The last couple of posts have been pretty out there, so lets step back and give some equal time to my inner skeptic. Putting my undoubtedly naive newbie zen eye away for a minute lets look at things from a hard-assed materialist right-hand point of view for a moment and see what we can see.
OK, well... In an open-minded mood I sat down to try a form of guided meditation with very little expectation of seeing much action without a fair bit of practice. I was rather surprised to find that I felt something my "first time out", as it were. Now one hears that such things happen, indeed they can even supposedly happen spontaneously, but I certainly wasn't expecting it. Indeed, as I said, I approached it with relatively little expectation, and maybe that very openness was why it worked. I am now fairly convinced that I did have a genuine peak experience of some sort, and indeed perhaps even an 'aftershock' the next morning.
Now of course the question becomes what did it mean? What exactly was it that I experienced? Buddhism seems to have one answer, but as I suggested in my last post, I suspect that Theism would have a somewhat different answer. Furthermore, I can also think of at least a third perspective which would be a Materialist/Athiest perspective. So lets sit with that one for a bit and examine it. (As I borrow phraseology from Genpo Roshi... Good grief, I am a bit of a slang sponge...)
The materialist perspective would probably go something like this: the Brain is a biological information processing system. My mind is running a sort of operating system, and as such it is capable of being hacked. Meditation, like psychotherapy, is a set of methods for doing just that. Some meditation might be the biological equivalent of "clock chipping", making your conscious mind just a bit sharper and more efficient. Other techniques might be the equivalent of a virus. (Go read Snow Crash). So transcendental meditation is a set of techniques for hacking into the human operating system and triggering interesting effects. Like cheat codes or easter eggs embedded in software. If you know the trick, exciting and fun things can happen.
But the theist would say that it's a direct apprehension of God and the Buddhist might say something about the formless unmanifest which what my own self before I was born, or some such. The hard-assed materialist would come back quoting Occam's razor and suggest that his answer is the simplest, because it doesn't rely on invoking something from outside the real known world of "stuffs and things and things and stuffs." (Darn it, now I have a hankering for Parliament, and I'm pretty sure our ripped Parliament got lost when our disk crashed this summer.)
And now here is where I start to get into squishy territory. There was a time when I would have fully bought the materialist argument, but now I'm not so sure. As alien as Wilber's "Integral Post-Metaphysics" is, I can't really think of a reason why it's wrong, nor can I think of a satisfactory way to avoid something very much like it. The problem with the materialist argument is that it is steeped in what postmodernism calls "the myth of the given." It is based on the assumption that the 'everyday world' has some sort of absolute reality. But the problem is that Descartes demolished this quite effectively ages ago, and never succeeded in putting the world back together, at least not that I'd ever heard. The first half of his Meditation on First Philosophy really quite exquisitely establishes the postmodern idea that you really can't trust most of what your senses tell you. Indeed, he demolishes God and the entire universe all the way down to his own consciousness, where he gets stopped by that ever so important truth, "I think therefore I am", which is fundamentally the only thing that we can really ever know with any certainty. Something must be thinking about this problem in the first place. I might be a brain in a jar or plugged into "The Matrix", but I must exist in some form or other to think about it in the first place.
Now, Descartes didn't stop there and through some daft-ass verbal trickery he tries to patch it all back together, but I've never really bought it. Usually I just sorta shrugged and moved on. It's all well and good to say that I don't really know the real world exists, but it's not a very practical or useful philosophy is it? And so I fall back on a less robust but more practical philosophy of generally believing what I see unless I have some reason to be suspicious. There has always been that nagging annoyance that Descartes destroyed the world 400 years before I was born, but I mostly just shrugged and decided that the only practical answer was to go ahead and be naive for lack of a better solution.
Wilber's answer is that there is no real world, or at least if there is then we have no access to it anyway, so we might as well just forget about it. What there are are perspectives. We experience the world through injunctions which bring forth experiences which depend, at least in part, on what viewpoint we have while performing the injunction.
