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| | WEST OF GOD: AN OPEN CRITIQUE PART 5
THE HOW OF GOD: INTELLIGENT AGENCY IN THE COGNITIVE PROGRAMMING OF PERCEPTION
How "God" is, is contingent upon how the human mind works, that it
should find intelligent agency so easily grasped and inferred, even to
the absurd degrees of silly superstitions and dangerous paranoia.
Within the past few centuries of written history alone, the conviction
of the imagination has given rise to compelling forms of intelligent
agency, waxing and waning curiosities such as astrology, witches, Mary
in mundane objects, phantom windshield pitters, el chupacabra, big
foot, and genitalia thieves, to name a few
[http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/delusions.html]. Some of these
psychological phenomena have had not only the powers of explosive
dissemination, but great staying power as well. How the mind perceives
faces in the Moon and clouds, and how it projects intelligent agency
into the physical and conceptual worlds, giving birth to Mother Earth,
Father Time, and Lady Liberty, is central to understanding how the mind
can also project intelligent agency beyond the universe in which
intelligent agency exists.
It is a detail of more than passing interest for psychologists that,
when people are given scenarios requiring the use of logical deduction
with abstract notations, the solution is not easily forthcoming for
even those of our modernity and educational sophistication, but the
solution is easier to come by when the scenario is instead detailed and
grounded in familiar social situations [16]. If there is one
intellectual skill set humans develop universally regardless of
educational levels, it is the ability to model and predict from
intelligent agency. The golden rule, which has independently appeared
across the globe in many ages, and which has been suggested to be the
cornerstone ethic of civilization, assumes a grand efficiency in the
human ability to use the model of oneself and its desires to plan and
choose stable interactions and favorable relations with others. Simple
observations of children at play will reveal the instinctual
spontaneity of grouping (collaboration and alliances),
hierarchy-building (submissive and dominant role-taking), and
competition among humans, giving rise to the familiar notions of
cliques, bullies, and fights, without which no grade school experience
is complete. Perhaps the most fascinating phenomena of all, in terms of
the current discussion, is the human ability to model and respond to
nonexistent intelligent agents as if they indeed existed. In its most
innocuous form this ability is manifested in childhood relationships
with imaginary friends, leaving milk and cookies for Santa or incisors
for a fairy, and conscious role-playing in games such as "Simon Says."
With some subtlety it is found in the compelling nature of fictional
novels, films, and myths, which can evoke real emotional reactions and
teach real truths while the narratives themselves, if not also the
elements within, are factually nonexistent. More disturbingly it is
manifested in the charades of mediums such as the contemporary psychic
John Edward, who uses cold reading to produce generic models of persons
that coincide with his captive audience's models of their own dead
relatives. Unable to fathom what tactic would lead to such coincidences
of detail, the audience members default to inferring that Edward's
access to family information is best explained by a mysterious
connection to "the beyond" as Edward himself suggests. Without a modern
understanding of such harmless manipulation as merely entertainment and
parlor tricks, however, the populace at large would either hail Edwards
as a gifted prophet of God or burn him at the stake as a gifted servant
of Satan. In this respect at least, the human ability to compellingly
free-form model intelligent agents begins to take on a more religious
dimension, for "the beyond" is thought to be inhabited by more than
grandparents with a kind word for the living, but also agents who were
never born into the world of men—gods.
When people respond to their acquired models of ancestors as if the
intelligent agency of those ancestors continued to exist and offer
advice or other aid from beyond the grave [17], it is no cumbersome
leap of logic to the viability of ancestor worship, food and animal
sacrifices, and prayer to the ultimate ancestor, the "father of us
all," who could conceivably have all the power that legend has to
offer. Neither is there a clearly-inhibited step toward belief in the
existence of other intelligent agents in the beyond—agents who, having
never been born into flesh, preexisted even the first father, and so
may be conceived as having the power to create life and the power to
destroy it. That compellingly-modeled intelligent agency, existing
conceptually and independently of questions of factual existence, is
the natural impetus of the people's conviction in the words of the
prophets of religious deities, is a most satisfying conclusion for the
atheist, whose suspicion is roused by the inexplicable dependence of
almighty gods on human mouths to speak their own minds, manpower to
accomplish their own wills, human artists to make public appearances,
and myth and legend to exhibit any power outside of the human skull.
