BELIEF SERIES LECTURE

The Trouble with Our Selves

Was there an Original Sin?

John Bulman

BRLSI Member

3 November 2004

We could never have guessed that the date we chose for this talk would be the day we learned that George Bush would be the next US President, but it does reinforce my reasons for wanting to give the talk. A television programme last night showed quite thoroughly his religious convictions, and he comes across as a sincere, convinced Christian, who felt, after 9/11, as the commander of America, that he had a mission to have it ‘shine like the light in the darkness, with the darkness not comprehending it’, to spread the goodness of America, under God, against the evil around the world. So there are two groups trying to destroy evil, the other being Al-Quaeda, with the other religious banner of Islam.

I want to consider what may be the common theme running through the various religions individually considered in this series, mostly systems of interlocking beliefs about the universe and the place of human beings. I don’t personally like the idea that they share a common belief in a god or gods, because one of the great world religions doesn’t involve belief in a god, and those that do have no common theme or ideas about God, his feelings and his wishes. I hope to show that their common theme concerns within each of us a deep unease, which they reveal and claim to cure.

I hope then to describe another great faith, unreligious, and probably held more widely around the world now than any other, which is the materialist, determinist and reductionist, scientific method. People have tended to see science as telling them things, compatible with their religion, but about the world rather than about people, and our conscious minds. Science in recent decades, however, has seen a revolution in our thinking about ourselves, certainly as drastic as statements by Copernicus that the earth was not the centre of the universe; by Darwin, that man was evolved, not ready-made; and by Freud, that our conscious motives are often driven by unconscious feelings. I shall glance at Buddhism, and at the Christianity in which I was raised, but it may all sound rather formidable, so I’ll start light-heartedly with a Bible story I sang as a boy:

Adam was the first man, or so we all believe,

One day he was filleted and introduced to Eve.

They didn’t know what to do at first,

But soon found out the way,

And that’s why we’re all sitting here today.

I doubt many literally believe that Adam and Eve were our first parents, or that we are agreed about the sin that drove them out of the Garden of Eden. The 13^th century statement by Pope Innocent III that ‘intercourse, even within matrimony, is never performed without the itch of the flesh, the heat of passion, and the stench of lust … the seed conceived is fouled, smirched, corrupted, and the soul infused into it inherits the guilt of sin’ reflects the sexual symbolism in the story of the snake and the apple, which led many people to the interpretation of carnal sin. The Genesis story means in fact that that by eating of the forbidden fruit they were presumptuously taking some powers into themselves, usurping the role of God: Pride before the Fall. Throughout the Christian story there run a thread, a theme of guilt and redemption. When, in Church of England Matins, we say every Sunday that ‘we have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we ought to have done’ we are probably thinking of recent, minor mis-demeanours and shortcomings towards those closest to us, not profound faults, yet we then make the rather electrifying avowal ‘and there is no health in us’, suggesting a profound unease.

Many years ago, an American missionary, approached me uninvited, and enquired ‘Are you a sinner?’ I probably was, against his moral standards and some of my own, but the word ‘Sin’ seemed too heavy for me enquire about the salvation he was offering me. But his question did remind me of a conversation I had with the abbot of a monastery in Thailand where I had just been, at the beginning of which he asked me ‘Are you suffering?’ Yes, I had some unhappiness, in my professional and private life, but for a westerner nothing unusual or worrying, but again, ‘suffering’ seemed too heavy.

In subsequent years, I’ve reflected on the questions from the missionary and the Buddhist, and have come to believe that they have a common origin in human existence, namely that we all feel ourselves to be separate from that which lies outside us, and that in a universe of two parts, ‘me’ and ‘not me’, this separation causes our unease. In a quotation from the French philosopher Roland Barthes in the play ‘Journey’s End’ (recently seen in Bath), demigod man’s distinctive talents of thought, knowledge and subtlety of action are seen as providing him with glorious diversion yet no divine omnipotence, the lack of which plunges his soul into ‘inexpressible and incurable suffering’. We find again the Genesis story, man discovering his powers, but his lack of divine omnipotence. Barthes is perhaps a bit extreme, but one can analyse man’s fairly habitual suffering in what I call The Troubles of the Self.

Loneliness or ‘solitary confinement’; nobody can share our innermost thoughts and feelings, nor we theirs. We can discuss and describe them, express them in art, but never share them. Our need of companionship, affection and perhaps respect come from the lonely specificity of our time and place of birth in the universe and journey through it, and the limitation this places upon our knowledge and powers. Our consequent vulnerability, to pain, and to guilt and remorse about should do but can’t, and injustice. ‘ The rain it raineth every day, On the just and unjust fellow, But mostly on the just because, The unjust has the just’s umbrella’.

More seriously, some families, some groups indeed nations, suffer extraordinary ill fortune; disease, death, financial disasters, earthquakes and floods, often quite unknown to the outside world, leading to the more fortunate sensing helpless sympathy. These feelings are inherent in our sense of being separate selves in the universe. A central, common appeal of all religions is that they alert us to, and offer to release us from, these existential pains. Their emphases vary, and I have sought to suggest with simplicity how some of the major religions, taken in order of antiquity, try to deal with our problems, and see their Religious Goals for the Self.

