I have decided to post a very personal piece (originally from the year 2000), that I have not, until now, made public; only a few, other than my daughter, have read it. I have recently been encouraged, however, to make it more available. After much consideration.…here it is.

Dear Daughter,

Your mother reports that you and Boy Friend are not quite on the same page regarding religion, and how to think about it in a scientific milieu. Without knowing the particulars, I’m nevertheless guessing that you are not as far apart as all that. Perhaps it’s more like you’re reading from different editions, or, maybe—and this is both depressingly and gloriously common—you are both victims of incompatible definitions of terms. In any case, you and I haven’t had a good religious discussion in some time. I would like to atone for this and share some of my thoughts. I hope that these may be useful in marshaling your own on the issue.

At the outset, I wish to make a disclaimer: What I am going to say to you is certainly not everything that can be said, and I have simplified my own views somewhat (I hope not “dumbed them down”). This is because 1) The language police notwithstanding, “religion” is really a catch-all metaphor meaning many different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, things, including several I will talk about little or not at all (“belief” itself seems to mean little in this context, except for purposes of rallying the troops; behavior seems to be much more germane), or I will conjoin several aspects. In other words, call we what “religion” is really a “pandemonious community of ideas”, if you will, existing in different proportions in all of us. (By the way, my use of “scare quotes”, here and elsewhere, indicate words or phrases of slippery definitions, AKA “metaphors”.) 2) This is a letter to my kid, not a major treatise or thesis topic. In any worthy discussion, there are always many possible levels of explanation. For example, invoking “God” or “Faith” or what have you does not mean the invoker is necessarily religious (or ir-), depending on which level we wish to view the matter from, and we just won’t be able to check out all the levels. And 3) I myself am different from day to day. Like everyone else, I learn, forget, and have (literally) a different perspective from moment to moment (Heroclitus is reputed to have said, approximately, that a person cannot step into the same river twice), so I would undoubtedly choose to write things differently tomorrow or next month. These matters are, by the way, why I refuse to answer any yes or no question about my own beliefs, of lack thereof. Such questioning invariably is coming from only one level of explanation (that is, it comes with its own agenda). Seemingly, it is also invariable that my interrogator-cum-tormentor’s level is not the same one I wish to respond from. (Now, If this comment lets my ideological cat out of the bag, well, I guess there’s no help for it. Anyone thus vexed will not be getting the message anyway. But this would not be my progeny!)

Having said that….

According to astronomer and physicist Chet Raymo, religion as humans practice it comprises three general elements: a shared cosmology (that is, how the world got to where it is now and our place in it), spirituality (how we respond on a personal level to perceived numinous aspects of creation), and liturgy (public expressions of gratitude and celebration). Suggesting the modularity of religion is a good start. I would say, though, that each concept represents a continuum, and I would add a fourth: an agreed way to learn and know the “truth”. The reason I make this addition will become clear as we go along. (Please note that many people use the word “spiritual” to suggest something supernatural. For that, I prefer the term, “transcendent”, discussed later. I use “spiritual” as a synonym for numinous, meaning a sense of the sublime.)

My first thought is that, when people argue religion, they are usually arguing only the first part. It makes no sense to disagree about spirituality: All people, not just those who call themselves religious, have feelings of the sublime, things that are beyond themselves, whether or not those things can be described physically. Those who know music theory deeply can still be moved mightily by a good performance of Mahler 5, say (might I say, even more moved?). And, when a scientist looks upon a summer night’s sky blazing with untold points of light, what is her response? In a famous footnote, the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote,

“I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on the carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light…What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”

And that from a man who claimed to be an atheist!

I am convinced that even very cold personalities feel a shiver of the numinous, the spiritual gestalt that is far more than the individual pieces of nature that can be described in an equation or two. Humans—all humans, regardless of creeds or professional animas—are built to be sensitive to spiritual things; that individual responses vary is merely a celebration of diversity. (Diversity? How can detestable, patently wrong people add anything good to life? This is a complex issue; here, I would only throw in, by way of analogy, the observation that dung beetles, too, have some pretty disgusting habits, but they turn out to be rather useful in the entire scheme of things.)

