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On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 01:30, John.Laurie@ga.gov.au wrote: > Hear, hear, Arie. However, I cannot bring myself to agree with the > tripe espoused by creationists, so I tend to get into discussions with > them. It forces one to find and organise the information which > pooh-poohs their pathological piffle. > > > > Some time ago, I tried to find something on the ‘psychology of > religion” on the internet but most of the sites seemed at best > subjective productions by believers. Does anyone know of such sites > which are not? Furthermore, does anyone know of any websites/books on > the psychopathology of religious fundamentalism? > Random brain read-outs: The most famous book on the topic is William James' The varieties of religious experience from the beginning of the twentieth century (1902), still an entertaining book well worth reading. Otherwise one can suggest the poetry of Blake, Manley Hopkins or Wordsworth, perhaps. When I did a web search for "psychology of religion" the first hit was http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/ which did not seem to be a rant in any way. Incidentally, it has the text of James on it. What little I have read of Karen Armstrong has not particularly impressed me. There are thousands and thousands of books on fundamentalism, which seems to be partly a social phenomenon that cuts across secular and religious society. It seems to be rather widespread to label it a pathology without further delimitation. It is also (I would add, cautiously) a bit too easy to label people with the pejorative "fundamentalist". Are all creationists fundamentalists, and vice versa? Finally, the whole problem seems to boil down to a problem about causality, which everyone has worried about since Hume. Hume showed that when we say that one thing causes another, we can't "see" the causality as such, only note the regularity; i.e. when X happens, Y always happens afterwards. But scientists, and indeed philosophers, have never been happy with this. I would think that most scientists would hope that when they formulate a scientific law or regularity that it points to something bigger; a true necessity for the causality to be followed. The trouble is that no-one has ever worked out a way of showing this blatantly metaphysical position to be true (Kant's fascinating and marvellous efforts are not well regarded by the crowds today). The reason that this basic problem in scientific epistemology is relevant here is that one aspect of causality is agency; i.e. how chains of events get started. Humans act as agents in the world as far as we know; or rather, to deny this point makes a nonsense of almost all human action; not least debating fundamentalism. How do we as agents intervene in the physical world? There are two basic positions, I think. The first is that one can trace events in the physical world back through other physical events and no other causes intervene. Hence, human intervention in the world must be a physical one, somewhere along this chain of causality, with other causes lying behind it. This, the most materialist position, is hard to defend when one thinks about "deciding" to do something, or working out exactly where we fit into the chain (after all, we could remove human will and the chain might still hold): it seems to have to squeeze this complex into the shape and effect of a quark or something. The second view, which is a bit Kantian, is that humans somehow intervene "at right angles" to the chains of "causality" we see in nature (or rather, the chains we would like to see). Example. In the splendid book "Flatland: A romance of many dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott, a Square", our two-dimensional hero is shocked to see a sphere passing through his plane. What *he* sees is, of course, a circle changing shape. I suppose that if other objects passed through his plane, he would see other patterns of regular change, to which he might eventually work out rules - of what he might think are causality. However, the clued-in three-dimensional observer would note that the fact that one set of affairs (small circle) is followed by another (big circle) followed by another (small circle -ie the shapes made by the sphere passing through the plane) does not mean they "cause" each other to happen: rather they are simply constant conjunctions caused by a completely unknown and unknowable set of events that lie outside of the normal run of events we actually observe. And perhaps that is how causality works in general, including that we like to think we initiate. If so, then scientific law making will really only get us a certain distance in understanding causality. Both these views of human causality are "scientific"; but they have their religious analogues with divine action too. The trouble with "scientific creationism", in my view, is that it buys cheaply into the naive scientific first view about how causality works. In other words, "scientific creationism" wants to squeeze divine action into the physical chain of events somehow "in the same plane", and thus ends up with absurdities about how God is meant to have intervened to bring about the world we have today. Such a view is bolstered by certain views of religious texts that have been regarded with due suspicion for a good one and a half thousand years, but I think that this is secondary to the first issue. Books on the history of fundamentalism seem to regard it as a defensive reaction against perceived onslaughts (e.g. as in, I think, Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (1982)). Scientific creationism is merely a botched way of doing the defence, and it is bad precisely because of its wrong view of causality. The trouble is that it seems very likely that this wrong view of causality is very prevalent in science too. Everyone might be better off if scientists came up with a better account of causality; so that when other disciplines or sectors of society borrow bits of scientific methodology, the results are not quite so horrendous! Graham Budd Flatland is available at: http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/ Wordsworth at http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/William_Wordsworth/ -- Graham E. Budd KVA Research Fellow Department of Earth Sciences Paleobiology Norbyvägen 22 Uppsala SE-752 36 Sweden Tel: +46 18 471 27 62 FAX: +46 18 471 27 49
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