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Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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LanDroid

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Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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Proposition: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God

Debaters for the proposition:
Heather Berlin, Cognitive Neuroscientist
Michael Shermer, Founder, The Skeptics Society & Best-Selling Author

Debaters against the proposition:
Dr. Deepak Chopra, Integrative Medicine Advocate & Best Selling Author
Dr. Anoop Kumar, Emergency Physician & Author, “Michelangelo’s Medicine”

Tuesday 3/27/18 from 7 - 8:45 pm EST US

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/d ... e-need-god

=> I believe it's possible to live stream this debate while chatting about it live here on BookTalk, but I've lost track of those details. We've done this before, perhaps Chris can help out...
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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Proposition: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God
I can't help but think they first need to debate what does "God" actually mean. Because God means something different to everyone. Deepak for example probably thinks God is an universal "consciousness" while fundamentalists think he's a jealous, vindictive deity, so very much like humans.

Anyway, thanks for posting, Landroid. I'll try to drop in.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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geo wrote:
Proposition: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God
I can't help but think they first need to debate what does "God" actually mean. Because God means something different to everyone. Deepak for example probably thinks God is an universal "consciousness" while fundamentalists think he's a jealous, vindictive deity, so very much like humans.

Anyway, thanks for posting, Landroid. I'll try to drop in.
That's the way I see it too, geo. Long ago I watched a debate with a similar proposition on William F. Buckley's show. It was a bit of a fizzle because the science guy said he, too, considers himself a Christian, yet he believes strongly in the theory of evolution. Buckley, for once, was flummoxed. Right off the bat, the proposition would need to specify that God is something like the Abrahamic God. Then you'd have a satisfying challenge set out for the debaters.

If somebody says to me that God is universal consciousness, I say ok, sure, I guess that makes sense. There is nothing I can see to argue about or make a fuss over.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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Don't know if you watched, geo, but you called that one. Consciousness was king for the side opposing the proposition. That side right off dropped all pretense of defending God as that entity has been understood over the centuries. I thought the two guys were saying that consciousness, constituting this force larger than ourselves, is what we need to comprehend as God. But exactly for what purpose or what necessity, they were at a loss to explain. The for side made the stronger case that humanity has the tools to improve the world, tools that derived essentially from the Enlightenment. God, whether understood in the traditional sense or the newer and more vague one, isn't required. Individuals may still feel some personal need for God-concepts, and the for side had no problem with that. They denied that we, the collective, need God to advance the humanistic goals that religion itself has, however partially and inconsistently, always promoted.
Last edited by DWill on Wed Mar 28, 2018 6:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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DWill wrote:Don't know if you watched, geo, but you called that one. Consciousness was king for the side opposing the proposition. That side right off dropped all pretense of defending God as that entity has been understood over the centuries. I thought the two guys were saying that consciousness, constituting this force larger than ourselves, is what we need to comprehend as God. But exactly for what purpose or what necessity, they were at a loss to explain. The for side made the stronger case that humanity has the tools to improve the world, tools that derived essentially from the Enlightenment. God, whether understood in the traditional sense or the newer and more vague one, isn't required. Individuals may still feel some personal need for God-concepts, and the for side had no problem with that. They denied that we, the collective, need God to advance the humanistic goals that religion itself has, however partially and inconsistently, always promoted.
Thanks, DWill. I didn't get to watch it. It seems these debates are not really intended to resolve our differences or come to an understanding. It's all entertainment.

Belief in "God" used to help us socially bond, but now I would say the concept only serves as a personal inspiration/identity for some people, and in vastly different ways. A universal consciousness has no meaning at all to Christian fundamentalists, but these kinds of debates at least give them a side to root for. Deepak Chopra is very good at sounding science-ish while speaking utter gibberish. Without actually defining "God" we all sort of just stab at the shadows, and maybe that's entertaining.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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geo wrote:
Proposition: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God
I can't help but think they first need to debate what does "God" actually mean. Because God means something different to everyone.
Better still, it might be good to clarify what we mean by "need God." My position is that the more we "evolve" (culturally) the more we embody God.