Likewise, it is asinine to fight about liturgical matters, which are, at the heart of it, aesthetic concerns. Would armies go to war over cherry vs. grape Popsicles? Or Beethoven vs. Brahms? Regrettably, some would, it is true. Peoples and nations have been wiped out for less. But it is not the mark of a mature people to consider such trivialities important. (Do you remember, when you were very young, watching Max Fleischer’s animated version of Gulliver’s travels, where the competing parties were ready to eradicate each other over which song would be sung at a wedding? What a moral!)

No, when people argue religion, they are more likely shouting, “My cosmology (and, maybe, its Creator) is bigger’n your cosmology—nyah, nyah, nyah!” Or at least more RIGHT. Of the scientists who pooh-pooh traditional religions, and there are many, a common argument is that the canonic ways of describing how we got to where we are now (in the Western world, this usually refers to what the Bible seems to say on the subject) are silly to a modern world imbued with rational explanations for things, or at least rational ways to find those explanations. Of the Bible thumpers who bad-mouth science, and there are many, the counter-argument is often simply that rational thought is, in fact, irrational, because it (apparently) contradicts the inerrant Word of God—that is, this is a matter of faith, not science. Still others object to both views, on the grounds that neither rational thought nor blind faith is sufficiently “human” (or, in the mind of some “poets”, sufficiently “beautiful”).

My own cosmology, the “creation myth” I see as most appropriate, comes down fully on the side of the scientific explanations. When we, as a culture, were young, supernatural explanations may have made a certain amount of sense. But the more we learn—and, here, I’m talking more about maturing as a civilization than the increase in our body of learning, although there is that, too—the less this is so. In my opinion, it is a terribly lousy deity that bends nature to match his (quite human) worshippers’ theology about him. Lousy and unlikely: The universe, we might say, is under no obligation to cater to, or even be aware of, human wishes and sensitivities!

It may be, as biologist Edward O. Wilson suggests, that humans have evolved to believe in gods. And philosopher William James (who is also the “father” of psychology as a modern empirical science) mused long and hard about the same subject, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, coming up with much the same conclusion (100 years ago! What a mind, what a writer!). I suspect this is largely true: The world at least seems work best if a majority (but not all) of its inhabitants are somewhat religious (especially along the numinous-ness continuum), so long as the “somewhat” is not openly warring with other evidence of how the universe works. (Of course, it is also true that the world works considerably less well if the majority is too religious—as in fundamentalist.) So, at least in a social sense, belief seems to be “adaptive” —in the terms of evolution, “selected for”. Indeed, sociologist Rodney Stark makes the excellent argument that early Christianity likely got a major boost (leading, from simple beginnings, to dominance in only three centuries) simply by keeping more of its members alive during epidemics than did the rival (pagan) religions, mostly because of a “superior” (and enforceable) ethical system. (There is, by the way, an ongoing academic debate over what it means to talk about the social, or group aspects of evolution, but the technical arguments need not concern us here. The fact remains that humans are social animals, and however we got the bodies and minds we have, our lives are played out in a social context.)

So, can we assume that human evolution hit upon religion as a good solution to a problem? Not everyone thinks so. Some scientists think of it more like a “virus” (the pejorative is usually intentional, though it seems fair to point out that some literal viruses are benign, or even helpful to organisms) that exists only to reproduce, not because it is really a good idea. (In that sense, all “life” exists to reproduce, which is the whole point of life, isn’t it…?) Others, like neurophysiologist William Calvin, suggest that religion is a remnant from an earlier age, a prototype science that hasn’t yet died off after a better alternative came onto the scene. These pundits are largely thinking of the fourth element of religion, the how and what of knowledge, and its interaction with cosmology. They are also thinking of hierarchical institutions: God tells the laws to the pope (or the shaman), who tells the bishops, who tell the priests….This is the “faith”, or “revelation” way of coming into (religious) belief, but it isn’t the only possible course to a working creed. The church I grew up in, for example, was not only quite tolerant in what to believe, but also insisted that raw faith, without empirical knowledge, was not sufficient for belief. And hierarchy, in that small congregation, did not come much into play. My father—you would have liked him—was not what you would call an especially religious man, and most Sunday mornings would find him in his shop, carpentering something or other. But he did enjoy (sometimes) going to church, for the peculiar pleasure of getting disgusted with the sermons. The funny thing is, the preacher seemed to like my father’s philippics, and surely left in a few verbal fuses lit specifically for his benefit. My father’s path, like that of all scientists, might be thought of as the personally-seeking-through-rationality, route to knowledge. These epistemological rivals—revelation and reason—have been at war (sometimes literally) for a long time—at least since Iranaeus took five volumes to excoriate the 2nd century heterodox Christians, but probably as far back as the beginnings of science-and- religion; perhaps to the advent of humanity…or further….

