ethical ramifications of the fermi paradox

The Fermi paradox—the estimation that extraterrestrial civilizations are common and would naturally expand into space, contradicting the lack of evidence that they exist anywhere—is the subject of fascinating speculation and guesswork. Every possible fate of extraterrestrial intelligence is proposed and explored.

They are probably just avoiding us, for obvious moral reasons. Contamination. Or they’re laughing their assess off and don’t want to disrupt the entertainment. Either way it doesn’t put us in very good light.

Heck, we should just be happy they’ve not landed to force-convert us to the One True Religion of the (Alien) Spaghetti Monster!

Link.

do religious atheists exist?

Of course they do! Buddhists are the standard example. But most all religions have had atheist proponents.

The main problem with the current crop of atheists is precisely that they conflate atheism with areligion, or rather a form of militant anti-religiosity. By definition atheism simply means you don’t believe that a (personal) god exists. It certainly does not imply that you reject all forms of transcendence!

Dawkins, Hitchens and associates are trying to fight religion by equating a-theism with a-religion. But their attack is profoundly flawed:

(1) they offer a specific scientistic flavor of atheism that one needn’t share: it is not because science works well without presupposing direct divine intervention that we need to abandon all forms of transcendence. Science doesn’t prove atheism, it just presupposes it.

(2) they equate religion with theistic dualism. As mentioned above, there are entire religions (buddhism, jainism) that do very well without a creator god, thank you very much. Most non-monotheistic religions are monist in the sense that they consider the gods (or whatever) as part and parcel of the world: they have, so to speak, an world-immanent idea of transcendence. This doesn’t mean that physicists are going to find Brahma within their particle colliders; but it does mean that Brahma can easily be interpreted as a “force” (or whatever) within our universe, and one that should be understandable by science – when science gets that far.

Atheism is not areligion – and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, namely a mutilated and watered-down view of religion. There is plenty of room in atheism for mysticism, transcendence and humbly acknowledging that we don’t understand everything. In fact, a religious atheism is perhaps even more interesting than a theistic one because the Mystery of the World lies not “outside and far away” but is the very fabric of our existence. Religious atheists are per definitionem not tempted to claim that we or the world “are god”, but they most certainly are entitled to believe that religious understandings are perhaps our best and most beautiful hope.

P.S. from Religious Atheisms:

How can there be “religious” atheists?

- Consider the group called the Sea of Faith – cultural Christians living in a post-christian world, who find meaning in christian culture, but not inerrant truth in its writings nor its beliefs. The Sea of Faith people believe the Western judeo-christian God to be a human construct … but the religion and broader culture built around that god to be still meaningful in their lives and others around them.

Consider the main character in Miguel de Unamuno’s short novel, San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Madrid 1933) : Father Manuel, a Roman Catholic priest taking care of the people in a small remote spanish village, but without faith in anything but this world … a Catholic atheist.

Consider Altizer’s Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity (1968), Kolenda’s Religion without God (1976), Pérez-Esclarín’s Atheism and liberation (1978), Apostel, Pinxten et al’s Religious atheism? (1982). Add in daoism and buddhism and forms of hinduism for the eastern variety of religious atheists.

Frequently the atheistic admonition “to live without gods” is translated to mean “to live without religion” as well, given that gods are always coterminous with religions. The mental conflict in the West arises as people of the West, indoctrinated for two millenia in the identity equation “Religion = God (= State)”, believe that religions require the presence of deity and the supernatural, whereas the ancient religions of the East and the modern religions of the West have none.

secular critique

A consequence of hinging our conversation on belief is that it tends to project “belief” in the abstract onto some believer, elsewhere. I often experience the dialog in the secular academy about religion as involving a kind of division of believing labor, if you will, in which avowed non-believers puzzle over the intricacies of religious belief, its loss, its renewal, its existentially contradictory character, without much investigation into the lived experiences and practices of the “religious.” In print, of course, there are many major exceptions to this, from Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety to Dawne Moon’s God, Sex, and Politics, which coins the useful term “everyday theology” to account for something like a religious habitus. But our conversations are different than the books we read, and I think we have some catching up to do.

from the Immanent Frame.

the (little) faith of the scientists

from the Paul Davies at the NYT:

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that physics “got religion” but only that science can never explain everything and must always assume (on faith) somethings. I am not sure Davies here is using a very strong notion of faith. in end effect all he wants is for scientists to dig deeper within science. This is no existential faith (ie one that might change how you live) but only a scientific one (ie one that influences how you do science).

