Neurobiology epiphenomenalism and religion

Religion cannot be reduced to “behavior towards supernatural agents”, which are “personalities whose existence is believed but cannot be proven scientifically”, i.e., personalities whose existence cannot be proven empirically. The worship of the sun in ancient cultures does not fit in the “non-empirical status” of the supernatural agent, as defined above: the existence of sun was easily and empirically verifiable by those ancient people who worship it ― and we cannot say that the Egyptians considered the sun as a “person”; they knew the sun was something similar to the moon and to all other astrological bodies they use to analyze through their astrological charts inherited from the culture of the Babylonian Zigurats.

The very first thing we must do when analyzing religion throughout human existence ― and not necessarily throughout human history ― is to divide it into two different kinds: the immanent and the transcendent religiosity. Most cultures mixed both criteria. In the case of the worship of the sun, the religion was immanent ― the object of worship was something concretely and/or allegorically belonging to the universe and appertaining to its logical order. Even the Greek gods were immanent because they were intracosmic and symbolized the human phenomena and life. However, alongside with the immanent, most cultures also worshiped the transcendence and the domain of the only master God who created the Cosmos (cosmos= “The Order”) and “after the Creation moved away from human presence and existence”, leaving to the immanent gods the task of ruling the Creation of that “master transcendent God”.

All books of Mircea Eliade are indispensable reading for someone analyzing the religion phenomena.

The problem of biology and neurobiology is that those scientists created a world for themselves, ignoring other scientific data as those coming from quantum physics. Sometimes, neurobiology seems to evolve itself to a sort of “neo-phrenology”.

Those neurobiology scientists are absorbed and exclusively focused by the “research of the effect” (epiphenomenalism) instead of taking into consideration the “causes” by linking their investigation fields to other scientific fields as quantum physics. They simply forget that our brains exist as a structure according to the same principles driving the quantum wave function. They also forget that according to quantum mechanics, quantum waves (which are not matter as the waves do not have mass) transform themselves in particles (matter, because with mass) when observed by a [human] conscience (see Bernard D’Espagnat). What we see in science is that physicists are clearly saying that neurobiologists are dumb; and the latter disregard the categorization and remain proudly in their dumb world.

A neurobiologist may be compared to a guy that is ― in a very dark overcast night ― looking for his lost car keys bellow the street lamp, inspite of the fact of having loosed them ten yards away from the light spot, and because there was no light available on the real spot where he lost the keys. However, they consider themselves as the most-super-intelligent creatures on Earth.

Any comparison between a human being religiosity and the music of the whales and the so called “culture” of the high apes, is irrational because it implicitly considers a sort of “human rationality” either in whales and in apes. The neurobiologists really start from the concrete reality ― or from a real, concrete and objective fact ― and throughout a serial of erroneous induced and deducted thinking ― with an intrinsic logic, however ― they reach to a faulty constructed reality which they call “scientific”.

 

The urgent need of rationality instead of rationalism

From Illuminism we have inherited an abusive rationalism that assumes that it can explain everything and imagines that alterity could always be reduced to a same predefined condition and without any residual differences.

The “great reason” of Lights should know better and recognize its own limits and stop when facing the unknown. Science is today a Babel Tower: every science field speaks its own language disregarding all the rest.

When quantum mechanics is strongly defying the macroscopic determinism, there’s a new and modern sort of ignorance in this article from Elizabeth Culotta ― but not the kind of De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) that Nicholas of Cusa taught us about. It’s irrational ― and therefore stupid ― implicitly attribute the human religiosity and teleological judgment to some sort of brain’s epiphenomenal causal determinism.

Rather I would advise people to read two actual books: “Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution”, by the German Gerhard Neuweiler (“We Are It: The Crown of Evolution”), and “Does Our Existence Have a Sense?” by the French Jean Staune.

The “golden age” in which reason was reduced to objective causality is gone.

 

Every human being has a religiosity independently of structured religions

« Voegelin then concludes his argument with a mischievous sleight of hand, when he further attributes to this range of individuals the beliefs of just one, Comte, presumably on the basis that it is easier to fit Comte’s positivist views into Voegelin’s meretricious argument that all gnostics were driven by the need for immortality, by a need for personal salvation.

This argument must fail because Voegelin is ascribing religious sensibilities to people who are, in some cases at least, not religious. The idea of personal salvation cannot explain the actions of a scientist.»

I do not think that a scientist is an irrational animal, i.e., a person without “religiosity”. I would ask the guy who wrote the aforementioned stuff to be more concise and distinguish between “religion” A or B, and “human religiosity”.

Furthermore, it seems that the blogger does not know much about classical culture and politics ― namely those of Ancient Greece ― as Eric Voegelin knew so well. The same concept of “immortality” Voegelin argues belonging to modern gnostics existed before Christianity with the Roman concept of “tradition”, which was the influence and the remains of Greek culture.

“Immortality”, for the Greeks, was exactly the concept of outstanding and exceptional human acts ― being either in literature, arts, politics or in philosophy (which was considered as “science”, for the Greeks) fields. Eric Voegelin did not create any new concept; rather he just looked back in History before Christianity to verify how a similar concept of “immortality” could be transposed through History and assimilated in a so called “post-Christian” Era.