When I look at the world with my eyes, I see the sorts of things that eyes can see. But if I look at the world with an electron microscope, or my theoretical eye of quantum physics, it looks very different. Why do we not yet have a grand unified theory? Because we don't yet have a perspective that can merge the 'truths' of quantum field theory and general relativity. But even if we did, it wouldn't necessarily tell us everything. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are the same stuff. Matter is somehow colossally compacted frozen energy. But what does that mean? We have no direct human experience of that, just like we have no direct human experience of quantum uncertainty, so we have difficulty saying what it 'means'. We can make predictions from it and these are borne out with experimental tests to high accuracy, but what does it mean? Fundamentally, despite our ability to predict it's behavior, we still have no idea what the universe actually is, and indeed an 'absolute' answer to that question is very probably out of our grasp.
So where does this leave us? We can predict the behavior of the physical universe, but we don't know what it is. But what about the interior universe? What about what goes on in the mind. The extreme materialist viewpoint is that it doesn't exist, but of course it does. In fact, after Descartes, it's the only thing that we really know does, in fact, exist. And indeed, given that we don't know what the exterior universe means or is, either, why should we bias toward it being somehow more real at all? Why should it be more real to probe with my eyes than to probe with my mind? The answer is, I think, that it probably isn't. So what does my peak experience mean? Well, absolutely? Nothing. It has no absolute meaning whatsoever, or at least none that I'm ever likely to have access to. Just as with the exterior universe, all I am left with is perspective, and there are many available. And somehow, it is up to me to try and stitch together what ever sort of integrated truth I can glean from the available perspectives. This is where Wilber's "Integral Methodological Pluralism" comes in, and the trick is, that most of the quadrant's haven't weighed in yet with their perspectives, because the transpersonal is generally not welcome in academia.
So here I am, left at the cutting edge of human understanding, with a mind full of materialist skepticism, a healthy respect for postmodern plurality, and a heart that seems to resonate in interesting and unexpected ways when the mind is probed with the right hacks. I've started performing the injunctions, and I've started bringing forth the experiences, but the meaning has still to materialize. I've got lots of perspectives to explore, but many, perhaps most, are steeped in the ugly rhetoric of the ancient world, as I have bemoaned before. As Wilber points out in Integral Spirituality, spirituality has tended to get stuck at the blue/amber level and so here I am looking for something like a turquoise meaning and finding that it's pretty sketchy out here on the bleeding edge. I seem to be beta-testing spirituality. Actually, it's more like alpha testing. I'm pretty sure the functionality could still change.
And with that, dear reader, I leave you reassured that my inner geek is still alive and well.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Mahayana Buzzkill?
Maybe it was an after effect from my Big Mind experience the day before (see here)... Yesterday morning as I rode the Piccadilly line into work, I noticed that I was enormously pleased with people. I was just sitting there on the train and everyone in the carriage with me just seemed simply marvelous to me. So I just sat there with a sort of bemused half smile looking at each person and finding them all beautiful. There was no sense of preference either. Each person was clearly individual, some were obviously more fashionable (as many Londoners tend to be) or conventionally beautiful, but all of them, even the frumpy, grumpy and ugly seemed somehow equally lovely yesterday morning. It was really quite a pleasant feeling, though I had to exert some mental discipline and not just stare at people smiling, as I'm sure it would probably feel creepy to them.
So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.
Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.
This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.
Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.
I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.
So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.
Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.
This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.
Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.
I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Altered States and other Revelations
It's been a bit of strange day. Actually, it's been a weird week.
To begin with, phase shifting is very much harder with a baby. When we left Colorado last Tuesday, Laz was on a schedule where he woke up shortly before noon, which corresponds to about 7 PM here in London. In other words, he was nearly 180 degrees out of phase when we got back to our flat in Harrow. Add to that the fact that neither Sunshine nor I managed to get much sleep on the flight while Laz did and we have a rocky beginning already.
