OF CONSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS: THE MIDDLE-MUDDLE

OF CONSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS: the middle-muddle

05/26/13 

Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman

One's conscience or value system is either inborn, acquired, both, or neither. Consciousness is the vital life force that animates all of life. Conscience is a subset of consciousness pertinent to human behavior. It marks “man.” All life has consciousness. But, not all life has consciences.

The Bible's opening phrase, "In the beginning God," is the conclusion of the whole matter of being and human existence. That one phrase expresses consciousness, which, itself, implies the possible existence of conscience. “He said, 'In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man.'” Luke 18:2.

Relating them both, conscience and consciousness, to man has challenged humans since the beginning of time, and yet challenges each person, daily.

In this brief essay, I share excerpts from 4 works which I respect: For the Inward Journey by Howard Thurman, A Rebirth for Christianity by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. It is hoped that this 4-part melding, and my careful editing, will yield an empowering synthesis which will inspire further understanding “of conscience and consciousness.”

“To use the oft-repeated phrase of Augustine, 'Thou has made us for Thyself, and our souls are restless till they find their rest in thee.' There is an order, a moral order in which men participate, that gathers up unto itself, dimensional fulfillment, limitless in its creativity and design...

“The moment we accept the literal truth, we are once again faced with the urgency of vehicular symbolism. To be led astray by the crassness, the materialistic character of the symbolism so that in the end we reject the literal truth, is to deny life itself of its dignity and man the right or necessity of dimensional fulfillment. In such a view the present moment is all there is—man is no longer a time binder but becomes a prisoner in a tight world of momentary events—no more and no less. His tragedy would be that nothing beyond the moment could happen to him and all his life could be encompassed within the boundary of a time-space fragment. For these slave singers such a view was completely unsatisfactory and it was therefore thoroughly and decisively rejected. And this is the miracle of their achievement causing them to take their place along side the great creative religious thinkers of the human race. They made a worthless life, the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body, worth living! They yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deep within them, they discovered of God, and his far-flung purposes. God was not through with them. And he was not, nor could he be exhausted by, any single experience or series of experiences. To know Him was to live worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. Men in all ages and climes, slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow pilgrims who journey together with them in increasing self-realization in the quest for the city that hath fountains, whose Builder and Maker is God.” – FOR THE INWARD JOURNEY, “Deep River,” by Howard Thurman (1984), pp. 222-223.

Thurman's cogent observation that the slaves' cosmology was “along side the great creative religious thinkers of the human race” is confirmed directly and emphatically by Alvin Boyd Kuhn if also, perhaps, unknowingly:

“Our challenge to Christianity has been primarily that it has abstracted the divine element from man's nature and externalized it, leaving him nothing but his grosser self. Christianity's failure to transform man for the better stems largely from this mistake.

“We have said that when it allocated to Jesus alone the divinity that was the heritage of all, Christianity dismembered integral man. Deprived of the power to redeem himself, man was left to grovel, ashamed and afraid to stand on his own feet and demand his birthright as heir to the kingdom of blessedness. He thus abrogated his title to Sonship of the Father and joint heir of his omnipotence. This reduced man to to the level of pitiful supplicant. Under such an influence, people enter the race of life without self-confidence, and so are defeated from the start...European man lived deprived of any sense of the value of his intrinsic self until the fourteenth-century Renaissance rediscovered and reaffirmed his innate ability and resources...

“No one will question that the struggle of the soul with its polarized opposite is a strenuous ordeal, often tragic and crucial. But, in the long run, this struggle is salutary, for it strengthens the soul's capacity to come to grips with life in action. Without temptation, without the long fight, there is no victory...

“Man must learn a balanced, sane, and happy integration of soul and body, if he is to lead the good life on earth intended for him. The attribution of evil to the sensual side of human nature has not been fully considered by Christian thinkers in the light of the damage it can cause to the psychic life. Yet it should be obvious that if human consciousness is taught to look with contempt and revulsion upon the instrument through which it has access and relation to life, the result must be injurious feelings of guilt and resentment...To laud spirit alone and condemn matter is to render the spirit impotent in action and to condemn man to self-deprecation, doubt, and fear. Such a position saps the will to joy, to adventure, to victory.” – A REBIRTH FOR CHRISTIANITY, “Death Throes and Birth Pangs,” by Alvin Boyd Kuhn (2004), pp.239-241.

Many African American descendants of slaves are among those who have practiced the “balanced, sane, and happy integration of soul and body, if he is to lead the good life on earth intended for him,” of which Alvin Boyd Kuhn has written, echoing Howard Thurman.

“Our survey of origins brings us, as we knew it would, to the most intimate and arguably the greatest mystery of all: the origin of life, and in particular of forms of life with which we may someday communicate....

