Four talks on Connecting Science and Theism: “Starting Science From God”

Connecting Science and Theism:

“Starting Science From God”

A series of four Public Talks and Discussions on Tuesdays in February, 2013

by nuclear physicist and Swedenborg scholar, Ian J. Thompson, Ph.D.

Location: Hillside Swedenborgian Community Church, 

1422 Navellier Street, El Cerrito, CA 94530.

In a series of four talks and discussions that start in the new year, Tuesdays at 7pm on February 5, 12, 19 and 26, 2013, Professor Ian Thompson shows how to rationally connect the ideas of science and theism, with the key being Emanuel Swedenborg’s concept of ‘discrete degrees’. With that concept, Dr Thompson presents theism as a scientific theory, explaining its basic postulates, consequences and predictions as simply as possible and without paradox. That is, he shows how following the core postulates of theism leads to novel and useful predictions about the psychology of minds and the physics of quantum materials which should appear in the universe.

The topics of the four talks are Feb 5: Connecting Science and Theism; Feb 12: Discrete Degrees; Feb 19: Explaining Theism; and Feb 26: Applications to Theistic Science. More details can be found at the website http://www.beginningtheisticscience.com/talks.htm. Each talk will start at 7pm, last 45 minutes, and (after a break) will be followed by 45 minutes for discussions.

The book accompanying the series is “Starting Science From God”, by Ian J. Thompson: ISBN 0-9848-2280-1, published Nov 2011 by Eagle Pearl Press.

Dr Ian J. Thompson is currently employed as a Nuclear Physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey, England, where until 2006 he was Professor of Physics. His personal website is http://www.ianthompson.org.

What is Mental Substance?

There has been a debate, seemingly forever, about the nature of the mind, and what it is made of. We know that it must exist, have causal powers, have or produce consciousness, and be intimately interlinked with brain function at least most of the time.

There are very many arguments that tell us that the substance of the mind cannot be material. Mental function cannot be derived from physical causality and still depend on rationality and teleology, because physical processes are formulated not to depend on reasons or purposes. Minds must therefore be non-physical, if they are indeed to depend on rationality and purpose. But 'non-material' and 'non-physical' are negative characterizations, and do not tell us what minds actually are!

Descartes postulated that minds were 'essentially rational': that rationality was the essence of mind. Just as spatial extension was the essence of matter. However, this still does not tell us the substance of mind, or what the causal powers of minds are specifically. There obviously are causal connections between mind and body, but Descartes' characterization of 'minds as rationality' does not tell us what these are.

But now we can use the basis of ideas described in my recent posts "Mental dispositions and desires" and "Are propensities the substance of things". In the first-mentioned post, mental activity was taken to consist of the operation of persistent dispositions or desires or propensities. In the second-mentioned post, persistent propensities were taken to be the substance of which a thing would be formed.

Combining these, we conclude:

mental activity is the operation of mental substances such as the persistent mental dispositions.

This is in exact analogy to the way physical things are formed of physical propensities (like gravity, electromagnetism, etc), which makes them to be physical substances. Minds are made of persistent mental dispositions. Those dispositions are the underlying motivations, loves and desires which make the person behave the way they tend to do. This claim may be summarized as:

The mental substance is Love

More precisely: mental substances are the underlying persistent loves which cause mental activities. By 'persistent', I mean at least lasting in time from one event to the next event after some discrete non-zero time interval. Maybe persistent loves last longer, such as for a whole lifetime: that remains to be investigated.

In this account, we may take consciousness to be a feature of the operation of loves and dispositions, and not that minds is made out of consciousness as if it were a substance. I argue that consciousness cannot itself be substance, on the basis of the Aristotelean ‘metaphysical grammar’ we are following. Only something dispositional like love or power can be a substance.

There is much talk in 'consciousness studies' about how the appearances of things, qualia, are missing from current physical theories. Consciousness is then claimed to necessarily exist in addition to the physical. This last step, I suggest, is a category mistake. 'Consciousness' is an operation, not a substance. It does not 'exist' in the way substances exist, as William James long ago realized.