There is a basis for arguing that traditionally humans needed an enforcer God, who cared more about following Law than even about the success or failure of "His" chosen people. But within traditional Jewish religion there is already a claim that as people improve (and repent) they will have God's law "written on their hearts." And that is older in Judaism than the notion of punishment and reward in an afterlife, basically a Persian introduction.

Why would we need an enforcer God? Because powerful people do stuff to others (like threaten them if they talk about an affair to the press) because they can. Because impunity. If the community agrees that such people "deserve punishment" (like Harvey Weinstein being shunned) whether in the afterlife or not, then such a God is being embodied. And is that something we need? You tell me.

More interesting to me is the question why we need a forgiving, loving God. It gets a lot of attention among Progressive Christians (and Jews), but I don't sense much awareness among the skeptical community. Maybe they have another word to suggest for what is being embodied if the community agrees that forgiveness, love and reconciliation are more effective than punishment and shunning?
DWill wrote:Right off the bat, the proposition would need to specify that God is something like the Abrahamic God. Then you'd have a satisfying challenge set out for the debaters.

If somebody says to me that God is universal consciousness, I say ok, sure, I guess that makes sense. There is nothing I can see to argue about or make a fuss over.
But fundamentalists and anti-theists have succeeded in defining an Abrahamic God as primarily jealous and punitive, with little understanding of the full range of relationship expressed even in the OT writings. I wonder how many who are fond of quoting the talking points against the Abrahamic God have any concept of the love and mercy expressed there. Check out the book of Jonah, sometime, or the book of Ruth. Check out the story of Joseph, who forgave the brothers who had sold him into slavery (as a "humane" alternative to killing him) and earned the title "tzaddik" (just or righteous one) in the Talmudic commentaries.

Do they understand that the same God who, it's claimed, brings punishing destruction on Israel and on the other kingdoms of the area, is also claimed by the same prophets to have in mind a new covenant, in which the law will be written on their hearts? To have in mind the dry bones of the decimated people being brought back to life by the spirit of God? To call for justice and mercy in a land where the poor can be bought and sold for a pair of shoes? (Much like the world of today.)

Universal consciousness is all very well. The Oversoul is better, because it has more content. But it is a real disappointment that the best IntelligenceSquared could come up with is New Age vapor. There are people out there, like Walter Brueggeman and Rob Bell, who could help people understand how much is at stake and get past all the clichés. This was not an example of Intelligence, much less Squared.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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Harry Marks wrote: the more we "evolve" (culturally) the more we embody God.
Yes, another way to express this is that God is the order of the cosmos that becomes conscious in the human brain.
Harry Marks wrote: why we need a forgiving, loving God… gets a lot of attention among Progressive Christians (and Jews), but I don't sense much awareness among the skeptical community. Maybe they have another word to suggest for what is being embodied if the community agrees that forgiveness, love and reconciliation are more effective than punishment and shunning?
This is the key evolutionary adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount, that divinity operates on the morality of forgiveness not revenge. The evolutionary point is that humans come to embody God as we live by mind rather than instinct. And yet in this fallen world instinct remains an immensely powerful driver of popular myth. The story of Jesus Christ is about overcoming the intuitive instincts in the Mosaic Law that equate justice with revenge, aiming instead for a consequentialist ethic where the results of our action are the key criterion of moral validity. Instead of the feeling of satisfaction and recompense from the ethic of ‘eye for an eye’, the focus of the Gospel ethic of forgiveness for repentance is what sort of shared world we are creating as the result of our responses.
Harry Marks wrote: Universal consciousness is all very well. The Oversoul is better, because it has more content. But it is a real disappointment that the best IntelligenceSquared could come up with is New Age vapor. There are people out there, like Walter Brueggeman and Rob Bell, who could help people understand how much is at stake and get past all the clichés. This was not an example of Intelligence, much less Squared.
Yes, it is worth a look at the Wikipedia pages for Brueggemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Brueggemann and Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Bell to find a more engaged perspective than some of the new age writers display.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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Robert and Harry, can you outline where you would have taken the question had you been on the panel? I'm thinking you'd be a bit more clear on the God part than was the against side. How might you have weakened or qualified the argument of the for side?
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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I am going to try to answer, for my part, in two parts. Rather than be clear on what "God" means, I will try to account for the disconnect between the conviction of Chopra and Kumar and their difficulties being persuasive. In a separate post, I will try to make some suggestions for how Shermer and Berlin might have been more faithful to the real issues at stake.

