Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt?(II)
The How and The Why: Are Cosmologies an Ontological Necessity?
The physical and social sciences are epiphenomena of society and culture – perpetually malleable, subject to extraneous socio-political, historical and cultural stimuli; however, also an arbiter moulding them through the proliferation of socio-cultural products. Thus, in order to dissect and form discussions around atheistic beliefs, one must realise the interdependency with the organizational and symbolic world they inhabit – mostly academic, sometimes popular. A multitude of nuances, mythologies and litanies are immensely important to the atheistic cosmology – specialised litanies from different fields whittle a specialised atheism propounded through different explanations such as that of the physicist or sociobiologist.
A scrupulous inquisition into the nature of belief, experience and being is essential in understanding anyone's faith. After careful inquiry one can make salient that atheistic cosmologies provide a certain ontological necessity, analogous to any explanation of the phenomenology of the world on which we dwell; a facet, just one strand in a vast interwoven array that entangles man.
The faithful being
This being can be divided into several categories: The human entity as matter; as a socio-cultural symbolic classification; the psychological manner, or the self – the operation of psyche in (Morris 1994:10- 13) relation with situational/environmental, biological, neurological and socio-cultural constraints which guides the actions of the being in its entirety. The self, from one perspective, is the captain of a ship on a tumultuous sea, commanding a course in accordance with the environment and the structure of the vessel – this is not to infer a Cartesian split, for the vessel in itself can demand and dictate the actions of the captain. The self is a creature of limited will.
The entity as matter is a phenomenon which encompasses both object and agent, which can be perceived by others in a myriad of ways. Thus, in talking of the faithful being, one must talk about the experiential aspects of the self as the conduit through which stimuli is both ingested, ruminated and expelled back through self-other relations. The faithful being rationalises phenomena based on culturally constructed categorisations of the world which are by no means concrete themselves. By contrasting atheistic beliefs against other cosmological world views through the medium of the self, one can extrapolate if atheists experience stimuli through cosmological mediums. Therefore, serving a psycho-cultural purpose which is a fundamental construction – and here I may be a step too bold – which is universal.
On the subliminal
Let me start this half with a little vignette, which may serve to illustrate my point:
I came to the boundary of the metropolis. It was the first time the stars relinquished themselves from bindings of light pollution...How wonderful that radiation is coming forth from a nuclear fusion reaction billions of miles away and probably hitherto passed and dead...But why matter at all? Why a molecule, electrons, photons e.t.c?
The subliminal experience, once rationalised, of myself seeing the stars can be classified as a symbolic experience. I became overwhelmed, and merely experienced for a while, then had a mechanistic description come to mind - but still wondered why matter? An experience shaped by socio-historical scientific dogmas – most certainly ascribed atheistic myths - also a cosmological experience and symbolic explanation bound by cultural webs. One thing is certain, that the way I rationalised the experience of the stars was part of my own internalised collection of mythologies. Myths, that as Midgley states:...are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning'(Midgley 2011: 1)
The theist could explain this experience coherently to the atheist. He may say a God has placed those stars there, without even a mechanistic description. All earthly matter may not be important to him, as it is explained by the will of God... But, still ask:Why God – the primordial matter to the theist?..The theist is awaiting heaven for this explanation. Atheism is content with doubt and faith in a present life, as endeavouring to answer the question of matter. However, that does not refute my claims that it is a cosmology. Just reasserts them as a faith in doubt with a commitment to the present.
The cosmological event
Mechanistic explanation are not alien to a theist, for a Christian will say a person died by being hit by a car, but it was gods will – they are likely to put the death down to some human fault, god did not push the man in front of the car, but it was the right time for him to be taken. Thus, the mechanistic, everyday experiential element is not removed, but an additional explanation is conflated to the mechanistic explanation as a conduit through which emotions such as grief and loss can be controlled. The atheist may lack the belief in an afterlife, but deals with bereavement in an equally efficient fashion; The human experiential life is unpredictable and we all must die and our matter be redistributed, creating a symbolic recognition of death based on a shared fate of humans. Thus, a symbolic rationalisation of death is constructed, hardly differing from the notion of the shared fate of humans to be judged or reincarnated.
