Theology for Atheists

Richard Ostrofsky April, 2013 With an introduction by Rev. Charles Eddis

Note: This new version of Theology for Atheists expands and slightly revises the previous one, published to the Web in October 2011. Four new chapters have been added: Chapter 6 on religious epistemology and the concept of 'personal truth'; Chapter 9 on the distinction between spirituality and religion as human projects (which expands upon and replaces an old chapter on religion as a 'cement of society); Chapter 10 on good and bad ideas in the religious tradition; and the concluding Chapter 11 on central challenges for religion today. Changes to the other chapters are minor, but sometimes reflect experiences and sympathies gained from my participation in a Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church, commenced just over a year ago. In place of an index, glossary and most footnotes, a searchable PDF version of the text with hyperlinks is published: on Scribd (at http://www.scribd.com/doc/32848765/Theology-for-Atheists)and on my own web site (at http://www.secthoughts.com/Religion_menu.htm)

Table of Contents
Introduction by Rev. Charles Eddis 1 Toward a Viable Modern Religion 2 A Clash of Paradigms 3 Where Did It All Come From? 4 What Am I? 5 The Context 6 'Personal Truth' 7 The Problem of Evil 8 Amazing Grace 9 Bad Ideas and Good Ones 10 Religion For Atheists 11 Conclusion: Challenges for Religion Today Appendix: Some Relevant Quotes i 3 9 14 23 39 46 52 57 67 76 88 100

Introduction by Rev. Charles Eddis

"A man's religion is the audacious bid he makes to account for and locate himself within his cosmos and world. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and complete his own personality by finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs." Ostrofsky p. 95

This is a lucid, well written provocative book on the conflict between religion and science, thoroughly grounded in science and in critical religious thinking. Ostrofsky takes the Great Chain of Being, and turns it upside down. Instead of a god creating the world according to some preconceived design, he outlines the scientific view of how the world creates itself one step at a time. From the beginning, the creative potential of the cosmos is innate. Not designed and called into existence from the top down, it builds itself from the bottom up. Mind and matter are a single substance. More than two millennia after the so-called Axial Age, driven by such figures as Socrates and Isaiah, a new spiritual age of equal significance has dawned, driven by figures like Spinoza and Darwin. In a world that unfolds and creates itself, the God who supposedly made the world becomes unemployed. Ostrofsky identifies himself as a physicalist and emergentist. All we see is created out of the physical. Mind has no separate reality. It is produced by brain activity. We are witnessing in our culture a clash of two paradigms, the auctorial and the ecoDarwinian two different modes of explanation with different domains of application. Writes Ostrofsky, "I'm completely happy to use that monosyllable 'God' as a convenient word for the over-arching context of human life understood by me as the principle of self-organization and its emergent cosmic, biological and social order." He outlines three modes of unbelief: 1. Reject the categories of spirituality and religion entirely. 2. "Believe in belief." Adhere to a system of beliefs and practices, not because the system is true, but to avoid consequences in rejecting it. 3. Take religious ideas and practices seriously but not literally, as living myths which are not at all like scientific propositions or the observations of daily life, but subject to their own standards of validity and veracity. Ostrofsky discusses the third mode at length. While there are no authentic religious dogmas, there can be more and less valid religious experiences. Religious belief systems are interpretative schema - strategies for giving meaning and navigating a course through life. They deal with evil, and seek to achieve a state of happiness, or enlightenment, or liberation, or grace. Science is to religion as house is to home. Religion and the arts make the world, our home, familiar and comfortable to the extent possible, and steel Page i

us to meet its threat and challenges. It is an interpretive and decorative pursuit. Knowledge advances. Religious emotions live on. Traditional answers and practices no longer deserve to have the last word, Bad ideas include magic and the supernatural, revelation and spiritual authority that cannot be questioned and challenged, divine judgment. Good ideas include the limits of agency, the divine 'spark', universal law, the trans-personal, communal worship, celebration, community making and support. Society itself becomes a sacred institution. 'Secular society' is almost a contradiction in terms. 'Religion' is just the commonly held theory of what it means to be human. Religion must redefine itself amidst a scientific world view. A challenge for religion will be to lead, or at least follow, the necessary shift in values towards a 'spaceship Earth' mentality. The earth is running out of the resources we want to have. Ostrofsky's book is a comprehensive statement of the impact of science on religion. In most of its thrust, it seems to this reviewer dead on. It has but one serious deficiency, in its treatment of "traditional religion." In spite of its acceptance of myth and legend, and its recognition that, because of different perspectives the human race will never see the same truths in the same way, it seems to assume that more people are blind to a realistic appreciation of religion than may be the actual case. It is doubtless true that many people accept beliefs and practices without questioning them. But are figures such as he cites, including John Shelby Spong and Hans Kung, too weak to prevail, given sufficient time, in their respective religious traditions? Are there not many voices speaking in such modes? And how are we to live with those who believe in belief, who resist the anguish of taking the trouble to catch up with the new axial age? Ostrofsky himself devotes two pages to Genesis 3, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, to showing the wisdom in this ancient tale. Is not the virtue of traditional religion, whatever its faults, the wisdom of human experience passed on to successive generations? We human beings need a house to live in, built by science. We need ways to make the house a home, the task of religion. George Santayana, one of Ostrofsky's favourite philosophers, put it this way: "The true philosophy looks to science for its view of the facts, and to the happiness of men on earth for its ideals." Rev. Charles Eddis Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Church of Montreal

