Today, The Revealer points to this article over at the Guardian where Oxford scientists have received substantial funding to search for the "ghost in the machine." The machine in this case is us.
The scientists will apply a chilli-based gel to the skin of volunteers and ask them to try different strategies to lessen the burning sensation, including asking people with strong religious beliefs to draw on their faith to cope with the pain.
I don’t really understand what they hope to find. Some people may market religion as a way to escape from, ameliorate, or in some way "deal with" pain. But this hardly means that true religion can really provide it. Religion, at least Christianity, provides an answer, but not an escape hatch. On the contrary, a Christian understanding of pain might very well make the pain less and not more bearable. At any rate, the "pain" of having chili paste spread on your skin hardly rises to the level of pain at all–at least of the sort that religion purports to "deals with." Instead, I’d suggest that the researchers subject the volunteers to watching children be subjected to abuse, friends dragged out to sea by tsunamis, loved ones dying lengthy, "pointless" deaths. Then maybe we’ll get some useful data.
… cont’d …
Picking up on our previous conversation at Joe Missionary’s, if we agree that there is an epistemological wall (or veil) around (or through) which we cannot see, then the atheist is one who assumes a priori that there is nothing behind the wall (or veil). The Christian is the one who says there is something and that that something has communicated by various revelatory means. The atheist holds that human reason is a mere naked fact, not affected in any way by the question of something behind the wall. The Christian on the other hand says, “Wait! Human reason itself is the greatest evidence that there is reason (distinct from intelligence, BTW) on the other side of the veil.” In short, the atheist makes the presumption against supernatural, and the Christian makes the presumption in favor. Now if this is all the case, then it is no wonder that those favoring the former presumption, look at those favoring the latter and comment:
You know there’s a God because there’s evidence of intelligence in the universe, but whenever the universe displays complete mindlessness and meaninglessness, that, too, is evidence that God is out there…
or
You’re getting pretty close to seeing God wherever you darn well please. White noise?
The Christian presumption of the supernatural by simple corollary disallows “complete mindlessness and meaninglessness” in the universe. Everywhere the Christian looks, he sees God, and never sees the “white noise” so obvious to the man of the anti-supernatural presumption. It is obvious to the Christian that he appears, to eyes not informed by his presumption, to see “God wherever [he] darn well please[s].” But this shoe fits equally well on the other foot, does it not? It is patently obvious to the atheist that the actions of the universe are mindless, meaningless, and contain no information. In both cases, things are only obvious when perceptions are informed by the various presumptions. Therefore, until we ascertain which presumption is actually correct, it makes no sense to judge one another’s perceptions based on our own presumptions. Presumptions, which in fairness to both, are surely no more than aesthetic preferences.
Cheers!
“First of all, it isn’t surprising to me that the perfection of all virtues would, yes, seem rather insane to us. But we’re the ones actually in the asylum.”
So, in other words, everything we know is wrong, unless it isn’t. You know there’s a God because there’s evidence of intelligence in the universe, but whenever the universe displays complete mindlessness and meaninglessness, that, too, is evidence that God is out there because God, even though he’s planted this evidence of intelligence in the natural world, naturally behaves in ways that seem “insane.” Which one is it? Is God evident in reason, or is God evident in insanity? You’re getting pretty close to seeing God wherever you darn well please. White noise?
somebody is going to tell me that I just don’t understand…
Well? Do you? I think you understand perfectly well, you’re just not letting on…
First of all, it isn’t surprising to me that the perfection of all virtues would, yes, seem rather insane to us. But we’re the ones actually in the asylum.
Eyes informed by faith see God everywhere in everything. Eyes without faith utterly fail to see him… Whose “eyes” are better developed? Kind of an “aesthetic” question isn’t it?
Cheers!
Again, I think this is consonant with some other pain-management strategies reagarding distraction or some other cognitive method of making the brain ignore or process pain differently. I don’t think it’ll get too far in the actual medical literature, whatever the pundits may yammer about it.
Credit to Theo Morph here for the “porcine flight” reference, BTW.
Thanks!
Funky asks:
On a more practical level, how do we know our mothers love us? Can we prove it?
That is precisely my point: No, we don’t “know” it (by way of objectively verifiable fact) and therefore cannot prove it. But we “believe” it (or at least things like it). In fact we believe it more strongly than Newton’s laws of motion or General Relativity. Why? Because it is “worth” believing.
And as you suggest with relativity, as we dig farther and farther down toward understanding the fundamental forces/particles/strings that model, ever more accurately, the true nature of the cosmos, it would appear that even “objective reality” is utterly unimaginable. How surprising is it then that if “objective reality” is a mere trivialization or “special case” of the “total reality”, “total reality” would utterly defy objective methods of detection or understanding? Not surprising at all…
Cheers!
I don’t know, this reminds me a bit of people who tried to quantify love by measuring sexual arousal (e.g., penile or clitoral tumescence). I read about that quaint line of research in Nussbaum’s excellent “Upheavals of Thought”, which examines the role of emotions in ethics and reasoning. Very good book.
