The Sea of Faith and Don Cupitt. Part II

The post enlightenment sea of faith

In part I of this series I described how in the first episode of his Sea of Faith series atheist theologian Don Cupitt was beguiled (like many others, such as the North American Intelligent Design community) by the "natural forces" vs "intelligent design" dichotomy. For Cupitt the inference was that natural law is just that, namely "natural" and therefore a process with its own internal (clockwork?) dynamic thus dispensing with the need for a prime divine mover either as an initiator and/or as the sustainer of natural processes. Cupitt has kowtowed to the tempting and popularist reaction which sees in high organization a self-sufficient and self-sustaining machine.

Cupitt's response contrasts with the classical science thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell whose faith underwrote their successful attempts to unlock the secrets of the breathtaking cosmic order, an order believed by Christians to be created and sustained by God everywhere and everywhen. In contrast, as I wrote in Part I, Cupitt's view was as follows: 

According to Cupitt, in Galileo's dynamic vision of the universe motion was "built-in" and therefore it was "no longer necessary to appeal to the action of a divine mover who keeps that universe energized".

For Cupitt any thought that cosmic organization is fuel to the fire of theism is to repeat the errors of medieval superstition & magic. After all, isn't the lesson we learn from our own technology (steam engines, clockwork, computers etc) that they run by their own internal impetus, volition and logic without the need for human intervention and least of all without any need for prayer or magical rituals to keep them going? It is a very natural intuitive reaction, therefore, to read into any highly organized dynamic the presence of an internal self-motivating sufficiency.  

However, Cupitt is undoubtedly right about one thing: The discovery of the mechanical universe which (superficially at least) appears to be oblivious to prayers and magical rituals is one reason (among others, no doubt) for the recession of the Sea of Faith. Consequently, the feeling is that science is an escape from the need to control by religious intervention and/or magic. Therefore science should evoke no mystical response. But there is an historical paradox here however; for it seems likely that the very organization of the heavenly motions and the correlation with the beat of the earthly seasons are implicated as one of the motivations behind the construction of the neolithic stone structures and it seems unlikely that these were mere stone computers absent of mystical significance.  

***

In the first episode of the Sea of Faith Cupitt went even further with his undermining of the meaning of the scientific project. In the following quote he misrepresents the scientific quest and underrates any notion of scientific progress...

.....yesterday's orthodoxy we see now is today's heresy. Today's orthodoxy will be laughed at tomorrow. All theories have a limited life. There are no fixed positions anymore.  They'll all crumble and be replaced by others. The truth now is not in the fixed positions, it's in the quest. 

That statement fails to do the slightest justice to the scientific project as I've come to grasp it. As algorithmic models of the creation, the theories of classical science are still taught in universities, not as irrelevant historical relics of a by-gone past but as excellent metaphors and approximations, object lessons in the startling way science makes miraculous progress. The classical theories still describe much about the cosmic order and were the foundations for later theories (cf. the Lagrangian & Hamiltonian formulations of classic mechanics and the later canonical quantum theory; see here). They also typify the breathtaking way various mathematical strands of thought evolved and came together to encapsulate the cosmic dynamic (Faraday and Maxwell, complex numbers and quantum theory). They were steps along the progressive quest of the highly successful physical sciences project. Schrodinger and Heisenberg advanced their own metaphors for the understanding of the quantum world, metaphors of the same descriptive isomorphic power, but it would be wrong at this stage in our understanding to claim that one metaphor has crumbled to be replaced by the other; both stand. 

There is, of course, still some way to go as the physical science project progressively readjusts our theoretical metaphors to fit the data-points of our experience. But what we currently have nevertheless captures the God ordained cosmic organization to a high level of virtuosity and artistry. Contrast this progressive, grand and heroic project against Cupitt's statement quoted above; this is a crass postmodern undermining of the true story of scientific progress toward better and better mathematical understandings of the world. 

