Scully: “So you’re basing this theory on a folk tale.”

Mulder: “It’s just another way of describing the same truths, right? I mean, all new truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions.* We fear the unknown so we reduce it to the terms most familiar to us. Whether that’s a folk tale, or a disease or a conspiracy.”

Scully: “Mulder, even if you’re right, I mean especially if you’re right, why would he leave his own country to come here?”

Mulder: “Free cable.”

from “Teliko”, episode 4×04

* Paraphrasing T. H. Huxley: “History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

Berenbaum: “Everything about insects is fascinating. They are truly remarkable creatures. So beautiful and so honest.”

Mulder: “‘Honest’?”

Berenbaum: “Eat, sleep, defecate, procreate. That’s all they do. That’s all we do, but at least insects don’t kid themselves that it’s anything more than that.”

from “War of the Coprophages”, episode 3×12 of The X-Files

This exchange (penned by the brilliant Darin Morgan), may be less eloquent but is certainly no less “honest” than Dawkins’ famous conclusion that the universe has “at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

In fact, it’s quite arguably more honest than those who share Dawkins’ assessment but go on to declare that we can go on living lives of meaning and purpose without the constant awareness that such constructs are anything other than protracted exercises in kidding ourselves. Every value and guiding principle we expect one another to live by – everything we do and believe in - pertains somehow to eating, sleeping, defecating, or procreating and not a whit more, because there is nothing else. What you call “loving” your significant other is purely driven by your animal instinct to preserve society and ensure the survival of your community’s gene pool. Sure, it feels like more, thank heavens, so that we at least can enjoy going about our ultimately pointless activities and following our arbitrary ethical guidelines. Societally constrained hedonism is the only real reason to go on living life.

If you believe this, suspending this realization is just an understandably desperate act of self-delusion. I mean, who wants to live like organic robots? If there is no fundamental principle of meaning and value other than our own derivative ones, pretending that what we believe and do in our lifetimes has any importance is merely playing out the actions of Deckard and Rachel at the end of Blade Runner (I’m trying to avoid spoiling anyone).

I don’t think the typically negative reactions to such reductionistic understandings of the universe are merely the result of human minds working overtime to avoid acknowledging a depressing reality; there’s also the fact that these lines of thought quickly take us to conclusions that are disturbingly, I would say suggestively, counter-intuitive. Killing deformed or retarded babies for fun is not just inconvenient to the survival of our species (in fact, it probably isn’t even that); it’s wrong. Isn’t it? That is, maybe things appear to have absolute meaning, value, and purpose because…they do.

Regardless, since I disagree with Dawkins that everything in the physical universe eliminates any evidence for a deeper purpose or meaning behind it all, I’ve chosen to live under the assumption that there is such greater significance to my life. Lacking conclusive evidence either way, to choose that possible understanding of the universe despite a realization of its conjectural nature is not a bit more of a delusion than the atheists’ willful suspension of disbelief in choosing their values and guiding principles.

In fact, when those who deny all but contrived, artificial meaning in the universe live as though there were any absolute importance or significance to how we live our lives, they are doing so in blatant contradiction to what they believe they know, consciously carrying on with their eyes closed. When we who believe in a deeper meaning for the universe live out our convictions based on that belief, we’re at least doing something that we truly do not believe contradicts reality. Personally, I’d rather be accidentally mistaken than knowingly embrace what I recognize are mistakes.

Christians may turn out to have been deluded, but at least we’re not the ones kidding ourselves.

The Pearl (Matthew 13)

I know the wayes of Learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the presse, and make it runne;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of it self, like a good huswife, spunne
In laws and policie; what the starres conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;
Both th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and historie:
All these stand open, or I have the keyes:
Yet I love thee.

I know the wayes of Honour, what maintains
The quick returns of courtesie and wit:
In vies of favours whether partie gains,
When glorie swells the heart, and moldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle, wheresoe’re it goes:
How many drammes of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
Yet I love thee.

I know the wayes of Pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot bloud and brains;
What mirth and musick mean; what love and wit
Have done these twentie hundred yeares, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuffe is flesh, not brasse; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Then he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.

I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes
I flie to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through these labyrinths, not my groveling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,
Did both conduct and teach me, how by it
To climbe to thee.

Many thanks to my friend Peter Smith for bringing this moving, insightful poem to my attention!

Image via Wikipedia

Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

Related posts:

1. LOST techniques of Biblical criticism Today James McGrath published a post on an intersection between LOST and biblical studies. I know, who would have thought he’d do something like that? Check it...
2. Translator’s fatigue in the Gothic Bible Recently I ran across an old article1 in the journal Language and had to smile at its similarity to a recent topic in the redaction...
3. The Human Faces of God: peer reviewing the biblical authors Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) Author: Thom Stark Wipf and Stock,...