Love has causal powers, and can make changes in physical things (as we all know!). Love always motivates from some purpose. In humans, we think it ought to be possible to link love with rationality and foresight, in such way that purposes and reasons come to have causal powers in both the mental and then in the physical realms. But exactly how these things occur has yet to investigated. 

Note finally that, though I have following an Aristotelean logic, I have arrived a position almost of the opposite of that formulated by Thomas Aquinas. Above, I take minds to be essentially some mental substances, in some forms or structure. Aquinas, however, takes minds to be the forms of things that is conjoined with potency: material potency in the case of embodied creatures. So, is mind the substance, or is it the form? 

The resolution of this conflict will be explained later in more detail, and will depend on realizing that Aquinas, by the term 'form', refers to much more than shape or structure. In fact, he takes 'form' to refer to the general/deep causal principles that makes a thing what it is: its 'substantial form'. This, in my opinion, stretches the meaning of 'form' much too far, but is what he must do without the concept of substance I have been recently describing.

Does desire generate thought, or thought generate desire?

We need to consider the relation, within the mind, between desires and thought. That relation should be the same as that between willing and understanding, since we generally think that willing is in accordance with our desires and with our loves and motivations: we will by means of desires. We also generally think that our understanding is in accordance with our thought: we understand by means of our thoughts and ideas.

But does desire generate thought, or thought generate desire, or neither?  There is room for debate on this, but there are psychological, philosophical and theological arguments to lead to the conclusion that it is desire which generates thought, rather than the opposite.

The psychological evidence stems from the fact that persons tend to think about what they want: their desires lead their dreaming, thinking, planning and eventually acting to get what they want. This suggests that desires generate the streams of thought that occur in the understanding, rather than that our thinking dictates what we want, love, or desire. Thought may influence what we desire but only by selection. Our thoughts select which desires can be feasibly brought nearer satisfaction.

Some will disagree, saying that it is primarily thought that makes our desire, and that we tend to desire things that we have thought up. This is true, but what is the causal determiner of what we think up?  Thoughts seem to pop into our heads, and thoughts about what we desire are much more likely to do so!  We interfere at this point sometimes and reject thoughts as unsuitable, but that rejection itself also requires motivation or desire. We do not clearly see our desires in our consciousness, but only our thoughts and actions, so we tend to forget about the essential role of dispositions and desires. How many times have we seen people, seeming to themselves to be rational, being driven by desires which they hardly acknowledge existing?

Philosophically, we could argue from the Aristotelian view that thought is the entertaining of the forms of things. Then, since forms themselves have no causal power, we could say that all the power must belong to whatever is doing the thinking and not to the thoughts themselves. This implies that thoughts themselves are not dispositions. The honor of being dispositions belongs to desires or loves. Desires are more similar to dispositions than are thoughts. It is dispositions (rather than forms) which are causally efficacious. 

This agrees in general with the analysis of Gilbert Ryle's 1949 book "The Concept of Mind". He argues that minds as a whole are akin to dispositions, and hence the actions of a person are the effects of those dispositions. He took this to imply materialism, but we will see later that other conclusions are possible, even preferable.

Images of God

We now have to establish principles that make connections between what God is and what we are. We saw previously that we do share ‘being’ . Now we look for more detailed relations that govern our interior constitution. The first thing to establish is whether there is any such detailed relation. Is there a principle in core theism which affords connections between Divinity and the mundane world?  Certainly, if God continually sustains our existence, then we would expect that there must be something about ourselves, and continue to be that something, that allows these acts of sustaining to have their effects. In Judaism and Christianity, humans are made ‘in the image of God, in His likeness.’ (Genesis 1:26) This imageo dei appears to tell us something about humans, and, perhaps, something about God. Some evolutionists take being in the image of God as not making ontological claims at all. It is generally interpreted,  however, to mean that humans are rational or have a rational soul because God is in some sense the Logos, the first principle of rationality. In this view, animals are not images of God and neither are plants or inorganic material. 

