Faith and Reason

I'm reading two oddly conflicting things today. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. I agree with Natalie Angier, New York Times reviewer, who says, "The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood." Author, Sam Harris, acknowledges the importance of spiritual experiences, while strongly denouncing the irrational aspects of organized religion. I find myself saying, "Yes!" "Right!" "I'm so glad to hear someone saying this out loud." Face it. The Bible and the Koran were not written by the creator of the Universe.

"There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books. But words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the inspiration he found there. The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself) leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict..."

You know me. I'm the guy who deeply believes that logic and facts will prevail. But I picked up last week's issue of Time with its cover article, "The New Map Of The Brain." Turns out our rational process aren't all we think they are.

"Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after
the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along."

It turn out all parts of our brains interact as much as they can and all our perceptions are filtered through prior experiences. One of the few things I can say for sure about this is that in a hundred years, we'll be laughing about how primitive our understanding of consciousness was in 2006.