5. On the Foundations of Religion.

Dearly Beloved,

One day, when attempting to play with my five year old grandson, he said to me, with only a slight hint of desperation, “It's a game; you have to pretend”. His words showed that he had reached that stage in human development which occurs at four to five years of age when we humans become aware for the first time that other people have minds and that their thoughts and emotions may differ from those which we ourselves posses. When we only know our own thoughts it is called first order awareness or first order intentionality.

My grandson was showing a second order awareness because the implication of his words were “I know that you have to pretend in order that you may play this game”. He might even have been implying a complex third order of intentionality, i.e. that he was aware that I had the capacity to pretend and that I knew that he was aware that I had that capacity.

Robin Dunbar was one of my fellow postgraduate students at Bristol University in the lively Psychology department where we studied ethology which encompasses the behaviour of animals from an evolutionary view point. He has just produced a book entitled “How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures “. I walked down to Heffers bookshop and asked the assistant if they had a copy. They said it had only just come in and had not yet been placed on the trolley which conveys the books to the shelves. Two minutes later she emerged with twelve copies piled from waist to chin.

The book is an interesting and complex read. Robin Dunbar points out that one of the ways in which we differ from other animals is that most humans are capable of fifth order intentional awareness. That allows us to make statements such as “I know that you believe that we realise that God exists and wishes to sustain us.” We humans are able to think about thoughts, both our thoughts and those of others.

Robin Dunbar points out that these are important statements because they allow us to express belief whilst at the same time having confidence that other people believe similar things. That allows us to come together and form a religion. That is a capacity that only human beings are capable of because we can comprehend fifth order intentionality and that ability distinguishes us from all other creatures.

Of course that capacity for awareness of the mental states, dispositions and thoughts of others allows us to empathise with, and feel compassion for, other people. That is an important capacity for those who follow the Christian faith.

I was unable to resist the temptation to attempt to write a statement which might demonstrate a sixth order of awareness. It was difficult but eventually I used as a basis Psalm 14:1 “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” This is my attempt:

The fool insists that I am wrong to think that you know that we agree that God wishes that we trust in Him.

Peace,

Paul.



The Isenheim Altar Piece by Matthias Grunewald (d. 1528)

Matthias Grünewald, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Rosa Celeste :  Gustave Doré 's illustration for  Paradiso  Canto 31, where Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean Introductory Notes for the Discussion Group for St Clement's at Andrew Day's residence on 23 rd February 2024 on the subject of AJ Ayer's statement that: “ If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. “ Contemplative Experience. I will use “contemplative” rather than “mystic” in honour of “Mystic Meg” a News of the World sub editor and later astrologer associated with predicting things about National Lottery winners (which I am told, were rarely accurate!) I am going to start with describing some tiny portions of the experiences of contemplatives and will then go on to deal with AJ Ayer's objections. I shall leave a few seconds before I identify each quotation to allow people to think a
Read more
Image
24. On War. Dearly Beloved, It is difficult for us to cope with a war in Europe so close to home, especially because it is a war within Christendom between Christian communities. Apart from the civil war in Herzegovina, there has been peace in Europe for 77 years. My father was 28 years old and my mother 22 when war broke out in 1939. My father was already in the Royal Navy and my mother joined the Auxillary Territoral Service. “The War” in my family continued in talk and discussion long after the fighting had actually stopped. It was the background to my childhood and was made more prominent when my mother organised her family to fly us out to Malta in 1953 where my father's ship lay in Sliema Creek. We lodged close by whilst he finished an extra year of service obligated by the Korean War. One my earliest memories is of looking down from a prop driven Vickers Viscount aircraft at the ships on the Mediterranean sea shining in the sun far below. That was the same Mediterrane
Read more
Image
  Nearly Beloved, 91 Questions About the Nature of Questions . Last night at St Clement's Church the choir sang a diversity of music including, Poulenc's Four Motets entitled Tenebrae factae sunt – which might be loosely translated as “ There was darkness ”. These are difficult, modern, meditative pieces but they were beautifully and movingly sung by St Clement's Choir conducted and trained by Karol Jaworski. The source of the Tenebrae is to be found in Mark 15:33 which describes Christ's crucifixion: “ And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour .” T his service, its hymns, motets and varied readings, raised the most demanding questions of Christian belief. Is any question more demanding of our understanding than that posed in the second of the motets, Christ's cry from the cross: “My God, why hast though forsaken me?' Altogether the varied texts on the service sheet contained twelve qu
Read more