Now normally I try and get some sleep on the long haul and then stay up as long as I can, probably going to bed in the early evening. But you can't really explain this to a 1-year old, so instead we've been trying to wrap him forward by keeping him up as long as possible and then keeping him asleep as long as possible. This sorta works, but he's also got a bit of sleep intertia. Anyway, he's pushed over enough now that he's waking up a bit after midnight, which is at least a schedule that allows me to go to work during the day. But it is decidedly weird, since it effectively means that our days are backwards. We get the evening and then the sun comes up and I go to work. My inner clock is quite confused.
Meanwhile I'm applying for jobs... again. It's a bit weird though, as some of these positions I'm applying for are connected to people I already have working relationships with. So I'm writing weird impersonal cover letters to people I'd usually e-mail and call by their first names. It's ever so slightly twilight zone. Or maybe it's just the sleep schedule.
Or maybe its something else. Just before leaving Colorado I bought a bunch of Buddhism books, and so I've been slowly soaking in Zen for the past week or two as well. I started with The Eye Never Sleeps by Dennis Genpo Merzel, which is really quite lovely. It's a discussion of the Hsin Hsin Ming, an ancient Zen poem. Genpo Roshi's (his current title) discussion is really quite refreshingly modern. It's still inscrutably Zen, but what would you expect?
Anyway the Zen seems to be seeping in a bit. On the plane flight home we watched Hou Yuan Jia, (known to the western world as Jet Li's Fearless). Actually not a bad movie. "Kung Fu movies" have come a long way, and many of them are really quite beautiful now. Anyway, I found my brain getting snagged on the Buddhist undercurrent in the film, so the brain is definitely digesting some of this.
I've also been slowing sampling the ILP starter kit. The "Out of the Box ILP" is not terribly helpful, and their "body" modules seem a bit hokey to me. (At least the "1-minute modules" versions of them.) But the meditation CD seems like it might be more useful. Today I watched the first of the DVDs: Big Mind Meditation (again with Genpo Roshi). This was actually quite good. In fact, it might even have worked which kind of surprised me. Maybe it was the weird sleep schedule, or the 5th cup of tea today, or maybe it was an actual kensho experience, but much to my surprise, I actually felt something. Indeed, it even seemed to be the 'right' sort of something. It was a particularly strong resonance during the 'Big Heart' section, and corresponded very closely to the descriptions on the DVD, but (and this is the part that is hard to dismiss) I felt it prior to hearing the description. So its not just a simple implanted suggestion. Perhaps it was a more subtle effect, or perhaps it was an actual Subtle effect.
Sort of hard to describe actually. It was a gradually growing tingle... sort of similar to an orgasmic sensation but centered primarily in the upper chest. There was also a sensation of dizziness and a disconnection with the senses rather akin to the buzz of drunkenness. During the "Big Mind" portion of the meditation there was indeed a sense of free-flowing motion and boundlessness in my head. But with the transition to "Big Heart" this shifted to a much stronger sensation of gushing forth from my chest and a desire to (for lack of a better description) hug the world. (Yes, Ick, I know. It's like a Coke commercial!) Anyway, skeptical as I tend to be about these sort of things, I was surprised to find it actually seemed to be doing something. Certainly gives me something to ponder.
His Big Mind technique is kind of interesting. Instead of engaging the sort of typical breaking down the ego methodology, he actually employs the conscious intellect using a Voice Dialogue technique borrowed from psychotherapy. Maybe this is the Buddhism for Gearheads I was looking for. Certainly psychobabble is a lot easier for a modern to swallow than magical energy.
Finally, returning to more mundane reality, I got some weird mail in my slot. A manila envelope addressed to Dr. C L Gerardy, and with a strange return address from Jerusalem, but postmarked from Phoenix. Inside, a mad bunch of bible quotes and other strangeness, mostly from Revelations. Presumably just harmless madness from someone (though if I do suddenly come down with anthrax have someone check the envelope), but I do wonder what I did to rise to their attention. Ah well, it goes with the territory I suppose, but usually I get the crazy messages through e-mail. Here, someone actually spent a few bucks to post something to England. No explanation of course, just madness. Perhaps nutters should learn the art of the cover letter?
