T. Konwerski (SoF, July 1995) invited responses to his 'Case for Theism'. Here are two which came in to the Editor.
Ian Lyon comments briefly:
Mr Konwerski’s ‘Case for Theism’ can be summarised in his two statements:
If there is no natural explanation, a supernatural agency must be involved, and At every major boundary of human knowledge there appears to be a paradox.
Both these statements seem to be based on the idea that knowledge of the natural world and the universe will not increase. As this is clearly and entirely untrue I’m sorry to say that he has not made his case for theism.
Vivien Gibson offers the following thoughts:
It doesn’t necessarily follow, from the fact that our brains/minds are so constituted as to see the necessity for beginnings and endings, that the ‘raw material’ of the universe and its laws are subject to these ‘this world’ concepts. So at least at this stage it isn’t necessary to postulate a creation.
Thereafter, couldn’t chance and necessity — evolution — account for all that has happened?
But if not, how about an evolving cosmic intelligence — learning as it goes and wellmeaning in the ethical sense — which is far from achieving perfection in either knowledge or in the moral sphere? And not therefore to be attributed godly status as we conceive it to be.
However, if we want to cling to the Old Tyme Creation concept, couldn’t it, too, (like the aforementioned ‘raw material’) be a ‘given’ and unable to be other than it is — in which case it wouldn’t be entitled to receive worship as it hadn’t done anything to earn praise and_ adoration? “Appreciative response’, yes, or perhaps ‘resonance with’, but not anything redolent of obsequious sycophancy. After all, we don’t share the same advantages, not least that of freedom from all those slings and arrows hurled at humanity!
I whole-heartedly support Margaret Chisman’s defence of spirituality in the area not covered by doctrinal religion. When I subtract from the whole of me that which is physical, ethical and aesthetic, I’m still left with SOMETHING — an awareness divorced from intellectual knowing — and, I feel, from indications of a creator God. A dimension, perhaps? Pure Being? Whatever, I do hope it’s authentic, the over-riding impression being that of a unity which dispels all the baser emotions in favour of LOVE...
John MacDonald Smith (SoF, July 1995) also provoked reactions with his piece on ‘The Evolution of God’. Here is what Molly Rosenthal thought of it:
Sociologists of religion are very wary of ‘evolutionist’ theories of religion, especially universalist ones or those based on analysis of the bible. Religion is not a unitary concept with one developmental path; primitive and animist beliefs have been found to be very complex. religions change over time in different ways; they are affected by society, the environment and experience, especially of cataclysms or prophets, but it is not a simple evolutionary process. Gods vary and are undefinable. If one can pick and choose ‘God-directed’ men diagnosed as ‘bicameral’ from different periods, it is 2 psychological theory, not an evolutionary one.
So the account by John MacDonald Smith, inspired by The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton, did not seems to me to be plausible. I turned to a summary of Jaynes’ ideas in Maps of the Mind by Charles HampdenTurner (Mitchell Beazley, 1981) which is a mine of psychological and philosophical theories.
Jaynes’ physiological account of bi-cameralism is straightforward, but his leap from that to conjectural history is suspect. The evolution of the human brain can be traced by comparing its structure with that of other animals, especially primates, where the neo-cortex is bigger and more developed, enclosing the old mammalian brain. Its two hemispheres are joined by thin nerve passages (the anterior commissure) and have been found experimentally to have different functions.
The left hemisphere deals with language, analysis, rationality and time-sequence, while the right is non-verbal, holistic, visio-spatial, diffuse, timeless and intuitive. In controlling actions and thought, there is a tension between reason and emotion, giving mind-body dualism, schizoid splitting, and SoF Magazine No. 24, January 1996 so on. An ideal balance is symbolized by ‘yin and yang’. Experiments on the stimulation by electrical current of the hallucinatory area of the right hemisphere can cause the subject to see visions or hear ‘voices’, always of others. But there is no brain tissue to show the gradual evolution of each species; only skulls remain.
Professor Jaynes sees the evolution of consciousness in language based on metaphors, analogues and behaviour derived from the physical world. He argues that language emerged after 40,000 BC, that people had no named individuality much before 10,000 BC and consciousness did not develop much before 1,000 BC, but does not specify the evidence for this dating.
He argues that from 9,000 to 1,000 BC, human brains were bi-cameral, processing information intuitively by the hallucinatory area of the right temporal lobes, which issued God-like commands across to the left hemisphere for action. He compares this process with that of schizophrenics who have capacities similar to archaic man.
He then goes on to discover bi-cameral man in myths such as the Garden of Eden, in the change between the God-driven actors in the Iliad and the more ‘modern’ ones in the Odyssey. But examples taken from oral traditions, myths and ancient writings cannot form evidence for all human consciousness world-wide. Would we recognize the universality of many myths and the humanity of biblical characters if their thought was so very different from ours? The development of writing was a major advance in the accumulation of knowledge, but it was not universal.
From archaeological discoveries in Palestine of ancient communities surrounding temples, he posits intuitive social control internalizing the orders of their God-kings. But such settlements were more likely to arise for economic and social reasons, with the development of agriculture.
There were many nomad communities before that, and many survive today; were they all bi-cameral?
Such theories are speculative and based on Western example. Cross-cultural research by social anthropologists on primitive societies produces other ideas. Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966) wrote that their world views were personal, anthropocentric and undifferentiated. Their Classification systems were symbolic forms of social control, related to their social structure, not the internalized orders of God-kings. I do not think that one can extrapolate from the workings of an individual man to the whole group or society run by intuition, even if there are strong social pressures to think alike.
Language and grammar did have important results for human development, especially for the left hemisphere. Pronouns distinguish the speaker from others; identity is formed in the social context of communication. According to G.H. Meade, when we hear ourselves give orders to others, we arouse in ourselves the incipient reaction to perform the order, thus becoming aware of the ‘I’ and ‘Me’, the subject and object. Amos would certainly have been aware of himself as an ‘I’. ee ——_ Nature is vast and unpredictable, beautiful but dangerous The sense of time, past, present and future, enables people to learn more quickly from the past, to plan ahead possible courses of action and to reason in a more sophisticated way — and to be aware of the uncertainty of fate and the inevitability of death.
The choice of actions, which makes humans environmentally adaptable, entails ethical judgement between good and evil. Presumably the right hemisphere would bring all this together to give meaning, finding explanations for the world around in imaginative terms. Nature is vast and unpredictable, beautiful but dangerous, giving rise to the sense of awe, Otto’s sense of the numinous, of unseen powers. Techniques for survival would be given moral force in traditions, and passed on orally from generation to generation, in taboos and stories refined into myths.
Today, when we live in a largely man-made environment and know so much about the universe and nature, about other cultures and the past, it is not surprising that our world is secular and confused. Social groups are less cohesive and social control more difficult. Individuals may remain with the group in which they were born, but it is difficult not to be aware of other possibilities which will affect them, even if they do not escape to find life and meaning elsewhere. As the social structure has changed, religions are less powerful, except for those who find refuge in fundamentalism or unreflective traditions, those who can keep dogmas and practice of religion apart from other knowledge, or those who can produce a balance between ‘yin and yang’.
But we cannot ignore the right hemisphere; the ‘evidence’ of religious experience remains, especially in the mystic’s ‘timeless moment’ of unity, in the inspiration of the ‘saints’ — alive or dead — such as Jesus Christ, and in great art, the realm of the spiritual; and examples can be found world-wide, not just in the Western traditions.