Musings on Truth
This has been a subject that has fascinated me for some time. About a year ago I took a paranormal psychology class where we studied the reasons that humans have such a strong tendency to ignore facts and science and focus our energy on beliefs that have no empirically backed evidence.
Our text, Wings of Illusion by John F. Schumaker, presented us with the theory that the evolution of the human mind has crossed a mental gulf, a cerebral Rubicon that can never be turned back from. At this point humans began to develop a new degree of self-awareness, language capabilities, information processing, and hypothetical and abstract thinking. Survival began to depend more on intellectual capability than physical prowess/dexterity. Humans attained death perception and had to adopt paranormal beliefs to counter the horror of death and chaos. The brain’s function was divided; half works with reality while the other half works at repressing it so the human doesn’t go mad.
Without paranormal belief systems humans would go insane; religion and other paranormal belief systems serve to insulate us from the reality that life is meaningless and the threat of death is imminent. The idea presented is that if we weren’t crazy we’d be insane. In other words, if we weren't crazy enough to believe in the paranormal we would fall to the insanity of the threat of our impending death and the meaningless of our short existence.
I have found this theory fascinating and horrifying because of the implications that it has for my own paranormal (religious) beliefs. I took this class at a time that I was already questioning my religious beliefs and earnestly seeking the truth on my own. As a Mormon we know that the truth is manifested through the whisperings of the spirit or a burning in the bosom. In essence, our emotions will tell us whether something is true or not.
These feelings of the spirit, transcendence, enlightenment, or whatever you wish to label them are created physiologically through chemical reactions in the part of the brain called the amygdala. Whether something truly paranormal initiates these chemical reactions causing the feelings, I don’t know. There are certain conditions that precede these kinds of reactions. What I do know is that the brain can be manipulated to produce feelings of euphoric spirituality or transcendence. That scares me. That means that the only source I have for truth is empirical evidence. That means that my past spiritual confirmations are dubious. I can still choose to have “faith” in those feelings but that is also a choice to ignore what I’m learning in school. I know that sounds really absolute and extreme but that’s how I feel. I feel depression and forlornness and also power and hope.
Ernest Becker said that if we have a passion for the truth, we shall encounter a “temporary period of forlornness.” He added that joy awaits us on the other side of this forlornness. He said that “disillusionment must come before wisdom.” Becker also admitted a belief in God before he died.
I’m still in a stage of disillusionment right now but I’m also excited by the terrifying prospect of the truth. It will be my endeavor to continue the search for the understanding of spirituality and how it affects us physically and emotionally.
Our text, Wings of Illusion by John F. Schumaker, presented us with the theory that the evolution of the human mind has crossed a mental gulf, a cerebral Rubicon that can never be turned back from. At this point humans began to develop a new degree of self-awareness, language capabilities, information processing, and hypothetical and abstract thinking. Survival began to depend more on intellectual capability than physical prowess/dexterity. Humans attained death perception and had to adopt paranormal beliefs to counter the horror of death and chaos. The brain’s function was divided; half works with reality while the other half works at repressing it so the human doesn’t go mad.
Without paranormal belief systems humans would go insane; religion and other paranormal belief systems serve to insulate us from the reality that life is meaningless and the threat of death is imminent. The idea presented is that if we weren’t crazy we’d be insane. In other words, if we weren't crazy enough to believe in the paranormal we would fall to the insanity of the threat of our impending death and the meaningless of our short existence.
I have found this theory fascinating and horrifying because of the implications that it has for my own paranormal (religious) beliefs. I took this class at a time that I was already questioning my religious beliefs and earnestly seeking the truth on my own. As a Mormon we know that the truth is manifested through the whisperings of the spirit or a burning in the bosom. In essence, our emotions will tell us whether something is true or not.
These feelings of the spirit, transcendence, enlightenment, or whatever you wish to label them are created physiologically through chemical reactions in the part of the brain called the amygdala. Whether something truly paranormal initiates these chemical reactions causing the feelings, I don’t know. There are certain conditions that precede these kinds of reactions. What I do know is that the brain can be manipulated to produce feelings of euphoric spirituality or transcendence. That scares me. That means that the only source I have for truth is empirical evidence. That means that my past spiritual confirmations are dubious. I can still choose to have “faith” in those feelings but that is also a choice to ignore what I’m learning in school. I know that sounds really absolute and extreme but that’s how I feel. I feel depression and forlornness and also power and hope.
Ernest Becker said that if we have a passion for the truth, we shall encounter a “temporary period of forlornness.” He added that joy awaits us on the other side of this forlornness. He said that “disillusionment must come before wisdom.” Becker also admitted a belief in God before he died.
I’m still in a stage of disillusionment right now but I’m also excited by the terrifying prospect of the truth. It will be my endeavor to continue the search for the understanding of spirituality and how it affects us physically and emotionally.
posted by paul at 5:59 PM
9 Comments:
Once again, I feel I am in the same boat - almost. I do feel a little lost and lonely. I no longer have the comfort of all I used to believe in, and the ability to relate to my family that entaled. But I am not at all depressed about it. Sure sometimes I'm sad, but I am comforted and excited by the prospect of truth. That is one belief I never had to let go, and don't think I ever will. Searching for truth is not a lost cause. It may be endless, but it is not lost.
