Latest News
Listen to June-Elleni interviewing Howard on My Spirit Radio by clicking here
Howard's latest book, The Tao of Holism, was published earlier this year. For more information, click here.
Look out for Howard's most recent articles in:
Kindred Spirit, Spring 2008 - A World Without Music.
Healing Today (NFSH magazine), Issue 112, May-July 2008 - Why Healing Isn't Superstition.
Network Review (Scientific & Medical Network journal), Issue 96, Spring 2008 - The God Confusion. (The publication of this article coincided with a lecture Howard gave at The University of Wales in Lampeter on 28 May 2008).
|
|
Is religion just superstition? |
|
Written by Howard Jones
|
|
Monday, 31 March 2008 16:09 |
|
Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford has taken issue with religion for some years now, the argument being that if we cannot subject religious experiences to the rigour of scientific double-blind tests, then it must be rejected as ‘superstitious nonsense’. Dawkins maintains that religion is an enemy of reason and the root of all evil as well.
Science has made the progress it has because similar experiments on similar materials are supposed to give identical results at different times and places. In practice however, there are always ‘experimental errors’ and human errors that have to be taken into account. Equipment doesn’t always behave in exactly the same way. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli was renowned for the disruptive effects he had on measuring equipment in any laboratory he visited, and some measuring apparatus can be sensitive to electromagnetic fields and humidity.
Furthermore, scientists of course are human and we are subject to the same errors and emotions as everyone else. It’s always satisfying when an experiment turns out exactly the way we planned, so we are all looking for a particular outcome, however objective and professional we try to be. The security in science comes from the repeatability of an experiment by different people.
Science has developed a technique for trying to eliminate human bias in assessing results and that is through what we call ‘the double blind test’. The double-blind test has become the standard scientific method of testing the validity of empirical evidence. The principle is that a neutral observer assigns numbers to some test materials or subjects and that neither the experimenters themselves nor the assessors of the results, nor the subjects themselves very often, know the identities of the subjects or the exact nature of the test until all the results have been analysed. Only then are the identities of the subjects disclosed, or patients are told whether or not they have received a drug or placebo, so that the success of the experiment can be evaluated impartially.
Religious experiences are most difficult to assess in this way. The subject knows whether or not they have had such an experience – there is no possibility of keeping them in the dark as to the nature of the trial, and the assessment of a mystical event has to be highly subjective, by its very nature. The affirmation of mystical events comes mainly from the fact that different people at different times and places have similar experiences – as is the case in a more restricted way with scientific experiments.
Also, just as herbal medicine has been established through thousands of years of successful use (probably with many calamities along the way in the early years!), so any claimed revelation or mystical experience has to be judged by its coherence and social value. Taking a completely pragmatic approach we have to ask: are the claims reasonable and do they work in practice for the enlightenment of the individual and cohesion of society?
In the pluralistic modern world, where we are all aware of many more faiths than that with which we were brought up by our parents, we are able to make choices – we can change our religious adherence to another faith, or to hold fast to a cosmic spirituality as our faith but to dispense with the dogma of a formal religion. This is what many within Britain are now doing. It provides a much more holistic world-view than if we insist on the veracity of any one set of religious principles. Inevitably, this implies that everyone else is wrong in their beliefs. An ancient eastern philosopher recommends that we
Find enlightenment through heeding many points of view
Find ignorance through heeding few
Wei Zheng, Tang Dynasty
Making choices as to which religion most closely accords with our world-view and the life we wish to lead is using reason in assessing the claims of revelation by the prophets or seers. This is far removed from superstition, which is defined as ‘irrational belief in supernatural agency without evidence’.
Furthermore, we are not so much believing in a supernatural agency as believing that the words of one particular man contain a wisdom that we would benefit from following, whether those words represent divine revelation or not. And it is usually men who have served as prophets of the major world religions though, in the nineteenth century, Mary Baker Eddy claimed inspiration from the New Testament to found the Christian Science movement and Helena Blavatsky wrote her book The Secret Doctrine, under the guidance of her spirit guides Morya and Hoot Koomi, that provided the foundations of theosophy. In the East, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu and Kung Fu Tzu never claimed any kind of supernatural revelation for their wisdom.
There is ample evidence, some of it gathered under stringent scientific criteria, of the occurrence of events that are classed together as psychic events or psi. The most studied are forms of telepathy and Guy Lyon Playfair has written authoritatively on the subject in his book, Twin Telepathy. But there are numerous anecdotal accounts of clairvoyance or of contact with discarnate souls that have been verified as genuine by those concerned.
We are dealing here with evidence of individual human experiences and we cannot sensibly apply the same sort of criteria of verification and repeatability that we would do in science for experiments with test tubes or lumps of rock. Even when we turn to experiments with animals or animal tissues, there is much greater variability in results than when we examine inert materials. How much greater then must we expect variability to be when we deal with human subjects with their range of daily emotional experiences.
The potential energy field that underlies all matter at the quantum level has been suggested by several scientists as the medium through which psychic and mystical communication may occur. It is a concept that has been suggested in other fields of human endeavour, such as psychology and philosophy.
Carl Jung believed that the recurrence of certain mythical images he called archetypes, like an incarnate son of a sky god who is resurrected after death, takes place because humans possess a collective unconscious for the exchange of images through space and time. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake called a similar spiritual domain the morphic field.
The idea goes back to the dawn of human articulation of such ideas amongst the Greek philosophers. Plato believed that human concepts had their origin in a domain of the gods he called the Forms or Ideas. Our earthly concepts were a reflection of those held in the realm of a universal spirit.
Thus many people use reason in arriving at their religious beliefs. The spiritual dimension is an integral part of the human psyche and an all-pervading spiritual field of energy forms the ground of quantum physics. This is not superstition!
This essay was first published in the Tree of Life magazine in autumn 2007 (www.treeoflifemagazine.com) and a reworked version on the same theme was published in De Numine, the magazine of the Alister Hardy Society No.44 in Spring 2008 (www.lamp.ac.uk).
Back to the top
|
|
