RELIGION AND REALITY

"Anonymous" posted a long thoughtful comment to the piece on The Jewish Question. I think Anonymous meant to post the comment to the piece entitled Is Religion A Crutch? In any event, the comment deserves a chance to be read, so here it is.

"Hardy devoted his poetry to laying out his magnificently sombre, completely disillusioned view of the world. The central fact of that world was the disappearance of God, and with it any reason for believing in providence or justice. Hardy’s most famous poem on this theme is “God’s Funeral,” which describes a procession carrying the corpse of the “man-projected Figure … whom we can no longer keep alive.” Yet this poem is perhaps too monumental, too self-consciously a “statement,” to capture the complex flavor of Hardy’s godlessness. For it is not only the absence of God that Hardy reckons with; it is the way that absence changes how we think about ethics, mortality, and value, the way it challenges all our traditions and aspirations."

Hardy was one thinker who established the groundwork for the "death of God" school of thought, popular in the 60s, as well as the development of new bases for theories on ethics, altruism, and the like.

Meanwhile, help and perhaps even hope, is coming from the opposite direction: from systems theory, as applied to biology.

In time, this approach to biological processes, given the recent emergence of the "postgenomic" world, may connect the dots between enzyme, hormones, et al., to the phenomenon of human consciousness--and from there to the emergence of religon. Religion, on this basis, is neither genetically determined, or a "crutch," but, instead, a linking mechanism--a sine qua non--between the physical (five senses) world and the realm of abstractions that are the operators for the neural processes of the human brain.

Meanwhile, the methods and assumptions for systems theory as applied to biology have been the focus of a series of seminars at Harvard.

Here is the abstract for one of the presentations at Harvard:

Evelyn Fox Keller
Program in Science, Technology and Society
MIT

Abstract
Recently, I was obliged to choose between only two alternatives—either it is or is not possible to reduce biological explanations to explanations in chemistry and/or physics—and I opted for the positive response. But I could as easily have gone the other way. For the question is in fact not well posed. Do I believe that there is something beyond physical and chemical processes involved in the formation of living beings? No, I do not. In this sense, I am an unambivalent materialist. But if by that question one means, can biological explanations be reduced to the theories of matter currently available in physics and chemistry, then my answer is no. And not, as Nils Bohr once argued, because the study of biology can be expected to bring the discovery of new laws (1932), but rather, because (and here, I paraphrase the arguments put forth by Nancy Cartwright (1983)) laws of physics—in effect, by definition—have been developed with reference to a narrow range of possible physical and chemical phenomena, and, one might say, necessarily so. For that is the way with laws—they are developed to describe (or explain) the lowest common denominator of physical and chemical processes, that which is said to 'underlie' the manifest variety of these processes.

October 31, 2007 9:38 AM