A God Without Moral Worth

How do we perceive the minds of others?

According to Harvard psychologists, humans typically see the minds of others along two distinct and independent dimensions – namely, agency and experience. Here, agency refers to “an individual’s ability for self-control, morality, and planning," while experience refers to an individual’s ability “to feel sensations such as hunger, fear, and pain.” According to these psychologists, certain types of judgments concerning “the other” arise and are played out depending upon the type and degree of the dimension attributed to another’s mind. A mind that has experience, for example, is judged to have moral worth and by extension certain inalienable rights, chief among these is the right to life.

Kurt Gray, one of the members of the research team writes,

 If you see a man in a persistent vegetative state as having feelings, it feels wrong to pull the plug on him,  whereas if he is just a lump of firing neurons, we have less compunction at freeing up his hospital bed.

A mind that has agency is considered suitable to be judged for the choices it makes.

Kurt Gray states,

When we perceive agency in another, we believe they have the capacity to recognize right from wrong and can punish them accordingly….

While the research respondents attributed a high degree of both agency and experience to the minds of “normal” adult human beings, these same respondents attributed to certain minds a lack of either agency or experience (If this is utterly unclear, just follow the link above. The original article is much clearer). For example, a fetus or infant might have experience but no or little agency. For the research respondents, God is a being that has agency (capable of moral action) but no experience. As Kurt Gray states, “We find it hard to envision God sharing any of our feelings or desires.”

Now, the notion that God has agency but no experience got me thinking. If a mind that is in possession of experience is deemed to have moral worth and God lacks experience, then god lacks moral worth. What, if any, are the implications of holding this view? How might one’s interactions with such a God be shaped by holding such a view and how might these interactions differ from those that exist between oneself and a God that has experience or moral worth? I certainly don’t have any answers. What do you think?

Gods and Devils: A Gift from an Ancient Buddhist Text.

Many moons ago God existed in my life. He was a fact, as true and real as one’s own hand held in front of the face (God has always been “male” for me. While at times He has appeared as an “it,” He never was able to become "the Mother" for me).

At some point later in my life, I came to believe in God. Furthermore, I came to realize that my belief was only one among many differing beliefs. At this juncture, a point in time now lost in the mist of forgotten youth, my search for God began. God was no longer a fact, but a belief that needed verification. While I still had belief or faith in God, I had no knowledge of God that would substantiate my belief.

When and where I lost my belief in God remains a mystery. One catalyst for my loss in belief was undoubtedly my liberal arts education. Through my studies of psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and religious studies (et al), I came to view God more as a concept of human creation than as an actual separate entity that exists among the starry heavens. God became a relative concept. Mind you, I never became an atheist. I never denied God’s existence… belief was simply replaced with doubt. I doubted God’s existence, but I hoped that He did and continued my search as an agnostic.

Now, my doubt was never really a balanced doubt. It was a doubt towards the negative. It was what is known in Buddhist psychological literature as a “doubt not tending to the object” (don mi ‘gyur gyi the tshom). In other words, while I doubted Gods existence, I tended to lean towards the notion that He probably did not. It was certainly not a “doubt tending towards the object” (don ‘gyur gyi the tshom) where I doubted the existence of God yet fostered the notion that He probably did nor was it a balanced doubt (cha mnyam pa’i the tshom), a mediating doubt that had no additional perspective attached. I would continue my search as a negatively doubting agnostic.*

I continued for many years as a negatively doubting agnostic until one day I happened to be translating a Buddhist text in which Brahma(?) is rebuked for his ignorant assumption that he was the creator of all existence. The narrator of the text informs Brahma that he is merely one Brahma out of an endless line of Brahmas (this text takes the position that the gods are more like eternal archetypes that living beings participate in through reincarnation). It is pointed out that even though Brahma has the eyes of a god, there are some things that he does not see (like all the Brahmas before him) and thus comes to have a partial or incorrect view of reality. Now at first, this text simply demonstrated to me the relative nature of reality. It all depends upon perspective and perception. But later, the text gave me a gift that other disciplines failed to deliver. Brahma, even with his eyes, was incapable of seeing certain things. These things simply existed beyond what his eyes where capable of seeing. While he could not see them, they existed nonetheless. Like Brahma, my eyes are limited. They see only certain colors and shapes. They only perceive a spectrum of reality to which they are attuned. I came to see that, I may not have experienced God in the past simply because my senses were limited in their scope of operation. In fact, a whole host of gods and devils (NPEs) might exist just beyond the range of my senses. I had come to the conclusion that God may indeed exist after all. My negative doubt in God had been whisked away by this Buddhist text and replaced with a doubt that is more balanced in nature. Thanks to an ancient Buddhist text, God had become a real possibility again.

•(Those interested parties will find Lati Rinbochay and Elizabeth Napper’s Mind in Tibetan Buddhism a readable introduction to Buddhist psychological models of the mind.)