***

But to be fair to Cupitt, he well describes the psychological and cultural knock-on effect of the discovery of the mechanical universe. The new perspective left a sense of cosmic alienation and desolation, not least because, to cap it all, the temple of the earth had been displaced from its Ptolemaic center by Copernicanism.  Cupitt puts it eloquently as follows:

Science became a kind of abstract diagram of nature. But when the universe is seen in this way it no longer looks so friendly to man. It doesn’t give him guidelines in the old way. It’s stripped of its old religious and moral significance. It’s god, if any, is a cosmic mathematician rather than a heavenly king and father. How would faith respond to the bleakness of this new vision of the universe?

....I think we know the answer to that last question; not very well it seems; at least in the West where the new science first took hold. However, for some philosophers at least a loss of faith wasn't a necessary  outcome. According to Cupitt Descartes, who he calls an uncompromising rationalist... (My emphasis)

.... proved God’s existence by abstract arguments and then used God to certify the validity of human reason and the existence of the mechanical universe. After that science took over. 

Cupitt goes on to contrast Descartes's faith with that of the very feeling and personable philosopher Blaise Pascal of whom Cupitt says....

Publicly Pascal was a gifted and sociable man with hundreds of friends and correspondents.....

But the highly intuitive Pascal was far from satisfied by Descartes's God whom Pascal saw as promoting a deist God....

Pascal who was an intensely Christian personality such lip service to religion was abhorrent. “I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to do without God but he couldn’t help allowing him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion. After that he had no more use for God”. That metaphysical God the God of the philosophers was not the God Pascal was privately seeking. 

And it wasn't only Pascal...

The effect of the new discoveries had been to break down people’s traditional sense of their place in the universe. People felt like aliens literally displaced persons. They were surrounded by giddying new vistas of greatness and littleness. In Pascal's mind this sense of exile came together with his Christian understanding of sin, paradise lost, man’s need for salvation, the contradictions of human nature.

In private Pascal was full of angst; for him human existence was characterized as inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. Pascal marveled at the vast complexity and beauty of the universe at both its large and small scales. And yet the size and dumbness of the cosmos filled Pascal with dread & terror. Man was lost in this tiny and insignificant corner of the universe and his purpose utterly unclear.

***

Let me now turn to what to me was the startling aspect in the first episode of the Sea of Faith. In part 1 of this two part series I wrote this...

"At the time it would have been easy for me to write-off Cupitt as just another pundit presenting an all too typically hackneyed misrepresentation of science and then forgotten all about him. But as it turned out his reaction to his own passe concepts was to weigh strangely in the scales of my own thinking. A few years after I had watched the series (I had also purchased the book) I was making heavy weather of some of the gnostic-like aspects of contemporary Christian evangelicalism.  To my surprise I found that Cupitt had given me insight into the condition behind these circumstances. It was ironic that Cupitt's reaction to the elegant intellectualisms of science had parallels in contemporary evangelical Christianity: Evangelicalism's own version of the reactionary existential angst triggered by the apparently soulless and profane mechanical world had taken the form of an escape into the high subjectivism of the inner life with its sublime epiphanies. Moreover, Cupitt's stark account of those Godless so-called "natural forces" was to surface again although in negated form among the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID). Many thanks to Don Cupitt for helping me make some sense of these situations, but perhaps not in the way he and the Sea of Faith movement would have applauded!"

In the first half of his first episode Cupitt surfed the usual "mechanical world" philosophical cliches, cliches which have led him (and many others) to a purely secularized view of science (which ironically itself ultimately has a tendency to undermine science). I nearly went to sleep, but about two thirds of the way through I was brought up with a jolt when he started talking about Pascal's night of personal revelation of the divine. This was stuff I hadn't heard before. Cupitt was describing the epiphany of Blaise Pascal which occurred late one Monday night in November 1643. This highly personal revelation not only calmed Pascal's spiritual angst but also gave him peace, joy, and an overwhelming sense of the presence of the divine. These are Pascal's words describing his experience.....

Fire....certainty, certainty, heart felt joy, peace. God of  Jesus Christ, God of Jesus Christ, My God and your God. Thy God shall be my God. The world forgotten and everything except God.....The world has not known thee but I have known thee. Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy.