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Toward a Viable Modern Religion

The title of this essay, 'Theology For Atheists,' is not the contradiction that it may seem. Though the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is as dead intellectually as Nietzsche pointed out (and we'll be exploring later what that statement actually means), the key issues of theology are alive and certain to remain so. In adult, god-neutral language, they can be framed in a few questions that any bright four-year-old begins to ask:

What is the cosmic context of our human lives, and how can I (and should I) understand and relate to that context? At the end of the day, what am I? How does the social world of human relationships really work, and where do I fit into it? Within those givens, which I cannot really change very much, by what goals and values should I live?

These three, I take it, are the central questions that religious thinkers down the ages have grappled with and that people, religious or not, are still grappling with. The first is the sort of question you might ask, waking up in a strange house, in a strange bed after a hard night's drinking: Where am I? What is this place? How did I get here? The second is the question you would ask on discovering that there were a lot of other people in the house, some even in that same bed. You would ask: Who are all these people? How do I relate to, and deal with them? The third is the question you would ask on discovering that this place was to be home from now on: Either how do I get out, or how do I make a life here? Even when we reject all claims that definitive answers to these questions were once revealed, discarding all notions of a God or gods to do the revealing, the questions themselves remain as valid and urgent as ever. If anything, they become much more urgent, given the technological powers now at our disposal, and the political choices these entail. If you accept the validity of such questions, then the title of this essay makes perfect sense because the questions are ultimately theological in nature, resting as they do on personal faith (in whatever, and however practised), and on the collective faith of communities and peoples and nations. Certainly, they fall outside the scope of science, because they involve value judgements moral, aesthetic and eventually political that science rightly eschews. Science seeks to describe and understand what is, and sometimes what can be. What should be is a question that science must leave to politics and theology (defined here as the discourse of ultimate belief) and, in the last resort, to people's private beliefs. My purpose in these pages is to review what I take to be central issues of traditional theology from an ecoDarwinian perspective that takes selforganization and emergence and (correspondingly) 'the death of God' as its Page 3

starting point. The project is timely, but it should be the leaders of the major world religions, not just amateurs like me, who undertake it because the mental health of millions who rely upon and trust them depends upon their doing so. Unfortunately, they show few signs of being ready or willing to undertake the hard thinking and doctrinal revision that such an effort must entail. With a few honourable exceptions, most of these leaders seem to be digging their heels even further into dogmas of decreasing relevance or credibility for modern people in today's world. Their institutional interests may depend on their doing so, for there have always been more people who prefer to cling to cheap, ready-made answers rather than think seriously about difficult questions. Still, this is not a healthy state of affairs. As Emerson said roughly 150 years ago, "The religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide." Before reading on, you might look over the quotations1 at the back of this essay selected as background to this essay's central point: that the death of gods made in man's image is by no means the end of religious thinking. Rather the contrary. I think the questions have actually been sharpened made more poignant and more urgent by the extraordinary successes of modern science, and the social movements that followed. The creator deity has been slain, but the needs he served seem more acute than ever. my own beliefs When people ask me if I believe in God I have to say no, because I surely don't believe in anything like the God they have in mind. At the same time, though I fit the dictionary definition and despite this essay's catchy title, I don't much like to call myself an atheist. To begin with, it loads the discussion that might follow in an obnoxious way by forcing me to define myself within the horizons and language of the religious party. I'd rather be known for what I do believe than for what I don't. For another thing, as will be discussed below,2 I'm completely happy to use that monosyllable 'God' as a convenient word for the over-arching context of human life understood by me as the principle of self-organization and its emergent cosmic, biological and social order. As well, I like and mostly agree with the religious notions in the quotations at the end of this piece. None of this makes me an orthodox believer, but it does make me, in my own fashion, a religious man. As a college student, well before I joined "the journey to the East by taking up aikido, I had an interest in religion that my father, a complete child of the Enlightenment, could never understand, and had no sympathy for at all. Not that I was ever tempted to join an established church, but I did feel the 'spiritual itch' of that '60's generation, and a need
1 2 Mostly taken from http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_religion.html. In Chapter 5.