Thank you for posting, Paul!
good explanation, I feel like i learned something from you here today. i also feel sad for you for some reason, or for all of us I guess, if Becker's right. I guess I don't really want truth that much if it means pain.
Ryan, don't be sorry for the arousal example. You're right in using this analogy.
I do want to point out to you, though, that not every man is arrounsed by the same women. You developed over a lifetime of influences what an attractive woman is to you. The few powerful experiences you have had are yours, but not universal.
I have many powerful spiritual experiences at different points in my life, stemming from different sources. Sometimes, even stemming from conflicting books.
It's wonderful that the Book of Mormon has been powerful for you, but your arrousal analogy doesn't hold true for any argument of universal truth.
Don’t be sorry Ryan, I think arousal is an excellent example of how our emotions work. Let me begin by saying that I have no intention to put down or discount anyone’s beliefs or spiritual experiences; I’m not trying to state what is true or untrue. My intention is only to share my thoughts on topics that I find intriguing, I definitely don’t have the answers.
Let me address your example from the point of view of the author, Dr. Schumaker. Your example is very appropriate because each one of us is aroused by a number of factors and the combination of those factors could be quite unique to each one of us. The combination for you could be quite complex where it could be extremely simple for me. Perhaps I am aroused by many women and feel attracted to a wide variety of features where you may have very specific characteristics that you are looking for. Likewise there are many different factors that can catalyze spiritual feelings for different people. For some it’s song and prayer, for others it may be someone handling venomous snakes and speaking in tongues. Others may feel that spiritual rush when they make a new scientific discovery. Schumaker’s point is that we assign the meaning to the emotion based on the culture that we know and are comfortable with. As we study different cultures it is hard to assert that Mormons or even religious people in general corner the market on spirituality. It exists in some form in every culture.
The scriptures have triggered spiritual feelings for you and they have for me too at times. The beautiful messages of love, forgiveness, and charity have inspired me to be a better man. They have also triggered confusion, anger, and disgust for me as there are many contradictions, examples of hatred, lust, murder, and bigotry found in them. I have also had some of my greatest spiritual epiphanies while reading books about science, poetry, and politics. The Age of Reason, written by one of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine, disputes the validity of the Bible but has strengthened my belief in God by helping me to see God’s hand in the work of his creation that surrounds us.
I do not believe that the purpose of science is to “explain away all of Gods involvement in our progression and events we witness in our lives” or to twist things around to sway us from what God wants us to do. If that was the purpose then I would want nothing to do with it. The purpose of science is to discover how things work. If the findings of science are inconsistent with our beliefs then we have a choice to modify those beliefs or to discard science’s evidence and ignore it. I personally believe that God would want us to understand His creations because it helps us understand Him.
This is a quote from the Ensign that I found that speaks to this issue.
“The struggle to correlate a passage in scripture with a specific portion of scientific research has been a challenge for centuries. But experience has shown that what a person understands today will be modified by tomorrow’s discoveries. Patience and humility will eventually resolve all questions—if not in this life, then in the next.”
“…this does not mean that science has no place in our eternal pursuit of truth. The more we learn of God’s handiwork, the more we come to know him and love his works. As a Latter-day Saint geologist, I consider myself fortunate indeed to have the opportunity to study rocks and fossils as evidences of God’s creation of our earth. Everything I have learned of the grandeur of the Creation has strengthened my resolve to learn more of our Heavenly Father and live as He would have me live.”
Val D. Greenwood, “I Have a Question,” Ensign, Sept. 1987
I appreciate you weighing in on this issue and I hope you will continue to read the blog and contribute.
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I had one more thought on this. I was thinking about the analogy of the puzzle and how we can have different pieces of the truth without being able to see the whole thing. I was also thinking about the idea of replacing existing truth as opposed to adding to it. The way I feel right now is like I had a puzzle that I was working on and I had a good portion of it put together when I started finding pieces that didn’t fit. I came to the realization that there was a whole other puzzle in my box of pieces that I was ignoring because the pieces weren’t fitting into my original puzzle.
Everyday that I am open to learning new things more of these new pieces appear in my box. The new puzzle is of the same picture as the old one except the new one is must larger, has many more pieces, and the quality of the picture is very clear and concise where the old one is fuzzy and cartoonish in comparison. I can’t quite discard the old puzzle because I spent so many years working on it and admiring it’s beauty that I have become attached. The old puzzle brought me joy at times but eventually frustrated me in it’s incompleteness.
The picture of the old puzzle is a caricature of the truth beautifully painted by men seeing shadows on the wall of a cave that they have interpreted through their imaginations as reality. They have valiantly tried to explain the world around them through mystic stories of miraculous happenings. Their painting is rich and beautiful but it is a person’s interpretation of reality. The new puzzle is created by God himself with no interpretation or representation. It is a photograph formed by the laws that God has created the world with and it is stark, sometimes harsh, and full of clarity and detail. Many people will prefer the warm comforting painting, maybe the mystical representation of reality is easier to understand, maybe they’re just used to the painting and the photograph is discomfiting because it’s different.
