Guernsey Walker
The Problem of Mind and the Problem of God
Guernsey WalkerThe Problem of Mind and the Problem of God
This discussion is not aimed at the professional philosopher. I am a lay person when it comes to philosophy.
My aim is to achieve a synthesis of ideas which I hope may appeal to lay people like myself with an interest in science and religion. I would be delighted if it was also interesting to professional scientists and professional theologians.
I have started by trying to assume no prior knowledge in biological science, so if you do have such knowledge please try to bear with some of the simplicities of some of my earlier paragraphs. Hopefully it may get more interesting as it progresses.
My motivation for this writing is the frustration I feel about the purely materialistic view of some scientists, and the relatively limited "non-materialist" ideas of many believers. I believe that (to echo one of the Buddha's sayings) there should be a middle way in this, and I am trying here to find some pointers to it.
I have called this The problem of mind and the problem of God because in many ways I see an intimate relationship between the two problems. The Hindus have a concept of Brahman and Atman, the world spirit and the individual spirit. If you like, the often used metaphor is that Brahman is the ocean, in relation to which Atman is a single drop of water. This is my link for the title.
So what is the problem of mind? And what is the problem of God?
In the last century or so, and particularly in the last decade or two, we have made huge strides in understanding the workings of the human brain. And arguably the pace of research is still increasing, with substantial resources being devoted to this branch of the sciences, and the introduction of new non-invasive methods of looking at the living brain, such as PET and fMRI.
We now know a good deal about the localisation of function within different parts of the brain, and we are gaining knowledge and insights into how the brain constructs our picture of the world.
We understand a sort of "pecking order" in these brain structures, with the lower central parts being the more evolutionarily primitive, and dealing mainly with unconscious functions. And then we have the upper and outer parts dealing with those aspects of processing which construct our rich picture of the world, and include the conscious processes that make us uniquely mammalian, and indeed uniquely human.
That is not to say that there is not a significant two way traffic between these various functional areas. We understand that there are many, many processes of which we are not conscious, or only partly conscious, such as the regulation of body temperature, breathing, heart rate, and automatic reactions such as fear or hunger. There is also a major subconscious intervention in conscious actions that to us seem quite simple. We understand that a muscular action such as moving a limb, or speaking, involves a huge amount of sub-conscious intervention to fine tune muscular contractions in order to achieve our conscious aims.
We understand a good deal about how the middle parts of our brains and the large outer parts (the cerebral hemispheres and cortex) process data from our sensory organs to construct our view of the world. We have localised the parts of this cortex which deal with conscious aspects of vision, hearing, touch, balance, speech and so on. And on the other side of the coin, those that deal with voluntarily induced motor outputs, including movement and speaking. We are increasingly understanding the role of the front-most parts of the cerebral cortex (immediately behind our foreheads) in integrating and "controlling" the whole at a conscious level into a complete human personality.
Hugely impressive strides have been made at the cellular and molecular levels, to understand how nerve cells operate. We understand the mechanisms by which nervous impulses pass along nerves, and how these are communicated between cells. We understand that long term memories are laid down when nerve cells grow and strengthen new connections between themselves, and by unused connections being weakened or lost.
In short we have a fairly good - though not by any means complete - idea of the way the brain goes about performing most of its functions. This is at the functional level. This brings us to the nub of the problem of mind, which effectively is the problem of consciousness.
For many years in the twentieth century many biologists (behaviourists) denied that consciousness was a legitimate field of biological enquiry. They felt that one could only objectively study behaviour. Introspective concepts like "consciousness" were outside the field of legitimate study. For many years "consciousness" was a field of thought only for philosophers. Today we see that some of this dichotomy between philosophy and biology still remains.
Let me say something about nervous impulses, more technically described as "action potentials", though this term does not cover the purely chemical transmission at (the majority of) the junctions between neurons (called synapses). Many people tend to visualise these action potentials as electrical signals. But they are distinctly not like the electric pulses travelling along a copper wire when it carries a current or a signal. They are much more chemical than this.
