First published in 2014 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
1 Spencer Court
140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ
© 2014 Keith Ward
The right of Keith Ward to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978-0-232-53130-5
eISBN 978-0232-53175-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Phototypeset by Kerrypress Ltd, Luton, Beds
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
1. The Spiritual Dimension
Does a spiritual dimension exist?
What is spirit?
Looking for evidence of spiritual values
2. Spiritual Values in Art and Beauty
Art as ‘mediating evidence’
The spiritual dimension in art
3. Spiritual Values in Morality
Morality as ‘mediating evidence’
The sense of transcendence
Morality and transcendent value
4. Spiritual Values in Philosophy
Interpreting reality
Materialism and Idealism
The idea of a creator
5. Purpose and Evil
The idea of cosmic purpose
Is purpose compatible with evil?
Evil and omnipotence
6. Philosophical Idealism
Cosmic evolution and purpose
Alternatives to God
The Idealist point of view
7. Spiritual Values in Science
The elimination of mind
Fundamental perspectives
The quantum vacuum
8. Explaining the Universe
Absolute explanations
The principle of axiology
The mind of God
9. Science and Mind
How minds create reality
Theistic Idealism
10. Spiritual Values in Religion
The gods of ancient religion
Forms of spirituality and religion
11. The Development of Religion
Towards belief in one supreme spiritual reality
The sense of human estrangement
12. Spiritual Values in Personal Experience
The sense of spiritual presence
Revelation and miracles
Apprehensions of spirit
13. Experience and Personal Ethics
Testing experience
The ascent from the cave
14. Two Concepts of Rationality
Evidentialist Reason and Clifford’s rule
Problems with Clifford’s rule
15. The Role of Reason
Dialectical reason
Common sense and spiritual sense
Bibliographical Notes
1.
THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION
Does a spiritual dimension exist?
It is remarkable how atheism is becoming fashionable in England. It has become almost compulsory to say that you do not believe in God, if you are to stay abreast of fashion. It is equally remarkable that very few people have any idea of what great spiritual teachers have said about God. Knowledge of God is confined to a few stereotypical ideas about an invisible person living just outside the universe who interferes in it from time to time, and who long ago dictated a few ethical commands to groups of nomadic peasants, commands which can now be seen to be thoroughly irrational and obsolete.
What many people in our culture seem to have lost is any sense that there is more to reality than collections of physical particles accidentally arranged in complicated patterns. I have spent a lot of my time in recent years talking to sixth formers (eighteen-year-olds in British schools) about philosophy and religion. I have found that for more than half of them, even at schools with a religious foundation, any sort of religion or spiritual practice is a closed book. They think that the whole universe is some sort of gigantic accident, that there are no objective moral values, and that belief in anything like God is a bit of comforting self-deception.
Atheism and what you might call ‘accidentalism’ (that everything is an accident, or is due to pure chance) is usually just a default position. It is what is taken for granted without argument, though there is often some vague feeling that this is what ‘scientists’ have proved.
When I talk to eminent scientists some of them do support this sort of position. Time and again they have said to me, ‘There is no evidence for God’. They think that God is an unnecessary addition to reality, which does not have any useful function, and can be dropped without losing anything much. They often quote Bertrand Russell’s remark that believing in God is like believing that there is an invisible and intangible teapot in orbit around the earth. Nobody can see it or touch it, and it does not make any difference to anything, but some people just seem to believe it is there ‘on faith’, or without any evidence. God, they think, is like that.
I should stress that it is only some scientists who say this sort of thing, but they tend to be the most publicly visible scientists (like David Attenborough and Professor Brian Cox – not that they have ever discussed invisible teapots). They appear on TV and are reported widely in the press, and what they say is taken as true by many young people. The two I have mentioned have done a tremendous amount to introduce people to the wonders of nature, and I could not admire them more. Yet I think they are quite wrong when they discount spirituality. I also believe that science itself points in a very different direction. There is a huge amount of evidence for the reality of a spiritual dimension to the world, and human life is going to be very different if the idea of God (or some idea very like it, an idea of a spiritual dimension to human life) disappears. But the fact that there is a huge amount of evidence has become so little recognised that it is going to have to be argued for.