To begin with, phase shifting is very much harder with a baby. When we left Colorado last Tuesday, Laz was on a schedule where he woke up shortly before noon, which corresponds to about 7 PM here in London. In other words, he was nearly 180 degrees out of phase when we got back to our flat in Harrow. Add to that the fact that neither Sunshine nor I managed to get much sleep on the flight while Laz did and we have a rocky beginning already.
Now normally I try and get some sleep on the long haul and then stay up as long as I can, probably going to bed in the early evening. But you can't really explain this to a 1-year old, so instead we've been trying to wrap him forward by keeping him up as long as possible and then keeping him asleep as long as possible. This sorta works, but he's also got a bit of sleep intertia. Anyway, he's pushed over enough now that he's waking up a bit after midnight, which is at least a schedule that allows me to go to work during the day. But it is decidedly weird, since it effectively means that our days are backwards. We get the evening and then the sun comes up and I go to work. My inner clock is quite confused.
Meanwhile I'm applying for jobs... again. It's a bit weird though, as some of these positions I'm applying for are connected to people I already have working relationships with. So I'm writing weird impersonal cover letters to people I'd usually e-mail and call by their first names. It's ever so slightly twilight zone. Or maybe it's just the sleep schedule.
Or maybe its something else. Just before leaving Colorado I bought a bunch of Buddhism books, and so I've been slowly soaking in Zen for the past week or two as well. I started with The Eye Never Sleeps by Dennis Genpo Merzel, which is really quite lovely. It's a discussion of the Hsin Hsin Ming, an ancient Zen poem. Genpo Roshi's (his current title) discussion is really quite refreshingly modern. It's still inscrutably Zen, but what would you expect?
Anyway the Zen seems to be seeping in a bit. On the plane flight home we watched Hou Yuan Jia, (known to the western world as Jet Li's Fearless). Actually not a bad movie. "Kung Fu movies" have come a long way, and many of them are really quite beautiful now. Anyway, I found my brain getting snagged on the Buddhist undercurrent in the film, so the brain is definitely digesting some of this.
I've also been slowing sampling the ILP starter kit. The "Out of the Box ILP" is not terribly helpful, and their "body" modules seem a bit hokey to me. (At least the "1-minute modules" versions of them.) But the meditation CD seems like it might be more useful. Today I watched the first of the DVDs: Big Mind Meditation (again with Genpo Roshi). This was actually quite good. In fact, it might even have worked which kind of surprised me. Maybe it was the weird sleep schedule, or the 5th cup of tea today, or maybe it was an actual kensho experience, but much to my surprise, I actually felt something. Indeed, it even seemed to be the 'right' sort of something. It was a particularly strong resonance during the 'Big Heart' section, and corresponded very closely to the descriptions on the DVD, but (and this is the part that is hard to dismiss) I felt it prior to hearing the description. So its not just a simple implanted suggestion. Perhaps it was a more subtle effect, or perhaps it was an actual Subtle effect.
Sort of hard to describe actually. It was a gradually growing tingle... sort of similar to an orgasmic sensation but centered primarily in the upper chest. There was also a sensation of dizziness and a disconnection with the senses rather akin to the buzz of drunkenness. During the "Big Mind" portion of the meditation there was indeed a sense of free-flowing motion and boundlessness in my head. But with the transition to "Big Heart" this shifted to a much stronger sensation of gushing forth from my chest and a desire to (for lack of a better description) hug the world. (Yes, Ick, I know. It's like a Coke commercial!) Anyway, skeptical as I tend to be about these sort of things, I was surprised to find it actually seemed to be doing something. Certainly gives me something to ponder.
His Big Mind technique is kind of interesting. Instead of engaging the sort of typical breaking down the ego methodology, he actually employs the conscious intellect using a Voice Dialogue technique borrowed from psychotherapy. Maybe this is the Buddhism for Gearheads I was looking for. Certainly psychobabble is a lot easier for a modern to swallow than magical energy.