According to Cupitt Pascal had a copy of the words of this experience sown into his clothing. Although we can praise God for Pascal's overwhelming epiphany and respect it, Pascal himself wasn't going to take a reciprocally magnanimous view toward the faith of his fellow philosophers like Descartes in spite of the fact that Descartes's philosophy was founded on and revolved around the divine. Re-quoting the passage from Cupitt that I've quoted above effectively accusing Descartes of deism....

Pascal who was an intensely Christian personality such lip service to religion was abhorrent. “I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to do without God but he couldn’t help allowing him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion. After that he had no more use for God”. That metaphysical God the God of the philosophers was not the God Pascal was privately seeking. 

That divine flick of the finger and the notion of a world with its own self-sufficient internal vitality and volition is the stuff of deist/atheist interpretations, interpretations which wrongly equate high organization with mechanical self-sufficiency. What is true however, is that once those secret algorithmic encodings which so successfully describe and metaphorically model the cosmos have been revealed to humanity this provides us with remarkable powers of information and control. That is, there is less need to inquire of God what the cosmos will do next or invoke magical rituals to keep it going because we know so much about the pattern of its God ordained dynamic. The Christian response to this gift of information & control should be one of the thanks & praise of beings utterly dependent on that God ordained order.  

For me nothing about the high organization which defines the physical world underwrites a deist or atheist world view although such are compelling conclusions for many. The deist/atheist intuitions, although understandable, become problematic with patterns of randomness and the expanding parallelism of quantum mechanics; these features have made it harder to swallow the elementary clockwork determinism of deism. 

Pascal railed against those compelling deist intuitions and sought an escape. But he appeared not to find an intellectual escape. He only found his escape in the depths of that deep heart felt epiphany of  Monday 23rd November 1643; an epiphany which as I've already related gave him feelings of peace and joy. Cupitt quotes Pascal as follows:

The god of Christians is not a God who is merely the author of mathematical truths in the order of the elements. He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, who makes them inwardly conscious of their wretchedness and of his infinite mercy, who makes them incapable of any other end but him. It is the heart which perceives God, not the reason. The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.

In the parlance of today's touchy-feely Christian culture it is likely that Pascal's late night epiphany would be identified by many Christians in the last century as the "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" or perhaps more recently in this century as a more general sublime "encounter" with the divine constituting a heart experience of God rather than head knowledge of God. My response to this kind of thing has always been this: Different strokes for different folks; i.e. God reveals himself differently to different people and frankly when it comes to faith I'm more Descartes & Galileo than I am Pascal. 

***

But what was Don Cupitt himself trying to tell us when he related Pascal's encounter with God? Cupitt was trying to get past us the notion that the intellectual world of thought which has unlocked the secret mathematical order of the cosmos was a very different thing to the world of religious experience and religious thinking. It is true that since the enlightenment these two worlds have not only drifted apart but, according to Cupitt, have also become alienated from one another; so much so in fact that the world of the intellect can no longer convey religious meanings; religious meanings were now the domain of our religious intuitions, rituals, mystical metaphors and, best of all, sublime quasi-gnostic know-how; these alone could sublimate humanity's sense of the divine and that yearning for a God of some sort. According to Cupitt intimacy & certainty with respect to God was no longer to be found by the reason and certainly not via the physical cosmos; that profane world of mechanism whose sacredness had been banished by the enlightenment meant that the divine now only inhabited an idiosyncratic corner of the human mind.

