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Innate ideas and the God shaped hole

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 17 February 2011


Plato thought that learning was a kind of remembering since all ideas were innate.  By contrast, John Locke, although not the first, understood the mind as a clean slate upon which experience was written. Complex ideas were produced from simpler ideas that were “experienced.”  This is why his philosophy is called empiricism, meaning that which is known by experience.

This potted version is of course hugely simplified but is enough to orient us to some interesting reflections.  Most of us, I suspect, side with Locke.  The proposition that ideas are implanted in the soul before birth seems totally strange to us.  However, the argument about innate ideas is far from settled. There is something unreal about Locke’s clean slate.

What does the writing, who deciphers what is written? Now that we know something about the neurological structures that are essential to our experiencing we have to conclude that the mind is not a clean slate at all but that it is prepared at birth for particular kinds of experience. 

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The mind is not simply a screen onto which the world is projected.  Rather, the sensory pathways of the brain are involved in complex processing of different elements of sensory experience and these are all put together in a way that is completely mysterious to produce conscious experience.

The processing that happens in the sensory pathways and finally in the cortex is further upstaged by other work that the brain does.  For example, there is evidence that our visual system is particularly structured to recognition of the human face.  This is why we can easily see the man in the moon and why a circle with two eye points and a mouth is immediately recognisable as a face even though major components are missing.

The other major discovery in this area is that we have inbuilt language processing areas in the left temporal lobe.  There seems to be a structure that sorts out grammar for us that we inherit, i.e. that is innate.  No matter what language the child learns, this fundamental grammar machine is essential for learning a language. 

This is why the most complex thing we ever learn, to speak, is achieved at an early age with little or not tuition, whereas it takes years of intense leaning to achieve adequate reading and writing. Language acquisition is an early evolutionary talent while reading and writing are late; there are no innate neural mechanisms that facilitate them.

It seems that this language acquisition machinery become less capable as we age so that if we have not learnt a language by the time we are eighteen then we have a very hard time indeed.

So innate ideas do exist, at least as innate structures that are receptive to certain kinds of information.

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The debate between innate ideas and empiricism is an old one and it had theological importance.  It was thought that among the innate ideas implanted in the soul was the idea of God.  In fact this became a proof of the existence of God. In rather crass terms, it is thought that all humanity has inherited a “God shaped hole” and along with it a yearning for that hole to be filled. This was thought to be an explanation for the universal existence of religion in human culture.

Modern Protestant theologians of the twentieth century were wary of this idea because it meant that all people had a need or thirst for religion and that therefore all religion was essentially the same and was able to fill the “God shaped hole.” 

This removed the possibility of the criticism of particular religions. All religions, no matter how absurd its beliefs, no matter how injurious to its believers and society it was had to be accepted.  The need for religion eclipsed the evaluation of truth.

This was an intolerable attitude for Christians because much of the history of Israel and the writings of the New Testament were given over not to the promotion of “religion” but its severe criticism.  The history of Israel is a history of the temptation of religion.  The crucifixion of Jesus is an indictment of corruption and self seeking political and religious structures.  If the resurrection of Christ is his vindication by God, then this event puts an end to religion. Or rather, that religion was radically criticised and transformed.

Certainly there is a tendency towards what may be called folk religion, that comforting concoction of nice sayings and fantastical visions that bears witness to no truth but the gullibility of human beings.  Certainly there is the use of religion by the state whereby it again turns into folk religion. All of these expressions fall under the axe of radical Christian belief.

By and large, commentary by social scientists on religion is wrought with problems mainly because they have not been trained as theologians.  They make the mistake of regarding all religion as being essentially the same and as being instrumental.  The giveaway is when they use the phrase “the great world religions” and when they understand religion as filling some need in the person.

The elephant in the room is whether religious belief is true.  By this I do not mean true in the sense of scientific rationalism, although that cannot be ignored, I mean something like; does the belief or system of beliefs consist of a narrative that frees rather than binds the human spirit. My old teacher at this point would have commented that “religion” is derived from “religio” the Latin word for “bind.” 

Keeping in mind that “freedom” has been made to stand for a vacuum in recent years, freedom is a central preoccupation of Christian teaching.  It is not the aim of Christianity to make us more religious, but to set us free from the tyranny of belief that stales our lives.  I think that it is helpful to understand Christianity as a religious antidote to religion. By outward appearance it looks very much like a religion.  As they say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck!

The anthropologists and sociologists will point out many similarities with other religions.  But what is seen from the outside is not necessarily the truth from the inside. From the inside there is a radical critique of all instrumental understandings of belief.  There is, or should be, a dismissal of any idea that benefit comes first in our thinking of the faith. Going to church may make us feel good, but we do not go to church to feel good, we go to church to be confronted by the truth.  That can be a dangerous and disorienting experience that will call us to a greater thing than what we think are our spiritual needs, that may, in the end, be as shallow as a fantasy about personal happiness.

This leads us to return to the discussion of the innate.  Is there something in us that is receptive to religion, a god shaped hole? I would answer in the negative from an evolutionary perspective, but I would also say that there is an existential need to have some understanding of life greater than sex and death. Our mistake would be to use this as a justification of religious belief.  This is because such a justification would be self-serving and confirm us in all our personal fantasies, which is the primary critique of religion. There may be a need for belief but that need does not bring with it truthful content, rather, there is the danger that any content will do.

This leaves the question about how we are equipped for faith. The Christian view is that we are part of the good creation of God but have been alienated from Him. This is the theological content of the story of the Garden of Eden. Faith, then, promises a return to a previous standard of wholeness in which our alienation from God is overcome. This says something about our nature. It is not that we need to overcome our nature, as if that is corrupt, rather it means that we return to an original nature that has been created and seen to be good.

The gospel is and is not natural to us.  It is not natural to our alienation from God, our sinfulness. This it radically transforms.  But it is natural to our created humanity.  There is something in us that responds to the beauty of Jesus, something that Christian art through the ages has striven to express. Aristotle said that in order to conceive of something there must be a phantasm in us that is able to assimilate that which is received. There must be something in us that recognises Christ, something as yet uncorrupted.

While there is not a "God shaped hole" similar to the language acquisition centre, there is a proclivity  to be attracted by the beauty of Christ and to find in him the fulfilment of all things, in other words, God. There is something in us that is attuned to the grain of the universe, so that new believers have the feeling that at last they have come home and have been restored to their true selves. 

It is therefore not the case, as Roses says in the African Queen; “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are here to overcome!”  If we take the creation narratives seriously,  we will know that our nature is made in the image of God, it is a reality wholly good. To think otherwise is to embark on a journey that will deny our most fundamental and unchangeable nature in asceticism and self-hatred.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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