Consciousness, Science and Religion

Consciousness, Science and Religion

Recently the integrity of religion has been questioned. Turn on a television and you’re likely to see a debate about whether religion is needed in today’s technological and scientific world. Browse local bookstores and books against religion cram the aisles; overhear an intellectual conversation and the affirmation of atheism and science is on their lips. It can be summed up all in a phrase: anti-religious sentiment has consumed the world. However, this article examines whether religion and science share a common motivation in their respective applications, and thus have more in common than they realise.

The structure of this article is as follows. First I will highlight the problem that consciousness faces in section 1, and then I explore in Section 2(a) and (b) how religion and science attempt to combat the problem that consciousness faces, and hereby showing the common motivation in the application of both disciplines.

1

All living organisms have a self-preservation instinct, the instinct to behave in a certain way to ensure the survival of the organism. The self-preservation instinct is ubiquitous in nature, for instance, stamp on a worm and it will try to wiggle out of the way; injure an animal and it will go into hiding to heal itself; starve a fellow human being and they will look for food. The self-preservation instinct is brought on by the sensation of pain or the fear of pain (death is included in this schemata), so the mechanism for the self-preservation instinct to come to the fore is the potentiality or the actuality of pain. For example, suppose a fox is running after a rabbit and manages to get some claws dig the rabbit’s skin and the rabbit feels this sensation to be painful, the rabbit will try to escape … next time the rabbit notices a fox it will attempt to hide or run away because it fears feeling the same sensation of pain again: the self-preservation instinct mechanism “kicks” in.

Nature, on the other hand, is terribly painful, overwhelmingly violent and extremely destructive. Imagine a world without the scientific and technological trappings of today’s society, imagine the extreme cold and hot weather conditions the human body had to withstand, think about the bloodshed they faced everyday killing and hunting the animals they would eat for dinner that night. Life eats on life; it’s a process of be the devourer or be devoured, it’s an existence imbued with pain, violence and death. Even without its self-preservation instinct, consciousness does not like experiencing pain: universal empirical evidence conveys the following truths uttered by people, “I wish I could lead a life without pain” and other sentiments.

Moreover, everything in nature that is born eventually dies. Plant a seed in the ground, and it will blossom until its decline results in withering away and dying. You also are born and then one day you will die. Nature is omnipresent, and death is the inevitable. So the problem now comes into sharper focus, it is the conflict between the self-preservation instinct and nature: it is the conflict between the instinct for survival and the inevitability of death.

All human beings have a consciousness. Consciousness is simply the states of awareness and qualitative experience that start in the morning and continue until we fall into a long dreamless sleep. By qualitative experience, I mean experiencing that a rose looks like this, or that music sounds like that. In contrast to a robot whom has no qualitative experience, it cannot tell you that the experience of pain feels like this or that, for example. This goes for all qualitative experience.

Self conscious is the capacity to be aware of one’s own consciousness. To reflect on the reasons we choose to act and your own thoughts and feelings, to notice oneself in relation to others and to notice oneself’s existence in the world.

The unconscious is consciousness that is not aware of the thoughts and feelings that it holds, usually these thoughts and feelings are those that if known to exist in the person’s consciousness, they would face wrath or punishment. Repression is the psychological mechanism that occurs when a consciousness holds those thoughts that will be reprimanded by pain and punishment. Repression, then, is when consciousness forgets certain thoughts and feelings, and then forgets that it has forgotten about having certain thoughts and feelings, even though it does. For instance, suppose that a man is sitting near a camp fire, and he feels the need to urinate on the camp fire to put it out. However, the rest of the group sitting around the fire have notified everyone that if they extinguish the fire, they shall receive severe punishment. The unconscious mind represses these thoughts and feelings due to the self-preservation instinct that consciousness does not want to face pain, violence or death for having those thoughts or feelings. Finally, projection is unconsciously attributing your own thoughts to someone or something else, for example, a workman blames his tools for his poor workmanship, rather than blame himself.

2

As great mythologist and thinker Joseph Campbell continually pointed out in his lectures, the phenomenon of death is the most challenging task that human consciousness has to face. Campbell goes onto say that the human being is a special animal as it is the only animal that knows it’s going to die, it is the only animal that can foresee the inevitable future that all human beings and animals are subject to, namely, death. So reverting back to the pertinent question: how does the human consciousness and the self-preservation mechanism come to terms with nature and death? The two options are (a) religion and (b) science.