Apart from our rationality, we can see that we have many similarities with animals. The internal functions of our bodies are almost all mirrored in simpler forms in some animal or another. Even plants have nutritional functions within their physiology that are simpler forms of the biological functions that go on within our human bodies. Moreover, within the Bible story of creation, the processes leading up to the creation of man suggest that plants and animals were partial contributions to this making, not to mention that they can both be food for humans. There are a great many internal similarities of plants and animals with humans. Such similarities remain even though animals have sensation and locomotion that plants do not and even though humans have a rationality that animals do not.

All these similarities cannot be about size or shape since there is an enormous range of sizes from the smallest plant cells to the largest mammals. Instead, we must be talking of similarities of internal forms and functions. If the similarities concern the systemic organization of living organisms, then there are indeed similarities between cells and mammals, starting from metabolic, genetic and sensory structures. Even nonliving things have their own patterns of nuclear, atomic, molecular and chemical structures, which everything in the world is conceivably able to share in some way.

Humans themselves are, of course, more than just their rationality. It is common to say that a human is a whole and unified person which consists of one body-mind combination and to try in this way to obviate the problems of conceiving minds and bodies together without a ‘dreaded’ dualism. Our own theistic view of the unity of humans will be discussed later; for now we only insist that humans contain not just rationality in the soul, but also sensations, loves, affections, actions—and that all these have effects in the body as well as in the mind and/or soul.

Let us take a broader view of the constitution of humanity and of the structure and materials of which our bodies are formed. We should give a generalized formulation of the way in which we, with all the world, are images of God. This is to add to our set of postulates the assertion:

Postulate 5  All the world, and each of its parts, is a kind of image of God.

This formulation still allows that the rationality of humans is a special kind of image of God, namely a more complete image. To be a ‘likeness’ seems to imply a closer and more complete relationship than an ‘image’. This generalized principle implies that plants and animals are also in the image of God but to a lesser extent. The challenge to theistic science is to elucidate in each case what kind of image of God is involved and what ‘lesser extent’ is implied in connection with plants, or even conceivably, with minerals, etc.

We observe that present-day humans are not angelic in everyday life and that some fail to show even normal humanity, let alone glimpses or pictures of divinity. In such cases, the generalized principle, which allows for lesser images, seems entirely appropriate. We should also note that the ‘image and likeness’ comes at the end of a creation story, and hence that such similarities are more like the culmination than the starting point of our religious and spiritual life. It may therefore be that the creation story describes, by images and likenesses, the stages of spiritual regeneration in religious life, rather than of stars, planets, plants and animals.

The possibility, even widespread likelihood, of lesser images of God is in agreement with the eternity of God. That eternity implies that God is constant while the world varies. That is, variations in the ways that creatures are sustained must reflect the variations in those individual beings, not in God himself. Similar conclusions are indicated by Matt. 5:45: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”.

Since organic and inorganic non-living materials have extensive similarities in their atomic structures to living materials, we may conclude that physical materials are, in a weak sense, also made in the image of God.

The postulate of theism, that all things in the world (all the human and inhuman, all the good and the barely good) are each a ‘kind of image of God’, allows us to make significant progress in theistic science. The properties of God must be conceived in such a way that our being such images is a sensible claim. The non-trivial question is then to determine what kind of lesser image should be envisaged in each case. The following chapters will describe the structures of the world in such a way that they can be images of the divine. This is the heart of theistic science, which describes general structures for mental and physical objects. Our task will be to identify the specific parts of this structure. This is easier since fortunately many of them have already been discovered by science.

We note that the principle of imageo dei is often criticized as anthropomorphic, as if God were (to much amusement) the ideal creature of each group of humans or animals. However, we are proceeding in the other direction: we are starting from basic features of God and seeing how the world might be constituted and might function in the presence of such a God. In a genuine theism, this is not at all the anthropomorphic ‘God in the image of man’, but rather ‘theomorphic’: man in the image of God.

Adapted from chapter 10 of Starting Science From God.

Can we understand Theism scientifically?

Many people think that science and religion are completely separate activities, as Galileo did when he exclaimed , “Scripture teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go!” Steven Jay Gould more recently took science and religion to be "Non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA). That is one way for accommodating religion to science.