They are all amalgams, each with something potentially for us all, but they all have a common theme, advocating the submergence - one could say transcendence - of the individual self; an atonement or ‘at-one-ment’ with all else; and with a goal of reaching some peace and joy. All have a ‘selfish’ motive: personal salvation.

What do we mean by the term self? There are two meanings, though we rarely distinguish. Objectively it can be seen as an organism, a personality, an appearance familiar to our friends. The most important thing in the world to us, however, is the subjective self, which feels separate from all the surroundings, including our body and mind, though it feels it owns and directs them, in the exercise of its freewill. There, with our inner self, is where out troubles lie, but the idea that it should be submerged, or transcended, is far from our western thinking, driven as we are to consider our material abilities and well-being.

Now, however, I believe our understanding of the physical world has come to support, rather than undermine, the essential religious ideal that we should escape the sense of independent selfhood. Brain scientists and philosophers of the mind, just by probing and lighting up the physical brain, are unravelling its structure, and the origin of all our thoughts and feelings is being shown to lie entirely within that lump of matter. The pursuit of this discovery prevents us from believing in a ‘self’ inside us, independent of that physical brain, for our sense of self is generated by the brain, whose compliance with our genes means that the self is entirely a product of the universe around us. To believe that we are separate entities in the universe, the owners of our minds and bodies, is an illusion and an error. If there is no self, our freewill becomes also an illusion. But we know that we have freewill, that we can raise an arm when we wish. If we are automata, that’s a big problem. If we are driven by the universe, how can anyone be responsible for what they do? How can the law or discipline be applied, if no blame can attach? The people closest to this science are really struggling to escape from their conclusions.

I have some solutions. Whatever the paradox that we may deny our freewill intellectually, the certainty that we have it persists. In 1977 the philosopher Brian Magee interviewed the American philosopher Quine, best known for his work in logic, epistemology and some of the remoter corners, to me, of philosophy. Having stated that he is a materialist rather than a dualist, he was asked by Magee whether he denied the problem as to whether we have freewill, and he replied:

‘Indeed we have freewill. The problem comes of a confusion, indeed a confusing turn of phrase. Freedom of the will means that we are free to DO as we will; not that we are free to WILL as we will, which would be nonsense. We are free to do as we will, unless someone holds us back, or unless we will something beyond our strength or talent. Our actions count as free insofar as our will is a cause of them’. (I would summarise that in the few words: (we can do what we will, but not will what we will.)

Quine continued: ‘Certainly the will has its causes in turn, no one would wish it otherwise. If we thought will could not be caused, we would not train our children, you would not try to win votes; we would not try to sell things, or to deter criminals’.

The first part answers the paradox as to whether we have freewill. The second part addresses the matter of social responsibility. As Quine says, we distinguish between what we like and don’t, and do our best to change what we don’t like, to change the will of people whose behaviour we dislike, be it by fines, prisons, execution or war. These things we have to do, but my concern is that they can’t help being what they are. It’s the universe expressing itself through them. We may hate and try to do something about it, but we should love them as ourselves. As I believe Saint Augustine said: ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’. Evil, and its consequence hate, are mentioned over and over in the newspapers, and personally I always feel we should always remember Saint Augustine.

I hope what I have been saying leads us into familiar religious attitudes. I believe that the future of all religions lies in understanding that the way to human peace and joy is to realise that we have inherited from our earliest ancestors a false notion. We are not separate willing entities in the universe; we are wholly embedded in it, fragments, as a fast and ever changing reality of which we are so briefly and partially conscious. It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves. To realise this is not to deny our roles as individual organisms in the world - each objectively has his own path, but we should learn to feel that the universe is working out its unknown purposes through us, and to rejoice in that.

Religions, with their ancient roots, all arose in different times and places, and put things in different ways, but they give us this message through stories about people, and super-people or gods. Each has developed its own way of implanting the intellectual realisation of ‘self-transcendence’ or ‘at-one-ment’ in our deepest habits and feelings. They have many and often colourful ways of inducing in the depths of our being, this feeling which is the very goal of religion, really where the answer is.

My hope is that all religions, one day, will be prepared to see a different way of understanding the colourful texts also which are their scriptures, in contemporary terms, and respect both equally. Those familiar with and in faith with the religion they were brought up in may not need it all translated in the terms I have suggested. But to some of us to whom the literal truth of the old stories may seem to crumble, and even though an attempt to compile a new parallel dictionary (restricted here to the Christian tradition) explaining the original texts is rather like analysing wine and finding mostly water, but missing the colour, the flavour and the intoxication of the original, I myself find in them refreshment, and new meaning:

God All that exists, within my experience and knowledge.

2. Thus to love all other people as one’s ‘self’.

Resurrection The promised reward in peace and joy.

Summary by Martin Sturge