The Perception of Saints: The Compatibility of Free Will in Science and Religion
In my experience, the radical empiricist or phenomenologist perceives the world with the same bewilderment and doubt as the mystic saint. When we seek to understand science or religion, it is unclear at a glance how the nature of science (NOS) and the nature of religion (NOR) interact and relate in today’s increasingly progressive and empirically driven world. Glennan (2009) argues that science and religion are in fact “too diffuse as cultural phenomena to be said to have a nature” (p.799). Given this, he suggests that the best method to understanding the compatibility between science and religion is to ask specific questions dependent upon various perspectives, narrowing the horizon for solutions and weighing the compatibility of individual conceptions. The greater concern is how science and religion inform one another, but specifically in this essay, as Glennan asks, I intend to investigate the problem: “Do developments in science—particularly those in psychology and neuroscience—threaten to undermine religious doctrines about freedom of the will and the divine nature of the soul?” (2009, p.799). In other words, can scientific findings spoil the religious doctrines of free will and the divine soul? To answer this, we will explore the compatibility between the mystical and phenomenological experience of the religious realm with the findings of contemporary science.
In modern neuroscience and psychology, the science of consciousness has become markedly precise (aided with new technologies and methods) and at the same time remains deeply intertwined with a long tradition of eastern and western philosophy. The “hard problem of consciousness,” coined by philosopher David Chalmers, poses the question of how one is to explain qualia, or the specific qualities of consciousness responsible for a phenomenal, subjective experience. This problem resonates throughout many different religious-centered philosophies of mind, including Hinduism, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism; but rather than analyzing the problem and generating a functional solution (as science attempts to do), the religious aim differs in attempting to cultivate experiences designed to “cut through” the problem, and as result, achieve what is often called the “mystical” experience. In Zen, this is known as satori; in Christianity, union with God. For the mystic—one concerned with the religious and spiritual experience—the hard problem of consciousness is not a problem but a doorway. Put differently, the fact of its appearance (maya) affords one a reference point from which to experience a solution (insofar as it has one, this is akin to attaining nirvana, though this idea alone is paradoxical). The devout mystic takes for evidence everything that appears in consciousness to support their faith. Is this not the practice of a good scientist? This is, however prosperous, still problematic for the scientist who seeks to report their findings to others.
If we return to our original concern, the hard problem of consciousness is central to understanding both free will and the spiritual notion of the human soul. First, freedom of will is generally understood and yet remains impoverished in most people’s conception. For some, it represents the freedom of choice, the possibility of choosing an alternative course of action. For others, free will means that we are responsible for our actions since we must make choices (as the existentialists assume), even if that choice is a non-choice or a failure to choose. But neuroscience has brought much of the free will debate to a strange and unsettling place. Through a process called “binding,” the nervous system consolidates its inputs from the sense organs, composing a constantly evolving orchestra of phenomena, i.e. subjective consciousness (Harris, 2019). To make matters more complicated, neurons are spatially distant from one another, requiring the binding process to include a complex modulation to create a sense of temporal synchronization. Without these precise features, experience would lack consistency and continuity.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains that “your perception of reality is the end result of fancy editing tricks: the brain hides the difference in arrival times. How? What it serves up as reality is actually a delayed version. Your brain collects up all the information from the senses before it decides upon a story of what happens” (Harris, 2019, p.26). In effect, this means that what we experience has, in some sense, already happened, if only by a fraction of a second. We can confirm this in experience by attempting to “direct” attention, as if we were a conductor standing at a distance from our environment. Phenomenologically, the moment we think an event has occurred, the event itself is long gone. The biological cost of synchronization is a conscious lag, and in a strange way, this affords the body to know reality before you do. The two conceptions of free will mentioned previously are undermined by this fact—one may not have the freedom to choose an alternative if the alternative is already a predetermined choice (your brain had already chosen this one by the time you were aware), and further, one may not be responsible for their actions if the actions they choose are in fact beyond their control.
Intuitively, these claims are problematic at best and blasphemous at worst. We feel as though we have the freedom to choose one option or the other. We feel (and are often held) responsible for our choices. These are good things, spiritually speaking, since they allow us to make our own choices and carve our own paths in life with meaning and purpose. Socially, these feelings foster trust and community. And from the mystical perspective, the “divine grace” of our conscious lag, i.e. the saving quality of our condition, is that the precise moment we lose to the Logos by way of our experience is the very same one into which we are born, that we are gifted in experience, in part wholly free and completely determined.
Commonly, people ethically object to the idea that free will is merely an illusion. When humanity was expelled from Paradise, it was because we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, granting us the “god-like” will to create and choose either good or evil. Without this freedom, we would be like the animals and plants, without a free spirit capable of effecting change in the universe. Modern neuroscience claims that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no free will and no illusion of it either. The mystic would agree. American vipassana and metta meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein was once asked whether he believed in free will. He responded by questioning what such a term could even mean, given that the assumption of a free will posits a will that is independent of the cause-and-effect relationships of the world. Annaka Harris recounts that “he gestured with his hands dancing above him in the air, trying to point to this imaginary free will” (p.31). In the tradition of Zen Buddhism, it is said simply that “cause and effect are clear.” In Greek mythos, hubris, the original sin of the personal ego, is the mistake of assuming one’s soul to be independent from the Cosmic assemblage, falsely claiming a will capable of acting apart from the chance and necessities of cause and effect. Again, the religious and even mythical perspectives do not attempt to define an answer to the problem of free will, but instead point directly to the experience of a kind of solution, most often an “awakening” to the reality of the concern. (In line with the avoidance of hubris, the Theologia Germanica says: “Nothing burns in hell but the self” (Huxley, 2014). In other words, any separation from God, including the identification with a self and “free” will, causes one to experience suffering.)
