The Currents of our Minds (The Wild One: Part Three)

All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally organically founded.

– William James

In my small, Christ-drunk hometown, it would have been nearly impossible to have grown up untouched by Christianity, and I grew up seeing the world through a Christian lens. For instance, had anyone asked me what god was, I would have offered, “a Supreme Being with a will and personality”, which is to say, I would have returned to them the Christian deity in a slightly abstract form.

Again, for religion, I would have said, “the belief in and worship of a Supreme Being”.  If heaven and hell existed, then I expected them to exist as metaphysical realms, and not, say, as radical shifts in how we experience the world.  And — in a subtle way — it would simply never have occurred to me that belief in god was any different from knowing god.  That is, if you happened to have true or accurate beliefs about god, then you knew god.  What could be more obvious than that?

Of course, that’s like saying if your beliefs about a certain oak are correct, then you know that oak.  But what happens if you yourself have never met the tree, and have only been told about it?  Even if what you’ve been told is reliably accurate, do you still know the oak?

Logos is a word sometimes used to mean the sort of knowledge you would have of an oak if you had never experienced the tree itself, but had nevertheless been given accurate information about it.  In contrast, gnosis is a word sometimes use to mean the sort of knowledge you would have of that oak if your knowledge matched your actual experience of the tree.

As you might recall, painful though your experience of recalling might be: In my previous post in this series, I introduced my amazingly brilliant admittedly simple notion that the category of all things god ought to be abolished and replaced by at least two distinct categories: Things the domestic god, and things the wild god.  A reason I offered for the two categories in place of one was the fact there seem to be two kinds of god, which, among other things, are known to us in different ways.  As Thomas Aquinas eventually discovered, you can gnosis the wild god.  And as Meister Eckhart pointed out, it is highly problematic to what extent, if any, you can logos the wild god.

But it’s different with the domestic god.  You can only gnosis the domestic god in the trivial way you can gnosis a conscious thought.  Instead, knowledge of the domestic god is all but entirely logos.  Put differently, everything we might know about the domestic god that is of any importance comes to us as second-hand information.  Or as scholars sometimes say, our knowledge of that god is revealed to us.

We believe the Bible is the infallible, inspired word of God.

– Words shamelessly stolen just moments ago from a Southern Baptist Church website by the post author.

I once had a friend, Michael, who I was never quite certain fully grasped the crucial distinction between our logos and our gnosis of something. That is, he seemed to always think he knew something if he merely knew about it.  Hence, I suspected he might believe such things as reading an article on wood carving had turned him into a carver.  One day, a group of us were sitting around a coffee shop doing nothing more important with our lives than talking about when we’d lost our virginity.  Michael stopped the conversation when he said, matter of factly, “I lost mine when I was eight”.  Then, after a pause, “That’s when I read the chapter on reproduction in my sister’s biology textbook”.

If Michael had not grinned after saying that, I would have half-suspected him of being serious.

◄ How the Domestic God Comes to Have Meaning to Us ►

Meaning is not what you start with, but what you end up with.

– Peter Elbow

At this point, you might well be wondering how the domestic god has the power to convince so many of us of its ultimate reality if it is no more real to us — in terms of our experiencing it — as reading about getting laid is getting laid.  And that question now brings us — as eagerly as a hand approaching a breast on prom night — to the origins of the domestic god.  For, once we understand how the domestic god was born, we will understand why the domestic god is so plausible to us.

I should first alert you to the fact — if you don’t know it already — that scientists and scholars have come up with a gazillion theories about the origins of deity.  Consequently, anyone who decides to delve into the topic will find it increasingly complicated.  Only one lucky truth happens to save us all from being overwhelmed by the sheer number of explanations there are for the origin of deities.  That is, by good fortune, all of those explanations are quite obviously wrong except for the few I like.  I don’t often brag, but I believe I might be the first person to have discovered that amazing fact.  Call it, if you will, my one modest contribution to the science and scholarship of Bubba.

There’s something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.

– Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Let me begin, then, by pointing out that religiosity is a human universal.  At least, certain aspects of our religiosity are common to all cultures.  People everywhere believe there is a spirit or soul that lives on after death; that prayer or ritual can change the course of events; and that illness and misfortune can be both caused and alleviated by invisible, but person-like, entities such as spirits, ghosts, dead saints, demons, dead ancestors, and gods.  Thus, there is a core religiosity common to all of humanity.

As I’ve mentioned, there are a gazillion explanations for how our core religiosity originated. But if we scientifically winnow those theories down to the ones that can still rivet my attention when I would otherwise be thinking of sex, then we find only a few of those theories are compelling enough to warrant mention here.  Besides their charm, those few have in common that they root human religiosity in the natural functions of the brain.  In other words, I think our core religiosity can be wholly explained without reference  to supernatural causes.   We do not, so far as I can see, need to posit the existence of spirits in order to explain why spirits are everywhere believed in.  We need only look to our own brains.

Perhaps the most important things our brains do to create our religiosity is they make certain assumptions or guesses about the world.  That is, our brains don’t merely mirror the world, they instead tend to project onto the world certain meanings or notions, such as the notion events have a plot to them, the notion other people have minds just like we do, and the notion sudden disturbances in our environment are caused by harmful creatures.  Scientists (who have very deserved reputations for coming up with the most fascinating names for things), fascinatingly call the three notions I just mentioned:

• Causal reasoning, which is our predilection to spontaneously organize a series of events into a chain of causes and effects, and which we might more simply call, “our tendency to think events have a plot”.
• Theory of Mind,  which is our predilection to assume or “theorize” that other people (and often enough other things) have a mind just like we ourselves do, and which we might more simply call “our tendency to think things have a mind”.
• Agent Detection, which is our predilection to assume or infer that sudden noises, movements, and other disturbances in our immediate environment are caused by something capable of wanting to do us harm, and which we might more simply call, “our tendency to jump in fright at unexpected noises, sudden movements, and weddings“.

I humbly now wish to publicly retract everything I have ever in my whole life said to anyone about the ability of scientists to have even one godforsaken clue about the difference between a fascinating name and, say, a ten-page account of an earthworm’s thrilling night spent churning dead leaves into undifferentiated mulch.  It is my dream to someday live in a community of artists and scientists.  But honesty requires me to acknowledge the names scientists give things frequently suck.  I expect I will be living on H. heidelbergensis Drive.

Moving on, those three predilections are rooted in our natural brain functions, and they probably evolved for various reasons that have nothing to do, really, with producing our unadorned, core religiosity.  For instance, Agent Detection most like evolved because it helped us survive by making us ready to face danger, rather than helped us survive by making us ready to think of  spirits.  When we assumed that a sudden movement in the bushes indicated danger, we then readied ourselves to face it. But, when we assumed that movement indicated our best friend, Og, was waiting in the bushes with open arms and warm smile, we did not ready ourselves to face danger.  Lions must have loved snacking on us in the days before Agent Detection.

Yet, once Agent Detection had evolved, it was not much of a leap for us to assume that unexplained sudden movements in the bushes — movements that turned out to be neither a lion, nor Og, nor anything else we could see — must still be caused by Agents of some sort. Only now they seemed to us invisible agents, or spirits.

Imagine the world for us before those three predilections evolved.  One day we see a volcano erupting.  A day or so later, Og, who seems never to get sick, gets sick.  We think, “How unusual!  First a volcano.  Now Og.”  Then we shrug and go back to whatever we were doing — which, knowing the kind of ancestors we must have had, was probably either daydreaming about sex or trying to figure out how to poke someone we didn’t especially like with a pointy stick.

Now, imagine the same series of events after those three predilections evolved.  One day we see a volcano erupting.  Naturally (naturally, now that we’ve evolved Agent Detection), we assume the eruption is caused by an Agent — that is, something with a malevolent will.  And naturally (now), we wonder what’s on that Agent’s mind, since we have also evolved Theory of Mind.  A day or so later, Og, who seems never to get sick, gets sick.  Suddenly, causal reasoning kicks in and we see the two events as linked by cause and effect.  Thus, their meaning becomes obvious to us: The Volcano Spirit is pissed at Og and has made him sick.  We must help Og!  Let’s go shove pointy sticks in the Volcano! And if that doesn’t work, maybe we should give the Volcano Spirit a virgin to appease Him with sex.