What is spirit?
First of all we need to get some idea of what I mean by ‘a spiritual dimension’, and what the great majority of philosophers in world history, both East and West, have said about it, so that we know what we are talking about. It is a rather vague phrase. It is purposely so, because I do not want to get bogged down in all sorts of arguments about the exact nature of God, or about some dogmatic belief that all people are supposed to accept. What I am talking about is the sense that the universe we live in and know a little about is more than just a collection of material particles or fields or waves (whatever exactly you prefer) with no consciousness, no objective value, no purpose, and no meaning. There is also a level of being that is deeper, that has something like purpose and value, and we humans can sometimes feel it and find in it resources of strength, hope, and inspiration. There is something like mind or consciousnessness at the heart of reality. I do not want to tie this down too much in words. As the Chinese spiritual classic the Tao Te Ching says, ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao’.
We need not know too much about the inner nature of matter (and perhaps nobody does, really) in order to find our way around the material world, and use it to fulfil our material needs. In the same way, we do not need to know too much about the inner nature of spirit (something non-material, but conscious, mind-like in some way, and of greater than purely human value) in order to realise that we live in a spiritual environment as well as a material one, and that to become attuned to that environment is to unlock huge resources of power and love in our lives. In fact, despite what I have said about the ‘default position’ of atheism in English, and maybe in European culture, there is also, I believe, a huge interest in spirituality, and a very widespread sense that there is an important spiritual dimension to human life. The trouble is that there is very rarely any way of holding together the fashionable intellectual atheism of the day and the deep sense of a spiritual dimension of human life.
Most philosophers and thinkers, especially in the Western traditions, have spoken about this spiritual depth as ‘God’. Others, however, especially perhaps Buddhists, regard that term as too anthropomorphic and limited (it is a personal and masculine term, after all). They use other terms, like ‘Pure Mind’, or ‘Suchness’ or even ‘the Ultimate’. I will continue to use the word God – it is a nice short word – but I want to say very clearly that I am really talking about spiritual values, and about the sense of spirituality, which I take to be a concern with values of the mind and heart, values which really exist in reality, and which are felt to be higher than the values of any purely human mind. So I will also speak of ‘Spirit’, thinking of these values as known by some sort of non-human consciousness, and thus as existing in something more like a mind than like a stone or a tree – though something very unlike any human mind.
Almost all great philosophers, theologians, and spiritual writers, agree that God is just one way, and a particularly personal way, of speaking of Spirit. God is not a male person with a beard, sitting on a throne somewhere above the sky, or perhaps just outside the universe. Still, God is personal, and I am not going to assume that there is a personal God, or that all people with a spiritual sense believe they are encountering such a personal God. Nevertheless, many of them do. In fact many religious writers – sometimes called ‘mystics’ (though that word can be very misleading) – hardly think of God as personal or male or like human minds at all. One of the most famous definitions of God – among philosophers, anyway - was given by Anselm, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century. He said God is ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’.1
On this definition, God is a unique sort of reality which is more worth-while, of greater value, more worth knowing and contemplating just for its own sake, than anything else anyone can think of. Just what that reality would be is something we have to work out for ourselves by asking what we think the most worthwhile or valuable thing we imagine would be like. We might not be able to think of anything – in which case we will have no idea of God. If so, maybe we should just try harder. Different people might have different ideas of the most worth-while possible thing. Some will think of a personal being, even of a person. Others will think of an impersonal being, like Plato’s ‘the Good’, perhaps. Some will think of a being that constantly creates and changes. Others will think of a completely changeless and timeless being. There is plenty of room for disagreement. But most people will at least think of a reality which is more beautiful, more wise, more powerful, and more compassionate, than we are.