That religious deities wield great power in the human imagination, and
typically nowhere else, is just as obvious a conclusion for the
monotheist, who does not allow for the factual existence of any deity
in all of human history excepting his own. The Judeo-Christian god is
very much an integral part of the history of the divine imagination,
for the Judeo-Christian scriptures have been cunningly employed to
establish new movements such as Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses,
by the same tradition of inspiration that Christianity employed the
scriptures of the Hebrews, who themselves employed elements of Egyptian
and Persian religious culture in their own scriptures. Where in history
exactly incorporeal intelligent agency was first conceived that the
notion should be eventually inherited by many modern religions is a
question that remains unanswered, but that this evolution of the divine
is directed by forces of human culture and the vicissitudes of
imagination seems well enough answered in the positive by inevitable
reason. For even if it should be said that the Judeo-Christian god
exists factually, it must also inhabit the imagination and be
independently modeled to some degree, in view of the variations of
belief and practice that have emerged within and from the popularly
accepted boundaries, in any given period of history, of what
constitutes Christianity.
Of course, to arrive at a god of the magnitude as that of the
Judeo-Christian one requires more than finding an invisible home for it
and persons capable of speaking for it; there must also be found its
activity in the physical realm to suggest its power, wisdom, and
authority. The mind has also provided the means to perceive intention
in the universe: the compelling cognitive powers of coincidence. [Here
I do not use coincidence in the sense of 'just' or 'merely' a
coincidence, as if to define intention out of the concept. Instead I
use coincidence in the sense of a conjunction of incidents, which may
or may not proceed from causes including intelligent agency. The word
coincidence has a natural ambiguity about it, which I favor in terms of
its ability to make visible potential post hoc and ad hoc fallacies.]
The perception of intention or of planning in the order of the universe
is a phenomena easily evoked from the brain, which normatively assumes
the coincidence of events—their temporal, spacial, or conceptual
proximity—to be relevant information concerning the source and nature
of causation. This natural inference system has both its benefits and
its drawbacks. For instance, the correlation between the movements of
the heavenly bodies and phenomena of Earth allows for the perception of
cause-and-effect relationships between heavenly and earthly phenomena,
some of which historically have been accurately conceived and many of
which have not. While some earthly phenomena are correctly explained in
the influence of the sun and the moon, such as seasons and ocean tides,
other earthly phenomena, such as human personality and individual or
collective destiny, are not in fact influenced by heavenly phenomena [I
should say, not influenced directly, though the energy of the sun is a
prerequisite of the biological processes that do account for
personality and destiny]. The ancient superstition of astrology was
thus born, not from an accurate understanding of the influence of a
handful of then-known planets, but from the human ability to coax
meaningful patterns out of unrelated phenomena, on the basis of the
assumption that they are related because of temporal/spacial proximity:
planetary positions' temporal proximity to births, and planetary
spacial proximity to constellations or other planets. Comets and
eclipses offer Earth nothing more than an unusual display of light, at
such times as the celestial mechanics allow, but these phenomena have
oft been interpreted as being related to earthly phenomena, by a common
cause if not by a direct cause-and-effect relationship. The coincidence
of a birth and a heavenly body appearing to hover over Bethlehem is
mentioned in some Christian gospels, presumably on the basis that such
coincidence is convincing of the child's significance, though this
conviction would have dissipated if the star appeared hovering over
China or if it hovered over Bethlehem ten years later. The power of the
narrative depends on the reader's acceptance of astrology, which itself
depends on the reader's acceptance of the relevance of temporal and
spacial proximity concerning causation. [While in modern Christianity
open acceptance of astrology is sparse, Christian Evangelical leaders
in America can be found dabbling in a more down-to-earth model of
speculation, one in which natural disasters are conceived as
representing the expressed will of God. While celestial motion and
solar eclipses are easily understood in terms of natural law, and are
now known to wield no effects beyond the psychological, the complex
factors behind the formation of hurricanes, famines, and diseases allow
for a level of ambiguity in the source of their causation, resulting in
a secret chamber of ignorance from which an angry Judeo-Christian god
springs on occasion.] While astrology is one of the more popular and
long-standing misapprehensions of correlations in causation, likely due
to the fact that its predictions are typically broad enough to ensure
some probability of accuracy, there are other examples of this kind of
misapprehension, such as belief in relevant correlations between skin
folds of the hand and future events (chiromancy), cranial topography
and character (phrenology), and hand-writing and personality
(graphology).