First, Chopra and his buddy are working with a kind of disadvantage, but they are not doing as well as they could to overcome that disadvantage. The disadvantage is that "the ground of Being" or "Being itself" both has some influence as a "phenomenon" and is quite literally undefinable. Looking at the same idea from another perspective, the practice which they represent is definitely better for both personal and moral existence, but no representation of it in concepts will, by itself, achieve those improvements. As a result it is easy to end up with what the other side called "a circular argument".

The disconnect comes because the practice, which is to distance oneself from "attachment" or emotional reaction to events and experiences, normally makes use of a particular conceptualization of what is going on. This may not be the only conceptualization that can work, but it is the one that has been established in practice. The conceptualization is that we "watch" our "thoughts". The practice then asks us to release itself from the "grip" of these thoughts, by observing it including the observation of it. In the traditional conceptualization, there is some more fundamental consciousness doing the observing. The process of thoughts running through our awareness is not the lowest stratum of consciousness. We literally cannot observe the lowest stratum because the process being observed requires some more fundamental process to be doing the observation.

Now, that all sounds pretty imaginary, pretty "constructed" out of interpretations, but it turns out it is an account that arose out of direct practice. As the yogis learned to calm the mind simply by observing thought, they experienced "unattributable" experience, including the oneness of everything. As far as I know that is not universal to everyone who sets out on the path, nor is it confined to India's cultures. But the unattributability is a kind of directly observable aspect of the experience: no external process gives rise to this (fairly replicable) experience. So interpretations of what is going on with it tend to take on the status of "truth" - that is, of replicable, observable aspects of reality. Our neuroscientific panelist notes that we can duplicate the experience (or at least some of the most salient signs of it) by stimulating particular parts of the brain. As a result, interpretations arguing that consciousness is "prior to" the brain and exists outside the brain tend to be discounted by secularists. Chopra and his colleague are still invested in the "external consciousness" interpretation, but I would argue they are so invested because of experience including benefits, not because of the sorts of arguments that scientific interpretations depend on.

It may be that we will construct a better account of this "unattributable" experience and why it arises from the extended experience of observing one's own thought process. If so, it will still involve some account of the lowest stratum of consciousness, the process of Being which is not subject to any objective characterization, and why making a practice of experiencing this tends to give rise to certain kinds of unattributable experiences.

But in the meantime, it is difficult to get around the fact that one of the experiences it gives rise to is moral transcendence. Not only do people "perceive" that there are fundamental unities which assert themselves despite the useful distinctions we have spent so much time mastering, but the result is a greater ability to empathize with others and respond to their needs. A kind of sorting of priorities takes place at the level of perceptions, without ever having engaged with the reasons for priorities or the perceptions.

Western interpretations tend to see this as a result of us seeing that no one "deserves" the marvel that is life in consciousness, that when we have finished prying loose all of those attachments we thought defined the purpose of life, the result is a stratum of joy so profound that we no longer see any need to be better, to live longer, to attract more mating opportunities, to be affirmed by more other people, to have more toys or more orgasms or more interesting foods. Those things are all fine, but we can get as much added pleasure by seeing someone else move from frustration to achievement as we can by our selves doing it. To experience that directly is to experience the universality of consciousness.

In many ways this is becoming the goal of literature, to the extent that it perceives itself as a single social process with goals and means. To access this transcendent joy, and demonstrate that empathetic experience opens the access to it, is something that music, art and literature have special abilities for. If we think about it, we can see this as their meaning even way back in their prehistoric origins - to deliver transcendence to particular aspects of life, so that we begin to feel the preciousness of life itself, and the meaning of that value in comparison to the shallow and transient goals that motivate us in more partial social processes of competing for status.