Of course, while this is a very famous definition, it does not follow that there really is a ‘greatest conceivable thing’, even though Anselm had a very irritating argument – the so-called ‘Ontological argument’ - to prove that there was, an argument which nobody believes but nobody can finally refute either. You can, after all, believe in a spiritual reality which is very great, but not able to do absolutely anything, and so not quite the ‘greatest conceivable being’. I want to think about such slightly lower-level spiritual realities too, and that is one reason why I will not always use the word ‘God’. But I will start with Anselm’s definition as the boldest and most interesting one, and later see whether it may need modifying when we compare it with the actual universe that we observe. Maybe it is worth pointing out, from the start, that Anselm’s God is probably not very like either a kindly and indulgent father or like a domineering tyrant either. We might spell out the idea of a ‘greatest conceivable being’ in a number of different ways, and they will probably not include either of these extreme and rather naive ideas. It is partly for that reason that I will sometimes use the rather less emotionally loaded word ‘Spirit’ instead.
It does not seem very likely that Spirit will be a person. Of course, if you think the most perfect possible thing is a person, it will seem likely to you. But even then it will be very different from a human person. Human persons have very limited power and knowledge, and are always making mistakes and doing things that are not very good. A personal spirit will have power unlimited by any other being and knowledge greater than that of any other being, will never make mistakes, and whatever it intends to do will be good (because the most worth-while possible being will always do very worth-while things). As Anselm said, God will actually be not just the greatest thing we can think of, but is likely to be much greater, much more perfect, than anything we can think of. So some people might say that Spirit is personal, but is much greater than any person, as we understand human persons.
Will Spirit have a body? That is, will it be a material thing, located somewhere in space, perhaps beyond the stars? Anselm thought not, and modern science would agree. There is a law in modern science, the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything in the universe runs down eventually. Every material thing in our universe sooner or later decays, and in billions of years the whole universe will cease to exist. If you think about it, it is obviously better not to decay and cease to exist. So if Spirit is the greatest conceivable being, or even, perhaps, the greatest thing there actually is, it will not be part of the material universe. Spirit will not be part of our space and time. Spirit will be non-material or spiritual. If it exists at all, it will be more like consciousness or mind. That is one way of describing God, but just to avoid arguments, I will not insist that everyone should call it God.
Believing in Spirit, then, is not believing that there is some sort of invisible person who interferes in arbitrary ways with the universe, for instance finding car-parking-spaces for his favourite people who ask very nicely, or sending earthquakes on people he especially dislikes. Believing in Spirit is believing that there is an existing state or reality of vast knowledge, understanding, freedom, beauty and happiness, not located anywhere in physical space, a spiritual reality of supreme value. Spirit will be supremely desirable and supremely worthy of reverence and admiration. This is not because it wants or needs our worship, as if worship was some sort of abject fawning. It is just because the natural response to such a being is one of awe, wonder, and admiration. If there is a Spirit, and if we could really become acquainted with it in some way, we could not help worshipping it, as the most beautiful and awe-inspiring being we could imagine.
It should be clear that looking for evidence for God, or for Spirit, or for spiritual reality, is not going to be like looking for evidence for some exotic animal or for an invisible teapot. Looking for that sort of evidence is like looking for footprints, or chewed leaves that will show an animal has been there. But a purely spiritual being does not leave footprints or chew leaves. If you wonder whether there is a reality of supreme understanding, beauty, and bliss, you are not going to find that out by looking for visible marks that some physical object makes. Spirit is not a physical object, so we will not be looking for evidence for something physical.
There can be evidence for spiritual things, but it will not be like evidence for physical objects. Even when physicists look for evidence for tiny sub-atomic particles that can never be observed, like quarks, they assume those particles are physical in some sense. They have location in space, they move about in space, and they have physical impacts on other particles. Spirit is not like that. The main and most important evidence for Spirit will be evidence for the existence of non-physical supreme values. There is such evidence, but it is going to be very unlike evidence for electrons or quarks. Maybe that is why some scientists say there is no evidence for God or for spiritual reality. They are imagining, wrongly, that there is some sort of physical thing (made of very thin or transparent matter, perhaps), which might leave tracks in a cloud –chamber, or tell-tale marks on a computer screen. But Spirit is not physical at all. So it is not surprising that there is no evidence of that sort. A different sort of evidence is needed.