Religions, however, should (and most do) make claims about what exists (God, spirituality, etc.), and how what exists  influences our life. Let us call theism the knowledge of the claims about the reality of God as made by religion, or presupposed by religion. I want to concentrate here on the core claims that are central to religion, and to focus on monotheism.  And I want to elucidate those claims in a rational manner. This is to take theism just like a scientific theory, and spell out & explain its basic principles as clearly as possible.

That there is a God, and that God is One, are the primary assumptions of a rational monotheism:

Postulate 1  God exists.

Postulate 2  God is One.

These are the postulates needed for further constructive work in theistic research. Not everyone may be willing to make such assumptions. The a-theist, for example, assumes that God does not exist. He or she is free to do that, to make that hypothesis, to see what further ideas follow, and to see what explanations may be produced. In our investigation, however, we begin with the theistic postulates above. May the best explanation win.

Such a pair of postulates is not enough to generate deductions and is hence nowhere near enough to produce all the explanations that we seek. We need to combine it with further postulates to be described later. 

Discussions with friends have shown me that there are many differences and uncertainties concerning theism. Even within theology the question of the powers of natural objects has been commonly divorced from the question of how God sustains those objects in existence. Because I understand that the behavior of objects does depend on the details of theism and on how they are sustained in existence, I will now present expositions to elucidate the needed principles of theism. The primary function of these posts is to outline the core principles that will be needed as foundations for the later scientific theorizing. The postulates listed are not arbitrary but were carefully chosen from what I think of as ‘vanilla theism’. These are the core beliefs of the main theistic religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Those are the three religions or peoples ‘of the Book’. Those religions often make further additional assumptions that are not shared by all. Sometimes I may append brief mentions of the content of those additional ideas, but I do not have the space in this book to explore all their separate consequences.

The core beliefs of philosophical theism are typically that God is eternal, infinite, necessary, one, immutable, impassible, transcendent and immanent. Then, for religious purposes at least, we add that God is good, loving, a divine person, worthy of worship, worthy of praise, righteous, just, awe-inspiring, and always merciful and forgiving. However, it is not entirely clear how these last attributes are related together or even how they follow from the first (philosophical) group of attributes. A difficulty for many people is that the philosophical attributes above hardly allow that God be living. That is because it is doubtful that an ‘immutable, impassible One’ can be loving and merciful. God may well be both, we believe, but the rational understanding of the connection is weak.

The coming postulates are chosen, therefore, to emphasize the life and loving nature of God. They assert that God is eternal, infinite and transcendent, but insist, in addition, that God is living and that God is loving. These postulates about life and love are certainly not known a priori. The philosophical proofs of the existence of God never conclude by proving those particular hypotheses about the living nature of God. Nevertheless, they are core and central beliefs of religious theism. I strongly believe that they come come from revelations from God. I believe that God’s input into the religious books over the last several thousand years has lead to a general awareness that God is living and loving. He is living and loving in his Divine way, a way that we forever struggle to understand.

I am not going to discuss particular revelations or particular books because I believe that the core claims to be made can be distilled from religious thought. Let us therefore continue with introducing the core theistic postulates to see what can thereby be derived as a basis for the principles of our world.

Adapted from chapter 7 of Starting Science From God.

Can there be Esoteric Knowledge?

Parallel to the standard 'exoteric' view of the state (whether of the established church, or of established science), there have long been other esoteric views about mind, spirituality and religion, that have been somewhat different, even radically different. Most of us feel that we are party to one or more of these esoteric perspectives, and, of those, most will also feel a considerable tension between these rare beliefs and those of our universities, industries and government. Furthermore, there are many apparent discrepancies between different esoteric schemes.

Our challenge is unify the inner and the outer, to find our integrity again. We have to creatively resolve, especially within ourselves, the tension between the disparate elements. Standard views will have to be considerably extended, and the esoteric themes will have to be developed into considerably more detail.