An action potential is actually generated by the movement of charged molecules (ions) across the membrane of the neuron. The characteristics of the membrane mean that the action potential is self-propagating, and so travels down the length of the neuron. But it is really a chemical movement. That is, it is a movement of charged ions in solution, and so generates a movement of charge that we can indeed detect with a voltmeter. This movement of charge is also integral to its propagation down the neuron. Nevertheless it is at basis a movement of ions in solution, not at all like electrical pulses down a wire. Does this matter? Or have I merely introduced a red herring?
Well, let us be clear about one thing. A brain is not like a computer! OK., this is a provocative statement, because in many ways it is tempting to think of the brain as a sort of computer. But let us just think what a (digital) computer is.
A digital computer consists of a collection of memory units (these days many millions of them) each of which can exist in one of two electrical states representing "on" or "off", and therefore representing the digits "0" or "1". The computer contains one or more processing chips which are pre-programmed to respond in precise ways to lists of instructions (programs), also presented as (long) lists of 0's and 1's. By means of this "software" the processor(s) change the contents of the memory units from 0 to 1, vice versa, and back again and so on.
By the use of higher levels of software, we can program the computer in a language which is easily intelligible to us, and which the computer then translates into the "machine code" which its processors can handle. Ultimately the layers of software enable us to interact with the computer through a "windows" type interface, and view the output on for example a screen or printer in symbols which we understand.
So now we can see that in structure and function the brain could not be more different. The brain does not have a bank of memory units. Neither does it work through a central processing unit. All the nerves of the brain seem to contribute to our memories, and these nerves form an integrated whole when it comes to processing. Any neuron in the brain seems to be able to have connections to neurons anywhere else in the brain; with its neighbours, or directly or indirectly to quite remote locations elsewhere.
It's worth just mentioning that, when we talk of memories, these of course include conscious memories, but also many unconscious memories such as the skills that can be developed in playing a sport or a musical instrument.
And here is the crucial point. A digital computer works completely automatically. It does not understand the patterns of light that it projects onto a screen, or the patterns of ink that it produces on paper. It requires the human brain to give these patterns meaning.
So here we are approaching the problem of mind. It is the problem of meaning; the problem of consciousness. Philosophers have sometimes called it the problem of qualia. We can set it out in perhaps just a few questions:-
1. What gives us an understanding of ourselves as a unique, conscious individual?
2. When we have a sensory experience, such as seeing a colour, what gives this the unique quality that we experience?
3. When we experience an emotion, or feel a pain, what gives this experience such reality for us?
4. How can mere action potentials in neurons give us on the one hand a sensation of say "redness", and on the other why is this so different in character from the pleasure of (say) sex, which is propagated by identical action potentials in other seemingly identical neurons? (Of course, in the case of sex, part of the pleasure is mediated by other chemical means (hormones), but it seems a reasonable assumption that the actual conscious experience is derived by action potentials in neurons in our brains).
We know that nervous impulses in the brain are all propagated in basically the same way, through nerves that work in a similar way. There are some differences in the chemical messengers at synapses, but so what? Why should nervous impulses in one part of the brain produce an emotion in us, while in another part of the brain they give us a sensation of vision, and in yet another part we get a sensation of sound?
Indeed, why should a nervous impulse in our brains produce any conscious experience at all? After all, it's only a movement of ions in solution!
This is the problem of mind. It's the problem of consciousness.
The philosopher David Chalmers has subdivided the problem of consciousness into what he calls the "hard problem"
and the "easy problem" 1.
He acknowledges that the "easy" problem is not actually easy. It's only easy in relation to the hard problem. The easy problem basically embraces functional activities: "the ability to discriminate stimuli, or to report information, or to monitor internal states, or to control behaviour" 2.
The hard problem is the problem of subjective experience. It is the character of those qualities that I listed above as questions 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Some philosophers have denied that there is a "hard" problem. Daniel Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained"3 not only suggests that the character of experience may be an illusion, but that there may be nobody there to have the experience anyway. He feels that when you've explained all the functionality, then you've explained the experience. The book presents this in such a way that it seems not so preposterous as it does at first sight. Dennett's book makes a fairly convincing case for this stance, and certainly adds significantly to our conception of the way in which the brain may function to produce consciousness.
