Part 3 (and last): From Thalidomide to Mental Enervation

All ideas carry the potential for abuse, whether they claim a supernatural component or not, and counter arguments will likely offer examples rather than a reasoned disagreement.[1]

A religious belief prohibiting blood transfusion is in my opinion a mistake. So was the use of Thalidomide to treat morning sickness. (It so happens Thalidomide was withdrawn the year before I was conceived.)

Foul! you say, Thalidomide was tragic, but science recognizes its errors and corrects them, it's built into the structure of scientific thinking (I agree). Religion, on the other hand, presumes certain truths and proceeds from there; it doesn't test and refine doctrine. (I agree[2]).

How are they the same? Because we trust the claims of both. All other things being equal, we make an informed decision based on everything we know and feel about a subject, a cognitive process involving our five senses and how we interpret them.[3]

The two types of conclusions are most assuredly different ("there is a God" v. "vibrating subatomic strings comprise all matter"), and the personalities behind them often stridently disparate, but we arrive at them using the same capacity to reason our way through a complicated landscape of ideas and sensory information.[4]

I have a scientific mind at my core, but I relish every aspect of human expression, including religious ones with which I vehemently disagree.
No other communities I know of expect members to be kind, patient, generous, peaceful, truthful, both inside and outside their community and sometimes at great personal cost, sometimes at great corporate cost, often anonymously, and few to the same degree or consistency.

Some secular communities will be some things; eg, scientists prize truth and patience, but they do not need to be kind or generous or peaceful, though there is nothing wrong if they are also those things, they're just not mandated.

On the contrary, conceit, indignation, anger, condescension, and other competitive behaviors are expected and sometimes celebrated among, for example, attorneys, business leaders, politicians, activists etc.[5]

No belief can exist without trust in our senses, the five traditional ones and an assortment of internal "quasi-senses" (which are combinations and interpretations of the five) that tell us something is right or wrong, good or bad, safe or dangerous, etc.

I don't mean this to boil down to an unhelpful conclusion that, all other things being equal, we can't ultimately know reality and so my opinion is just as valid as yours; that doesn't get us very far. But that may be where we land for now, because, all other things truly being equal, any differences between you and me would be due to unpredictable fluctuations in quantum states of the particles that make up our bodies.

I would rather that one of us be more right than the other, that some ideas be better than others, that some behaviors be more preferred than others, and for greater reason than it is the natural order of things to be thus.

That's what I'd rather, and it doesn’t matter which one of is is more right, only that one of us is, and we agree how we got there.

If you acknowledge a transcendent moral ideal, you have a foundation for developing an internally consistent framework (disregarding for the moment whether you and I agree).

If you don't acknowledge a transcendent moral ideal, your foundation is equally strong, it just supports a different sort of cognitive structure, one in which the same precepts of the transcendentalists are defined in terms of an action's or adaptation's efficacy toward a particular end.

They are different models for describing the same thing.[6]

My question: What prevents us from integrating those models?

My answer: Our unwillingness to consider, however briefly, the validity of opposing ideas, and to reconsider the validity of our own.

(A final word anticipating disagreement: Those who've comfortably settled in on either side will not be convinced. I realize that in pursuing common ground I make myself an object of ridicule by both sides; it's the inevitable end of those that seek consensus, because it is, in the end, not possible.

As an anonymous freshman peer grader wrote on one of my papers many years ago, Either I'm very bright or I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. The prof agreed. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps I don't.)

[1]
As I've said before, even if our moral sense is a byproduct of evolution, it doesn't make it any less significant; quite the contrary. If we consider all the bits and pieces that combine to make up humans the product of evolutionary happenstance, then no one piece has any more significance over any other, they are all equally significant, having served some purpose at some time and each a critical piece of the human story.

[2]
Actually, a very good case could be made that organized religion does in fact test and refine doctrine over time; I know it's not the Scientific Method, but it's an adaptation of sorts to what we learn about ourselves and our environment; for the sake of brevity, I didn't want complicate things here.

[3]
We trust that science makes wise judgments. We are certainly harming ourselves with some process or substance today that we are entirely unaware of. That is the nature of testing and implementing chemicals in our daily life without observing the affects over generations. Yes, we're assuming a certain amount of unstated risk, but we also assume the risk is outweighed by the benefit, or we wouldn't be doing it in the first place.

[4]
I do believe we often reach the wrong conclusion. There is a good reason some religions practice prayer and fasting - it makes the mind more amenable to interpreting stimuli as spiritual insight; it's little different from ingesting chemicals.

[5]
Of course I'm not saying all religious adherents follow their own tenets, only that religions make an effort to follow them. I would also argue that secular communities with similar high ideals, like soldiers, doctors, Masons, etc, are adapting conventionally religious ideals to a secular purpose. It’s no surprise warring nations claim God is on their side; the two purposes align well.

[6]
Science is rife with examples. In my own background, it was Cognitive Stratificational Linguistics (Lamb, Lockwood) v. Transformational Generative Grammar (Chomsky). Or Freud v. Jung v. Skinner etc. The power in a better model is not just how elegantly it handles all the data, but its predictive ability.

Started: 2012-04-22