In an infamous ethnography on the Azande, Evans-Pritchard became fully conscious to the fact that 'the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events' (Evans-Pritchard 1976:18). To put in brief Azande cosmology is an incredibly difficult task, as Evans-Pritchard points out: 'It is no use saying to a Zande 'now tell me what you Azande think about witchcraft' because the subject is too general and indeterminate, both too vague and too immense, to be described concisely' (ibid. p.23). However, the most salient features are that witchcraft is a psychic act; a hereditary condition; that it manifests itself as a blackish swelling, Evans-Pritchard determines on the information provided by his interlocutors that it is somewhere near the xiphiod cartilage; only sorcerers can utter spells; many oracles, diviners etc. are employed to combat and find the source. Witchcraft, is seen as an almost unconscious act, caused by social disruption, one often will find the be-witched is prey to someone with whom one had a fray with in the past. (ibid).
Even early ethnographic accounts such as this, however provide immense value when one envisions the rift between everyday perception of causality and cosmological explanations; between sensing stimuli, rationalising and an ultimate reality. For instance, if one looks at examples regarding death amongst the Azande and then relates it to the car vignette, one will almost certainly find no differing conditions...God didn't push the accelerator; Neither did witchcraft...
In the case of a man that committed suicide, Evans-Pritchard enquired into the full nature of the event from one of the community members, eventually getting a response that the man had killed himself by hanging; this he did because he was angry with his brothers; But, witchcraft caused the man to kill himself because only the mentally ill commit suicide (ibid, P24). One can see how this differs only slightly from atheistic cosmological views. Three causal events happened, and indeed the third – the mental illness – is the most important as it is the causal event which requires an explanation. An explanation of psychological depression through social rejection or discontentment resulting in suicide would be the atheists cosmological explanation, akin to the theory of bewitchment. Cosmology is based on the Why not the How (ibid).
As he later states:
'Zande belief in witchcraft in no way contradicts empirical knowledge of cause and effect. The world known to the senses is just as real to them as it is to us. We must not be deceived by their way of expressing causation and imagine that because they say a man was killed by witchcraft they entirely neglect the secondary causes that, as we judge them, were the true cause of his death' (ibid, P.25).
Similarly, one should not be deceived by an atheistically grounded explanation of causality. Atheistic conflations of Why to the How, is one facet of an ontological necessitation to understand certain events. One must understand that it is only certain events. For, it is a fallacy for one to believe ones cosmology is consciously phosphorescent in logically deciphering every stimuli one encounters... I don't think about the molecules in my coffee I am currently drinking...Although I am thinking about all those lovely neurotransmitters... Now, I am consciously considering my coffee as it is ordained by my current situation, which required such an analogy...Thus, as I will suggest later, enquiries into the nature of consciousness, agency and ethics arise from such mild contemplations on cosmological categorisations/rationalisations of the phenomenological world through the conduit of the self.
Conclusion?
Through a logical contemplation of what atheism provides for those who adhere to it, one can delineate the possibilities of an ontological necessitation of why akin to any cosmological world-view. Unearthing innumerable questions which must be investigated; If a cosmology is an ontological necessity, why is this so?..Does the conflated why provide evidence that reality is a consequence of cognition, not a prerequisite?..What are the socio-historical events that lead to a rise in atheism and why is it a cosmology that purports western ideological conceptions of egocentricism(Midgley 1999 & Foucault 2002[1966])?..If atheism has no ascribed moral code, what can this tell us about ethics?
It is my belief that an engaged philosophical enquiry that utilised knowledge afforded us by other social and bio-psychological sciences can help to answer such questions, and that the questioning of belief does not stop at atheism, it starts: A new brand of ontological anthropology and a fresh turn to Metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology.
By Richard James Marklew
Bibliography
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles, And Magic Among The Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Foucault,M. (2002[1966]). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Oxon: Routledge
Midgley, M (1999) 'The Origins of Don Giovanni: if our genes are selfish, does that mean we are too?'. Philosophy Now (25): 32-34
Midgley, M. (2011). The Myths We Live By. Oxon: Routledge
Morris, B (1994). Anthropology of The Self: The individual in cultural perspectives. London: Pluto Press
