Together Towards Tomorrow: Pluralism in India

April 10, 2012 By Benjamin Chicka 1 Comment

On January 21, 2011 the De Smet – de Marneffe Memorial Annual Lecture was held in the new post graduate block of the Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (JDV) campus. The speaker for that year’s event was Dr. Ramachandra Pradhan of the University of Hyderabad. I was asked by the faculty of JDV to take part in this event as a panelist along with Dr. Pradhan fielding questions after the lecture from those in attendance. The title of his lecture was “The Contributions of Western Philosophy to the World Cultures and the Future of Philosophy.” However, I noted that most students in attendance were concerned about the exact opposite. Is there something about religiously pluralistic India that can contribute to the world’s future in ways “Western philosophy” that is often presented monolithically cannot? That is the question we were left with last week and now examine more closely.

During this conference the solidarity sought with one’s religious neighbors was often expressed in terms of practical and political concerns. A brief summary of a lengthy discussion during the panel session will serve as a good example of what this means. There is genuine worry that if religions are not up-to-date with modern knowledge, they will not be capable of meeting the needs of modern people. Technology has become very integrated into daily life and many people let their smart phones do all their thinking. Deep thought is being lost. Technology has also not yet alleviated the massive poverty found in India. When people are no longer satisfied with technology as the solution to life’s problems, will religion have made the creative advance needed to be relevant? The potential solution focused on during this conversation was not that becoming up-to-date meant comparing religious claims with those in biological science, for example, but that it meant becoming pluralistic.

Augustine Pamplany has argued that the epistemology of Indian science gives it ontological proximity to religion and gives warrant to such spiritual holism. The dialogue between science and religion is part of the broader context of the manifestation of truth. The universe is the macrocosm in which humans are microcosms. And taken one step further from a spiritual perspective, both are part of the larger divine macrocosm. Before explaining this further, it should be contrasted with two opposing ways of relating God and world.

The mindset that penetrates through the seen to the unseen merges what is cosmological and divine into the monism of pantheism. Conversely, overly rational emphasis on analysis over synthesis has led, especially in the Western philosophical tradition, to dualism and the separation of God and world. The former approach appreciates a depth to reality but remains largely ignorant about the physical details of that reality. The latter tends to view reality as inert and passive, creating profoundly confused creatures who don’t know how to live in the world.

Pamplany’s approach is dialectical. God’s mystery can be explored by probing the mystery of the physical world and vice versa. Advaitic epistemology has advanced a way of knowing that is methodologically pluralistic by beginning and ending in experience. Disciplines like science, art, poetry, and religion are not to be separated because they are all means of gaining knowledge from experience. All disciplines have the same goal and method, to know truth.

So in India, experience dictates epistemology rather than epistemology dictating what can possibly be experienced. The conceptual clarity and theoretical sophistication of Western science are not enough for science and religion to effectively dialogue. Western science is viewed as being overly rationalistic, thereby fracturing a unified approach to truth. Hermeneutically appropriating the spiritual vision behind Indian science brings praxis back into the picture. As Pamplany says, “on the one hand, the logic of integration dominant in the Hindu approach towards reality necessarily entails an ontologically complimentary vision of science and religion, and on the other hand, the emerging epistemological context generated by the compelling scientific knowledge and its methodic and linguistic commonalities with the religious epistemological structures render their intersection inseparable” (Together Towards Tomorrow, 392).

Besides being spiritually evocative of religious harmonization, this makes some biological sense. Larger cooperative groups have advantages over smaller isolated tribes. Pluralistic responses to technological problems made possible by our advanced biology are actually more thorough according to the logic of evolution than responses anchored in one religious tradition and ignorant of other possibilities.

As we improve our information processing ability with our technology, it takes a more concerted effort to remain responsible for long term goals. Atoms form molecules that form cells which allow for organized molecules that make organisms with specialized tasks possible which, in turn, allows for social systems with divisions of labor. Rather than just continuing this movement with reckless abandon, religions have the tendency to look ahead with visions. The sometimes accidental advances in technology can be directed toward goals in which humans are more in balance with one another and the earth. There was a sense among my students and at this conference that cooperating with other religions will help engender those goals while religious competition will be disastrous. Just as evolution has led to people with the ability to use tools and modify their environments, now in drastic ways due to modern science and technology, religions will also modify their environments. And it is hard to argue with the notion that a pluralistic position advocating cooperation will modify the world for the better when compared with religious exclusivism. We are at a point where we will get nowhere unless we can shed some old religious trappings and work together.

