Once again Triskadecimus incisively and cogently points out the flaws in my reasoning, and I am grateful. Logic proves nothing but what it started with, although the interrelationships may not be obvious, and the conclusions valuable. Introducing data into the problem makes it dependent on the validity of the data, which may be of high reliability – or it may not.
The problem is that without “the eyes of faith” nothing that we would consider supernatural is in any way evident to the unbiased observer, whether it be me, Gaudere, Tris., Lib., Nen, David, or QuickSilver. What Tris. has said, however, looked at from a third-party standpoint, is quite on a par with what David has always said – the difference being that Tris. is a man of faith, and David is not. (This is, of course, not a putdown of either’s view, but simply intended as reportage of their stated views.)
I do not, however, feel that we are at a total impasse. Nen, QuickSilver, Lib., and I seem to agree that a given mental or spiritual act is referrable to the biophysical phenomena through which it functions in our human bodies. We differ only in whether there is another layer superadded to this, or whether our apparent consciousness, religious experiences, etc., are simply constructs, complex neural interactions observed as single gestalts (in the traditional perceptual definition, not as Lib. would use the term).
To bring in a metaphor that I think will be most useful, let me recount some reading I did. In his book Expanded Universe, Robert A. Heinlein reprinted the latter half of the James V. Forrestal Memorial Address which he delivered at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was entitled “The Pragmatics of Patriotism.” In it he observed, first, that egocentric survival was the first moral imperative. He who fails to survive is incapable of taking any other moral act. He quickly noted, however, that it might be supervened by other acts, with the classic Heinlein example of a mother cat dying to save her kittens. The biological logic here is that the preservation of the species through self-sacrifice for the young is a second clear moral imperative, trumping the survival one.
Heinlein then recounted having seen a baboon perched in a tree, serving as lookout for leopards while the rest of the tribe fed. By “rotating ths duty” among the adult baboons, the tribe acted for its survival as a tribe and therefore for the increased survival of its members. Here we have a third moral imperative, and one that fits quite well with the origin of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
By extension from self to family and then to tribe, Heinlein reminded the cadets of the function they served, of training to serve as naval officers and their self-imposed duty to place their bodies, if necessary, “between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.” He saw patriotism as the extension to nationial level of the same impulse that motivated the mother cat and the baboon sentry.
And he finished off the speech by suggesting that this same sense of duty and responsibility might be extended to all mankind, bringing us to the connotation Jesus put on “neighbor” in the passage I quoted above.
Where I am going with this is that I see, not a dichotomy between faith and logic, between the spiritual and the material, but an extension. An atom is comprised of protons, electrons and neutrons, but it has a reality of its own, characteristics derived from but not identifiable from its constituent hadrons and leptons. A molecule behaves distinctively from its constituent atoms. A crystal or a fluid behaves differently from the molecules that comprise it. Each constitutes a step of greater complexity but functions under laws that are simple when observed solely on that plane. One does not need to know nuclear physics to observe a chemical reaction accurately, despite the fact that the reaction, understood thorougly, involves the breaking and reunion of covalent and ionic bonds and the reconfiguration of the atoms involved. And one can understand the digestion of food quite well without getting into great detail on the organic chemistry involved.
By the same token, is it a reasonable conclusion to suggest that consciousness, soul, spirit, and those other phenomena that we have bandied about here are simply ways to take the complexities of how we operate in biological terms and construct a “spiritual chemistry” that does not require dealing with a “biological physics” in the same way that knowledge of normal chemistry does not require comprehension of the physics that in fact underpins it? That those terms that I began this sentence with are in fact real units in the same sense that a molecule is a real unit, despite the fact that they operate through neural mechanisms in the same way that the molecule operates through the interchange of electrons and ionization of atoms?
Seriously, reason and logic are integral parts of a debate. Must they “rule all evaluations of human effort”? No, although they do warrant a modicum of attention. A balance must be achieved; however, I fail to see how the limitation you describe is caused by a self-centered vision. Would you please elaborate?