Thinking in this vein, we might consider how religion might spread. The image of a “virus” is an interesting one to be sure, and is lent credibility by an observation: While there are indeed some vertical aspects of religious traditions (that is, there is some correlation between the children’s religion and that of their parents), especially in vertically propagating religions such as Judaism, new recruits (conversions) are almost invariably horizontal. Stark makes this clear, and it also fits into psychologist Steven Pinker’s contention that people are far more socialized by their peers than by their parents. Still, how does this differ from the spread of other ideas, including those of science? Anthropologist Donald Brown famously published a list of human “universals”, those elements of humanity, like joke-telling, the use of figurative speech, and musical variation, common to all cultures. It seems to me that a putative virus could easily hop aboard any such vector, including such academic “universals” as scientific paradigms. But I await further exegesis on this point. (Science apologists and explainers contend that the big difference is that, scientific ideas, as opposed to religious ones, are subject to a rigorous shakeout, with only the “fittest” surviving. I agree, up to a point: It is also true that some brilliant scientific ideas never find a home [the ecological niche being already filled], never see the light of day [they are denied journal publication], or are even murdered “in utero” [dissertation advisors carry a lot of weight], simply because they do not fit into the currently reigning paradigm. There is verticality in the transmission of scientific ideas too!)

But there is an alternative to seeing things as faith versus scientific method. It is also possible to tilt one’s view of religion to the spiritual, the second aspect, above. Your grandmother was a Bible Belt farm girl who received her education (in Classics and Latin) at Wake Forest (best known, at the time, for its School of Divinity) during the Depression. She would always have described herself as religious. Yet, she loved teaching and the life of the mind (even though most of the minds she encountered were young ones), and had a midlife amour with geology which, after my father died, became a flaming passion, rounded out through flings with fossil hunting and archeology. Geology, of course, is a science not often considered compatible with her kind of early education. So beliefs within a person can evolve. In later years, Grandma, to my knowledge, never denied the possibility of an afterlife of some sort, but she did often say that it is silly to for the living to speculate about it (she sometimes did anyway), or to use such speculation to build a belief system around (she didn’t). Usually polite and charitable, she could sometimes be rather grouchy, like the time, shortly before she died, that she fulminated to me about her neighbors. It seems that they had been going on about her “immortal soul”, which she thought to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, she was, always, in awe of life, the universe, and everything—in her own way, wonderfully spiritual, ergo, on some level, wonderfully religious. In this way, the spiritual way, the gods can be genuinely profound, and even useful (and, maybe, even personally so, in a sense…?).

What kind of God? What varieties of gods, we might ask, are worth wanting? Feyman again:

“It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” Not a play-acting Santa Claus, then.

The philosopher Baruch (AKA Benedict) Spinoza believed in what I think of as omnitheism: not a “top-down” puppet-master type of god, but, rather, a “bottom- up” deity that grows along with the unfolding of the universe. Spinoza was excommunicated for his failure to recant this conceit, but the famous physicist Albert Einstein once declared Spinoza’s the (only) type of god he could believe in. Michelangelo was just using artistic license, then.

A supreme deity of compassion? Of perfect order and universal harmony” It is worth quoting the philosopher David Hull at length (from his book, God of the Galapagos). “What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror….Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory…may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not the loving God who cares about his productions….The God of the Galápagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.” Job was whining to the wrong whirlwind, then.