A stereotype concerning this holistic spirituality needs to be avoided, however. Indians are not aloof mystics without any concern for the world. Sophisticated work has been done on the Indian contributions to modern science and technology, especially astronomy and communication technology. Consider this statement from the Vedang Jyotish (1000 B.C.): “Just as the feathers on the peacock and the jewel-stone of a snake are placed at the highest point of the body (at the forehead), similarly, the position of Ganit (mathematics) is the highest among all branches of the Vedas and the Sastras.” Furthermore, the development of science in India was also pluralistic. Belief among Jains and Buddhists in limitless space and time helped develop work on infinite numbers as well as set theory. Another stereotype accompanies this one, that Asia is traditional and the West progressive. India has been very progressive, especially in the technological realm. But, I would argue, it has been even more progressive that the West in its pluralistic religious response to science and technology. After working through these issues in India, it looks downright ridiculous to read books on science and religion in which Christianity is treated as the only possible dialogue partner with science. But there does seem to be a paradox in India’s pluralism.

This pluralistic acceptance of difference is grounded something like a holistic monism. They are all means of experiencing what cannot be experienced and touching what cannot be touched by normal means. Differences are complimentary when in a larger totality. I simply wonder if a kind of philosophical and religious reductionism is present in this reaction to scientific reductionism. Scientists reduce complex organisms to their simpler parts when offering explanations. But isn’t reducing physical experience to a spiritual manifestation a similar move? If there is a problem with scientific reductionism, there should also be a problem with spiritual reductionism. I remain unconvinced that everything is so obviously a manifestation of the divine. What of all our mistakes and errors, including our biological knowledge of why people might come up with superstitious religious ideas? Pamplany’s dialectic needs to be pushed further into a possible critique of its resulting holism.

Consciousness has become a central issue in this discussion. It is not the creeds of religion that matter as much as the experiences engendered by adhering to a set of creeds. But can consciousness be reduced to matter? If not, can divine consciousness support the world and its many religions? Is it the point of contact with this spiritual holism? Behind the many different religions, is one’s spirit the point of contact with the divine consciousness? What if our mental ideas are mistaken? Next week we dig deeper into the theological tradition in India that has wrestled with such issues and the new problems it has created.

P.S. The photos in this month’s series are from my trip to India.

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Religion and Science in the Indian Context

April 2, 2012 By Benjamin Chicka 2 Comments

During the past year I had the great fortune to spend a little over one month teaching at Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (JDV), the Pontifical Institute for Philosophy and Religion, in Pune, India. The purpose of my visit was to teach the course “The Scientific Study of Religion” to seminarians (roughly amounting to undergraduate students in the United States) at the institute. The course focused on explanations for religious belief commonly offered in evolutionary science, neuroscience, and biological/evolutionary psychology and the relevance of such explanations for theological concerns. However, I don’t want to describe what I taught (I previously gave an introduction to the debate here on Patheos). I want to emphasize what lessons I learned about science and religion from those working in the subcontinent and contrast such activity with the state of the field in the West.

What is most striking upon entering the debates in India is the ever-present contrast between logical positivism as formed by the Vienna Circle and a holistic attitude about life reflecting a mix of Hindu spirituality and the many world religions active in India. The logical positivists were twentieth-century philosophers who tried formulating a version of empiricism based on the great success of the sciences. They held two basic doctrines. Mathematical statements are analytical, devoid of implications about sensible data in the world but intelligible in terms of their own axioms. All empirical sciences are synthetic, meaning scientific statements only count as such if they lead to some clearly testable empirical claim. The result was a rejection of philosophy and theology in the great tradition. Claims concerning most of ontology, metaphysics, and theology were discarded as nonsense because they could not be analytically self-justified or translated into empirically verifiable claims.

The positivist program is literally dead. No one actively researches in the area, though some analytic philosophers with distaste for metaphysics and theology are still suffering its aftereffects. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows that any consistent mathematical system will rest on statements incapable of proof in that system, and modern science has overthrown the naïve association of science with visual experience. Nonetheless, the concern with this school is understandable. India has exploded onto the world stage and will not stop growing any time soon. Science and technology are increasing the pace of life, as well as economic disparity. As science and technology hurl India forward, there is genuine concern that lack of reflection about the movement will result in great losses for the Indian people.

A common expression of this contrast is that the dharma (natural world and its laws) and adhyatma (referring to a text extolling a spiritual science – the defense of consciousness and awareness of belonging to the all-encompassing Brahman) are simply different worldviews and cannot conflict. Taken in a way that avoids the dogmatism of thinking one worldview explains all that exists, a scientific material worldview cannot explain consciousness and spirituality because they are not in its purview.