There is yet another, and perhaps more powerful, category of
coincidence that beguiles the mind, and that is the coincidence of
conceptual proximity. When exterior events or phenomena are aligned in
some fashion with interior concepts or psychological phenomena, the
mind may infer some relevance in this connection. Most fundamentally
this tendency is expressed in the unavoidable perception of a face in a
simple drawing involving two dots and a curved line. What is seen is
not, in fact, a face, but a drawing with some analogous proportions to
the human face; yet to ask of a person what he sees, he will invariably
say that it is a face. This same tendency is also expressed in the
perception of the Virgin Mary in window panes, tree stumps, and
grilled-cheese sandwiches, those curious and infrequent visions adored
by some Catholics. In some cases this tendency is useful for detecting
intelligent design, the activity of intelligent agents, since nature
observably has no common inclination to transcribe the proportions or
contours of the human body in any format. Nor does nature observably
have any inclination to behave as if ordered by intelligence, making it
possible to distinguish between living and nonliving objects. Yet
inevitably the hyperactive tendencies of perception may on occasion
serve as a hindrance to understanding; false positives are unintuitive,
so that their falsity, when real, becomes the unthinkable. Consider
this argument posed by the Christian Origen:
"As the stars move with so much order and method that under no
circumstances whatever do their course seem to be disturbed, is it not
the extreme of absurdity to suppose that so much order, so much
observance of discipline and method could be demanded from or fulfilled
by irrational beings?"
This is properly an argument from analogy to the intelligence of stars,
but Origen finds so intuitive his own ability to anthropomorphize the
heavenly bodies that their intelligence has become the only viable
option, and their lack of intelligence unthinkable to the highest
degree. He could not see the lines and paper for the face he had
perceived. By the strong human association of intelligence with certain
effects of this source of causation, the coincidence of external
phenomena behaving in a similar fashion as that which is powered or
influenced by intelligence is simply too compelling an evidence to the
mind, and so the illusion forces the conclusion that the phenomena is
in fact derived from intelligent agency. Today the absurdity of the
alternative has subsided, largely due to an epidemic change in model
perspective by the elucidation of celestial mechanics, but it was
inevitable that the theists would seek to capitalize upon this artifact
of perception, for no illusion could conceivably be more useful, and no
self-deception more desirable.
[future section regarding natural theologians such as William Paley]
The third category of coincidence, which is currently receiving a fair
amount of attention from Christian apologists, is an improbable and/or
unrepeatable juncture of events whose outcome is perceivably beneficial
towards life or happiness. Many mundane event probabilities are
intuitively gauged by the human mind and do not always require an
explanation in intelligent agency, but precipitously large
improbabilities of beneficial outcome may express a pattern easily
suggestive of planning or scheming which do require an intelligent
agent. Unlikely events happen all the time without typically being
recognized as such, but when they do occur, the uniqueness of the event
according to the individual perspective begs the question of "why,"
much as mundane events evoke the same question in young children who do
not yet know what is mundane. In these instances of improbable events,
the imagination is open to considering new and alternative
explanations, one of which may be causation by intelligent agency. A
series of fortuitous or unfortunate events suggests an arrangement
specifically in regards to one's well-being, which is typically the
interest of only other personal and thus intelligent beings. A modern
example of such thinking is a variant of the strong anthropic
principle, mastered by such apologists as Hugh Ross of Reasons To
Believe, wherein the parameters of the fundamental constants of the
physical universe are strongly perceived to be tweaked in favor of the
production of extremely unlikely and intelligent carbon-based life.
Through this perception of likelihoods is forced the conclusion of the
activity of an omnipotent agent, who may just as well be the
Judeo-Christian deity. The relative accuracy of like suspicions however
is contingent upon the sample size of probabilities, and subsequently
can be exaggerated by the special framing of circumstances. Those who
are familiar with the ways of salesmen are aware of the cognitive
influence of the special framing of circumstances to elicit a
particular choice by a potential customer. By the veil of calculated
ignorance the potential customer may fall into a false sense of
privilege, this creating positive energy in the perception that one is
not receiving the benefit of just a product but the benefit of a
remarkable once-in-a-lifetime deal. What the potential customer is
strategically unaware of, is that the "deal" is in fact a mundane
routine—everyone is getting a deal that is not a deal, since the price
was exorbitantly high to begin with. Those who argue for the remarkable
hospitality of this universe towards life as we know it, simply because
life is allowed to exist somewhere at some point in some condition,
often fail to mention that most of time and space, including this solar
system and the Earth—and even life itself—are almost if not entirely
inhospitable to life. The inclusion of this relevant information
potentially leads to the opposite perception that this universe is not
tailored specifically for intelligent carbon-based life in any way
noticeable, but is rather remarkably indifferent towards it.
Yet if one was a man living two millennia ago, from a time in which a
vastly inhospitable universe was not yet conceived, and the heavens
quite literally revolved around the one planet in the solar system that
supports life, natural ignorance would provide for mankind in its
infancy the perfect incubation chamber for a runaway anthropic bias—one
that would inevitably benefit theistic philosophy and religion.
| | | Posted 11/27/2007 7:52 PM - 5 comments
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