In fact, it escapes me why any god should worry about our worries. Charles Darwin, the former candidate for the collar who found his calling (not to mention the start of his theory of natural selection) in those Galápagos Islands, was appalled by such unspeakable cruelties in nature that no deity that he could believe in would, in good conscience, perpetrate. There is the rub, of course: “Conscience” is a human construct, as are “waste”, “horror”, and “indifference”; they are not applicable to other levels of abstraction, including gods. As ex-journalist Terry Pratchett observes, God’s eye may be on the sparrow, but he doesn’t lift a finger to stop its fall. Or, we might also notice that, for all the yowling and screeching, there seems to be no shortage of kittens. And what is cruel to the perpetratee is just life to the perpetrator. Most levels of nature do not, can not possibly care about love, pain, and the whole damn’ thing as experienced by…us, say. So, let’s not take God too personally, shall we?

Or, at least, let’s not blame it all on “God”. You see, not everyone who BELIEVES believes in a supposedly stereotypical deity, one who is personal, supernatural, omnipresent, omniprescient, omnipotent, a Creator of universes who still makes house calls in the form of answering prayers, and probably a male. But who says “God” has to be stereotypical anyway? The word “God” has been “only” a metaphor for millennia (perhaps, even as long as the species has had “metaphors”), and, like most short words, a rather slippery metaphor at that. (Interestingly, parts of the Kabbalah—a collection of Jewish mysticism—claim that it is blasphemous to define, or even describe God.) Those who claim otherwise (by their lights, I must surely be an arch-atheist too!) I claim to be misusing the language, or, more precisely, engaging in “metaphoro-pathology”. (I mean this more literally and less facetiously than you might think!) But this is a rant for a rainy day. Let’s move on.

John Polkinghorne, a physicist who became an Anglican priest, said, “Those who are seeking understanding through and through— a natural instinct for the scientist—are seeking God, whether they name him or not.” His words, “seeking God”, are a giveaway to his position on the how-we-learn continuum. (I wonder how many garden-variety parishioners understand that detail?) This is, not so incidentally, the part of religion most attacked by scientists after the cosmology stuff: Do we, as discussed above, know what we know through faith alone (BAD), or by taking the effort to find out (GOOD)? It isn’t quite as simple as either side makes it, of course, as there really is a continuum here: Most everyone is a “reductionist” (a term often used pejoratively, but not so intended here) about some things, and something akin to “faith” is, after all, how scientists choose which questions to even ask of the universe.

Feynman’s biographer, James Gleick, suggests that scientists, as a class, have an antipathy toward the Sunday-school “God of the gaps”, “the last-resort explanation for the unexplainable, called on through the ages to fill holes in current knowledge….Feynman conceded the existence of genuine human knowledge outside the range of science…but…he saw a danger in tying moral guidance to unpalatable myths.” (“Myths”, in this sense, do not necessarily imply an untruth; rather, they are morally instructive stories with no meaningful basis in historical fact.) About that supposed antipathy to a “God of the gaps”: Maybe. The great evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who considered himself to be quite religious, by the way), explains: “ There are people…to whom the gaps in our understanding are pleasing….These people hope that the gaps will be permanent, and that what is unexplained will also remain inexplicable.” On the other hand, many scientists (especially, for some reason, physicists, like Stephen Hawking) invoke “God” for precisely this reason, as a filler metaphor for what they don’t know (yet).