Looking for evidence for spiritual values
What sort of evidence could there be for a spiritual, non-physical, reality of supreme value? When we ask for evidence, we are usually thinking of some physical marks or traces. Are there any physical marks or traces of a supremely valuable being in the universe as we experience it? I am sure that there are, but there is a problem. Not everyone would agree about such evidence. Some people see the universe as cruel and violent; some see it as just boring and uninteresting; some see it as just ‘one damn thing after another’. Some people even commit suicide, because they cannot face existing in a universe like this.
We have to respect such feelings. They are personal and deeply emotional responses to the world as we experience it. We do not, after all, see our experience as experience of a neutral world. We see it as charged with feeling-elements, with dangers, threats, beauties and terrors. ‘All knowledge begins with experience’, said British Empiricist philosophers like Hume and Locke and Berkeley.2 I agree with that, and if we are going to find any evidence for spiritual reality, we will have to begin with experience. But it is not at all obvious what ‘experience’ is. It usually comes through our senses – sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. But is it confined to things like colours, shapes, noises, and touches? Obviously not, because we say that our senses ‘tell us’ that there is a world of three-dimensional solid objects out there. Our sense-impressions communicate information about a physical external world.
But is that all they do? Some philosophers, like the well-known English philosopher A. J. Ayer (who once tried to teach me) have tried to separate feelings completely from sense-perceptions. He suggested that our sense-perceptions (which he called ‘sense-data’) tell us about a world of facts, which are neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly. They just are. Then we react to things, by purely subjective responses of liking or disliking. These are subjective feelings, Ayer said, because they do not really belong to the things themselves. They are just reactions we happen to have to things. They are not objective properties of the things themselves. Different people have different feeling reactions to things. Such reactions are purely subjective, and tell us nothing about the real world.3
But is that true? Do our feelings tell us nothing about the world? After all, if we see a lion approaching us rather rapidly, we do not say that we first have some perfectly objective lion-shaped visual perceptions, and then we have a purely subjective feeling of fear. Lions really are threatening, and we do not just see some perfectly neutral sense-data. We perceive a real threat, and the feeling of fear is part of that perception. Feelings are part of our experience. So if we find the world depressing or pointless, or if we find it beautiful and exciting, this is not just our subjective reaction to our experience. It is part of how we experience the world, part of how it appears to us.
Of course, people experience the world in different ways. But then they perceive the world in different ways too. You just cannot separate off your perceptions completely from your feeling-responses to the world, and say that one is objective and the other is not. What is really out there is, of course, seen from your own point of view. But that does not mean it is not real. It is what is real, from your point of view.
When you think about it, your perceptions are not really of ‘things’, independently existing solid objects, after all (well, not according to the Empiricists’ official doctrine, anyway). All our perceptions – the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes that we have – are in a way ‘subjective’ too. They are not really properties of separately existing things, and we can never even be really sure that ‘things’ exist, when we are not looking at them.
We know that the sights, sounds, and so on that we have are constructed by the mind, and are not ‘pictures’ of real things out there. Electro-magnetic vibrations of waves with a frequency between the infra-red and the ultra-violet hit the retinas of our eyes, cause electro-chemical impulses to race to about thirty different areas of our brains, which then produce a picture of three dimensional solid coloured objects. But anybody who knows about the physiology of perception knows that this picture is a construct which the mind fills in from data which are very different in reality.
So what makes us think that our so-called ‘subjective reactions’ are not just as real and ‘objective’ as our sense-perceptions are? Might our feelings not tell us, just as our sense-perceptions do, something about the world we experience? Feelings are constructed by the mind, just as our perceptions are, so who is to say that they do not reflect something about the reality we encounter in experience?
Our point of view might not be a very good one. It may be clouded by all sorts of preconceptions and inaccurate beliefs. But it is still a point of view of something out there. It is not just a fantasy conjured up by our minds which has no relation to what is real. Of course there are fantasies and delusions. But the very fact that we call them fantasies shows that we are able to distinguish normal beliefs and fantasies. Not all our beliefs about the world can be fantasies. The hard problem is to find a reliable way of making the distinction between reality and delusion. But that there is a distinction to be made is not in doubt.
