Z-Bate! Faith, Reason & The Four Quadrants

First of all i want to thank C4Chaos for agreeing to christen this experimental idea of mine and participate in the first ever Z-Bate!

C4

It has been great having your voice in the mix on my nascent blog discussions.  I find your own well-established blogging first-rate, informative, thought-provoking and non-dogmatic - right on! You are also Integrally informed which is not only fun for Wilberheads like myself, but also adds a layer of depth and context to the conversations that folks at Zaadz are interested in having. We have had some good exchanges about several topics, but standing out for me right now are a) those with respect to the "trinity of new atheists", Harris, Dawkins and Dennet as well as b) those about the existence of paranormal events and abilities.

This first post is just to get the ball rolling and I imagine you might be in 100% agreement with the bulk of it - but I think it is in the nuances as we apply the ideas to examples that things get interesting.

I am going to take issue with your use of terms like "rational fundamentalist," as well as your conflating of truth-claims for meditative states with paranormal phenomena and your assertion that people like Dawkins are "flatlanders" for using reason to debunk unreasonable faith...

I want to start today by exploring the relationship of Faith to Reason within the context of Ken Wilber's Four Quadrant model.

The Four Quadrants

What I have found so exciting about this Four Quadrant approach is not only it's inclusive embrace of reality, but also the assertion that there are different sciences for each quadrant. But let's begin with the basics of the model. As you know, Wilber suggests that we look at reality through the four lenses of interior, exterior, individual and collective. The other seed idea for the Four Quadrants comes from the ubiquitous trinity of the Good, True and Beautiful as attributes of the Divine, or discrete aspects of what we find valuable as human beings.

For the sake of this model, Wilber assigns Truth to Science, Goodness to Ethics or Morality, and Beauty to Aesthetics. To further elaborate, Beauty is in the "I" of the beholder, it is a subjective, personal experience, while Goodness or Ethics/Morality is a "We" discussion about how we treat each-other, and Truth in the domain of Science has to do with "Its" that have simple location.

This gives us a four quadrant framework that (clockwise from left to right) divides into: individual interior (I, Beauty), individual exterior (It, Science), collective exterior, (Its, Science),  and collective interior(We, Morals). We notice by looking at the diagram that the left side is interior, the right is exterior, the upper half is individual, and the lower half is collective. What I find interesting about this model is the way it puts different ways of looking at or studying reality on a big map, where we can see not only how they are distinctly different from each-other, but also how they are related. Part of the idea behind this model (and it's parent Integral Philosophy) is to create a meta-context within which we can include different perspectives and data from every field of study. In so doing we can start to see relationships that we may not yet have noticed. The other side of that coin is that we can also develop a healthy respect for the different domains with which each discipline concerns itself. Central to understanding the model is recognizing that  reductionism in any direction creates a "flatland" - eviscerating the dimensional nature of reality - and Wilber would say "Spirit" itself!

Wilber further suggests that there actually are sciences for each of the four quadrants, but that in the dominance of our modern empirical "monological gaze" we have become obsessed with reductionist science that sees only " Its" and completely denies anything that doesn't have simple location. This is of course in stark contrast to the premodern zeitgeist that saw magic and mythic forces where now we have discovered scientific principles at play. Thus unless you can kick it, or measure it in a laboratory, or inject it full of neurotransmitters it is not provably real. While representing an important leap forward in our understanding of reality, this right-hand reductionism completely ignores the social domain and the interior world of meaning, contemplation, subjective valuing, spiritual experience and so forth.

This reductionism has created a war between the religious world and the empirical scientific world. Religion vs. Science. But we should remember that in this case what we mean by science is empirical science, and that there are many kinds of science says Wilber, each with different "validity claims." Consider the diagnostics and statistics or DSM manual used by psychotherapists. He speaks also of "communities of the adequate," such as the teacher-student hierarchies in Zen Buddhism, which have their own criteria for determining the interior progress of meditation students. Consider too the truth claims of disciplines like mathematics or philosophical logic, and on the other hand the truth claims from the research of moral developmental psychologists like Kohlberg and Gilligan - all very scientific, none empirical or to do with simple location.

Scientific Method, Reason and Faith

At this juncture I want to define the scientific method in a fairly standard way as: the observation of phenomena that leads to the formulation of a hypothesis which leads to an experimental process to test the truth or falsity of the hypothesis regarding the phenomena, which leads to a conclusion that either validates or modifies the hypothesis.

The scientific method can be applied in all four quadrants without committing any reductionist evisceration. The scientific method is golden.

In the interior discipline of thought the scientific method has to do with reason, logic, critical thinking, and other intellectual endeavors to relate learned information and the proof of experience to each-other in coherent and consistent ways. As far as I can tell the application of reason is also a wonderful support for other interior disciplines like psychotherapy and meditation. While we might suspend analytical thinking for periods of time to enter fully into the experiential mode of emotions, free-association or meditative absorption, how we then interpret and integrate those experiences has to involve reason if it is to be useful and grounded in reality. This is true in the arts as well, where knowledge of theory and history and technique informs and is in deep relationship to the mysterious creative impulse.

I want to define faith here in the fairly standard way as: belief in something without any evidence.

One of the central assertions of what I am trying to articulate here at zaadz is that one can be deeply spiritual and absolutely committed to scientific method, and that in fact the more integrated and developmentally unfolded one's spirituality is the more informed it is by reason, and the more immersed  it is in relationship to the mystery as reality itself, not as something you have faith in without any evidence. I suppose one way of saying it is that what we do have evidence for is so astounding, so miraculous, so awe-inspiring that the quest for magical belief and literal mythic religious faith begins to look not only fragmented from reality but like a complete dead end, both intellectually and spiritually.

Here's a funny reference to this idea.

Where We May Diverge

I think you are in substantial agreement with this, which is why i find it quite odd when you use phrases like "rational fundamentalist" to describe people like Richard Dawkins, or when you say that James Randi is able only to debunk obvious con artists claiming magical powers, psychic or paranormal abilities, but that the small percentage of real-deal claimants would stump him.

I think we might have slightly different ideas of how faith, reason and science fit into the four quadrants.

For me the kind of faith that Dawkins is debunking should and does fare very poorly in a spiritually scientific inquiry. Furthermore, I don't think that Dawkins is at all out of line or being reductionist - his work is rich with awe and wonder that many would describe as spiritual in it's expression.

Nor do I think that the term "rational fundamentalist "or "scientific fundamentalist "is anything but an oxymoron. It's like calling someone a round-earth fundamentalist, or saying that being 100% committed to the belief that the sky isn't green is somehow extremist because what if maybe the sky actually is green - it just makes no sense. When new evidence for the sky being green is in, reasonable people will chage their minds - until then it simply isn't.

Faith is by definition unproven and often clung to all the more strongly in the face of proof to the contrary. Reason and the scientific method pride themselves on seeking proof and being change-able in the face of verifiable evidence to the contrary. That's the whole point and the fulcrum on which their differences turn.

I think too that using empirical science to evaluate psychic claims is entirely appropriate and not reductionist at all - because the claimant is actually suggesting that they can act on simple-location-bound reality with their minds and defy the laws of physics.

This is of course entirely different than claims about, say, satori in meditative practice. In fact were someone to claim that experiencing satori gave them paranormal power over the exterior world, I would suggest that it was more likely a somewhat psychotic experience than one of spiritual depth. Yet when I have challenged the existence of the paranormal and called for evidence you have said that this was like asking for that kind of evidence for meditative states.

There is plainly a major difference.

Do you hear the distinctions I am fumbling toward?

Best
~Julian

Here's Response One from C4Chaos.