Many people are talking about David Brooks’ new column, The Neural Buddhists. First, I think much respect should be given to Brooks for introducing science into his column; too much punditry today is informed by seat of the pants introspection & anecdote, as opposed to what scholars have uncovered thanks to the funding of the taxpayer. That being said, I think on the specifics there are problems with his interpretation of the literature in the area of neuroscience. Frontal Cortex, Island of Doubt and Evolution Blog have all hit the main points (though I tend to think that Jonah’s reaction most closely reflects my own). I think the idea that neuroscience lends some weight to the validity of mysticism as such is about as plausible as the contention that cosmology buttresses the case for a Creator. These results are interpreted through a filter contingent upon your prior beliefs; for those looking for confirmation of their spirtual or metaphysical beliefs science will no doubt offer it because of the vast sample space of findings and the imperfect mapping of words to the phenomena being described.
But this dynamic is I think the most important point about Brooks’ column; most people are just disclined toward being hard-core materialists who subscribe to a spare atheism. That’s an empirical fact. I recently pointed out that even after two generations of state supported atheist materialism the majority of Chinese still avow some sort of supernatural belief; and if you listen to the news reports about the Chinese earthquake you will know that many are burning paper money which the dead might use in the afterlife. The banality and ubiquity of these sorts of behaviors in our species suggest to me that Brooks also has the disciplinary focus off in terms of relevance to public policy or modeling social phenomena; neurotheology and its fascination with mysticism focuses on atypical and extreme psychological states and individuals, cognitive psychology and the prosaic day to day function of religious practice and belief capture a much larger proportion of human experience and so are more useful for prediction of the bulk of the distribution of human behavior.
I suspect that these arguments for mysticism derived from science apply most to elites, the cultural creatives if you will. And it is among these same elites that you have the most vocal scientific materialists who would deny the reality of the numinous. Though I do believe that elites are very important, I think too often they forget that the vast majority of humanity is not, by definition, elite. Even within Buddhism there is a separation between the philosophical and mystical elite, often monks, and the religion of the vast majority which is much closer to devotional theism. Since Buddhism became popular among Western elites during the 19th century the philosophical and mystical dimension of practice has always been emphasized as the more authentic and pure variant, with the operationally theistic devotees of movements such as Pure Land being dismissed as “debased” or “corrupted,” but at the end of the day I believe this is just reflecting a class bias (similarly, “folk Catholicism” as “syncretistic”).
Nevertheless, one of the widely applicable results which the neuroscientists are uncovering is the powerful role that emotion plays in our cognition. Additionally, psychologists have long emphasized the importance of implicit cognition. This material reality is something I believe many scientific materialists do not adequately confront; genuine ratiocination is only a thin slice of human cognitive phenomena. It stands to reason then that arguments against religion or spirituality based upon its irrationality will generally fail, because yes, it is irrational, and people believe fundamentally because they are irrational. In fact, one might inject a bit of humility into the discourse and offer that scientific materialists themselves hold many irrational beliefs! (that is, beliefs they hold not through rational reflection, but because of emotional response or social conformity) Of course, I do believe on the margins a minority of humans are amenable to arguments against theism or metaphysical phenomena because of their own peculiar cognitive biases; but I think the route of argumentation from axioms and the coherency of inferences is always going to exhibit diminishing returns if you persist over time. I suspect that theist arguments for God based on innate psychology fall flat precisely because some individuals only weakly manifest the intuitions which are presupposed; but inversely, I also believe that some of the cognitive parameters which characterize convinced materialists are lacking in the majority of humans, so their arguments may seem strange & inhuman indeed. Ultimately, a great product does not sell itself without reference to the nature of the consumer.
Related: Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison and M. B. Dougherty respond to the column as well….
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