Other thinkers agree that there is a hard problem, but believe that continuing research into brain function will one day solve it. In a way this is Dennett's position as well. Quite probably this is the position taken by most people who are engaged on research into brain function 4.
Others agree that there is a hard problem, but that it is beyond the ability of science to solve it. We're getting into dualism now. Basically this contends that there is something else "out there" or "within" which is the seat or source of consciousness, or which is the entity which is conscious. We're talking about something "spiritual" which is somehow attached to and interacts with the brain. These days it is probably only the very religious, who believe in souls, who would talk in this way.
Chalmers tries another tack which he claims is not dualistic.5 Certainly it's not dualistic in the terms of my previous paragraph, though perhaps it smacks of dualism. He proposes that there may be some fundamental intrinsic property of matter that produces consciousness when organised in the form of neural structures. (At least this is what I take him to say, and hopefully he will forgive me if I've misrepresented him or represented it too specifically neurally). He points out that science as a whole rests on a number of fundamental properties which we can't understand any further, such as gravitational, magnetic and electrical fields, electrical charge, mass, and so on.
This brings me to the nub of an issue which is often overlooked. Even if one day we can explain consciousness in purely "material" terms, in reality we will have done no such thing. Since we cannot understand the fundamental properties such as those just mentioned, our so called scientific explanations are not full explanations at all. They are only explanations in terms of other concepts. In fact ultimately they are only descriptions in terms of other concepts.
This is not to say that such scientific "explanations" do not advance our understanding. They do. But they can and do so easily lead to what I might call "the great materialist fallacy".
This is the fallacy of believing that the "material" of which our world is made is in some way "real" stuff. In fairness, many philosophers of mind acknowledge this fallacy at the intellectual level. They realise that the brain, through our senses, constructs a picture of the world that is our own mental construction, and which is not what is actually there. For example, objects seem hard to us because the molecules of our fingers repel the molecules of which they are constructed. But we don't see this happening at the molecular level. Something just feels hard (or soft, or spongy, or wet, or rough and so on).
Physicists talk about "particles". Maybe they understand that these are not really bits of "stuff" flying around. Or if they are, what is this "stuff"? But at the material level it's easy to forget this. This is the point. The mental image that our brains construct is so persuasive that, even when we pay lip service to its fundamental unreality, much of the time we still slip back into the habit of mind of thinking that that is what's "really" there, and that the "material world" is solid and real.
So materialists let themselves talk about understanding the brain in purely material terms, without necessarily remembering or realising that "materiality" is not actually the reality that their brains tell them it is.
This is not to say that we should not continue with our strivings to understand the workings of the brain in "material" terms. It is though to point out the limitations of these explanations.
Once you realise that our picture of the world is constructed by our brains - by ourselves you might add - then it is just obvious that the possibility exists (I'm putting it no higher) that our senses may not show us everything that there is.
This is not to say that classic dualism as described above is a valid point of view. Because of course a description of the brain's working has to be sought in the workings of scientific "laws". Perhaps this brings us back to Chalmers' idea of consciousness being a fundamental property that matter can generate. But in a way this is just a truism. If we reject dualism - as we have to - then we just know that consciousness is produced by our brains anyway. The real question then brings us back to the divide between Chalmers and Dennett. Does the hard problem exist, or are we just deluding ourselves, and actually there is no hard problem?
Certainly we seem very real to ourselves, and so do qualia. Dennet certainly hasn't explained away this sense of the reality of qualia at least to my own satisfaction.
The one thing that most thinkers in this field fight away from - they will jump through hoops to avoid having anything to do with - is any mention of the word "God".
Of course, if you bring "God" into it, then you can easily be just falling back into dualism. But I wonder if this is the whole story behind this rejection of God. I suspect there may be more to it than that.
It occurs to me that the major characteristic of all the concepts of "God" as they are put about by the great world religions is that they have become so thoroughly discredited for many thinking people. We just know that if there is anything else behind this world of ours, then surely it must be far more extensive and unknowable than the usually limited concepts of God put about by our institutionalised religions.
This then is what I call "the problem of God", which I want to try to deal with next.