So, scientists, even those who claim to be non-believers, often do, in fact, have some kind of “deistic” underpinnings, at least along the spiritual, numinous-ness continuum--but perhaps in their creation myths as well.. But this all depends on how matters are defined: Take note that such scientists’ personal concept of God (stated or otherwise) is far removed from the almost anthropomorphic foul-tempered, vengeful, and arbitrary rules-mongering Yahweh, the tribal god of the Israelites, who regularly interacted with humans, wrathfully punished backsliders, and encouraged ethnic cleansing. No, the concept of God has come a long way, even to non-scientists. Certainly, the Old Testament prophets would hardly recognize the God of later believers, a still somewhat anthropomorphic (to the Mormons, quite literally anthropomorphic), and still transcendent deity, but one who by now has evolved into the Lord of all Creation (although, in actual practice, we tend to box Him, with purposeful capitalization, into a rather tribal arena; He is more useful that way, especially when we need to separate ourselves from the OTHER GUYS). (God with a history? An evolving God? Oh, yes. Today, most people who claim to be believers probably like to think of the One God, immortal and eternal. But it wasn’t always so (!), even in the Bible. The creation story of Genesis mentions gods in the plural—elohim, in Hebrew. Likewise, The Ten Commandments, comprising a contract between the Hebrews who left Egypt and Yahweh [apparently Abraham’s tribal deity], presuppose multiple gods. Joshua gave the followers of Moses a choice: They could worship a) the old Egyptian gods, b) the gods of Canaan [which territory the Israelites would raze and claim as their own], or c) Yahweh [they were not allowed to use that name, of course], with the only condition that if they chose c), then didn’t live up to their commitment, they would be in seriously bad trouble. All this is well and fascinatingly discussed in The History of God, by Karen Armstrong, who teaches comparative religion in London.)

Speaking for myself, I find the idea of a personal, transcendent, and anthropomorphic God to be at least un-useful and distasteful, even borderline blasphemous. (“Transcendent” refers to something that is beyond human rationality. A transcendent God has no obligation to adhere to the laws—either moral or physical—that are imposed upon mortals. So, such a God can make or break rules according to exigencies of the moment; supernatural events become, therefore, no problem—and even preferred. I have deep qualms about this as a working concept. A transcendent God is, it seems to me, a very bad idea, one not worth believing in. A proper God lives within his, hers, or its own rules.)

Howbeit, this being a far stickier, and more aesthetics-based subject than most, I’m not so convinced of my eternal correctness (“eternal, ever since Wednesday”, as Dylan Thomas said) that I wish to require everyone to believe as I do (as I sometimes say, everyone’s entitled to his or her own erroneous opinion). That would not be merely silly, but incredibly stupid as well. God—as I view God, and also as our culture views “God”, will, along with associated metaphors, continue to evolve. It is true that “the more we know, the more we know that we don’t know.” Around 1900, physicists believed that our knowledge of how the universe works was pretty well complete. We just had to tie up a couple of loose ends and….And then along came relativity and quantum mechanics, and….And science went wacko. Does this prove that knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is useless because it will soon be superseded? To me, there is no such lesson. Rather, it behooves us all—fundamentalists and poets along with scientists—to retain a large portion of humility. That is all, and that is everything: When we don’t know the scope of our knowledge, whatever we choose to represent the unknown, in a universe where the possibilities expand faster than we can possibly even identify, let alone understand them, can have no limits. Is this a “God of the Gaps” I am talking about? Perhaps, but one I can well understand. (A God of the gaps is, to be sure, unappealing when one requires crisp definitions for rhetorical purposes. But is this necessary, or even desirable? Not always, perhaps. As I suggested earlier, “God” works best as a loose metaphor. A “God of the gaps”, then, becomes useful as a meta-metaphor!)

What I cannot easily abide, in addition to the transcendent God of the religious right, is the warm fuzzy one of what I might call (in a non-political way) the religious left—the “poets” who refuse to engage, in contemporary parlance, the left side of their brains. Here, as cited by Gleick, is the rest of Feynman’s footnote:

“Poets say that science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms….Far more marvelous is the truth [of how the universe works] than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do not the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

(I don’t mean to trash poets as a class, of course. Indeed, much beauty, and perhaps much truth, can be found in such a worldview, as Feynman himself knew. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams also claimed to be an atheist, albeit for different reasons, I suspect, than Feynman. Still, he wrote much sacred music of soul-boggling sublimity. My own feeling is that the both avowed atheists were in fact closer to the MIND OF GOD than an ark-load of the most fervent of fundamentalists.)