The contrast of holism with positivism is also not surprising when the makeup of India is considered. More than any place I have ever been, India has a thriving religious pluralism in which all religions are not only tolerated but encouraged to thrive. While this is false when considering specifics, Christians and Muslims can face persecution in more rural areas, it does accurately reflect the general attitude of the population. Most of my students were religious hybrids, expressing their Christian identities through Hindu philosophers and theologians. So instead of assuming a conflict between science and religion, Indians, as with the rest of life, embrace the different fields as part of something larger. Harmony comes naturally. One could think of the attitude as involving three concentric circles. The innermost is the realm of dogmatic religions that conflict with the next circle, scientific findings. The outermost circle is the place of spirituality, seen as embracing the inner circle of science but not its positivist interpretation. It is its supplement to a full view of reality. Furthermore, as my brief reference to adhyatma indicated, many believe this extra empirical realm can be “seen” because it has been found by spiritual experts in a fashion not unlike that a physicist takes to finding new particles.

I suggest that in their rejection of the Vienna Circle, Indians share a concern present in Western religion and science: the need to liberate philosophy and theology from over specialization. Theologians want colleagues to emerge from their conceptual cul-de-sacs and engage scientific findings. They want scientists to do the same and learn about the philosophical grounding and theological wondering implied by scientific work.

Paralleling this concern about specialization are two institutions promoting the interface of science and religion in India. The Association of Science, Society and Religion (ASSR) is housed at JDV where I was teaching and focuses on how theological claims (largely Christian and Hindu, with some Buddhism to be found) relate to science. The Institute of Science and Religion (ISR) is technically located at a different seminary, but many of its activities are now in collaboration with the ASSR to aid in funding and publicity. The ISR’s defining mark is its regular journal, Omega – Indian Journal of Science and Religion, which focuses on philosophy of science, scientific studies of religion, and the general academic study of religion more than the ASSR. These organizations are roughly analogous to the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley, CA which publishes the journal Theology and Science, and the Zygon Center for Religion and Science in Chicago which published Zygon, a journal focused more on philosophical and scientific work.

The problem with this holism is an air of arbitrariness lurking within. The view can be called holism, a name that seems to indicate an embrace of all and rejection of nothing, but arguing that science is limited differs from providing positive reasons for something more being real. There is a danger that having such holism as one’s natural view leads too quickly to flights of fancy; catapulting one past empirical knowledge of the material basis of our lives right into an interpretation of matter as a manifestation of the spiritual. Next week, when everyone is discussing Christianity and Easter, we will examine this holism in more detail and get a look at how Indian philosophers are handling the internal tensions of their pluralism and relating that position to practical concerns over the advance of science.

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All Scientists Need is Love

September 24, 2010 By Benjamin Chicka 99 Comments

Despite his professed atheism, Sam Harris might be surprised to learn that a theist agrees with many aspects of his proposal for a science of morality, has been thinking about the issue for longer, and perhaps only wishes to extend/deflect it in scope. Thomas Jay Oord, professor at Northwest Nazarene University, is known for his work on love research and its intersection with a relational form of theism. He now refers to the “love, science, and theology symbiosis” to indicate that both disciplines can be brought to bear on a full understanding of love. Thus, he rejects, along with Harris, the assumed absolute split between facts and value that prevails in much of popular culture.

As a reminder, a common assumption is that science deals with facts and morality with values and feelings. However, the perspective a scientist takes to data impacts her interpretation of that data. Interpretation is how facts become known as relevant facts. In other words, value already colors science so studying value need not mean a new kind of science. However, while Harris would agree with this statement to subject religious moral codes to scientific criticism, Oord notes that the converse is also true. Genuine altruism, sacrificial love, cannot be rejected as impossible outright. It is an empirical matter whether cases of it can be found. If so, they may require God as their explanation.

“Wait,” you may be thinking, “Harris is currently arguing for a science of morality while Oord is talking about love. Those are not the same.” Well, not exactly.

Defining Love, Thomas Jay Oord, 978-1-58743-257-6Oord rejects the narrow association of love with romantic feelings for another, a move which again brings him close to Harris’ concerns. Oord ends up sharing with Harris a focus on well-being.  Oord defines love as follows: “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being” (Defining Love, 15). A loving action is influenced by previous actions of others, oneself, and God, with the action performed in hope of future flourishing. This definition has three parts which Oord clarifies as follows.