This objection does not then even reach the level of Kuhnian or other relativizing of scientific knowledge.

I don’t think that the concept of faith has any productive role to play in the field of natural sciences. If anything, faith should be sought in the practical realm (politics, economics) where it might actually play a significant role in upholding our societies (we need to have faith in democracy and in the Euro for them to work – gravity does quite well with or without our faithing it, thank you very much).

thanks ed.

ecology and the closing of the political-ethical divide

(this post is in honor of the newly released U.N. report on global warming)

Ecology structurally resembles old-time religions. Specifically, it in some sense goes further than any religion has up until now:

If in christianity you had to do/believe X in order to save your soul and could tell others about it, should you feel so inclined;

and if in Islam you had to do/believe X in order to save your soul and were supposed to force others to do likewise (but would still save your own soul should you not succeed in converting others);

with ecology you have to do X in order to save yourself (though you have no longer a soul) but you also have to convince/force everyone else to do the same if you are going to succeed in saving yourself! This is going further than any of the monotheisms ever went.

Of course: ecology’s “holy book” is a whole bunch of carefully verified scientific findings, whereas christianity and islam’s holy books are, well, revealed. But that doesn’t change the basic similarity in the structure of the “religions”, though it does make ecology much more believable.

This analysis implies one important thing:

(1) with ecology, the distinction between ethics and politics disappears. You can certainly be a good ecologist on your own, reducing, reusing and recycling in your own home and biking to work, but this will only avoid a disaster (i.e. the End of The World) if governments force everyone else to do likewise. This is what christian and islamic fundamentalists in the U.S. and Middle East are also trying to do.

Ecology has a view of well-being that is all-inclusive; it allows for no individualism as far as salvation is concerned (in this sense it is closer to the mono/heno-theism of judaism). Either we all make it, or none of us do. We therefore must force one another to be good. Ethics therefore trumps politics (as it should when we can all agree on the ethics). There can no longer be a separation between ecology and state, however much we might still want to separate churches from the latter.

Now i am not dissing ecology. As i stated above, it is by far the more believable of the options out there, and i do realize that it does not see itself as a religion (no new religion ever does). And i’m all for it, anyway. But nonetheless and my personal feelings notwithstanding, it looks awfully much like a religion, and a rather stringent one at that! And to top it off, we cannot either imagine it being wrong or come up with an alternative. Now does that not ever sound like good old-time, medieval religion (only its green now)!

buddhist experimental ethics

from Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (p. 35):

Looking deeply requires courage. You can use a pencil and paper if you like. During sitting meditation, if you see clearly a symptom of your suffering, write it down. Then ask yourself, “What kinds of nutriments have I been ingesting that have fed and sustained this suffering?” When you begin to realize the kinds of nutriments you have been ingesting, you may cry. Use the energy of mindfulness all day long to be truly present, to embrace your suffering like a mother holding her baby. As long as mindfulness is there, you can stay with the difficulty. Practice does not mean using only your own mindfulness, concentration and wisdom. You also have to benefit from the mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom of friends on the path and your teacher. There are things that even a child can see but we ourselves cannot see because we are imprisoned by our notions. Bring what you have written to a friend and ask him or her for their observations and insights.

The text points to at least three things: (a) always trying to improve, (b) monitoring your progress, (c) communicating and getting help from others.

experimental ethics (part 3 in a continuing series)

so i’ve been doing my little ‘experiment‘ with yoga for a week now (well, more or less…). And though i don’t have any yogic substance to contribute to the blogosphere* (yet?) i would nevertheless like to make a remark about the practice of experimental ethics itself:

Despite the fact that i might never come to any solid conclusions regarding my yoga practice, i nevertheless feel that there could be a great value to people discussing their moral/ethical/religious practices out in the open and with one another. By nature, ethics is normative and not descriptive so that we shouldn’t expect to hit upon any experimentally verifiable ‘laws’. Nor will we necessarily be able to formulate any new and interesting ‘ought’ ideas. However, we might well manage to help each other along a bit more quickly than were we only randomly hitting upon better ways on our own.