The Consciousness side of the debate failed by being caught up in the metaphysics of their understanding. They are not able, of course, to take people through a two or three year course of meditation to actually experience the transcendence that they are familiar with (and which does, sometimes, heal people). They should have argued that "we need the experience of empathy, and the communal process of cultivating it, even more than we did before science, and transcendent awareness is the way to reach that." Instead they ended up in pointless assertions about the primacy of consciousness itself, with no sense of how to link that to other people's ways of thinking about life. It doesn't really matter to them. The sociology of the New Age movement has always been a matter of recruiting those who are seeking, rather than offering everyone an account of life that will motivate them to take up the practice. I suspect that is because only upper castes could afford the leisure when the basics of this social process were being put together in India, but that's another story. My point is that their goals as well as their argumentation were at complete cross purposes to the debate structure and the other side's conceptualization of what was at issue.
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Re: Debate: The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God 3/27/18

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DWill wrote: How might you have weakened or qualified the argument of the for side?
Of course my ideal would be that they would sort their arguments according to which conception of God they were refuting the need for. Instead they treat all conceptions of God as the same, which makes as much sense as treating all of Islam as a single social movement, with the same motivations and the same understandings all the way through.

But that is not to be. Those on the outside of religion usually have in mind a version they are rejecting, and any other version, I can tell you from long experience, is treated as not legitimate, as some kind of one-off invention for debating purposes. So fine. They would not go about it the way I consider ideal. What else might they do?

The initial argument actually started with a very useful distinction, between God-as-explanation, which she called the God of the Gaps (for good reason, if you ask me) and the God in religious practice, which brings morality, comfort, a sense of belonging, and meaning. Her basic argument was that we can do without that second God, which means we don't "need" God by the typical definition of need. An honest approach. But it is not the same as whether God-in-practice makes things better than doing without. (A need case is stronger than a comparative advantage case, in debate terminology, but the second is usually easier to defend).

So a second good sorting would be between positive aspects of God-in-practice that are linked to the negative aspects, like tribalist rivalries, and other positive aspects that are "clean". Some would argue that to have a sense of community you have to build on tribalism, and that it is difficult in that context to avoid conflict, scapegoating and other negative social processes. But I would argue that as humanity "evolves" socially, we get better at having community without rivalry. And thus God-in-practice gets more helpful.

Another nasty side effect of religion, of all meaning structures, actually, is that they indicate those whom we should condemn and thus create candidates for scapegoats for the tensions and frustrations of the tribe. Do we get better at having meaning structures which function without "enemies"? I think so. Shermer tried to formulate that sort of thing, with some rather flabby talk about incentives for cooperation (he does not apparently believe that cooperation is meaningful in itself as a value).

In progressive religion this meaning-without-enemies goes by the name of "reconciliation" (and is functionally equivalent to atonement). Our skills for it are getting much better, over the decades, to the point where it has become a practical process for dealing with family violence and for reforming youthful offenders. The essential process of reconciliation is to bring an "offender" to the point of repentance by compelling them to engage with the victim, or the victims family if they have killed someone. This, I would argue, is a process of engaging with God. Without the God who is in our ability to meet each other as fully equal rather than as a thing to be used for our (other) purposes, reconciliation does not happen. So once again when there is a link between good-God and bad-God effects, our cultural evolution has led us to get better at the good-God processes and to be better at separating them from the bad-God processes.

A similar sort of thing happens with "clean" positive aspects, such as meaning and comfort, or meaning and morality. We get better at conceptualizing these processes and so we learn to be comforted without denial of reality, and to be moral without claiming it is due to force majeure.

It may be true that we build up skills that can be used without reference to the transcendent or the absolute, but Christian philosophers believe that the transcendent and the absolute are incorporated directly into the structure of these advanced skills.

To give a simple example, it was inevitable that countries with democracy as a core value, such as England and the U.S., would reject slavery. Why? Because the basis for choosing democracy is justice, and thus the system incorporates a rejection of injustice into all of the rationales for how it chooses to do things. It creates the equivalent of "cognitive dissonance" within an individual, when the system tries to behave according to principles of justice while at the same time building a rational infrastructure for dealing with slavery.

In a similar way, the God-who-persuades (as opposed to the God-who-compels) becomes a part of the very advancements that the No Need team cited. Thus they do not make us less needful of the God-who-persuades, but they do make us better incarnation of the God-who-persuades.
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