If you’re like me, this discussion of current scientific thinking on the subject, however superficial, has still managed to give you an accurate insight or two into what might once have long ago been the very first birth pangs of the domestic god.  The scientists are obviously  trying to communicate to us that our belief in spirits and such evolved because we were super-apes who had cool pointy sticks and plenty of hot volcanic sex, right?

As Albert Einstein once famously said, “And yet, such an attitude would be wrong”.

Although Einstein actually did say those very words, they were in an essay on an entirely unrelated subject.  I quoted them here, not because they are relevant, but because I can imagine how it must have been quite an experience back in the day to have the Albert Einstein say to you, “And yet, such an attitude would be wrong.”  And, apparently, one of the key reasons I can imagine that experience as somewhat bordering on the brink of being awesome, is because we humans have — in addition to the predilections I have already mentioned — a natural inclination to elevate our warm and fuzzy feelings towards our parents, and perhaps old folks in general, into something akin to ancestor worship.

There are several other mechanisms native to our brains that might help create in us a core human religiosity.  A good discussion of them can be found here (.pdf file).  Assuming the scientists are correct, we now understand how the world for us came to be full of invisible entities such as spirits, dead ancestors, and even gods of a sort.

◄ Summary and Conclusion ►

Still, we have not yet fully explained the origins of the domestic god.

For the domestic god is a much more theologically elaborate concept than what might be brought about solely by the cognitive predilections and inclinations that I have referred to.  Moreover, the domestic god is not only more theologically elaborate, but the domestic god typically functions in ways that are not fully explained by the cognitive predilections mentioned.  In short, there’s still more to this.

We would only be kidding ourselves if thought we now have, say, Shiva in a nutshell, or that we have encompassed Christ, or analyzed Allah, or provided for Pete.  Pete, of course, is not a god, but I’m just saying for the record, we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we had provided for the poor guy.  So, in the next post in this series, I will complete my discussion of how the domestic god was born.  From there, we will go onto a discussion of how the wild god was born (For the domestic god and the wild god were born of different parents).  And then we will turn our attention to discussing a certain kind of love.  That kind of love is sometimes identified with god.  But which god?

Perhaps we can return now to the question of why most of us are convinced the domestic god exists even though none of us have experienced the domestic god.  I think the answer to that question is now apparent.  Those of us who do not believe in spirits, or to some extent, those of us who do not believe in the domestic god, are swimming against the currents of our mind.  It is easier for us to believe in spirits, and even easier for us to believe in the domestic god, than it is for us to disbelieve.

“What do you think of God,” the teacher asked.  After a pause, the young pupil replied, “He’s not a think, he’s a feel.”

– Paul Frost

In the end, all the world’s reasoned arguments for the existence of the domestic god have in all likelihood convinced far fewer people that god exists than the many more people who have been convinced by the currents in their own minds that he exists.  We began this post by pointing out that our knowledge of the domestic god is logos, rather than gnosis.  And so it is.  But we should now add, our logos of the domestic god is to some large degree compounded and supported by what might be called, “inherent cognitive prejudices or predilections”.

Now, there is a final point I think it worth making here before I happily hie myself to much funner pastures than logos and gnosis.   We should not make the mistake of thinking our knowledge of the domestic god, or our knowledge of his or her teachings, worldview, etc. are insubstantial crap just because our knowledge of such things is logos rather than gnosis.  Nor should we make the same mistake even if it proves to be the case that some of our beliefs about the domestic god are derived from ways in which our brains have farted down through a million or more years of our painful, yet amazingly progressive, evolution from hairy super-apes with pointy sticks and a tendency to poke our neighbor to nearly hairless super-apes with cool bombs and a tendency to blow up our neighbor.  Logos matters. Thoughts matter. So-called “mere” words do matter.  As  Siddhartha Guatama is said to have said:

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.

Many sages, living in all places and all ages of history, have agreed with Sid that our thoughts and words significantly influence our lives.  We should never underestimate the domestic god, though we know him or her but as logos.

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