Facts are, more or less, facts, and science is particularly successful in ferreting them out—at least enough to relegate favorite myths to the realms of metaphor and archetype. Naturally, the responsible scientist refuses to make an alternate religion out of mere knowledge, so it should be possible to argue facts without resorting to cultural warfare. Unhappily, this seems to not always be the case. For one thing, scientists are, like everyone else, human, and necessarily live very human lives outside academe. Many, in fact, make their livings in decidedly unscientific (in the academic sense) commercial ways, which has its own set of problems. (It is worth noting that science was, until the last four hundred years or so, a branch of academic theology, and the practice of it still retains many of the original structural forms: a professorial “priest” class, “altar boys” [undergraduate students], acolytes [graduate students], seminarians [post-docs], the laity that pays the bills, and even a “pope” of sorts: the currently favored worldview, or “paradigm”. Indeed, even the quest for at-the-bottom-of-it all rules that most cosmologists indulge in [physicist Steven Weinberg titled a book Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature] seems suspiciously theological. Then too, not all scientists check their own “human nature” at the ivory tower’s door, and viciously fractious professional hissing, spitting, clawing, wauling, yawping, and mewling are not uncommon, as is recurring rampant rutting.)

Perhaps, then, there truly is a “shirts and skins” kind of aesthetic component to both theological and scientific hostilities: “I don’t really care about the facts behind your beliefs; the point is, they are not, to me, beautiful enough, and, by the way, you aren’t either.” If this were shown to be a major element in religious (or scientific) argument (every conflagration needs both a spark and a reservoir of combustible material; what I am discussing here is the former), it would make me very sad. But how else do we explain Hitler? Or the Rape of Nanking? Or the Armenian Holocaust? Or the annihilation of the American Indians? Or, in an every day sense, any argument (be it political or personal) with an obvious or hidden emotional appeal? Aesthetics seems to be one very good way, after all, to judge who is “one of US”, and who is not.

Come to think of it, maybe this is the human universal that, even today, binds both disciplines—and, perversely and oxymoronically, the Ring of Power that binds us all: the tribal imperative, Us and Them. There is, indeed, much literature in psychology that points out that humans separate into rival camps at the drop of a hat (almost literally!), for little or no important reason. (Collectively, this is sometimes referred to as the Stanford Effect, after some scary psychological research at that institution.) Aesthetics, in this way of thinking, could be just the “perfect impurity” in the crystal, the war whoop of a family, tribe, a sect, an academic faction. Religion bashers often point out, correctly, that, historically, religion has served this tribalizing role as efficiently and loyally as Bertie Wooster’s valet, Jeeves, but to, often, hugely more lethal effect. Religion was, in fact, the rallying cry behind the crusades, and remains the loudest call to arms for all sorts of contemporary atrocities. Still, I’m not yet ready to blame religious proclivities any more than I could blame aesthetic sensibilities, per se. I once wrote of bit of doggerel which mused on tribal competitions, their usual outcomes, and a (possibly) facetious solution. For what it’s worth, here it is, along with the prose introduction:

There is, perhaps, too much news to read these days, and depressingly little of it is good. It’s worse than a jungle out there, for, in a jungle, there are simple reasons and explanations for what goes on: Hunger demands satisfaction, and it is only question of strength, or time, who is the lunch-or and who is the lunch-ee. In human “civilizations”, the situation is considerably more complex. As a rhetorical basis for conflict, “he started it by hitting me back” has traditionally enjoyed a great deal of popularity among contestants. But this approach can lead to global trouble in a day of rapid communication [and this was before the widespread popularity of the internet!]. Tribal warfare is, therefore, obsolete in many ways. But tribes continue to study war, with ethnicity providing the dogmatic underpinnings. How can we get anything worthwhile accomplished if we have to spend all our time worrying about genocide, fratricide, matricide, and all the little cides? Is there any way out? Cogitating about the affairs in various parts of the world, I think I’ve hit on something. In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, I offer: A Modest Proposal, 1993.

Jets, McCoys, and Capulets

To Sharks, Hatfields, and Montagues—

All of a kind, its perspective we lack.

Blame must be laid, yes?

Pass on the gist of our reviews:

“He started it by hitting me back!”

I, to each clan, tribe, and nation

Wishing cult’ral insulation,

Proffer a repudiation

First,then a reccomendation:

Historical condemnation

Is no basis for elation.

We’re in it for the duration;

Think, thus, homogenization!