Even without an independent will or consciousness responsible for directing experience, the notions of responsibility and choice are not incompatible with either the neuroscience or mystical understandings of free will. The mystical experience, alluded to earlier, recognizes the “illusion of free will” as an illusion and attempts to cut through any attachment (or detachment) to something independent from direct experience. In Christian terms, their project is to “walk with God,” or in Zen terms, to “give into the way.” What happens has, as it is experienced, already happened. But this does not mean that we cannot be held responsible for our actions nor that alternative choices are not valuable. In fact, our faculties of reason and sense-making afford us the ability to differentiate between deliberate and non-deliberate actions, between lucid or unconscious actions. Even though a bank robber was not free to choose not to rob the bank, we as a society still choose (not with free will) to punish and shame said behavior. These experiences have meaning and value to us as individuals and with others. We are not free to choose independently because conscious awareness is not independent from cause and effect, but we must choose nonetheless, contributing to the ever-growing chain of cause and effect that conducts the unfolding of experience.
The body continually updates itself to provide us the experience of the hard problem of consciousness, that is, the very contents of phenomenal experience is the unique and qualitative experience of subjectivity. The brain constantly alters itself in response to relentless inputs from the environment, and, like a radio, conscious awareness receives a total and direct picture of reality in each moment. This is what I mean when I say we are expert imperfect perceivers. One hardly needs to try to understand or listen to another; one need only become receptive (which is not to be confused with passive). In my view, the sciences can complement the findings of the religious experience. Free will, as accepted by what Aldous Huxley calls the “perennial philosophy,” or the central philosophical foundation of the world religions, is more or less compatible with the findings of neuroscience and psychology regarding consciousness and its interdependence on the causal nexus comprising experienced reality. I would even go so far as to say that a spiritual perspective allows a clearer perception of the reality of these findings.
Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic, said, “The philosopher who denies divine providence is a stranger to the perception of the saints” (Huxley, 2014, p.173). Contemporary ideas in perceptual psychology coincide with phenomenological evidence to suggest that direct perception, i.e. experience that is not only immediate but a haecceity, experienced wholly, uniquely, and without distance between perceiver and perception, is entirely consistent with the subjective experience akin to the “perception of the saints.” To become aware of one’s direct perception is to engage in the Delphic meditation: know thyself. In spiritual terms, “the reward of being in harmony with Tao or the Logos in its physical and physiological aspects is a sense of well-being, an awareness of life as good, not for any reason, but just because it is life” (Huxley, 2014, p.167). This follows from what we have already discussed regarding “giving in” to what has already happened and “letting go” of the independent notion of free will. Clinical psychology supports both of these attitudes as positive to the development of one’s self, i.e. the organizing function of consciousness (itself inseparable from total consciousness). If “divine deliverance” or “salvation,” as the Bible often puts it, is out of time and into eternity, to perceive “like God,” that is, directly and without any separation, is to wholly embrace the development of one’s consciousness precisely as it is meant to become in reality. (It is in this sense that awareness itself can be curative, as Gestalt psychology supports in accordance with Buddhist and Vedic philosophies.)
To conclude in rather a rough way (since there is always more to be considered), in my opinion, science benefits the religious experience insofar as it compliments the experience asserted by many mystical doctrines. The commonplace understanding of free will is, for the most part, mistaken in the context of phenomenological experience since the idea often transgresses the very facts of this direct and unorientable experience. Developments in science may undermine naive and misunderstood religious doctrines about free will and the soul, but at its core, the spiritual life is a deeply scientific venture. “Only the totally selfless are in a position to know experimentally that, in spite of everything, ‘all will be well’ and, in some way, already is well” (Huxley, 2014, p.173). Religiously, the human soul remains a firm and fertile spirit in the mind of the scientist willing to step aside and allow Providence to do its work. St. John of the Cross said: “All our goodness is a loan; God is the owner. God works and his work is God.” I remain rather confident that science will never define the divine soul, though it may yet provide the solutions to other problems relating to the function of the soul or spirit as an inter-dependent mind. Religion remains the primary source of spiritual growth, explaining in ethical and mythical terms what science cannot; science remains the primary source of intellectual growth, explaining in functional and descriptive terms what religion cannot.
Citations
Glennan, Stuart S. Whose Science and Whose Religion? Reflections on the Relations between Scientific and Religious Worldviews. Science, Worldviews and Education. Vol. 18. 2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2779-5_8.
Harris, Annaka. Conscious: A brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. HarperCollins, 2019.
Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. McClelland & Stewart, 2014.
