Sunday 13 May 2012

Charles Foster in Fortean Times

Reading Barrett in New Scientist reminds me of a two-part article in Fortean Times recently (the April and May 2012 editions) by Charles Foster.  Having conceded in the first half that science can adequately explain all the various mental states usually cited as evidence of the divine, he goes on to argue in the second part that they nevertheless do provide evidence that we are - in the words of his title - 'Wired for God'.  Religion, he contends, has a 'tremendous thermodynamic price' [sic] and altruism is 'Darwinian heresy' (so he clearly hasn't read Dawkins' Selfish Gene, despite referring to him in the very next paragraph as 'the High Priest of the reductionists').  He rejects the idea of memetics on the grounds that 'A horizontal influence [memetics] would be so much stronger than the vertical one [genetics] that the subtle selection of genetic characteristics upon which natural selection depends would be rendered more or less irrelevent.'  (A viewpoint he attributes to Stephen Jay Gould - I am not aware of Gould's views on the subject of memes, but I would find this argument very surprising coming from him.  Isn't that reduction in biological change pretty much what has happened?  Isn't that why we hear all these arguments over whether humans are still evolving?) 

He covers a lot of the same ground as Barrett - children of all ages believe God to be omniscient, whereas they quickly lose their belief in the omniscience of their parents - but goes rather further, seeking to use this as direct proof that 'God is not an anthropomorphic projection.'  He objects to the idea of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device on the grounds that it doesn't explain all the beliefs about God - cue Norenzayan's distinction between instinctive and analytical beliefs, since contra Foster it would seem that HADD does explain the non-theological beliefs.  He places a lot of emphasis on the (probably correct) belief that early rock art is tied to shamanic visions, though quite how that supports his case is less clear.  Finally, he falls back on the philosophical problem of consciousness, asserting that 'The only point of an 'I' is relationship.  There's no point in an 'I' unless there are other 'I's around to whom I can give of mine.'  He combines this with the further insistence that imagining something immaterial - particularly a consciousness - 'seems [...] impossible if we are merely bundles of neurones.' 

His conclusion, therefore, is that the existence of God is supported by spiritual experience and religion (including altruism), for which he claims there is no adequate materialistic explanation; and by the 'utterly unlikely' idea that 'matter should be able to generate the idea of non-matter'.  Since I feel that there is perfectly adequate explanation for the former, and find the latter not in the least surprising, I am far from persuaded by his thesis. 

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