What startled me about Cupitt's message is that it is not a million miles away from the message I was starting to hear from many contemporary "encounter"/"Holy Spirit" based Christians; for them knowing God was primarily about a profound heart experience of the divine and this was sharply distinguished from what they disparagingly referred to as a "head knowledge" faith. One heard about the 18 inch gap between heart and head and how difficult it can be to cross that gap. As far as my faith was concerned I always knew which side of this contrived divide I was going to end up on! As with Descartes my faith revolved round the head and not the intuitions and experiences of the heart. It became apparent to me that Cupitt's message was all too reminiscent of the gnosto-christian culture that I had experienced up until then. This realization of mine  became an even stronger theme for me in the following decade with the advent of the 1994 Toronto Blessing. Fortunately, the polarization that this induced in church life has, I think, lessened of late but it can still plague churches today (See here for example). But one thing was clear: The divide that Cupitt had identified and which has developed in the last 400 years between the sacred and the profane is of very general import; so much so in fact that it effects diverse subcultures in similar ways (The return to new age and pagan mysticism may be  a case in point) 

But diversity, equality and inclusion wasn't always on the agenda of  all churches; some of them had the same horror as Pascal of the God of the learned philosophers. They were quite sure that full gospel Christianity should, as an obligation, include an intimate, mystical and almost gnostic revelation of God's power. In the second half of the 20th century it was all to take a very bad and alienating  turn as it divided Christians along an intuition vs intellect fault line.

It was this head vs heart dichotomy which was subsequently to plague my relationship with church in the coming decades. The  church (or rather parts of it), like Pascal, could no longer reconcile the cosmic picture and the intellectual world of mechanism with God without doing violence to science (*1) and hence it escaped into the epiphanies and theophanies of almost orgasmic experiences of the divine and those experiences became a shibboleth of a quasi-gnostic flavour of Christianity. 

Thanks to Don Cupitt it became clearer to me how Christianity's retreat into the human heart was pressured by a spiritual  angst which was amplified by the enlightenment. But the  fault line between head and heart probably goes even deeper and the rise of a society based on technology and science merely widened an already archaic fault line. See for example, the Cathars and Diamaid MacCulloch's book Silence: A Christian History (London, Allen Lane, 2013)

***

Is Don Cupitt a Christian? Some would say that that is impossible for someone who seems to be atheist. I am, however, prepared to give Cupitt the benefit of the doubt for the following reasons. He undoubtedly knows Christian theology well. He has said that religion is potentially the depositary of our highest ideals and yet he is conscious of the human fallibility and sin which obstruct those ideals. My reading of him is that he understands the Christian doctrines which contrast the propensities of human selfishness with the vulnerable love we see in Christ and his self-sacrificing work to deal with sin. Via Pascal's perspective Cupitt tells us of The concealment of God's glory in the weakness of Christ and that God is most profoundly revealed in Christ's passion.....that may express the image of God Cupitt follows and worships in spite of the technical philosophical twist that Cupitt believes this image corresponds to no known real world entity. If Cupitt has taken onboard this image of God as his highest ideal to which he strives and he points to Christ as the epitome of this ideal he therefore eschews idolatry and follows the express image of the true God (See Hebrews 1&2). But in saying these things let me be clear; I can't be absolutely sure about Cupitt's private stance and secondly I don't follow him into doctrinal unrealism.

Footnotes

*1 e,g. Christian Young Earthism and Flat Earthism. Of course, in contrast there are some sophisticated & intellectual parts of church culture for whom science is well integrated into their faith - e.g. the Faraday Institute

The Aumann's agreement theorem paradox.

Different perspectives implies a likelihood of different experience
sets and conflicting probability estimates, therefore setting 
 the scene for potential disagreement. 

I was rather intrigued by James Knight's use of Aumann's agreement theorem in a blog post of his that can be found here:

The Philosophical Muser: Why Christians Disagree So Much

James' post was a response to a challenge put to him that If Christianity is true, why are there such a varied set of Christians who disagree and squabble about so much? Towards the end of his article we read this (My emphases)....

Given the state of humanity, I’d no more expect Christians to agree on everything than I would mathematicians to agree about politics, or opera singers to agree about economics. But, I do wish they would – and as I often argue – Christians SHOULD agree more, especially on objective things – and two Christians of any sex, ethnicity, denomination, should converge on more and more consensus if they were to sit by the fire, Aumann’s Agreement-style, and honestly, rigorously seek the truth together, like people who care about what is true."