So, my friends, the true salvation’s

Compuls’ry miscegenation….

Now, however, I’m not so sure. It seems certain that, if all religion and ethnicity were banned today, humanity would find another set of criteria upon which to make tribalistic assessments that serve as vectors for the putative malignant “viruses” of destructive hatred. (It bears repeating that any human tendency, whether genetic or cultural in origin, can be such a transmission path. But “viruses”—ideas—can be either bad or good. That is to say, in the present context, that cooperation—“team sprit”—can be put to both constructive and destructive uses.)

Is there any out? According to philosopher Peter Singer, the key to a mature way to deal with this might be to find a way to enlarge one’s “moral circle”, who is US. Can this be done? We must, I believe, hope so. But this will depend on how well we can re-train our minds that received their default structures over the long haul of evolution, most of which was nothing like today’s world. In other words, to enlarge one’s moral circle is not intuitive; it is hard work, requiring a good deal of specialized education. This is one thing that science has going for it—knowing how to educate. But I’m not convinced that it knows, yet, what to educate. (My own conjecture is that circles tend to close—that is, the border between US and THEM gets less porous—during times of environmental [or economic or social] stresses [Calvin hypothesizes a kind of “pumping action”: Many rounds of ice ages, say, would favor increasing proportions of “cooperators” in populations]. This tendency, if true, could be, and surely has been, seized on and manipulated for political and socioeconomic gain.)

I trust that, among persons of honest good will (that is, among those who can, with effort, overcome parochial tendencies and enlarge their moral circles), the working assumption can always be that a person’s beliefs, however stupid or silly they may seem, are at least sincere. Having said that, I further suggest that it behooves humans of good will and intellectual integrity to use all their cognitive faculties and analytical powers to seek out answers, including religious answers, consistent with what is known. (The above statement could easily be spoken by all scientists, except that many would substitute the word “moral” for “religious”.) My feeling is that you would agree with this concept, as would BF. So, while you two may indeed have different cosmologies, they can and must be discussed rationally, and you may even find him knowing a bit about the subject. (Richard Dawkins, a zoologist best known for his provocative writings on evolution theory [he popularized the “virus”, or, “meme”, as he termed it, concept], quotes one scientist arguing with another, “You know, we really agree. It is just that you say it wrong!” Dawkins then chides his own detractors: “…you know, we really do almost agree….It is just that you see it wrong!” [Dawkins, by the way, also claims to be an atheist. Yet, intriguingly, he said, in The Blind Watchmaker, that he couldn’t imagine anyone being an atheist before Charles Darwin wrote down how evolution must work. Is he, perhaps, saying, “Your god isn’t big enough; take mine!”?) Where the two of you are more likely to differ on purely emotional grounds may be over what I earlier called “liturgy”—that is, ceremony and ritual. I know that, for you, the rituals of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the rest, are of crucial importance—whether or not they are “religious” in origin. BF’s personal culture, and his family history, may be a lot different than yours. So it becomes necessary to cut each other some slack (or, if you can’t…). Again, apart from an increasingly obsolete tribal imperative, nothing is to be gained by arguing taste (unless, of course, you are a paid critic). “Okay”, you might say to yourself, “I like bowling, he likes basket weaving. So what?” Mature people really can deal with these things.

Where there can be no compromise is, of course, is where the pedal of the desire- to-know hits the metal of faith—which we all have, at some point—that is, there can be no compromise on morality, or, more precisely, on one’s personal sense of rightness. If one person fervently and honestly believes in the fundamental correctness of gun ownership, for instance, while another believes, just as strongly, the opposite, there can be no middle ground. But I doubt that you and BF are anywhere near those positions on any matter of lasting import. (Please note that I give “morality” short shrift in a discussion about religion. The fact is that, wherever the “faith line” is drawn, religion truly is not synonymous with morality: The moral tenets of non-religious people are, these days (in the past, there apparently were fewer openly non-believing people), as strong—and as weak—as those of believers. (Having said that, however, I hasten to add that, in my opinion, a moral/ethical system that acknowledges and is informed by what is known on evidentiary grounds seems [at least I hope this is so!] to have a better chance of lasting in today’s world than one which claims that all laws stem from a transcendent deity. 

