Where does 'The Spirit' come from?
Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 7:25 pm
Religious believers, including LDS, frequently claim that their belief is supported by strong personal experience of the active presence of their deity - in LDS terms 'feeling The Spirit'. This strong feeling is often felt to beat any other kind of evidence - 'I have a spiritual witness that the Book of Mormon is true, and that <NAME> is a prophet of God'. But it is possible to conduct an experiment that proves that this kind of feeling can be produced by means so absurd as to reduce its evidential value to zero.
Francis Galton (1822-1911) , Darwin's cousin, was a pioneer geneticist, statistician, psychologist ... and a lot else besides, including the inventor of finger-printing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
At one time in his life, he became interested in the question of the source of the reverence paid to idols by what were then commonly called 'primitive' peoples. How could someone who knew that an image was a mere piece of painted wood - who indeed had possibly made it himself - regard such an object with the reverence and awe due to a deity? As a man of science, he decided to conduct an experiment. He decided to make an idol himself and to try the effect of worshipping it. In order to make the experiment as revealing as possible, he selected an object 'in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings'. It was in fact the comical drawing of Mr Punch on the cover of a then famous British humorous magazine:
To this image he forced himself to do daily obeisance, 'and made believe in its possession of divine attributes', including ' a mighty power to reward or punish'
http://galton.org/cgi-bin/searchImages/ ... s_0286.htm
He found 'little difficulties in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed'. The experiment at length succeeded, and he tells us that 'he began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share for the feelings that a barbarian retains for his idol.' Another undocumented account tells us that Galton eventually gave up the experiment because it worked too well: every time he entered his London club and saw Mr Punch enthroned on the periodicals table, his legs became unsteady and a sweat broke out across his shoulders.
Hmm - reverence for Mr Punch is found through the act of worshipping him. The same would presumably go for Micky Mouse. And similar processes are perhaps at the root of the spiritual experiences claimed by the devotees of many religions. If so, the evidential value of these experiences is zero, apart from telling us the power we have over our own consciousnesses.
We begin by acting as if we believed: we end up believing for real - in pretty well anything. Now where have we heard that before?
Francis Galton (1822-1911) , Darwin's cousin, was a pioneer geneticist, statistician, psychologist ... and a lot else besides, including the inventor of finger-printing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
At one time in his life, he became interested in the question of the source of the reverence paid to idols by what were then commonly called 'primitive' peoples. How could someone who knew that an image was a mere piece of painted wood - who indeed had possibly made it himself - regard such an object with the reverence and awe due to a deity? As a man of science, he decided to conduct an experiment. He decided to make an idol himself and to try the effect of worshipping it. In order to make the experiment as revealing as possible, he selected an object 'in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings'. It was in fact the comical drawing of Mr Punch on the cover of a then famous British humorous magazine:
To this image he forced himself to do daily obeisance, 'and made believe in its possession of divine attributes', including ' a mighty power to reward or punish'
http://galton.org/cgi-bin/searchImages/ ... s_0286.htm
He found 'little difficulties in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed'. The experiment at length succeeded, and he tells us that 'he began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share for the feelings that a barbarian retains for his idol.' Another undocumented account tells us that Galton eventually gave up the experiment because it worked too well: every time he entered his London club and saw Mr Punch enthroned on the periodicals table, his legs became unsteady and a sweat broke out across his shoulders.
Hmm - reverence for Mr Punch is found through the act of worshipping him. The same would presumably go for Micky Mouse. And similar processes are perhaps at the root of the spiritual experiences claimed by the devotees of many religions. If so, the evidential value of these experiences is zero, apart from telling us the power we have over our own consciousnesses.
We begin by acting as if we believed: we end up believing for real - in pretty well anything. Now where have we heard that before?