Fortunately, we have at least a few illustrious predecessors who give us indications of the way this could possibly be done, by telling us how they resolved these tensions. Here,  I begin with Emanuel Swedenborg.

From different religious and esoteric traditions, we hear general concepts such as that

• ‘Humans are created in the image of God’, and
• ‘As above, so below’,

but is there sufficient detail here? It is clear that if we are to develop a new science from these views, then we need considerably more detail about one or more of ‘God’, ‘above’ and/or ‘below’.

For example, if our principal view of the Divine as ‘an unknowable unity’, then it is not clear how to carry on to make a science. Conversely, if we view God as having arbitrary omnipotence, then ‘anything is possible’, and again a rational science is difficult to imagine. Alternatively, we can speculate endlessly, with enormous variation, to form rational schemes which describe the essential features of our physical world combined with some new spiritual features. To induce specific, workable and useful knowledge, I believe that we need some guidance from someone who already knows. Otherwise we are guessing in the dark.

Thus, again we are obliged to consider the knowledge and wisdom of some of our predecessors. We may consider this either as inspiration or revelation, but, whatever the source and whatever the means, we have to decide of ourselves which to consider. In this blog I am trying to develop and apply the knowledge presented by Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg is particularly useful because of his position as ‘rational visionary’ within the Western Christian tradition. Not that he leaves this tradition unchanged, but that, more clearly than does Plotinus for example, he explains in much detail the visionary and mystical contents of many of the outer forms of Christianity.

Are the ideas of theistic science common knowledge? Or are they esoteric? Are they part of ‘science of consciousness’? In the past, only those with esoteric interests have found these ideas. They are commonly only found by going beyond ‘literal meanings’ of religious, to various esoteric texts. But what we want should not be esoteric, but common knowledge! They should be part of everyone’s knowledge who is interested. Just as science is today: so they should be part of science, namely the science of consciousness.

Furthermore, they should not be esoteric because we are somehow ashamed of the new theories. We should be able to tell them to our neighbors without belittling them or their everyday efforts to be friendly, faithful, loving and useful.

We may intuitively agree with the above principles. But Swedenborg gives reasons for them all. Let us follow these reasons, and develop a theistic science to see what must be in the ‘science of consciousness’ for these principles to hold.

www.beginningtheisticscience.com

The End of Faith (Book)

Commentary on Sam Harris 2004, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, New York: Norton.

This book claims that religion leads to intolerance and terror, while 'religious moderation' keeps alive ideas which create intolerance. No beliefs about our world, he exclaims, should float entirely free of reason and evidence. Many of the problems of faith and religion come via very literal readings of scriptures, but doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. Rather, we should rely on rationality and evidence, and not just on authority or hearsay accepted uncritically. Later in the book, he does take moral, ethical and spiritual experiences all realistically, and sees virtue in views such as Buddhism which aim for love and compassion.

I reply that many of Harris' diagnoses of religious problems are justified, but his proposed remedies are not. I would certainly confirm that we do need reason and discourse, especially in comparison with unexamined faith. We do need to resist scriptural literalism, and especially do we need to do this from within religion. We do need to be open to new evidence, and we do need to explore and transform consciousness. All of these aims are part of theistic science.

But when we do all these things properly, we find that consciousness is not purely private. We find that there is rather a metaphysical structure that underlies consciousness, a structure which is also one of the sources of religion. I admit that religion has strayed far from its sources, falling into literalism, the ignorance of moderates, blindly following authorities, etc. But we cannot solve these problems of religion and blind faith by ignoring them and wishing that they would go away!

Instead, we do need to seek out a clear, nonparadoxical and rational understanding of theism. This way, we can return to our sources, and (even) Christianity can be renewed. One of these sources was conspicuously absent in Harris' book. He was clearly well educated about Eastern philosophies, but ignored Emanuel Swedenborg: just the kind of 'mature and stable mystic' that Harris was crying out for, to enable the rational understanding of consciousness and spirituality. Swedenborg has already begun formulating the 'Science of Good and Evil' that Harris seeks, in order to rigorously answer questions about the 'happiness and suffering of sentient creatures'.