Indeed, I would make the point that a doctrinal, dogmatic belief is, in an important way, antithetical to truly moral thought; thus reliance upon doctrine cannot be how most people—at least not my favorite people—make moral decisions. The reasons for this are twofold: In the philosophical traditions, moral decisions are based on “free will”, free choice, regardless of whether the freedom is real or merely apparent. To the extent that one operates through doctrine, then, there can be no freely decided actions. The second reason is more fundamental. Dogma, whether religious or otherwise, presupposes a predictable, knowable future: You do this; there are known consequences; you do another thing, there are other known consequences. However, in the real universe, it is not possible to know the complete future in any meaningful way. Those things you cannot predict vastly outnumber those things you think you can. Yet we go ahead in life anyway. This does not mean that there is no place for a common mission statement, a group ethos, even a tribal dogma. But it is important to understand that conformity and uniformity are merely tools for smooth social functioning; they do not directly represent anything like “virtue”. Like all tools, they are agnostic as to value, including moral value. That is, they can be used for either “good” or “evil”, without consideration of moral concerns.

There is one more issue, a side issue, perhaps along the lines of apologetics, or, why-religion-deserves-to-still-exist, that I would like to touch upon briefly. Here, I am again thinking about both spiritual matters and aesthetics. I feel strongly that it is legitimate to take a scientific view of religious and aesthetic concerns. At the same time,it is important to understand that there is beauty in the best of science. The latter, like all things important to humans, can be and should be poetic, even musical. In that regard, I am being only slightly facetious when I say that the rest of religion can go to hell, just leave me the music. I cannot imagine anyone believing in a literal heaven without knowing certain works intimately. To me, it would be more than a profound embarrassment, perhaps even grounds for summary exclusion, to fill out St. Peter’s pre-entry assessment form and not be able to, under the REPERTOIRE heading, list, say, Brahms’ German Requiem, Bach’s Magnificat and B Minor Mass, many of the German chorales and Welsh and Appalachian hymn tunes, the fugueing tunes of William Billings, works of Purcell, Gibbons, Vaughan Williams, Gutiérrez de Padilla.…all of which had at least religious inspiration, if not, originally, liturgical implementation. I know, I know, Hitler was inspired by Wagner. Should that doom a Ring lover? (Something should, perhaps, but let’s not go down that road right now.) I realize this is a personal thing, but how can what is numinous and aesthetic not be so, at least in part? Architecture? Try the Duomo of Florence, St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Mark’s in Venice, St. Paul’s in London, St. Isaac’s in St. Petersburg, the Cathedrals of Chartres, Trondheim, and Mexico City—and that is only in the Western religious tradition. We won’t even start with visual art. Anyway, the point is that, on a strictly private basis, I can forgive the Church a lot of sins (maybe) for what is sublime because of it. Too, we can make a strong case that science, as we know it today, could not possibly exist without its religious ancestry. Does this suggest the argument, then, an adolescent one that the Old Folks are stupid? This is, at my age, something I wish to avoid discussing, but…I won’t stop you from thinking about it….

Lastly, my dear child, I wish to share my own feeling that the mark of good religion, exactly like that of good science, is that it is not afraid to have doubts, to not know. Indeed, I personally mistrust all belief systems and world views that are too sure of their own eternal correctness, especially about the meaning of the universe and our place in it. One more favorite Feynman-ism:

“You see…I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which may be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here….I really don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any [apparent] meaning….It doesn’t frighten me.” 

In the end, the issue isn’t really about how we believe the universe is unfolding. That is an empirical matter that we now seek empirical explanations for. And liturgy, the temporal ceremonial avatar of our aesthetic urges, is partly—largely—a social thing. Faith vs. reason represent a vital public discussion, along with questions of ethics and social values. But the numinous, the spiritual….that we—I—see with James to be intensely individual. At last, we all have to make our personal peace, or war, with the depths of nature. And this is, if anything is, beyond ultimate understanding, beyond telling, and beyond, in any human sense, time. This is where we learn, where I feel we must practice science; this, finally, is where we find God.

Love,

Dad