If you accept this you might say that our feelings normally, when they are working properly, give us a special sort of access to reality. They reveal values (things that we admire and love) and disvalues (things that we fear and dislike) to us. Human knowledge is not a sort of mechanical registering of information, with values being added on as an after-thought to what we perceive. Human knowledge is essentially experience of values and disvalues, so that we perceive things related to us in threatening or inspiring ways, to which we may be more or less sensitive, depending on our own preconceptions and ways of relating to the world. This is where we might start looking for evidence of spiritual values.
It seems reasonable to say that all human knowledge begins with experience, and that our experience is of values that we seem to perceive as somehow there in reality. Human knowledge is not just the recording of neutral facts or sense-perceptions. If we explore various areas of human experience where we seem to encounter such objective values, we might find that these are values that really exist whether we acknowledge them or not. We perceive them from our own personal point of view, with all our inherited and learned prejudices, special interests, and capabilities. But they can reveal to us something important about reality.
In the following sections of this book, I will look at six main areas of human experience: at the arts, at morality, at philosophy, at science, at religion, and at personal experience. In each area, I will try to show that there are special experiences of values, and that these experiences are evidence for the existence of more than simply physical facts, even though they are closely related to physical facts. When you take all these areas together, the evidence builds up to an impressive argument for seeing the world that we experience as communicating spiritual values – a ‘sense for the spiritual dimension’, that is beyond and yet expressed in and through physical facts.
Not everybody would associate this spiritual sense with God. That is partly because many people think of God as a rather nasty or despotic person who stops people doing what they want, and is often angry and vindictive. We might set aside such an idea of God, however, and think of God, as Anselm did, as the most perfect and desirable being there could possibly be. Then we could say that believing in God is believing that all the different objective spiritual values we experience are expressions of one reality of supreme value, which is the source of all the values we can experience. This is what the philosopher Plato called ‘the Good-and-Beautiful’. Plato thought that philokalia, the love of the good and beautiful, is the highest human activity.4 ‘The Good’ is also, with some slight amendments, what most theologians and philosophers have called God. It is what I am calling Spirit.
I want to argue that if we put it like that, there are lots of human experiences that are, taken together, good evidence for Spirit. But of course to accept that means that we have to interpret our experiences in a special way, as experiences of a transcendent spiritual dimension. Not everybody will do that. We would have to cultivate a special sensibility, the spiritual sense, to do it. So the evidence is not convincing evidence for everybody. All the same, it is evidence. And it is enough to make belief in Spirit a reasonable and fulfilling part of our mental life. Belief in Spirit will not be a mere leap of faith without any supporting evidence. It will be a fully rational and sensitive approach to the richest and most important parts of human experience.
2.
SPIRITUAL VALUES IN ART AND BEAUTY
Art as ‘mediating evidence’
I will begin by looking at the sense of beauty, which we find both in nature and in art. Painting, sculpture, music, drama, literature, and dance are all forms of art, of creating beautiful forms that can be contemplated and enjoyed just for their own sake. Art can have a sense of meaning and value that seems to convey a sense of transcendence, of something conveyed in and through physical forms, yet having a reality that is more than just physical. This sense can be experienced in two main ways, in the creative process of composing artistic works, and in the contemplative process of enjoying and appreciating them. Artistic creativity and appreciation are two of the main values that reveal a spiritual dimension of life to humans, two major forms of spiritual value.
The ancient Greeks spoke of the Muses as inspiring goddesses who helped them to create beautiful forms. Many artists through the ages have felt a power of inspiration that seems to work through them, almost to use them to bring into being new forms of beauty. When an artist creates a new work of art, he or she naturally works within a tradition which has been built up over many years. Yet traditions constantly change and develop, sometimes in novel ways, and originality of vision and technique is a quality greatly prized in artists. Great art is the bringing into being of the new, of something never seen before, constructed by the sheer power of creativity.