I ended the previous section by setting out what I see as "the problem of God". At any rate this is the problem that I shall try to address in this section.
Inevitably in doing this I shall talk about religions since, by and large, most religions claim to deal with God. There are exceptions to this. (When talking about religions there are always exceptions to any generalisation!). For example the purest forms of Buddhism are primarily about a way of life, not about God. (Though we shall see that this may also be true in practice of some adherents to religions which claim to put God at the centre).
Some people also make a claim - often when they are trying to be critical of "non-believers" - that Humanism, certain political doctrines such as Communism, and perhaps even atheism, can have the qualities of religions. However without getting into a debate about what is or is not a religion I think it will be a worthwhile exercise to try to summarise the claims that religions make, and the reasons why adherents are members. This will perhaps be a somewhat random selection in no particular order of importance or logic and, as already stated, there will probably be exceptions to each of my generalisations.
As Richard Dawkins has pointed out6, a person's religious allegiance is a pretty defining human characteristic. If one hears that somebody is a Muslim, Hindu, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Jew, agnostic, Humanist or atheist for example, this already triggers a bundle of preconceptions about them in our perceptions, often without our being particularly aware of this, or even thinking too much about it. In some ways it's a more defining characteristic than nationality. And this largely follows an accident of birth. One was born into a family and/or a community that followed a particular religion.
Of course some people change their religion, at least on the surface, and some drop an inherited religion to become agnostic or atheist. In these cases though, it may be difficult to see to what extent they lose the habits of thought with which they were originally indoctrinated. Alternatively, some who start out atheist may become religious converts, but these are probably a minority.
Many people who stay with their inherited religions, or who join a religion, will cite the benefits this brings into their daily lives as the most significant reason for their adherence.7 This is not surprising in a religion such as Buddhism which is about a way of living one's life. It is perhaps more surprising in a religion such as Christianity, where one might have thought that the primary claim was one of life after death. But this does not seem to be so.
It is noteworthy to me, as an outside observer, how few Christians seem to actually believe in their hearts that life after death is true. On the face of it, everlasting life through Jesus' death and resurrection seems to be at the centre of their religion. So for example, one would have thought that a funeral would have been an occasion of rejoicing that a loved one has gone to a better place. But no, in general it is not. And the current pre-occupation of many Christians with anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia, strongly indicates a concern with the earthly here and now, and not with an everlasting life afterwards. This seems a definite conflict between what the religion says "in theory" and how people see it in practice.
Religions tend to involve the placating of a God in order to try to achieve a particular human goal. The goal may be eternal bliss, but it may equally well be something more earthly: God let me pass my exams; let my son/husband come back from the war; God, help me with my diet; help us to deal death to all infidels. The actual method of placating the god may take the form of prayer and ritual. Less often these days will it involve any sort of physical sacrifice (certainly not - one hopes - a human sacrifice) except in the realms of denials such as "giving up for Lent" or the fasts of Islam.
Very often the placating action will involve some sort of binding to a particular moral code. This is a particularly interesting aspect of religions when it come to politics and government, since from the earliest mists of remembered history it seems that rulers have used and abused religions to reinforce their powers of rule.
This use by rulers, or secular states, of religion for the moral control of populations is perhaps particularly relevant to us today, though I guess it has always been relevant. From the time that Abraham descended from Mount Sinai clutching the ten commandments, and no doubt before that, through the hi-jacking of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, to the modern Church of England, Christianity has been used to provide moral sanctions in society.
Islam plays an even more overtly political role in many present day Islamic states. In the case of Islam we see that individuals can even be motivated to self immolation by the conditioned belief that death in a "holy war" can lead straight to paradise. One may criticise the naivety and ignorance of such a belief, but one cannot really question the bravery of these individuals, any more than one would question the bravery of the Christian martyrs of earlier times.
Probably we can all think of instances where this ability of religion to facilitate social cohesion is or has been beneficial to society, as well as instances where the abuse of this power has been detrimental to human happiness. In either case though, it must be noted that this use of religion is placing it squarely in the earthly here and now.