The exact "science" of Mathematics is a domain of knowledge incommensurable with politics and economics and no easy like-for-like comparison can be made. Mathematics is an activity, in fact a form of model building, which depends on very strictly agreed symbolic conventions and algorithmic procedures being followed. If in mathematics every one keeps strictly to the same conventions and procedures disagreement can't arise. The progress of mathematics bares this out; I'm not aware that mathematicians frequently and fundamentally disagree (except perhaps about un-proven conjectures). This of course is not so of politico-economics; disagreements about best economic policy and its political implementation abound. This why economics is a breeding ground for politicians and their political passions & power seeking; after all the only way to implement a particular contentious economic policy is to get political power (Hopefully by democratic means). But let's not think any better of those sanguine mathematicians over and against those battling politico-economists - the latter are dealing with very complex and epistemically tricky material which as we will see provides one reason among others why politico-economics breaks the assumptions of Aumann's agreement theorem and promotes the sharp divisions of power politics.....and that's before we consider those ever present very human psycho-sociological factors which one expects of complex adaptive systems like human beings. 

In fact I would rewrite the first sentence of the above quote as follows....

Given the natural state of human affairs, I’d no more expect Christians to agree on everything than I would politicians to agree about politics, or economists to agree about economics. 

***

Aumann's agreement theorem assumes we have a set of interlocutors who start with a common information base ("common priors") but then these interlocutors bring to the discussion table differing levels of knowledge in the form of conditional probabilities that all interlocutor believe to be a trustworthy contribution to the discussion (So-called "common knowledge" as opposed to "common information"). The interlocutors update their probabilities by mutual cooperative sharing of their differing conditional probabilities (*1).  They assume one another to be rational honest agents and that they can trust one another's probability estimates as they share them. According to the agreement theorem they will eventually converge on the same information set. See the following link for more on the agreement theorem: Aumann Agreement - LessWrong

Before I go any further let's get one thing straight. Most common sense people (which includes myself and people who believe there is such a thing as a single truth out there which stands over and above the slippery slopes of cultural relativism and critical theory) have an intuitive grasp of Aumann's theorem; that is, they understand that in an epistemically transparent world where evidence acquisition is not an issue and interlocutors are rational and honest, then agreement  about truth will inevitably emerge. So the agreement theorem proves what most common sense people already believe (Of course critical theorists and cultural relativists are likely to make heavy weather of this common sense truth). Aumann's theorem is a nice confirmation of what all reasonable people already know intuitively. But the article on Aumann's theorem that I have linked to above ends with this warning: 

The fact that disagreements on questions of simple fact are so common amongst humans, and that people seem to think this is normal, is an observation that should strike fear into the heart of every aspiring rationalist.

So, given the agreement theorem which is undoubtedly mathematically correct why is disagreement between humans so widespread? In this connection I made the following comment on James' blog entry. As a rule my comments never get past the Philosophical Muser's approval process and are therefore cancelled (The Philosophical Muser's concept of "free-speech" is qualified) So, rather than let my comments disappear into oblivion I thought this matter to be so important that it needs airing. What follows in the next section is based on the comment I added to James' post...

***

I think I agree with the general drift of your argument here but not in one or two of the details; especially, may I say,  you are missing the crucial point of the agreement theorem and vastly underestimating the epistemic issues impacting attempts to get agreement.

That cozy fireside talk seldom, if ever, arises. For a start whilst our interlocutors are locked in by the fireside they are not updating their experience or accumulating any further experience. They have to try and get agreement on the basis of the information they already have (in the form of priors and conditional probabilities). If this pool of information contains contradictions and they insist on sticking to their scripts they won’t necessarily reach full agreement even if they are rational.

Therefore our interlocutors are going to have to get off their backsides, get out on their bikes and find a set of consistent priors and conditionals. But that brings us to the main problem: This information can only come from statistics which result of a wide and long term experience of the cosmos. Moreover, any mature engagement with that cosmos requires thousands if not millions of bits of information. Single interlocutors, therefore can’t survey the whole lot; ergo, their experience is liable to being skewed and/or very partial. So, unfortunately our interlocutors, on top of all their other very human survivalist social traits, have to face the epistemic problem of systematic and random sampling errors.