Finally, returning to more mundane reality, I got some weird mail in my slot. A manila envelope addressed to Dr. C L Gerardy, and with a strange return address from Jerusalem, but postmarked from Phoenix. Inside, a mad bunch of bible quotes and other strangeness, mostly from Revelations. Presumably just harmless madness from someone (though if I do suddenly come down with anthrax have someone check the envelope), but I do wonder what I did to rise to their attention. Ah well, it goes with the territory I suppose, but usually I get the crazy messages through e-mail. Here, someone actually spent a few bucks to post something to England. No explanation of course, just madness. Perhaps nutters should learn the art of the cover letter?
Monday, January 08, 2007
The Mind Just Googles
"Sex, Money and Power: The Bible Shows You How" (Michael H. Brown)
P.S. The actual book he wanted to recommend is "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" by Shane Claiborne
New Old Blog
Well, Blogger has updated their blogging engine with new stuff, so now I've "upgraded," though it remains to be seen if it is truly an improvement. First thing I had to do of course was get it working with the my local blogging client (ecto). The transition was not too bad, but one never knows with these things. Anyway, this is mostly just a quick post to make sure that things are still working.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Absolutely Alien
OK... So I've decided that Mere Christianity is so deeply flawed it doesn't really make any sense to continue this blow-by-blow. This first half of this book, which is supposed to be his intellectual argument for belief is just riddled with appallingly poor logic. At virtually every step he tends to make one of three fatal mistakes: (a) artificially narrowing the available options to just 2 or 3 possibilities, (b) proof by fiat, or (c) just introducing a new conclusion without any explanation at all.
Basically, his argument boils down to something like this: human beings have a notion of ethical behavior, therefore there must be a perfect moral force outside the universe which acts on us, and this is the Christian God who created all things. The bible tells us that there was this man called Jesus, who died to that God could forgive us for being human. Because the Bible says he claimed to be both humble and the son of God, he was either (a) the son of God, (b) he was crazy or (c) he was Satan. (Apparently (d) he never existed in the first place or (e) he was an earthly opportunist and con artist or (f) he was misquoted and appropriated by the organized church who was afraid of the message the God and Man are one, are not viable options). Lewis' solution to determining between these options?
Oh well...
There are a few sort of interesting ideas in the book here and there, but mostly this book is reinforcing my notion that Christianity is a bizarre cult full of people whose thought processes are utterly alien.
Basically, his argument boils down to something like this: human beings have a notion of ethical behavior, therefore there must be a perfect moral force outside the universe which acts on us, and this is the Christian God who created all things. The bible tells us that there was this man called Jesus, who died to that God could forgive us for being human. Because the Bible says he claimed to be both humble and the son of God, he was either (a) the son of God, (b) he was crazy or (c) he was Satan. (Apparently (d) he never existed in the first place or (e) he was an earthly opportunist and con artist or (f) he was misquoted and appropriated by the organized church who was afraid of the message the God and Man are one, are not viable options). Lewis' solution to determining between these options?
Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.A classic proof by "It's bloody obvious! What are you, some sort of moron?"
Oh well...
There are a few sort of interesting ideas in the book here and there, but mostly this book is reinforcing my notion that Christianity is a bizarre cult full of people whose thought processes are utterly alien.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Chapter 2: Still not doing well
Just a quick follow up. Having read chapter 2, Lewis is not doing much better. This chapter discusses "Some Objections" to his previous chapter. (I guess I'm not the only one then.) First, he tries to distinguish morality from 'instinct', which is all well and good. But then he confuses the issue by calling things like 'patriotism' and instinct. Interestingly, he then states that following these sort of drives as absolutes would lead to disaster, which again I'd agree with. But his argument that (pseudo)universal values systems (i.e. morals) are somehow other than these instincts (such as patriotism) are weak indeed, and effectively boil down to just a simple axiomatic statement, disguised underneath some frankly ill-advised metaphors.
We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.
Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.
What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.
We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.
Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.
What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.
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