So can we begin to formulate some reasons why people choose to believe in a particular religion? Could we perhaps say:-
1. Conditioning. People have often been thoroughly exposed to their religion as children, and have become thoroughly indoctrinated at a conscious and unconscious level. A religion such as Christianity contains devices designed to encourage such a "blind faith". For example the parable of the sower8, the story of "Doubting Thomas" 9, and the supposed saying of Jesus: "Truly I tell you; unless you turn round and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven" 10.
2. Fear. This could break down into a number of sub-categories:-11
(i) Fear of reprisals. We have seen this in earlier times in Christianity in the workings of the Inquisition, and still see it today in Islam.
(ii) Fear of offending your nearest and dearest, or of losing ones friends. For example, you belong to a church. It suits you to belong. This is where your life is centred. If you are a professional priest, this is also the means of your livelihood. To deny your faith could disrupt your life terribly.
(iii) Fear of breakdown of society. You believe that society needs the moral code of your religion in order to be a fit and decent place for human beings to live in.
(iv) Fear of death. You think that if you break with your religion you may not achieve everlasting life, or worse you may be cast into everlasting hell.
3. Love of God. This is a bit of a "catch-all" category as I'm using it here. I'm intending it to included those people who genuinely believe that God speaks, or has spoken, to them.7 They want to believe because they genuinely want to live this way of life. They genuinely believe that being part of a religion improves their quality of life. There are many religious people who believe that their religion "gives them something". But what is interesting is that this "something" is nearly always a benefit in the here and now on earth.
I think this is a fairly comprehensive list, though others may be able to add to it, and Dennett in the reference I've already given, does a much better job of enlarging on it.
What is interesting to me about all the listed factors, is that they are nearly all practical day to day concerns. They are matters affecting our daily lives (and perhaps deaths). Quite far down the list (not even on my list!) is any need or desire to try to understand why the world is here, why we are here, why the world is the way it is, what makes the world work, or why we work.
If religions say anything about these matters at all, it is on a fairly naïve and simplistic level. For example, many present day Christians have a notion of a "non-material" soul along strictly dualistic lines. (Though it is noteworthy that the early Church - as is still reflected in the words of the Creed - actually talked about the resurrection of the body. And Jesus ascended into heaven. He did not just dematerialise.)
By and large though, proponents of religions tend to defend their religions in terms of practical day to day concerns. In the case of those great monotheistic religions which depend upon the Biblical books that Christianity calls the Old Testament, there's a bit of a paradox here.
It's pretty clear that most thinking people can't accept that all that's in the Old Testament is literally true. There's so much that is inconsistent, and so much that is obviously a product of the times that the books were composed. The cosmology of the beginning of Genesis is trifling and anthropomorphic. Many of the advocated moral sanctions are of a nature that we would not dream of applying today. Many adherents to these three faiths clearly don't accept all that's in these books. Many probably don't even think about it very much.
But even so, strange problems rear their heads. We hear of people who seem to truly believe that the Bible is "the Word of God" (whatever that means). This drives them for example, to denounce women priests and bishops, and campaign against homosexuality, two attitudes which can be described as greatly lacking in charity, to say the least. In the US the so-called creationists are moved to try to defend the opening chapters of Genesis against what science has now explained as the origins of life and the age of the earth.
I suppose they feel that the foundations of their religion are being attacked. It's a common phenomenon that very often, the less sure people are of their beliefs, the more vehement they are in defending them. It's as though they are desperate for other people to agree with them as a sort of vindication that they were right all the time. They feel that their beliefs cannot be all that stupid if other people also hold them.
So what are we left with? The world over, we are left with a collection of Gods that people adhere to for reasons affecting their daily lives, and because they have grown up in particular traditions. Note that I am not saying that the reasons for "belief in God" given above are invalid; just that they have nothing to do with whether a god or gods as described by any particular religion, actually exist. There are two further issues here:-
1. As I suggested in my previous chapter on the "problem of mind", it is just obvious that what we perceive about the world through our five senses may not be (quite probably may not be) all that actually "exists". Some people will go further and say that there must be something beyond the reach of our perceptions which orders everything and drives it in the ways that we perceive, to produce the world as we know it, life as we know it, and ourselves as we know ourselves. (Some people are more specific than this, and say that there must have been, or is, an intelligent designer. However I'm trying to keep this at a more general and less potentially anthropomorphic level).