The narrow focus of this research ignores the questions you rightfully bring up, Steve, and so when I’ve read of this article on several blogs and news sites, I think that believers are overstating the relevance of this experiment to theology.
A pain management specialist I once listened to extolled web surfing and videogame playing as good distractions for a patient with a serious attack of pain. By having people look at holy images, you may get some of that same distraction value you get with videogames even without some sort of religious experience and in spite of greatly varying levels of religious commitment amongst your experimental sample.
I guess it’s not so much that it bothers me that this research has no relevance to theology. Surely it doesn’t. It’s just that it isn’t clear that the researchers (or participants) realize this. I mean even in the part I quoted here it says they’ll ask “people with strong religious beliefs to draw on their faith to cope.” What religion teaches that? Bill & Fran’s 1st Church of Fun?? Sounds like some hardcore secularists parody of religion… animistic folks just praying to the chili gods for relief…
If religion teaches us to “pray in God’s will,” then why would we expect to it to be his will (more than not) for him to help us to “cope with the pain”–especially a pain so… err… pedestrian… as having chili-sauce voluntarily spread on one’s skin?!?!
Cheers!
If by “ghost in the machine” you mean “immaterial soul”, I do not see any implicit or explicit promise in the article for such a thing.
I did some research on pain and perception last semester for a philosophy of medicine course. It is well-known that all our perceptions are extensively processed by the brain before we ever become conscious of them. Following from this, we have found that mood and cognitive strategies can have a great effect on perceptions of pain. This just seems to be a variant of this increasingly important branch of medical research. However, I don’t see how this research alone will prove or disprove that our conscious selves are more than our material bodies.
Is this the same research?
http://getreligion.typepad.com/getreligion/2005/01/god_on_the_rack.html
Knowing is a tricky business. According to relativity, different observers can know different things and both be “right”. On a more practical level, how do we know our mothers love us? Can we prove it?
So are these scientists going for the James Randi Paranormal Challenge money?
It seems weird to me that religious people are always so quick to backpedal and/or deny that any of the alleged blessings/benefits/real-life-effects of their religion can be observed, recorded, or otherwise measured objectively. Like the people who say that God will never be apparent in scientific tests because he’ll know we’re testing him and so deliberately fail to show up. Okay, so God doesn’t want to be seen, but he wants people to say they’ve seen him?
It’s like God is this weirdo who’ll only meet you in dark corners and you have to be blindfolded, otherwise no dice. Like I’ve said before, find a person who behaves like God is supposed to behave and you have yourself a bona fide nutball. But for God, it’s like some kind of special mystical thing that he’s so weird. That’s one of the reasons why I finally left. It was like God was bipolar with borderline personality disorder; getting away was (and still is) a major relief.
(Now, watch, somebody is going to tell me that I just don’t understand…)
Sorry I haven’t responded yet. Been off living life away from the blog for a few days.
Picking up on our previous conversation at Joe Missionary’s, if we agree that there is an epistemological wall (or veil) around (or through) which we cannot see, then the atheist is one who assumes a priori that there is nothing behind the wall (or veil).
No, the atheist is the one who says “I can’t know what’s over there, so I’m not going to say what’s over there. If whatever is over there wanted me to know about it, then I would be able to know about it. Therefore, if anything is over there, I have no responsibility to speculate about it, so I shall behave as if nothing is there, because functionally–as evidenced by the epistemological barrier–nothing is there.” But you seem to be hung up on the a priori thing. There are no a priori decisions in being an atheist.
From Walter Kaufmann:
“Properly speaking, theology is, as the word indicates, the science of God. Something that tells us about God, his attributes and his relations to man and the universe. But of this, i believe, no knowledge is available, and so theology is impossible. Nothing in this realm can be proved. Nothing in this realm can be known. What, then, is theology? Some people try to get around this by saying that theology is any kind of systematic discourse about religion. That seems to me to be an abuse of terms. Then, people like Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Freud and Nietzsche and other critics of one or another church, including myself, would all be theologians. That is an abuse of language. Theology is the science of God and his nature, attributes and relations to man and the universe. Yet there is no way of knowing that there is a God, or how many gods there are, or what are his or her or their nature or attributes.”
Theo:
Our normative experience consists of having, and interacting with others who have, varying degrees of the various virtues. And in nearly all cases, the folks with whom we interact have nearly “normal” levels of the virtues. Rarely do we encounter someone “3 standard deviations” above or below the norm in any one virtue. When we do encounter people who manage to elevate one virtue (or a few virtues) very near to perfection (this is usually at the expense of others) they are often considered insane, for what is insanity if not an extremity of variation from the “norm”? At some number of standard deviations above or below the norm in any particular virtue, we, the “normal”, will usually find such a person either ready (on one end of the spectrum) to be imprisoned for life with no possibility of parole, or ready (on the other end) to be hospitalized in a secure mental institution.