1. Intentionally: An act is not loving if greater good is accidentally achieved. This aspect of Oord’s definition pushes against Harris’ consequentialist focus. At the very least it problematizes his exclusive focus on ends without mention of motivation. A moral person would presumably want to see well-being achieved after calculating how to bring it about, otherwise nothing would get done. Conversely, John Dewey made it clear that intention without reflection on effects of that intention is irresponsible. If one is motivated to value a certain end-state, it is one’s responsibility to perform a valuation in which the necessary steps, possible problems, and likely consequences of achieving that goal are understood. Otherwise, haphazardly trying to bring about good, though the intention, might result in disastrous consequences. Valuing a result and intentionally going about taking the right steps to achieve it go together. This is perhaps the other extreme for Harris. Forcing people against their will to bring about the scientifically calculated best result might turn a science of morality into an immoral activity. You might have thought of the Nazi regime as you read that last sentence.

2. Sympathetic Response: Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead often spoke of prehensions. Feeling feels feeling, or reaction is always to an object which is itself reactive. The notion of objects has to do with social relations and reacting to them as objects. This “feeling with” is usually called empathy in scientific studies. Oord means sympathy to indicate being internally influenced by another so one’s experience is due in part to that other. For example, past conditions deflect my identity to be what it is at the moment while that identity will then influence other creatures just as the past influenced me. Compared to intentionality, this is usually the automatic internal reaction involved in love. We must deal with such circumstances that influence us.

3. Well-being: If a focus on intentionality pushes against Harris, a focus on well-being is a bridge between their approaches. Intentionality and sympathetic response are the conditions for the possibility of love, not love itself. But we can determine what is required to call an intentional act love or not: well-being, or promoting the common good. Not all intentional acts are loving, only those which promote good in the world. Again, with Harris, Oord would say it is not a loving act to save a few at expense of many. However, Harris is more optimistic that we can gather data to determine the varied worth of individuals so one person who will, in turn, lead to the flourishing of hundreds should be saved over five people who will influence no others. Oord, by accepting Whitehead’s notion of prehensions, rejects this atomistic view of reality in favor of a relational view in which people always have value for others.

This approach focusing on overall well-being has most often been associated with utilitarian ethics, as evidenced by the crucial role that theory plays in the proposal being made by Harris. However, that association is not exactly correct in Oord’s view. “Strict utilitarianism is not possible for finite creatures. If the world is characterized by interrelatedness, precise calculation by localized individuals of the greatest good for the greatest number is inherently impossible. Despite the impossibility of precise calculations, however, we use measurements, both intuitive and scientific, to gauge the relative enhancement or undermining of overall well-being” (Defining Love, 61). Basically, Harris needs to temper his expectations while remaining confident that morality can become more scientific.

With this definition in place, Oord sees two dominant research questions for the “love, science, and theology symbiosis.” First, can humans act lovingly on their own, without any inspiration from a deity? Second, is every act of human love actually an act of God without any human contributions? If one answers yes to the first question, as Paul Zak did in the first week on this series, God seems to be on the sideline and superfluous for major moral questions. If one answers yes to the second question, all human good would not really be human good as its source would be wholly beyond humanity. As noted, Oord does not want to answer either question before looking at the data. So, as an empirical matter, what data does he find on well-being to help determine what actions promote and whose well-being should be considered in a given case?

Most sciences focus on what they call empathy and altruism in trying to understand what Oord is defining as love. In social-psychology altruism is usually defined so as to necessitate no benefit whatsoever comes to the actor, making altruism basically impossible. However, intention/motivation, a key component of Oord’s theological argument, is left out a priori for no apparent reason. This definition eliminates altruistic actions that might motivate similar actions in the future or bring self-satisfaction from a deep well done.

Charles Darwin located altruism within parent-child relationships. Giving sacrificially for the good of a child is an action that can then be extended to community life when faced with external obstacles such as other hostile communities. Faithful members ready to give aid will ensure their community survives over one without such cohesion. But this explanation still relates to individual survival. Individuals survive when their community flourishes. Even in the case of parents, Richard Dawkins has made it known that the genetic lineage survives in the sacrifices of parents for children. This has come to be known as “kin selection.” In either case, experience can teach that helping others reaps a gain. Such acts have come to be known as reciprocal altruism in scientific literature.

Cooperative acts proliferate when creatures discover giving benefits the giver. Take vampire bats, for example. Female vampire bats give blood meals to nest mates who would starve otherwise. This increases the probability of future interaction, the blood is necessary for survival so there can be such interaction, and the giver is more likely to receive in future interactions. Besides material gain, an often hidden aspect of reciprocity is reputational gain.

Actions are often influenced by the wishes of others or selfish desire. Darwin already knew in his time that working for the good of a group can be strengthened or deflected by public opinion. Members of a group would approve of actions that seemed to be for their overall good and chastise the opposite. Others are helped for the sake of reputational gain, which carries the assumption that benefits will be returned now or in the future.