What is often not seen - or is seen but is ignored - is that there is a huge logical gap between these quite abstract concepts, and the actual gods as portrayed by individual religions. Even if for the sake of argument one accepts the premise of an "intelligent designer", then the argument which says that that the universe must have had an intelligent designer, and that therefore my particular god exists, is clearly a nonsensical one when set out explicitly. Nevertheless it is an argument which is very often used!
Any sort of power behind this universe (or shall we say "intelligence" for want of a better word) must surely be way, way beyond the oh so puny descriptions of gods put out by all existing religions. Yes, you may say, but we just do our best to "imagine" God using the information we currently have to hand, and given our feeble human imaginations. Well, all I can say to that is that, as a "best" it's just not good enough. It falls far short of the needs and general intellectual sophistication of educated 21st century people.
2. This brings us to the second issue.
Looking back at the bases for our current religions - and I'm thinking particularly of the great monotheistic religions here - surely the time has come when they could (and should) rip up their more stupid historical ideas and start to think of their God in more sophisticated ways. (Christianity of course has a particular problem in this, as it would also have to rip up all the magical and "miraculous" stuff from the New Testament).
Why should they do this? Perhaps the prior question which needs deciding is whether there is anything in these religions concerning our day to day lives which is worth preserving. I don't propose to go into this here. Others can do that. Suffice to say that I personally believe that there is a morality worth preserving - and so may many others if the reasons for belief in God set out above are correct.
Now you might say that this morality could not function without the religious sanctions of heaven and hell. But this is not borne out by the facts. Buddhist morality manages perfectly well without such sanctions. Many people today can see that a decent moral framework gives the best possible way of life. Isn't that already part of the reasons, as set out above, for people defending their religious belief in the first place?
Then you might argue - as many atheists do - that you don't need to belong to a religion in order to be "moral". Well I think this is true - up to a point. But only up to a point. It is true in the sense that either a religious follower or an atheist can be a moral person if they want to be. It is also true that many atheists do in fact act morally.
However I think it is also true that many atheists do find themselves free of any moral imperatives. So the loss of religion in society can lead to a loss of general moral standards. I'm not a sociologist, and I'm not going to try to argue this case here. I shall again leave this point for others to develop if they will. But I do think that this is where an organisation which binds itself to morality can act as an effective mutual self-help group towards living a moral life. The organisation can provide a moral imperative which many people could not by themselves sustain on a solitary individual basis.
This strongly indicates a future role for our existing religious institutions if they are willing to take up the challenge of substantially reforming their traditional dogmas, and dropping all the "supernatural" and magical stuff. This could well reverse the current trend towards decline by reinstating their credibility in the eyes of many thinking people. It would have to involve an acknowledgement that the traditional stuff was "of its time" and has had its day.
The problem of mind - the problem of consciousness - is still wide open. However we do know enough now to see a possible solution to the problem of "God".
I think I've shown - at least I've tried to show - that it is just obvious that our five senses (and therefore science as a whole) do not necessarily show us all that there is to be known about our world.
But I've also argued that this has nothing to tell us about the truth or otherwise of our established religions. Though I've also suggested that these religions have such a feeble concept of whatever (if anything) lies behind our universe, that their cosmologies and dogmas would be best dispensed with anyway.
We've seen that the physical substance of the world may be less substantial than our senses tell us it is. Possibly this allows some such concept as Braham and Atman that I mentioned in section 1 above. It does not of course require it, but it does not deny it. So I've suggested that whatever (if anything) lies behind our world is effectively unknowable by us.
Some may say that there has been revelation to us by "God" through the various world religions. But then we come back to the great paucity of thought in these religions. So this just won't do. A true revelation from a "God" would surely have involved keeping our "religious" knowledge up to date with our general knowledge. This just hasn't happened. To believe that there is an anthropomorphic being behind our world is pure wishful thinking.
At the same time though, I've also suggested that the moral side of many religions can be useful to human societies.
What does this mean in practice? I will talk mainly about Christianity, since that is "my" religion - the religion I know best.
