If you’re a working scientist – if you work day-to-day in domains not well understood enough to engineer solutions from known principles, if collecting data, generating theories, formulating hypotheses, and testing them are your bread and butter – then religious arguments often seem pretty crappy.
It’s not that scientists can’t make terrible mental gaffes, of course – they’re human, like everyone else. But there’s a certain mental discipline necessary for doing real science well which surpasses even the rigor expected in the philosophical and rationalist communities. We just don’t know as much as we like.
And while some theology, regardless of whether you buy the premises, is based on solid argument – even though he lacked modern tools of valid argumentation, Aquinas is no slouch – vast swathes of religious thinking is based on a particular kind of garbage: reasoning from analogy.
Again, don’t get me wrong: analogical reasoning is indispensable. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter built his career by demonstrating the power of analogy in thought. At one talk, his host said something like, “We’ll join you at coffee hour after we drop Doug’s books off at my office slash study.”
Hofstadter whirled, smiled, and said, “At your office slash study. Beautiful.” Beautiful, because his host had illustrated precisely what Hofstadter had shown in his talk: that we use analogy constantly in our day to day reasoning, case in point: an office slash study is a place used for work and to store books.
Everyone knew what he meant, and that’s the beauty of the analogy. But just because we understand his off-the-cuff comment doesn’t mean it’s a meaningful foundation for a science of “office slash studies” – it was a convenience category, useful for calling something out, not for drawing firm conclusions.
Unfortunately, Christian “apologetics” leans heavily on analogies. In God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis said that Islam is the greatest of the Christian heresies, and all that’s best in Judaism survives in Christianity. Well, that’s cute, and it may even make you think, but it’s bunk if you know the histories of the religions.
All too often, Christians use analogies about Jesus, their faith, and the world to argue for one point or the other – but then go beyond it to act as if those analogies were real. This is how Augustine got in the trap of arguing for forced conversions for “pastoral” reasons, forgetting about the real people being abused.
One such analogy is behind the idea that “food dulls the soul.” This is a relatively obscure theological point, I admit – as J. K. Rowling might say, we’re pretty deep in wand lore here – but it illuminates both the positive value of this kind of reasoning and the pitfalls inherent in this kind of imprecise reasoning.
“Food dulls the soul” is a concept – from Lewis or Miller, elaborated by a local priest – that if you find yourself backsliding into a sin you thought you’d conquered, check your diet over the last twenty-four hours: it’s likely that you had a big, hearty – dare I say gluttonous – meal which softened you up.
The general idea is that the Devil assails a poorly defended point – it’s easy to accidentally overeat – before attempting deeper corruption. The proposed theological mechanism is that “food dulls the soul” – focusing you on your body, detaching you from your spiritual connection, making it easier to sin.
I’ve observed this. The overall phenomenon is real. The explanation even has a grain of truith in it. But as stated, the explanation is garbage. True-sounding garbage: the precise phrase would be specious bullshit, statements that sound true but which are simply made up to suit the author’s purpose.
For the soul is the form of the body. At very the least, it’s an eternal Einsteinian record of every event that ever happened to you in the mind of God, and at the most, it’s an eternal, indestructible spiritual essence under the total control of the Supreme Being of the Universe.
The soul is the form of the body. You can’t separate it from the body. You can’t be born without it, or sell it to the Devil, or cut it away with a subtle knife. If you hop in the transporter, or get transported to the grid, your soul will go with you, no matter how convoluted the episode. Commander Data would have one.
And so: you can’t “dull” the soul. That would be like wearing out the number five: it’s not even wrong, it’s incoherent. And yet, something rings quite true about this idea – to the point that I recognized the immediately. What gives, then? This is a problem well known to artificial intelligence researchers:
“Soul” is a suitcase word.
In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky defines “suitcase words” as words with a whole cluster of meanings we carry around like a suitcase. My favorite is “consciousness,” which packs in attention (I was conscious of the noise) to wakefulness (I lost consciousness) to sensation (conscious experience).
When that priest discussed “food dulling the soul,” he was engaged in a bit of sloppy theology to convey a subtle idea. The soul should be reserved for the theological soul – which has a precise definition to keep us out of trouble – but it’s a stand-in for our intellects, our hearts, our spirits, our state of grace.
The theological soul itself can’t be dulled, but we humans as rational animals can get in a very animal state, where we are focused on this world to the exclusion of the next. Our rationality become reactive; our spiritual senses can get dulled; our actions are in touch with our bodies, not our spirits.
Whether the Devil literally exists or not, whether we are tempted by spiritual forces of evil or whether we’re simply vulnerable to engaging in locally greedy policies rather than appropriately delaying gratification to gather greater reward, we can get in a mode where we’re self-satisfied.
And when we do – when we overfeed our bellies, or underfeed our spirits – that’s when we are vulnerable to falling into deeper problems. Like the “office slash study” where Hofstadter’s books got dropped off, “food dulls the soul” is an analogy, a stand-in for a whole cluster of related ideas.
Much of Christian apologetics and spiritual advice falls into this category. Specious bullshit is too unkind for this kind of analogical reasoning when it is used in its proper fashion: as a roadmap. This kind of theology is technically untrue, but may be useful, guiding us in the general direction of the good.
Feynman once said “the sole test of any idea is experiment”. But is it? Astronomers might disagree. Even though telescopes put on space probes are called “experiments”, they aren’t: they are instruments for gathering observations. Astronomy is an (almost) purely observational science.
But even though it isn’t strictly true as stated, Feynman’s maxim is nevertheless useful – a bright, clearly visible sign that can guide us away from deadend a priori thought-mazes and towards evidence-grounded a posteriori theories which are falsifiable.
The same can be said of many theological maxims. Food may not technically dull the soul, but it can get you into trouble. Islam isn’t a Christian heresy and Judaism isn’t contained within Christianity, but the faiths do exist in a relationship which is fruitful for Christian thinkers to seriously consider.
But, while they may be useful, these maxims aren’t literally true. So be careful with the theology you encounter. It may be a useful crutch for your thinking, but don’t swallow it whole or try to build castles atop of it. At best it will leave a bad taste in your mouth, at worst buried in a pile of sand.
That last bit isn’t true either, but hopefully you get something out of what I mean.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Douglas Hofstadter.