The agreement theorem simply sets a lower limit on agreement time. That is:

Agreement time >= Aumann agreement time:

 

As I found out with my own AI Thinknet project AI systems also suffer from similar epistemic problems relating to sampling bias and partiality. After all, I think the YEC organization AiG have implemented their own YEC AI interlocutor presumably by training it with a bias on YEC texts.

As I’ve said before because of these fundamental epistemic limitations tribal identification & group think where one outsources epistemic help to the experience of a large group of minds is an adaptive trait and this factor shouldn’t be underestimated in terms of its potential epistemic utility. So what James refers to as “incentives, needs and agendas” have the potential to be adaptive whether we like it or not.

So, even without factoring in those many awkward human social foibles (which potentially have adaptive value), epistemic challenges alone are very likely to lead to agreement failure. My guess is that disagreement due to epistemic issues is the biggest factor in disagreement. The only antidote I see for this is epistemic humility. But the trouble with this is that when faced with utterly convinced  group-think such as we find in AiG & Trumpite brands of Christianity epistemic humility & tentativeness is read as weakness. Hence, a certain amount of vehemence is demanded in the heat of argument.

***

Olber's paradox was a famous theorem in astrophysics. This paradox shows that under plausible assumptions the night sky should not be black but a continuum of bright star light; the fact that this isn't the case pointed to the need to revisit the underlying assumptions; it was a profound piece of theoretical thinking which lead the way to our understanding of an expanding universe. I contend that likewise Aumann's theorem  prompts us to think a bit deeper as to why it's not a real world model; in particular it urges us to think about both our epistemological limitations and the complexities of socio-psychology which strongly influence the acquisition of knowledge. With respect to the latter we are prompted to investigate the adaptive value of group think & group belonging along with its potential downsides and tradeoffs. Because Aumann and his successors are making us think harder about human affairs then like Olber's paradox its pedological value can't be underestimated.

The upside of group think is that it widens the number of experiencing agents contributing to the conversation and this increases the amount of incoming evidence. It's true, however, that the instincts behind group think have a big potential downside as group-think can lock in error such as we see among cultists and fundamentalists who exploit the adaptive instincts; in this context the survival of the group identity takes precedence over further evidential updates. Aumann's theorem prompts us to study the cost/benefit balance entailed by joining an epistemic group with a strong sense of cohesion and collective identity. In this sense Aumann's paradox is as profound as Olber's paradox. 

***

I would want to rewrite the second half of the quote at the beginning of this post which I took from Philosophical Muser along these lines....

Christians are expected to make heavy weather of agreement, even about on objective things – and two Christians of any sex, ethnicity, denomination will not necessarily converge to a consensus if they were to sit by the fire, Aumann’s Agreement-style attempting to get convergence; disagreement is likely even if they honestly, rigorously and rationally seek the truth together, like people who care about what is true."

The Agreement theorem tells us that in principle agreement is possible if we get our priors and evidences right, but therein lies the epistemic challenge of gathering huge amounts of data some of which may present accessibility problems; this epistemic challenge necessitates that the quest for knowledge becomes a social symposium and this cues in all the foibles of the sociological dynamic. That these human and epistemic factors can make agreement problematical should always be at the back of our minds and therefore our difficulty in conforming to Aumann's theorem SHOULD be the basis of an attitude of epistemic humility rather than thinking that Aumann's theorem underwrites an attitude of epistemic arrogance; in my books this classifies as an abuse of the theorem. Agreeing to disagree until more information comes to light should not make us shudder.

But let me repeat and finish with this warning..... 

The only antidote I see for inevitable disagreement is epistemic humility. But the trouble with this is that when faced with convinced group-think such as we find in AiG & Trumpite brands of Christianity, humility is read as weakness. Hence, a certain amount of vehemence is demanded in the heat of argument.

Disagreement, sharp disagreement in fact, seems to be the natural state of human affairs.

Footnotes

*1 A conditional probability has the form "The probability of A given evidence B is P"; formally expressed as P(A/B). Here B is the evidence relevant to the truth of A.