Just a quick caveat here, religion is to be used in a context between the 5th century and the 15th century; the middle ages were belief in religion were rampant, and held to be literally true. Science here is in contrast to religion, rather than invalidating its claims. The scientific context is between the 20th century and the 21st century, where science is now the mainstay of empirical and rational knowledge.

Option (a) - religion. The human life, at this time period, is at the constant mercy to nature, and life is painful, violent and filled with death, and consciousness, especially with its self-preservation instinct can not remove itself from any potentiality or actuality of pain. Consciousness desires an existence without the conditions of nature, an existence full of pleasure, without pain and without death. Consciousness knows the pains of nature are impassable and cannot be removed, so how does consciousness deal with this fact?

Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us in his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “weariness that wants to reach the ultimate in one leap, in one fatal leap, poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more; this created all gods and afterworlds.” Simply, consciousness projects the belief of the existence of God and heaven (or re-incarnation – or any eternal life principle), an existence of eternal life and everlasting pleasures, but this projection is an unconscious defence mechanism against the conditions of nature. Consciousness cannot be aware that these religious beliefs are merely projections, so it must repress them, otherwise they would not have the psychological impact that consciousness depends on them for, and the self-preservation instinct would be rooted in limbo. So, the concept of heaven is the concept of eternal life filled with maximum pleasures and the elimination of pain. Heaven is a beautified existence without the inevitable conditions of nature, that is, pain, violence and death.

Now, someone might object that some human beings do not want an eternal life brimming with pleasure without pain, as some human beings commit suicide. Self-consciousness, as far as we know, is special in that it’s only available to human beings. Suicide is an act of self-consciousness to go beyond the self-preservation instinct, and to end its own consciousness, so it doesn’t affect the claim that consciousness wants to naturally survive. Moreover, the motivation to commit suicide is to remove suffering from experience and to forever stay in the sweet pleasurable slumber of sleep, so in that way it is similar to the afterlife. Lastly, in the religious middle ages suicide was seen as a sin against God (isn’t this consciousness trying to protect itself against its own self-annihilation?) that would be rewarded with eternity in hell, and thus strongly prohibited and rarely acted upon, sine they literally believed it to be true

Option (b) - science/ technology. Now science has many aspects, such as attempting to find out the causal law-like regularities of nature, and the attempting to find out the nature of reality. However, I will be using science in a narrow sense, focusing on the usage of science and technology to benefit mankind as a practical, rather than theoretical, application.

Now science rejects God and the afterlife, but science is still subject to nature and its consequences. One aspect of consciousness has not changed through the ages of man, and in fact it never changes, is consciousness desire for an existence without the conditions of nature, an existence full of pleasure, without pain and without death. We can see this as science, specifically by the medical industry, attempts (and sometimes successfully) to find cures to pain, sickness, sorrow and death. If consciousness did not have any problems with these aspects of nature, then consciousness would not attempt to deal with them, and it clearly does.

So one aspect of science is used by consciousness (how else could it be developed?) to ensure the organisms survival against nature and death. Science, unlike religion, tries to solve these natural occurrences in the present time, as it has the means to attempt to do so. Consciousness abhors its own destruction, and uses science as a means to attempt to combat the natural phenomenon of death. This can be seen in the current instances when medical doctors merely try to prolong an average life-span from death.

Lastly, consciousness uses (or hopes to use) science to finally escape death and live in a pleasure filled existence by transcending the disliked aspects of nature, that is strongly reminiscent of a religious afterlife. Recent scientific movements, such as, Transhumanism is a world-wide and popular intellectual movement using science and technology to improve mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as suffering, disease, aging and death as undesirable. Furthermore, many science-fiction writers have devised non-religious utopian visions were death and pain is abolished, and life is pleasurable; this is a modern day wish fulfilment. Lastly, scientists talk eagerly about the possibility about freezing the body until a time when an advanced race of scientists could finally cure death.

It doesn’t matter whether the belief that science can eventually cure death is true or not, it may just be a fantasy, but that’s the whole point. The projected religious beliefs were found not to be true, but the society did not to know that at the time, and the same applies to the fantastical and non-fantastical scientific beliefs.

By Andrew Field