In the case of Christianity, let the established churches acknowledge the stupidity of their dogmas. Forget about life after death. As I've suggested, many of their adherents don't really believe it anyway. Acknowledge that Jesus was just a man with a message. Concentrate on his message of love your fellow men. Reconstitute the Church into an organisation that believes in and propagates love and morality, and cast its intellectual inheritance into an historical role; into the role of interesting myth that we believed once.
In the case of Islam, moderate the extremists. Stop telling people that death in "holy war" provides a life in heaven. For that matter, forget about the idea of heaven altogether. Concentrate on morality in a similar way to that that I'm suggesting for Christianity. Perhaps acknowledge that some softening of your sterner doctrines would bring you more into line with modern liberal thinking. (Though there is an issue here of how stern we should be with our social offenders. Have we in the West actually become too soft here? Again I'm not going into this debate in this short paper).
Maybe such a reformation of Christianity and Islam would give them completely common ground at last, so that they could at last join forces in a "crusade" for the common good.
At the moment the established religions are losing their adherents in the educated parts of the world, and I believe will continue to do so (so long as humanity has the resources to remain well educated). This is because of their insistence on belief in frankly stupid ideas. I don't believe that in the long term Islam will succeed in holding back this tide by means of force and fatwas.
I believe that both Christianity and Islam owe a duty to society to reform themselves in the way that I've suggested, in order to start to regain lost ground. If you like; a sort of second Reformation.
2008
Since writing the above I've become aware that there is an organisation with it's roots in the Christian tradition, which already seems to have done this, and purports to be open to all across a spectrum of Christians, adherents to other religions, agnostics and even atheists.
It seems to have done this by making no requirement for it's members to hold specific beliefs. Thus it seems to fulfil all the requirements noted above for an organisation which promotes morality while shrugging off any of out-dated ideas from the past.
This is the Unitarian Church, but I cannot of course speak for them. They speak for themselves, and the UK web site is at http://www.unitarian.org.uk/index.shtml.
The interesting, and unfortunate, thing here though is that Unitarianism seems (at least at present) to be such a minority religion. One has to ask why this is. It would be very depressing to have to conclude that a majority of religious adherents actually need to be given "certainties" by their religion, even if these may not be true.
1 See for example "Consciousness and its place in Nature". David J. Chalmers. Published at http://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf
2 Ibid. Page 2, section 2 paragraph 1.
3 Consciousness Explained. Daniel C. Dennet. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. 1991.
4 Some of this can be seen in two further papers by David Chalmers; "Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness" and "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness" at http://consc.net/consc-papers.html
5 David J. Chalmers. Ibid.
6 For example in his programmes broadcast on UK Channel 4 television in January 2006 entitled "The Root of all Evil?". See also a review in Wikepedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_All_Evil%3F
7 For example, I cite a number of conversations I had with (mainly) Christians but a few other believers on the BBC's religious message boards.
8 The Revised English Bible. St Matthew's Gospel. Ch. 13. vv. 18 to 23. For example verse 22: "The seed sown among thistles represents the person who hears the word, but worldly cares and the false glamour of wealth choke it, and it proves barren."
9 The Revised English Bible. St John's Gospel. Ch. 20. vv. 24 to 29. For example verse 29: "Jesus said to him, 'Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who find faith without seeing me.'"
10 The Revised English Bible. St Matthew's Gospel. Ch. 18. verse 3.
11 This section draws on Daniel Dennett's excellent presentation to the 2007 Atheist Alliance International convention. At the time of writing this can be viewed on You Tube at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-808547712754338659or purchased on DVD from http://atheistalliance.org.
Dennet draws a distinction between "belief in God" and what he calls "belief in belief in God" and gives reasons for the latter. Although I acknowledge this as a valid distinction I haven't gone into it my text here (perhaps my text tacitly assumes it). Dennett's reasons for continuing with a religious belief are fear, love, guilt, the sunk-cost (Concorde) fallacy, and just plain embarrassment. He of course has much of great interest to say under each of these headings, and if you are able to view his presentation I highly recommend it.
12 Judaism, Christianity and Islam.