Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World
Eric Dietrich
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0231171021
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Flipping convention on its head, Eric Dietrich argues that science uncovers awe-inspiring, enduring mysteries, while religion, regarded as the source for such mysteries, is a biological phenomenon. Just like spoken language, Dietrich shows that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. Science is the source of perplexing yet beautiful mysteries, however natural the search for answers may be to human existence.
Excellent Beauty undoes our misconception of scientific inquiry as an executioner of beauty, making the case that science has won the battle with religion so thoroughly it can now explain why religion persists. The book also draws deep lessons for human flourishing from the very existence of scientific mysteries. It is these latter wonderful, completely public truths that constitute some strangeness in the proportion, revealing a universe worthy of awe and wonder.
of truth. “Oh well.” I shrugged. “I never really believed all that stuff, anyway.” And I moved on. . . . Almost. The second thing my puzzling revealed was that as I approached the time of ascension, the time of “Knowing the Truth About Santa,” the transition wasn’t abrupt. Shortly before Santa was eliminated by truth, but quite a bit after he ceased to be a part of the ordinary world that only a fool would deny, he became quite strange, different from the other inhabitants of reality. And he
least that is the current view. The parrot, dolphin, and chimpanzee language studies conducted so far suggest that parrots, dolphins, and chimps don’t have, and aren’t capable of, robust symbolic language. And even when expressly taught (which is laborious), these animals grasp only the most basic symbols.4 If all human peoples have a language, if language is universal for our species, then it likely had a role in human evolution. But even if speaking a language is central to being human,
of others, since it is easier to act on a duty you feel than one you merely comprehend. Nevertheless, the role of rationality in each view is obvious. Clear thinking and happy, kind feelings can guide behavior. This is a shocking conclusion to most religious people. There is a vast land of morality captured in the duty view and the happy consequences view. None of it requires a god to make it work. Our conclusion, then, is that we don’t need religion at all to have even a very strong sort of
neuronal thing with no consciousness at all. We will clearly and cleanly imagine a being of some sort living a robust life, traveling hither and yon, doing this and that, with neurons abuzz, yet with no consciousness at all. This is where the second intuition exercise comes in. And the second movie. Philosophers have a technical term for creatures that have bodies—neurons, brains, and sense organs—but experience nothing: zombies. Zombies are very important in philosophical discussions of
dark energy. But they couldn’t do it without changing such knowledge utterly. For starters, a religion formed from the mysteries would have to deify them somehow, or derive deities from them. This is required in order to make the mysteries supernatural (our next topic). They also would have to force the knowledge of the mysteries to be arcane. As discussed, this is now very hard to do: Schrodinger’s Cat is already out of the bag. 4. See Koch, Quest for Consciousness, as well as Dietrich and