The topic of discussion was “Has Neuroscience Killed God?” Featured was a discussion between Cambridge neuroscientist Rev. Dr. Aladair Coles and psychological therapist Martyn Frame, a Christian and an atheist respectively. The discussion covered the ground you might expect, e.g. whether determining the neurological phenomena associated with religious experiences fully explained those experiences and was therefore sufficient to discount them. Overall I think this was a much better discussion than last week’s disappointing conversation between David Papineau and Keith Ward over materialism/dualism, in which I sided with the materialist over Ward (whom I really respect).

Anatomy of a religious experience (via Wikipedia)

Frame early on concedes that religious experience as emanating from divine interaction is not strictly speaking disproved by neurological evidence, but keeps insisting that (reductive) naturalism is somehow more in line with the scientific evidence. Yet when pressed to explain how this was the case, he kept wanting to offer philosophical/theological challenges. Specifically, he wondered why the Christian God wouldn’t wire people to believe in specifically Him (i.e. the Christian God) rather than to allow people to either believe in another deity or disbelieve altogether. Unsurprisingly, Coles countered that 1) this is not after all a neurological question and 2) a God who wired everyone to believe in Him would be despotic and unlike the Christian God. Coles was very careful not to dismiss Frame’s concern as a real problem, but pointed out quite rightly that it was a philosophical and not a scientific challenge. As this show’s topic was specifically on the scientific evidence, I think Coles was right in respectfully and not dismissively steering things back.

Among the more interesting scientific discussions was the evidence cited by Coles that the parts of the brain that appear to be involved in the perception of religious experience are not at all unique to humans. There is no detectable “God module” that humans utilize for their prayer lives and religious experiences; people interact with their deities in the same way they interact with other humans. For Coles, it might be easier to dismiss God if there were such a lump of cells tacked on by evolution which makes humans think they are having their mystical experiences, but having the brain act in a normal, human way when interacting with either other humans or a spiritual being is “deeply Christian” in that it coincides with the Christian belief in God as a person with whom we interact rather than just some mystical force. I found that interesting; take it or leave it.

One of Frame’s lines of evidence was pointing out that people with a dominating right hemisphere were likelier to be religious than otherwise. The right hemisphere is the creative side of the brain and notoriously can find patterns even where there are none; the popular implication is that, essentially, right-brained people are the likeliest to believe in things that don’t exist, and that this explains religious people. Coles countered that there are plenty of left-brained people who are religious in different ways: he said that although right-brained individuals seem to have more mystical experiences, left-brained individuals are likelier to view God in doctrinal or theological terms. Moreover, Coles cited studies that show people with no religious inclinations who have the left side of their brain damaged will often find a sense for spirituality as a result of their dependence on the right hemisphere. From this he suggested that we all have the physical mechanisms for religious experience built in to us, but such inclinations are sometimes “bullied” out by a dominating left hemisphere. Such people are not de facto atheists or materialists, but may find mystical, religious experiences harder to access.

A couple additional thoughts from me.

• The case was predictably made by Frame that being able to artificially stimulate mystical experiences using electrodes applied to the applicable regions of the brain invalidates any immaterial source for those experiences in other people. The implication is that if we can fool the brain into thinking there is a God through very mundane physical processes, this goes to show that it’s all delusion caused by our brains’ reactions to electro-chemical accidents. This is a very old, very tired bit of reductionism. If neuroscientists were able to manipulate a subject’s perception so that he thought his mother was in the room, this would not at all invalidate the existence of the subject’s mother, or even exclude the possibility that his mother was in the room. Similarly, neuroscientists are able to artificially approximate all kinds of reactions to stimuli that, while actually existing, are not actually present at the time. To my mind, this is a line of evidence that painfully begs the question. All that has been shown is that certain kinds of experiences that are experienced by our brain’s chemistry are in fact reproducible by chemistry.

• The topic of this show dealt specifically with religious experiences; I have indeed had religious, even mystical experiences, but I am not particularly right-brained. My left hemisphere really tries to get me to dismiss my experiences, and although I do think it important to suspend my belief in them when evaluating these questions, I find that my left hemisphere is more than adequate to explain my religious beliefs anyway. The fact is, I don’t believe primarily because of religious experiences as perceived by my right brain: equally so, perhaps even more commonly these days, I believe because the world makes better intellectual sense to me with a God behind it. Importantly, in practice I discount every mystical personal experience, mine included, and proceed with my belief in the Christian God based on a reasoned choice. All this to say, for me, not much hangs on the outcome of this discussion in either direction.

Please note that I’m not saying there aren’t real challenges for theism or Christianity from neuroscience. I honestly don’t know enough to say whether there are or aren’t. But I do know that Dr. Coles presented a better case than Mr. Frame.

Anyway, for a cordial, civil exchange of interesting ideas, I certainly recommend checking this episode out.