God's Will

In my last post, I made a simple point - human beings, and indeed all species, seek to flourish. This is their primary motive, their “prime directive”, the organizing principle of their lives as individuals, as a species and as living creatures.

However, if we accept this simple point and follow it to its logical conclusions, the assumptions of philosophy and religion are revolutionized. Let me explain.

First of all I must make clear that I learned about the importance of human flourishing from Aristotle. He said the purpose of human life is “eudaimonia”. Through the centuries that term has been typically translated as “happiness”, but in recent decades a translation closer to “human flourishing” has become increasingly preferred.

The problem with the early translation is that manifestly people do not seek happiness. For example, a recent series of studies showed that people who have children are not made happier for it – in fact the opposite is true.

So why do people continue to make having children one of their life goals? Because they are not seeking happiness, they are seeking to flourish, and flourishing, seen from an evolutionary perspective, means reproducing. Happiness is a serendipitous by-product of flourishing, something that happens to you if you are flourishing.

Another problem with viewing mere happiness as the purpose of life is that it assumes an individual purpose. In fact, like childbirth, education, prosperity, or pretty much anything else associated with happiness, human flourishing is a collective effort. As humanity flourishes, so does the individual.

What the theory of evolution and the study of life have taught us is that the goal of every species is to flourish. So we must understand the prime directive of humanity to be eudaimonia: human flourishing, not individual happiness. Human flourishing seen from the point of view of evolutionary philosophy is the flourishing of the species.

If there ever was a species that did not seek to flourish, it would face extinction almost immediately. This fundamental drive, the mainspring of all living activity, the purpose of it all, the meaning of life, is the drive to flourish.

The so-called “New Atheists” tend to two mistakes. Firstly, they tend to say life has no purpose. The fact that every living thing greets every day with one over-riding goal, namely to flourish not only as an individual but primarily as a species, is apparently lost on them. The second mistake, and here Dawkins is perhaps the worst offender, is to view religion as irrational, unscientific, and probably resulting from a virus-like infection called a “meme” that is either a useless spandrel or an actively harmful parasitic idea to the species.

Religion should not be viewed as anti-scientific. Science is our attempt to explain the world. There are methods that have gained a lot of support because they provide reliable and effective explanations of the world, led by what is called “the scientific method”. And there are methods of explaining the world that are full of holes, such as mythology and religion.

Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world. That it does not use scientific methods means only that it is bad science. But religion exists because it makes sense of some natural phenomenon that real people really experience, and for which there is no generally accepted scientific explanation.

Science is here surrendering ground to ignorance. Science needs to step up to the challenge and instead of denying that there is a purpose to it all, something that is obvious to religious believers, it needs to provide a rational explanation of that purpose.

For the devout, purpose comes from God, and all that happens is “the Will of God”. It’s a simple formula. We mortals are not privy to the motives and logic of God. We are insects on the planet’s face, subject to an immense and somewhat inscrutable force. Our role is to respect that His will is law. Our role is to submit, as Islam in particular makes so clear.

When religious people speak of the Will of God, the scientist needs to recognize they are speaking in metaphors about the laws of physics, they are speaking of time and motion, they are speaking about the natural world as if it were a watch created by a master craftsman. God’s will is a metaphor for the logic of the universe. The Holy Spirit is a metaphor for the life-force that motivates us all, the drive of all living species to flourish.

We should be reminded that the first sentence of the Bible reads, “In the beginning was the logos”, where the Greek word “logos” has been translated as “the Word”, but could just as easily be translated as “the point” or “the logic”. The religious are using mythology, superstition, and bad science to explain the logic of the universe.

The scientist must approach religion as bad science, a science that encourages us to submit to the world as we find it instead of making it a better one, to surrender to nature instead of taming it. In the end what religion really tells us is to submit to the real human beings – the priests, rabbis, and imam – who take on the role of interpreting God’s will, and arrogate the power that this role confers.

The logic of the universe that we find ourselves in directs us as a species to flourish or perish. The great debate, between science and religion, between all good science and all bad science, comes down to this question: what is humanity’s surest path to flourishing?

Religion has one answer – can science provide a more rational and compelling one?

Intentionality

Just finished an excellent book called The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

The book discusses the history of man’s relationship with four plant species: the potato, the tulip, the apple, and marijuana. But it uses this history to make some important points about evolution and co-evolution, natural and artificial selection, and even to bring in a few interesting points about a philosophical buzzword, intentionality.

Intentionality is the quality of thought sometimes referred to as its “aboutness”. Thought is always “about” something. What it is about is referred to as the intentional object.

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in psychology and philosophy is John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, intended to show that computers cannot show true artificial intelligence, because whatever they do, they don’t truly understand what it is they’re doing. Even if we were capable of creating a computer that could read Chinese and translate it perfectly to English, we could never argue that the computer had any real intelligence, because it never actually understands Chinese.

The thrust of the argument is that the mind is not a computer, and that intelligence is more than just the ability to follow coded instructions.

I think Searle is both right and wrong, and this is why the argument over the Chinese Room experiment has such life. I think the human brain and indeed the entire natural world operates much as a computer does, although a computer is at this stage of its development reflecting that reality only in a very primitive way.

But where Searle gets it right is in reminding us that no matter how sophisticated the computer, it never really *gets* it, because it’s missing one ingredient; intentionality.

So what is intentionality? I think Searle would agree that when human beings cultivated the apple and other agricultural products to their current form, they demonstrated intentionality. Certainly they proceeded with intention, and armed themselves with belief and desire.

But Pollan’s book makes the interesting point, not new, that the apple, the potato, the tulip, and narcotics and medicinal plants such as marijuana, have themselves contributed to the making of the human species as it walks the earth today. Can we say that they proceeded with intentionality? Obviously the individual apple or grape on the vine does not contain enough brain power to make decisions or hold beliefs, but as a species-being, does the capital-A Apple species proceed with anything we might describe as intentionality?

Now let’s throw another perspective into the mix – Wayne Dyer, and his book and audio series, "The Power of Intention".

Dyer is a well-known speaker on public broadcasting networks in the U.S. He seems to be a self-help speaker of a liberal bent (liberal in the American sense of politically centrist but socially aware) and is tolerable to listen to, even though he will drift into semi-religious mysticism from time to time – “The Power of Intention” being a prime example.

Dyer argues that everything in the world is filled with “intention” – a word he leaves sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted as either God’s will, or perhaps just the feeling many folks have that “everything happens for a reason.”

But one does get the feeling listening to Dyer that he is onto something, if he only had the words to express it properly. And what I think he is on to is this poorly understood force that causes the apple to do what it does, and the human being to do what *it* does with the apple.

Whether one calls it “intention” or “intentionality”, there is a motive force behind life that just is missing from an inorganic piece of machinery like a computer. A human being is alive with intention, and intention, whether conscious or unconscious, is what defines it as being alive. This is perhaps why Sartre considered intentionality to be just another word for consciousness.

Which brings me back to the wellspring of life, as touched upon in an earlier post – all life is motivated by the intention to persist through time, and all activity is ultimately traceable to this eternal spring.

By this definition, we can agree with Dyer that all organisms, all matter, all things known and knowable, are imbued with intention and intentionality.

One of the things that distinguishes humanity as a species is that it is not only intentional, it is aware of and in a process of ongoing discovery of its own intentionality – and indeed that of the universe we live in.