So is anything missing in the way scientists are beginning to understand love/morality?

Oord adopts a critical realist stance to all this data. This position holds that it is impossible to know whether descriptive language ever corresponds perfectly with reality. Nonetheless, language is probably partially correct as far as its continued use is justified by its adequacy to new data and predictive power. The same is true theologically, Ooord says, with love.

Intentional acts for the benefit of others with no expectation of benefits in return remain unaccounted for currently. And since he defends genuine altruism as something currently unexplained in scientific theories, such unbounded love in need of explanation is a bridge to an affirmation of God’s real influence on the world. Once affirmed, as a critical realist, this surplus creaturely love will be at least something like divine love.

Unbounded love requires God’s activity. Only then can we account for limited and unlimited accounts of love. The fact that individuals and religious groups have often fought outsiders for the sake of self-preservation should not be neglected. It is only to be noted that the well-being of others has been promoted to individual or group detriment. Turning this into a negative statement for Harris, he has simply neglected to include among his data set for a science of morality the fact that individuals and groups have sometimes chosen to act in ways that show love to all others, and not only the statistically preferred group.

Oord’s theological hypothesis is that if God acts voluntarily in noninterventionist ways, then created entities are never prevented from being what they are. That God loves will always be the case. How God loves is case-dependent. He calls this “full-orbed” love, meaning God cannot force anyone to follow a certain course but instead offers different kinds of love as needed in different situations. In other words, God is relational and affected by the creatures relating to God. “Because God is present to all creatures and because God loves perfectly, all creatures are directly loved.” (Defining Love, 192). Presumably this thesis cuts both ways. Oord would need to accept the freedom to try and create a science of morality, even if that science builds in ways contrary to religion as Harris believes it will. It is at least an experiment in creaturely response to God’s loving offering that Oord seems committed to tolerate. But on the positive theological side, the same loving God is the being creatures respond when instantiating an overall increase in well-being for others. Creatures can choose ill over good while God’s love will never fail. Love is natural, requiring human choice, as well as needing divine persuasion without which altruistic love would be impossible. In terms of his definition of love, it is a matter of sympathetic response to God and a natural human choice to take or leave God’s loving gift. Thus, Oord believes he has given an answer to the either/or dilemma of whether morality is only natural or only supernatural.

It is interesting to note some commonalities that one may not expect between this theological proposal and Harris’ science of morality. The possible actions that God offers to the world arise from an understanding of past actions on the part of God and creatures in the world. Harris’ science is also situation-specific, based on considering past data that promoted well-being. In each theory, the best possibility differs in concrete situations people face. However, a stronger question for Oord arises due to Paul Zak’s work on oxcytocin.

Oord believes that our ability to love in any case requires God’s inspirational call to love, but Zak has shown that love can be natural without ruling out the God hypothesis. God is not unnecessary, but does not appear to be necessary, at least in some cases, either. Rather than responding to God, we sometimes respond to our neurochemistry. And, as has already been noted, Oord’s God is not one which interrupts natural causal relations involved in love. Take Oord’s definition of the classic Greek love philia. “Philia is intentional sympathetic response to promote overall –well-being by cooperation with others.” (Defining Love, 50). Zak clearly explained how he has discovered the role of oxcytocin in such cooperative relations. The molecule increases from and in turn increases cooperative relations. Zak’s lab is still producing great research, so the story is not complete yet, and there currently remains room for Oord’s claim that genuine altruism is to be explained by God’s love. But a differentiation between God’s role in finite and infinite acts of love may be need in Oord’s proposal. Rather than explaining the former in terms of a creature’s imperfect response to God, it may be explained naturalistically. The latter, though, may still have great theological import as it enables the transcending of finite limitations through the love of others and enemies. To paraphrase Paul Tillich, God has to do with our ultimate, not finite, concerns. It has been said that we love because God first loved us. In dialogue between Oord’s process theology and the current science of morality, maybe this should now read we love infinitely (or unselfishly) because God first loved us infinitely.

In the end Harris gets at least part of what he wants as well. As noted at the end of last week’s post, rigid religious morality codes have no role in this conversation. Love between creatures and God is relational and dynamic based on circumstances for Oord. Religious understandings of love must remain open to critique for Harris. A theology in which creatures respond to loving offerings tailored to each situation would surely join a critique of rigid laws as well as its own situational affirmations, lest the theological answers lose touch.

One obvious question remains: is this proposal a two-way street? Oord has done his best to form his hypothesis based on current research on love/morality, but what could a scientific research project take away from his proposal other than knowledge of its limitations and humility toward theological claims in turn? Maybe that is enough.

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