An Ad Essay from Dr. Fred Bauer: #5 Psychology: Confusion?

By: Dr. Fred Bauer

Posted: 11/11/09

The linchpin for those who argue that science has made belief in God obsolete is seeing. When Judge John Jones III of Dover, Pa., handed down his judgement against Intelligent Design, he did so because science bases itself on "empirical, observable and ultimately testable data." Observable data are seen data. Astronomers use telescopes to see. Biologists use microscopes to see. Economists and sociologists who claim the mantle of science do unaided, everyday seeing. This view is often referred to as naive realism.

Previous essays assumed naive realism. They claimed that paper, metal, plastic (but not money), as well as individual persons (but not groups), can be seen. They assumed what astronomers assume who believe they've seen supernovas and what biologists assume who think they can observe finches, barnacles, or DNA. No one has ever observed such physical things, not even telescopes or microscopes.

Einstein, following Kant, who relied on psychological investigations by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that our views of the external, physical world consist of internal models - pragmatic fictions - based on subjective sensory clues. He called naive realism "a bourgeois illusion." In other words, the essays leading up to this one took the argument against atheism only part way.

To complete the argument, it is necessary to learn the scientific discoveries about seeing (and what is seen) that show why naive realism is a bourgeois illusion. The full details occupy more than three hundred pages in William James on the Stream of Consciousness.

Many of those details can be found in general psychology textbooks. Begin with a specific case of seeing. Astronomers assure us that, approximately 163,000 years ago, a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud exploded, sending light outward in every direction. On the night of February 23, 1987, some of that light finally reached the eyes of Ian Shelton, was focused into two retinal images that triggered afferent nerve impulses that reached his brain, at which point he saw... What?

This is where the general psychology textbooks show confusion. What exactly did Ian see? (What do any of us see?) Did Ian see an object, the star? Light in his eyes? Images in his eyes? Was his "seeing" an interpretive process in his pitch-dark brain? Or something else?

Consider some relevant quotes from a typical, 2002 general psychology text. "Light: What We See." "... our eyes do not actually see." "You experience a sensation only when the appropriate part of the brain is stimulated." "The brain perceives images right side up." "[A near-sighted person] will be able to see near objects clearly, but distant images will be blurred." "[A far-sighted person] will be able to see far objects clearly, but close objects are blurred." "Yet we see whole images, not collections of isolated features."

A critical thinker will ask: Do I see or does my brain do it? Am I my brain? Do I see objects, both distant and nearby? Or light that reaches my eyes? Or images that allegedly represent objects? Harvard's Steven Pinker gives a more general, neuro-psychologist's answer: "Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. The information in an internal representation is all that we can know about the world."

But what about color, which Aristotle long ago argued is the common-sense answer to "Precisely what do we see but can't hear, smell, etc.?" Myers, in the text currently used at AC, poses the problem in this provocative way: "We talk as though objects possess color. We say, 'A tomato is red.' Perhaps you have pondered the old question, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise?' We can ask the same question of color: If no one sees the tomato, is it red?" His answer is "No"! Color, he believes, exists "in the theater of our brains." If that were true, the colors we see would be in the back of our brain. (Believe it or not, another psychology-text author wrote, "a more correct expression would be that 'our eyes are in the back of our brain'.") Can anyone honestly claim they see colors in the back of their pitch-dark brain?

The truth about observing - actual seeing-experience - poses huge problems. For instance, the most total problem is solipsism: "Why, with access only to mental representations, do all of us believe other things besides our self and our representations exist?" Even if other selves similar to us exist, what evidence is there that anything physical exists? Most importantly, what evidence do any of us have that a brain exists whose functions correlate with our stream of consciousness?

Rather than dodge such questions, William James wrestled with them for years. At the end of his career, he admitted that, to answer the question, "What do we see?", it would be necessary to be 'metaphysical,' which he defined as making "an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently." Just such an obstinate attempt is needed today when atheists claim, "Science makes belief in God obsolete," and rest that claim on na've-realist beliefs about observation.

That unusually obstinate attempt is doubly needed since quantum physics has utterly undone our ideas of physical things in general, including brains. (To be concluded).