Think

To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 5

Opposite the mysterians are philosophers like Patricia Smith Churchland who is noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.

Patricia Churchland calls people like Martin Gardner "anti-enlightenment." She is proud of the human brain, its reasoning ability, its resourcefulness, and given enough time, she suspects, no question is unanswerable. Patricia Churchland strongly believes that there are no permanent mysteries and that in the end, no matter how far in time it will be, we will know it all.

In her book "Touching A Nerve" she states that "Ignorance is just ignorance" and that not knowing something doesn't mean we will never know it. To prove her point, Patricia Churchland goes back in history when authority figures argued that germs, earthquakes, atoms or volcanoes were considered forever outside the human understanding and even trying to explain them was considered trespassing on divine territory.

"But we trespassed." writes Patricia Churchland. "We asked. We probed. And we learned. People who say we will never fathom the nature of consciousness are just doing what previous authorities did - they are choosing to hide from knowledge; they're cowards."

"There is something smugly arrogant about thinking," she would also write, 'If I, with my great and wondrous brain, cannot imagine a solution to explain a phenomenon, then obviously the phenomenon cannot be explained at all. ... What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.' "

Interestingly enough, the website http://www.thebestschools.org/ lists Patricia Churchland as number 19 in its 50 Top Atheists in the World Today which makes her a very interesting case:

If the "limitless brain theory" will prove correct, Patricia Churchland may be among the atheists who found divinity. Perhaps even the god of her "opponent", Martin Gardner, who was a theist who admitted that he had no rational basis for his beliefs, and merely chose to believe them on faith because they made him feel better.

So, do we have any chance to ever "know-it-all"?

The inquisitiveness of our minds is considered one of the great qualities that define our species and differentiate us from the other animals as rational beings. Our analytical brain seems hardwired to search for every possible meaning of each piece of information we came across.

We strongly believe that this built-in reasoning mechanism is the sure way to understanding to greater extends the world around us.

But even if our brains' capacity and capabilities will somehow become limitless so we could physically be able store and process infinite information and correlations, there is one more element that has to be taken into account.

Time.

Because "know-it-all" actually means to know absolutely everything to the extent that there can never be anything to add. And for a being possessing absolute understanding and knowledge, the time (at least the time we sense) cannot exist.

Time implies future events determined by the present and past factors, which mean among others implications, additional unexpected information. Therefore additional information means not yet "knowing it all", for ever. And that makes absolute knowledge and understanding  impossible atributes within the boundaries of our universe.

Quite confusing! Although, atheism is perceived to gain ground, every way you look into their claims make their case weaker and weaker.

Could this result be just a matter of malevolent subjective manipulation of facts to convey this conclusion?

Let's then see what science has to say about atheism.

Atheists like to say that science is their natural ally; therefore an objective scientific look may be clarifying.

The field of science relevant to our understanding our belief system is that of cognitive sciences.

Aimed essentially to determine how mind works, cognitive sciences are interdisciplinary studies corroborating significant findings of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. According to these studies, cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that the way human brains are wired seems to make it impossible for someone to actually be a true atheist. According to the scientists, we are not even aware of all our religious ideas, those being part of our implicit beliefs.

Implicit beliefs guide our actions continuously in the world and can be detected through our behaviour. Implicit beliefs are, for example, that unsupported objects fall or that a physical object can only be spinning in one direction at any given time. Such beliefs would provoke immediate surprise responses to objects appearing to levitate or if dog spoke.

Pascal Boyer, atheist evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist who advocates the idea that human instincts provide us with the basis for an intuitive theory of mind that guides our social relations, morality, and predilections toward religious beliefs.

In one of his articles in Nature Magazine, Pascal Boyer comments:

"Humans also tend to entertain social relations with these and other non-physical agents, even from a very young age. ... It is a small step from having this capacity to bond with non-physical agents to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible, yet are socially involved."

In fact is common knowledge that not only children have "invisible friends". Our reflections, our interior monologues are just our way to entertain a communication with a fictitious listener.

Some scientists argue that our immaterial relation with imaginary being was in fact an evolutionary achievement of our minds.

And as at the other end of our mental conversation could have been no one or anyone, at a certain point in time it could be a god, Jesus or Buddha.

"So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution?" asks Pascal Boyer. "Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than "religion" in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities."

So science, "the traditional ally" of atheism may be very close to establish that one of the key functions of our human mind, the imagination, cannot be detached from the divine belief.

As long as we will be able to imagine, supernatural entities will always be present to fulfil human's fantasies.

Every human. Including every atheist.

Nury Vittachi, a science writer with science20.com summarises the findings of recent studies in cognitive sciences in one of his articles.

"While militant atheist may be convinced God doesn't exist," Vittachi says, "God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist".

End of To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 5