.
I watched a wonderful programme last night, Wonders of the Solar System, in which Professor Brian Cox (who is rapidly become the successor to Carl Sagan in his enthusiasm for presenting the wonders of nature and science with a real sense of awe in my opinion) witnessed the Northern Lights from the snowy wastes of arctic Norway. He had illustrated and explained the causes in terms of the magnetosphere and it’s interaction with the solar wind, and as he witnessed the effect he said that he had expected to see it coming down like a curtain of light from the sky. And it didn’t. He described it as seeming to rise into the sky likes spirits rising, flying to heaven. The scientist moved to see beyond the physics and explain the wonder in the language of metaphor.
Apparently, back in around the 14th/15th centuries, people were prepared to live, kill and die over theological differences. Differences such as whether the bread used in the mass stood for the body of Christ or whether it was the body of Christ, for example. Now, what is going on here? In the first instance, the bread is understood as a metaphor. In the second, it is understood as a concrete truth. Neuroscientists seem to tell us that different parts of the brain process metaphorical imagery vs concrete representation, so the difference is one of perception and cognition. A hypothesis I hope to develop in another post is that differing states of consciousness result in different limitations as to what can be known and differing ways in which it can be known, but certainly my experience in learning disability and mental health care plus my own experiments in altered states of consciousness confirm to my satisfaction that these two different ways of understanding the nature of the bread are in fact state dependent and probably require differing neurological processes. So Brian Cox was witness to a powerful natural phenomenon and was moved to a spiritual metaphor in order to explain his full response to it.
One of the other things that I learned as a nurse is that pathology is so much easier to define than health. Pathology can be understood in terms of the parts. It is a process that lends itself to a reductionist analysis. Health does not. To understand health one has to look to ecology… the internal ecology of the individual in relationships to the ecologies of the external world. Maybe, just maybe, that is what a religion tries to do… to map the ever shifting ecology of the experience of the sacred. To understand that the bread is both a representation of the body and the body itself, that the Aurora Borealis is both a shower of photons caused by solar wind being channeled by magnetic fields and a living animated spirit. To map the liminal states that take us to these deeper interactions with the world without excluding the alternative experience but to understand our experience as a limitation of the sacred itself.
“Professor Brian Cox (who is rapidly become the successor to Carl Sagan in his enthusiasm for presenting the wonders of nature and science with a real sense of awe in my opinion)”
Best not to confuse superlatives, CGI and stressed, breathy tones with awe.
“A hypothesis I hope to develop in another post is that differing states of consciousness result in different limitations as to what can be known and differing ways in which it can be known, but certainly my experience in learning disability and mental health care plus my own experiments in altered states of consciousness confirm to my satisfaction that these two different ways of understanding the nature of the bread are in fact state dependent and probably require differing neurological processes. So Brian Cox was witness to a powerful natural phenomenon and was moved to a spiritual metaphor in order to explain his full response to it.”
As Lewis pointed out, how a thing is composed tells us nothing about what or who it is, a lesson which mawkish materialists like the Brats of Sagan need to learn and although your intentions are good it’s a fact that you should keep in mind when thinking on your hypothesis. Remember also that a hypothesis is useless without an experiment, that neural correlates don’t tell us what consciousness is, and that neuroscience is in danger of becoming the new quantum mechanics.
Should have better worded that… I agree that neural correlates don’t tell us anything useful about the nature of consciousness… but they can tell us something about state, and I do strongly suspect that there is a correlation between state related neural activity and what can be known as well as *how* it can be known. Though I don’t think neuroscience will ever supercede quantum physics as a marvelous source of spurious metaphysical metaphor
I had hoped that an understanding that knowing the composition of a thing told us nothing about the thing itself was in part a key point of the post… I may have to spend a little bit more time thinking about composition
I’m liking Professor Cox as a presenter of science to the lay person though… even if he does remind me of that character from the Fast Show… “Aren’t computers brilliant? They can do anything! Except play football. They’d be no good in goal, but they do everything else, virtually.”
I didn’t think I’d like Cox’s effusiveness at first, but have to admit that I did take to him in the end.
Yes, the experience of a thing, the thing itself, and what is between them. Turning towards consciousness to analyse it is a reflexive activity that can only produce more consciousness; defining the object on its own terms certainly gives us knowledge of the world, but if we leave ourselves out of the definition our connection with it might be one of power but will lack relationship. And perhaps that is the best way of bridging the gap. What is between is relationship, and that is also what is sacred. We may, or may not, be able to demonstrate that by neuroscience, and I have some reservations about the notion of different sorts of consciousness. Is light a wave or a particle?
Different sorts of consciousness? I know what you mean… I’m guilty of what we have discussed before, lazily jumping between definitions of consciousness without being explicit. I would rather use the word “state” rather than state of consciousness, since it implies a whole person state of which the nature by which we engage with out experience is simply one aspect, but if I simply use “state” I suspect that many readers will be at a loss as to know what I am writing about. “State of Consciousness” has entered such common parlance as a word packet that it probably deserves fully unravelling before even starting the sort of discussion I am attempting.
The act of experience creates the physicality of neural pathways in the brain. Because we know that the brain is rebuilt every so often, these pathways have to be reformed. How the renewal processes do this without having to go through those experiences again, is a question that has fascinated me for some time. Is it possible that different experiences are manifested differently or is the route for manifesting experiences a standard procedure that varies little? I suspect the former and not the latter and if this is the case, then the role of religion may fall into the differing manifestations route.
RR