Remember "The Secret" back in the mid-2000s? I thought it had some solid principles that were buried beneath a moderate layer of crap. One thing from The Secret that I started doing was carrying a small rock in my pocket. Every time I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the rock - either on purpose or without thinking - I was supposed to think of something I was thankful for. Taking time throughout the day to be intentionally grateful made me marginally less of a brooding a-hole.
I'm thankful that I'm healthy.
I'm thankful that I live in a peaceful country.
I'm thankful for toilets and asthma medicine.
But in these cases, I have no object for my gratitude. I can't say, "I am grateful to [direct object] for my relatively hairless back." My agnosticism has robbed me of ultimate purpose and, from time to time, of an opportunity to use a noun as a predicate.
Does gratitude imply the existence of a benefactor?
When a human does something nice for me, I'm grateful to that person. It's a natural human response, and there are some interesting theories on how that response helped our species survive.
The human brain has an amazing capacity to create a back story that integrates disparate facts. We have a natural tendency to impute context, to create meaning. Our inclination is to reject randomness and look for cause-and-effect. In his book Impro for Storytellers, Keith Johnstone explains the neurology behind humans' justification reflex:
The verbal hemisphere of "split-brain" patients automatically justifies the decisions of the non-verbal part. Such justification is never-ending, effortless and automatic. When a projectionist mixed up the order of the reels of a movie, my mind accepted this as "flash-backs" or "art".
When we win the lottery, we want to know why we won it and not somebody else. I know because I won the California Lottery Mega Millions drawing. Got two numbers plus the "mega." I was swimming in $9.00 of gambling winnings, y'all! Barely missed the threshold for Form W-2G.
The human impulse to find a recipient for our thanks is a manifestation of the mind's rejection of randomness as an answer to the question of why. So when we feel thankful, we thank God rather than admit randomness because we're programmed that way.
Living a life full of gratitude leads to a higher quality life, but my thanks does not necessarily need a recipient.
However, on Thanksgiving I want you to know that I'm grateful for everyone who has been reading this blog, especially those of you who have been kind enough to take the time to show me the ways that you think I'm full of shit. Seriously.
I definitely agree that you can be thankful without there being a recipient of your thankfulness. However, two things come to mind as far as I'm seeing it. First, there are different senses of thankfulness, and your idea amounts to being thankful FOR something rather than being thankful TO someone or something. It is the difference between appreciation and gratitude - we can appreciate something without a recipient, but gratitude does require a recipient inherently. An example would be that we can appreciate the Freedom we have without understanding what others did to make that a reality, so we would lack gratitude - gratitude corresponds to our degree of understanding. Second, this is a lot like the idea of purpose that you refer to briefly. We can create a purpose for ourselves without there being an "ultimate purpose," but such purpose is completely subjective and ultimately lacks the full sense of purpose. It is like being thankful that you have something without understanding how it was made possible for you to have it. Hopefully I made that clearer rather than murky or critical of your "thankfulness."
ReplyDeleteAnyways, In the midst of this you inserted a hidden gem, you point out that: "Our inclination is to reject randomness and look for cause-and-effect. So when we feel thankful, we thank God rather than admit randomness because we're programmed that way." And yet, if you deny a designer we all would have come to exist unintentionally and, therefore, "randomly," but we were programmed to reject randomness as you say. This would be inherently contradictory since randomness certainly can't "program" anything – and it certainly wouldn't program us to reject itself and thus the truth. So it would be necessary that something else "programmed" us, and it would be on purpose. You apparently ignore the possibility that we “reject randomness” in favor of cause and effect because it is the logical thing to do. Logically we need a cause for everything and since “randomness” is not a functional cause of anything, we reject it as a cause.
Duane, I really like the distinction you made between appreciation and gratitude. The right way to answer the question "Who are agnostics thankful to" is "We're not thankful to anyone, but we appreciate you asking."
DeleteI would like to discuss the idea of humans' programming to reject randomness from a evolutionary point of view. The programming happens as a result of the process of natural selection (rather than a designer-god).
If an event takes place, it is either random or it has a cause. If we interpret a random act as random, we are correct, and we can do nothing to prevent or ensure this act from happening again. If we interpret it as having a cause, we are incorrect, but we can still do nothing to prevent or ensure this act from happening again.
However, if an act has a cause, and we believe it has a cause, we can either prevent it from happening again or ensure that it does happen again, and the benefits can be vast to our survival individually and as a species. If an act has a cause, and we believe it is random, we miss this opportunity.
Therefore we do not benefit from correct identification of randomness because we cannot leverage randomness for survival. We could, however, benefit from a tenacious drive to explain events in terms of cause-and-effect because we are not hurt if we're wrong, and we can benefit greatly if we're right.
I believe this evolutionary compulsion to find cause-and-effect relationships is the exact reason why humans believe in a supernatural world that does not exist. That probably does not exist.
That was very well articulated. The view that Natural Selection is the cause is the non-chance explanation available to those who reject design. So we have 3 possibilities: Design, Natural Selection, and random chance.
DeleteThere are a couple key difficulties for your chosen explanation. First, Natural Selection doesn't actually Cause anything. It is the "Process" that takes place, as you acknowledge; it is the description of "what" takes place or "how" things take place, not "why." Basically, Natural Selection can't "do" anything, it is simply a process - like a Law of Science (Thermodynamics or the speed of light) which doesn't cause anything but simply explains what constantly occurs. So this “Process” can’t “Program” us because it can’t “do” stuff, and something else must cause the process to take place, just like we need something to cause the things the Laws describe. If the Atheist wants to say the cause is random chance then they have accomplished nothing. So this means that regardless of what degree of Natural Selection is proposed, it does not preclude a designer because the "Process" still needs a non-random cause.
Secondly, there is a good reason to think this "compulsion" to seek out cause/effect relationships is not simply due to Natural Selection - that reason is Logic itself. Logic demands that every effect needs a sufficient cause (I could point out that Scientific inquiry also requires every effect to have a sufficient cause). So we are compelled to seek out cause/effect relations because Logic requires it. Therefore, the idea that the reason is some type of innate survival benefit will be insufficient. There will always be an actual cause for any effect, though we may not know what it is. But if the reason we seek for the cause is Logic, then we must be Logical beings, and then we also need a cause for why Logic exists and why we are Logical... which of course points to Design.
Another problem for the Natural Selection perspective is that it only attempts to explain the process of life. It does not explain the beginning of life, or this planet, or the Universe - or the existence of Logic as I just pointed out. The Atheist must propose additional causes for those things. The strength of Theism is that it presents a consistent cause for each part with the idea of a Designer.
Lots to chew on. Whenever I gather the day’s eggs from my chicken coop, I say, “Thank’s, Girls.” The hens don’t give a cluck for my expressions of gratitude, but I like how it makes me feel. And it’s a recognition of our interdependence.
ReplyDeleteNow on to the importance of an “object” for our gratitude… In my own life, what characterizes moments of deep gratitude hasn’t been the presence (or absence) of an “object,” but simply the dissolving of “subject.” I feel most grateful, in other words, when boundaries of self disappear and I perceive how interconnected everything is. When I eat a carrot, I try to see the compost pile filled with last year’s scraps, the rain, my children weeding the garden, the manure from our hens, the green machinery of squeezing sunlight into sugar and exchanging my exhalations for my inhalations in the process. The carrot needs me and I need the carrot and our lives aren’t so separate, really.