The ‘moral sciences’ might not be quite able to take over a full-fledged experimental apparatus from the harder, natural and social sciences, but they certainly should be able to adopt some version of the ’scientific community’ – the one that discusses and discusses. And i do not think this is already happening:

True, philosophers and ethicists have academic communities and journals that enable them to discuss, but they are trying to come up with theories of what we ought to do, i.e. their output is not ‘good practices’ but ‘true sentences’. I am looking for the former. Moreover, with the advent of internet, scientific journals are a most outdated and inadequate form of communication, when we have blogs and social websites that are much, much quicker at disseminating and discussing information and ideas.

So all in all, even if i don’t come to any conclusions regarding my yoga practices, i hope that discussing them might encourage others to do likewise so that we might learn and improve together. Here’s to hoping!

converting to science

or why Charles Taylor is one of the greatest living philosophers. He explains that people don’t necessarily convert to science/secularism from religion because they are convinced the former is more true, rather because they see science as “more mature, more courageous”, more “manly”: i.e. for moral, not for scientific reasons. From A Secular Age, p. 366:

[T]he story that a convert to unbelief may tell, about being convinced to abandon religion by science, is in a sense really true. This person does see himself as abandoning one world view (“religion”) because another incompatible on (“science”) seemed more believable. But what made it in fact more believable was not “scientific” proofs; it is rather that one whole package: science, plus a picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which science represents a mature facing of hard reality, beats out another package: religion, plus a rival picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which religion, say, represents true humility, and many of the claims of science unwarranted arrogance. [...] This is the sense in which what I’ve been calling moral considerations played a crucial role; not that the convert necessarily found the morality of “science” of itself more attractive – one can assume that in a sense the opposite was the case, where he bemoaned loss of faith – but that it offered a more convincing story about his moral/spiritual life.

The newest forms of religious experience

I am now half way through (ok, i’m on page 343 of chapter 9 – almost half way there) Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which attempts to retell the philosophical story of the west’s basic view of the world went from an enchanted, meaningful cosmos created by God in 1500 to that of a disenchanted, empty and infinite universe that has no immediate meaning to offer us. This is a well-known tale, but one that is seldom told very well.

I think Taylor is certainly describing an existing emptiness that we all feel. However, i also think that he is describing a world that is about to change, one that is just on the verge of discovering a new and once again satisfying meaning – or at least a good ersatz to the old christian version of the thing. Let me give two examples.

When i asked my roomate if he felt this lack of meaning in life, he simply shrugged and defined the meaning of life to be living life. Though, the answer is not ultimately satisfying to one (like me) rather worried about meaninglessness in life, it is nevertheless a coherent and reasonable position. He is no longer worried about a lack of meaning in life, he has, so to speak, digested the bad news and moved on.

My second example is what i said about Gibson a post ago. Here we have a new religiousness that seems to see religion (ie good, old-fashioned gods and goddesses religion) as another plane or level accessible to certain types of people – probably that 10% of the population Max Webber deems truly religious. This type of religiousness offers what you could call a narrow meaning. It doesnt need to explain everything as old-fashioned religions still do. It only asks for one level in which it will tell a meaningful story.

It is, of course, this second example that most interests me. I think we are figuring out ways of “doing religion” that neither conflict with established scientific views of the world – nor degenerate into lame, empty ethics. The new religiousness is not New Age either. It is a perception of things that adds an extra layer atop previous ones. Physics has its description of atoms that cannot explain or account for the biologist’s language of cells, which in turn is topped by the economist’s talk of supply and demand. Religion can now simply come and sit atop all those previous descriptions, offering its own irreducible talk of gods, the good and the like.

This religiousness does not have the secular problems Charles Taylor refers to. Because it has completely decoupled itself from other layers of experience, without losing its own reality. The world is no longer infinitely empty – or rather “le silence éternel de ces espaces infinies” (the eternal silence of these infinite spaces) need no longer scare us as it once did Pascal: we only need move one level up and realize there are other ways of seeing things that are much more friendly. Soon this view will begin to spread, i think, and the secular age described by Taylor will very gradually come to an end.

meditation experiment (update day 1)

Just finished my first pre-lunch meditation. I spent the whole time thinking about the writing of this post but managed to keep the thinking “light and superficial”

In practice, “10 minutes” turned out to be “until i felt done” which is probably fine. “Feeling done” consisted mostly in realizing that i wouldn’t manage not think anymore, while also feeling rested.

End result: mind is “cleared”, chest is “lighter” and mood is “higher”. On the whole a good day 1.