“Some day—perhaps next year, perhaps during the coming century, perhaps long after that—we shall either discover life beyond Earth, or acquire sufficient data to conclude, as some scientists now suggest, that life on our planet represents a unique phenomenon within our Milky Way galaxy. For now, our lack of information on this subject allows us to consider an extraordinarily broad range of possibilities: We may find life on several objects in the solar system, which would imply that life probably exists within billions of similar planetary systems in our galaxy. Or we may find that Earth alone has life within our solar system, leaving the question of life around other stars for the time being. Or we may eventually discover that life exists nowhere around other stars, no matter how far and wide we look. In the search for life in the universe, just as in other spheres of activity, optimism feeds on positive results, while pessimistic views grow stronger from negative outcomes.” – ORIGINS: FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION, “Life in the Universe,” by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith (2004), pp. 225-227.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an internationally-esteemed astrophysicist of African American descent. He is not a Christian mystical-philosopher, like Howard Thurman. Neither is he a comparative religions scholar-philosopher, like Alvin Boyd Kuhn. He is, instead, a scientist, who insists upon much more “information” about the origins of life in the Cosmos, before he will “conclude, as some scientists now suggest, that life on our planet represents a unique phenomenon within our Milky Way galaxy.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson's reticence to capitulate to life's exclusivity to Earth notwithstanding, without evidence of “life on several objects in our solar system,”--be they planets, their moons, or other-- “which would imply that life probably exists within billions of similar planetary systems in our galaxy,” pessimism mounts exponentially that life will be found beyond our galaxy. This even he readily concedes! So, Tyson has been trapped, paradigmatically, by the lack of corroborative evidence from science. Meanwhile, in reliance on other “evidence,” his enslaved forebears inferred through their peculiar faith, life beyond this time-space continuum. That faith freed their spirits to feel and to know a sacred consciousness of God in the present world, infinitely beyond, as well as within, their own consciences. Tyson must ineluctably suspect, as Howard Thurman writes, that under his view: “man is no longer a time binder but becomes a prisoner in a tight world of momentary events—no more and no less....encompassed within the boundary of a time-space fragment.” Meanwhile his compeers have transcended the “time-space fragment” spiritually, intellectually by the mysterious soul-force of faith.

In chapter 3 of his famous book denominated, “The Nature of Normal Science,” Thomas S. Kuhn states:

“What then is the nature of the more professional and esoteric research that a group's single paradigm permits? If the paradigm represents work that has been done once and for all, what further problems does it leave the united group to resolve? Those questions will seem even more urgent if we now note one respect in which the terms used so far may be misleading. In its established usage a paradigm is an accepted model or pattern, and that aspect of its meaning has enabled me, lacking a better word, to appropriate 'paradigm' here....

“Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, either to be completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle's analysis of motion, Ptolemy's computations of planetary motions, Lavoisier's application of the balance, or Maxwell's mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.

“No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.” – THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, “The Nature of Normal Science,” by Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago: 2012), pp. 23-24.

This “actualization of promise,” which Thomas S. Kuhn's “nature of science” paradigm portends, has an almost-religious ring to it. “Belief” or “faith” is here coupled with a fact-specific interest. Coupling is the key: facts with paradigm to bequeath actualization of promise. There must be such a “match,” after all, to make a pattern. Rhetorical recursion or repetition is more than mere ornate flourish. It is also, when rigorously applied, substantive: a seminal crossing of matter with spirit. Birth ensues. Birth of an idea, a movement, a person, a product. It is “actualization of promise.” Thus, any false dichotomy between science and religion is erased in this divine moment of actualization, of transfiguration, of manifestation. “Eureka's” cum “Hosanna's” cum “Amen” proceed from epiphany to life in joyful creative irruption!

Jesus describes this process of becoming in this manner in Matthew 18: 19-20 – “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

This “struggle of the soul with its polarized opposite” of which Alvin Boyd Kuhn speaks is personified poetically and empathetically in Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 – There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Neither is “belief” beneath Neil deGrasse Tyson, the resolute scientist. He writes:

“If you believe, for example, that most planets suitable for life do produce life, and that most planets with life do evolve intelligent civilizations, you will conclude that billions of planets in the Milky Way produce an intelligent civilization at some point in their time line. If, on the other hand, you conclude that only one suitable planet in a thousand does produce life, and only one life-bearing planet in a thousand, evolves intelligent life, you will have only thousands, not billions, of planets with an intelligent civilization. Does this enormous range of answers—potentially even wider than the examples given here—imply that the [Frank] Drake equation presents wild and unbridled speculation rather than science. Not at all. The result simply testifies to the Herculean labor that scientists, along with everyone else, faces in attempting to answer an extremely complex question on the basis of highly limited information.” – ORIGINS: FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION, “Life in the Universe,” by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith (2004), pp. 229.

I beg to differ, respectfully, with Drs. DeGrasse Tyson and Goldsmith. Their “belief” is

indistinguishable from a similar belief held by Howard Thurman's “slave singers.” At least for the singers, however, life itself induced a feeling, wherein “quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deep within them, they discovered of God, and his far-flung purposes. God was not through with them. And he was not, nor could he be exhausted by, any single experience or series of experiences.”

Yet, as Thurman checks the scientists, so Alvin Boyd Kuhn, in turn, checks Thurman: “To laud spirit alone and condemn matter is to render the spirit impotent in action and to condemn man to self-deprecation, doubt, and fear. Such a position saps the will to joy, to adventure, to victory.” – A REBIRTH FOR CHRISTIANITY, “Death Throes and Birth Pangs,” by Alvin Boyd Kuhn (2004), pp.239-241.

Life, being the essential precondition for consciousness, both science and religion, its impetuous offspring, necessarily emanate from the same place and return to the same place: life. Whether zero or infinity is the opening predicate, or the closing refrain, if it is the same in each case, the middle term—the interregnum—is a muddle for both science and religion. How each unique epistemological and philosophical system addresses that middle-muddle is a question of conscience—or not--for each discipline.

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