Well, with God, we posit that he is the perfection of all virtues. I.e., he is many, many standard deviations above the “norm” in all virtues. I therefore say we, the “normal”, the ones in whom the various virtures are far from perfect, would naturally tend to find such a one insane. Throw mud balls if you like, but in this case it is we the “normal” who require additional degrees perfection, and not God requiring a few notches of takedown. I further posit that life itself is pretty much an institutional commitment, wherein we pursue recovery, in this case not of normalcy, but of complete perfection in virtue. And I suspect the day is coming in which those perceiving life in this manner will be institutionalized for the recovery of “normalcy.”
Just as a thought experiment, try to imagine perfect love (self-sacrificing concern for the betterment of another) and perfect justice (all acts receive precisely their due recompense) united in a single person or a single action. We are so “normal”, and therefore so far from “perfect” in either virtue, that it is quite difficult to imagine what such a person or act would look like. But that doesn’t mean the the perfection doesn’t exist, or that it is irrational to assume that the perfection could (or in our case, must) exist.
…
Well, Theo, aside from case studies in miracles, I cannot readily point at scientific studies that try to show the finger of God at work (and as for a statistically validated study…). I don’t think it’s inherently impossible, mind you, but this experiment won’t be the one that does!
Well, there may or may not be some scientific or medical merit to such research. I’ve no objection to the exploration. But I guess what bothers me (and maybe I’m reading too much between the lines) is that this type of research seems to me to be trying to get in behind religion.
Like this guy (Ned Block) over on the Edge’s Things You Believe But Cannot Prove who “believes” (but cannot prove) that
the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” will be solved by conceptual advances made in connection with cognitive neuroscience
Well maybe, but will cognitive neuroscience “solve” the existence of cognitive neuroscience?
What if we can create a pill to give everyone the “religious experience” if they chose to swallow the pill? What if they make a pill that makes people not remember or suffer emotionally from the tragic death of a wife or child with absolutely no other side effects? This pill would essentially eliminate certain kinds of suffering. Would you want to take it, the “grief pill”? Would anyone? Will we have we come any closer to answer the question is religion (or any particular religion) true? In my opinion, no. But that’s the ACTUAL question I think needs answering. And “cognitive neuroscience” is closer to making “porcine flight” a reality than it is to answering the question of religious truth. The real question utterly defies the methods of science!
Cheers!
Yes. Well I mispoke (mistyped). I don’t see how that changes what I said, however, about the presumed sanity or lack thereof of God. You cannot say that the atheist does not have a presumption (or, forgetting the moment the a priori, at least an assumption) against theism.
Kaufmann states of theology:
Nothing in this realm can be known… there is no way of knowing that there is a God, or how many gods there are, or what are his or her or their nature or attributes.
Baloney. This seems to me to be based on a questionable (and ultimately self-defeating) idea that “knowing” means having scientific or mathematical proof, or at least “knowing” means “knowing what may be objectively known”. [By that definition there would no way of “knowing” that one’s definition of knowing was actually correct, or even functionally “useful”, for there would be no way to “know” what “useful” was.] This is simply an epistemological assumption in the guise of pure, hard logic–one that might rationally be accepted OR rejected. It could be there is a Babblefish waiting to be discovered, thought I doubt it. It could be that God has communicated. Then there would be a way of “knowing.” And the argument would then easily be reduced to finding out how we “know” that God communicated…. Instead, I would counter by simply asking: What, of all the things worth believing in (or “giving intellectual assent to”, if one is so inclined), come with this level of proof? I say none.
Similarly, Theo, your assessment that “functionally… nothing is there” is only fair based on your view that nothing pierces the barrier, which SEEMS to be based on the presumption that only things we can objectively detect are real–a presumption I simply reject. I “perceive” the barrier being pierced all the time, and I look at you and say: “Can’t you see it? It’s obvious” And you look at me and say: “You’re seeing things you wanna see.” We’re stuck. We have different rules about how we “know” stuff, and are thus at an impasse. I always come back to what is worth knowing? It is a question, therefore, of value–subjective value no less–not of epistemology that separates us.
Cheers!
Yup, that appears to be a report of same thing.
If you follow getreligion’s link thru to the timesonline uk article, you’ll find the following clarification:
While enduring the agony, they will be exposed to religious symbols such as images of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix. Their neurological responses will be measured to determine the efficacy of their faith in helping them to cope.
“Efficacy of their faith” !?!?!! My suspicions are confirmed: the “efficacy” of faith is on trial. I ask again, what dolt thinks that images of the Virgin are going to lessen pain? I’ll tell you who: superstitious (and grossly ignorant) religious and secularist (and grossly ignorant) scientists.
What is actually being measured is the efficacy of “the brain thinking that having faith will alleviate pain” to alleviate pain. We may find that “the brain thinking that having faith will alleviate pain” does indeed alleviate pain. What we will not have answered is whether faith alleviates pain. I.e., we will not have evaluated the “efficacy of faith”. We will have proved that a belief (however irrational) can have an effect on our perceptions of physical stimuli (who could doubt this?), but we will not taken the first step toward whether the belief was true.
Off soapbox!