I choose the photograph as a reflection of God’s creation and I will take the clarity that it offers as well as the disturbing horror that is a part of life, suffering, and death. I’m not satisfied with stories anymore. I’m not satisfied with taking anyone else’s words as the truth. I want to experience the truth first hand, not just through a feeling but through all of my senses together in a tangible way that can be replicated by anyone without any mystical conditions required. I want to see the world and my life as it is in all it’s naked splendor. I want the truth.
Ryan,
I love this topic too. I haven't posted my notes from last week's discussion because Paul's post has so much depth.
You've moved beyond this point, but I wanted to continue the point about arousal not stemming from every woman for every man.
The cause of your arousal comes from a lifetime of ideas you've created. What attracts you stems from your own imaginations, cultural identities, and other outside influences. There are hormones which are triggered, but to get them to trigger in the first place you have consciously or unconsiously developed your personal definition of what "attractive" is.
This same thing CAN be said for your idea of only seeing one piece of the world at a time. You are thrilled by the idea of trees and mountains, and even architecture. But what thrills you (or doesn't) comes from what you've already learned, and what attachments you've created in your mind.
I LOVE nature. But, often, when I go on a hike or to a mountain somewhere, I look at the trees and see the thick brush and lack of diversity in vegetation, and I'm so saddened by the destructive control we humans have weilded over this earth. Had they not been so hasty to harvest useful trees, this forested landscape would have the diversity needed to give a much more healthy life to both tress and animals that have depended on this area. When lightening strikes on a dry day, fire will move more quickly and dangerously because of the damage we've done. I see streams clogged, and unable to perform the natural cleansing they used to be able to do to provide us healthy drinking water. The water now must go through an made water-treatment facilities. I see less and less natural forest as I travel, and I am heartsick. I see acres and acres of mono-cropped farm land and I cry for the torment we put the earth through. I have to burn so much fuel to even get to real nature that I feel guilt for my own mistreatment of our land.
But, I'd rather know what benefits true wilderness have, and how to recognize it when I see it, so I can try to do something to preserve the last unspoiled places we have left.
It is a matter of choice. I can choose to still blissfully love everything about the human-altered existence... or I can choose to love unaltered lands more. Yes, I still love forest, even after we've altered it. Yes, I love the city. Yes, I'd love to have a garden, and even a farm, and not completely gather from wilderness. There IS value that I am attached to in the human forces on nature.
But the untouched, unaltered wonder of creation is what inspires awe in me.
So, with truth, I start with what I know, and what I think I know. But I search for things in purity - without others' or my own adulterations to draw on as sources of truth.
mike's somewhat related comments:
To begin, I would like to present a hypothesis that has interested me concerning faith, science, religion...
There is an interesting asymmetry between cause and effect in nature. Most fundamental theories of physics can't distinguish between past and future, meaning that if you reverse time the result is just as physical. But the fact remains that we can distinguish between the things that 'cause' us and the things that are an effect of us. My hypothesis is to associate the former with knowledge, and the latter with desire.
Perhaps at the most fundamental level, the asymmetry between knowledge and desire (cause and effect) is very small. But our bodies are extremely complex and the small difference gets magnified to the point that on our level of working consciousness we don't see that they have that much in common.
The second aspect of my theory is to propose that faith is identified with a certain level of desire. Science is the organization of knowledge, and religion is the organization of faith. (But due to the asymmetry, the organization is different i each case).
Take for example, the discussion about whether to include intelligent design in the teaching of evolution. Evolution is a scientific theory in the sense that it says: we have certain facts and they can be best organized by hypothesizing relationship X between them. Many people have argued that it is just a theory, and has not been proven. The philosopher Karl Popper argued (quite successfully) that a scientific theory by can never be proven, but that the hallmark of such theories is that they can be disproven. By disproven, we mean that we compare the stated relationship to a new set of facts and find it lacking.
Intelligent design is not science since there is no reason for us to believe that any living being can ever take its predictions and compare it some some fact and disprove it.
Anyway...I digress. The point is that we still believe things even if they can't even in principle be compared to known facts. I would argue that this is because this kind of belief is not based on knowledge, but desire.
So one question pertinent to this discussion is whether or not we should trust in an idea that is justified only by the fact that we really want it to be true.
I would argue that we don't really have any choice. And ironicaly, the reason we don't have any choice is because we are 'free agents'. That is, we are free to act and not just be acted upon. We are free to push into (cause) the future in a world where the future is uncertain compared to the past.
At times the intensity of my desire is mitigated by a sense that I can do nothing at the moment to further my understanding.
I am a big believer in the analogy between faith and females. (From a man's perspective). It seems that the more I am infatuated with someone, the more impossible it is to develope a relationship with them.
Also, I realize that one thing I said in my last post was somewhat untrue. We are not obligated by free agency to act according to our innermost desire. However, the conflict of faith only arises because we are free agents.
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