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to scratch it somehow. At the time, I just read a few books on Taoism and Zen. Later, I watched an aikido class, fell in love with that art and was hooked for a lifetime. Later still, I began to write. I'd suggest that all honest writing is a form of meditation, a form of prayer even. The experience is to invite one's thoughts and feelings to come to the surface of consciousness, and then work to put them into fitting language. Whatever else it is, writing is one very good way to get in touch with, and dwell in, the context of your own life.3 If that word 'God' is taken as I'm proposing, to mean just "the overarching context both of a given individual life and of life itself," then that context must have a number of dimensions a cosmic and physical dimension, a biological and ecological one, a social, cultural, historical and political one, a familial and biographical one whatever you feel has shaped you. The great religious teachers were wholly correct in pointing out that we are not the authors of our own lives. No life is self-created or wholly self-contained; every life arises and sustains itself for awhile in some external contexts. You can take these for granted, or try to understand them. You can feel at home and comfortable in the world as you find it, or thoroughly alienated from it. You can love life and its contexts, or hate them and the great religious teachers were correct that love is better. But where does 'belief' come into this? I see a world before my eyes, and feel it on my skin. What is there to 'believe in,' exactly? The context of life is there, whatever sense I can make of it, and however (or whether) I can reconcile with it, whether I am aware of it or not. We should ask ourselves and others, how they understand the contexts of their lives, not whether they 'believe in God' or not. That said, I can declare a few beliefs and disbeliefs of relevance for this essay. In epistemology the philosophy of what it means to know things I would describe myself as a pluralist and conversationalist, but not a relativist. That is to say, I believe that knowledge is socially constructed within some cosmic context (what we call reality) and that, for any given question, more than one answer is often possible and valid. But I don't believe that one answer is just as good as another, or that validity is to be judged wholly within some cultural context. I believe that cultures themselves can and must be judged by their contributions to life and their exploitations of it. "By their fruits ye must know them," as the Evangelist said.4

On the epistemological payoffs of this occupation, see Annie Dillard's little book, The Writing Life. As she says, "No one would say that a day spent writing is a good day. But a life spent writing is a good life." Matthew 7:16. By analogy with Occam's Razor, this principle might be called "Matthew's Microsope."

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In metaphysics, I am a physicalist and an emergentist: I recognize nothing 'supernatural,' but believe that mind, society, culture, spirit and everything else we want to speak of are properties that emerge through processes of self-organization from physical energy and matter. To the ultimate question of "Why is there something rather than nothing," I hope (have faith, if you prefer) that quantum theory, or its successor will eventually provide a satisfactory, empirically testable, answer. It's worth mentioning that today's physicists are actually working on this problem have, at last, real ways to work on it. It's no longer just a matter for myth and speculation. This metaphysical paradigm of self-organization and emergetism will be discussed further in Chapters 2 and 3. But at this point I'd like to add that the upshot of this modern, scientific worldview is not, as many suppose, a reduction of the mysteries of life to a mechanical clockwork of particles. Rather, what science has been showing is that physical energy and matter have much more interesting properties than Newtonian mechanics had supposed. Though wholly without belief in any supernatural God, I am not without religious feelings. In fact, I might describe myself as a casual worshipper in several religious traditions: I become Taoist, Zen Buddhist and thoroughly Animist when I practice or teach aikido. In my sexuality, I would have to describe myself as a Pagan, offering submissive devotion to the Goddess. As will be detailed later, I can follow Catholic theologians in dividing the cosmic order into three parts: 'the Father' (a physical and metaphysical order pre-existing humanity and life); 'the Son' (an inner alignment of love and peace; and 'the Holy Spirit,' a contextual order pervading and connecting nature and self alike. As a good Catholic then, I can recognize some such trinity as logically distinguishable, yet inseparable aspects of a single cosmic order. I remain very much a Jew in my sense that this order is to be questioned, studied and wrestled (or negotiated) with, not just accepted on authority.5 In another context, I once described myself as an ecoDarwinian Gnostic.6 The 'ecoDarwinian' bit is a compact way of saying that I take self-organization and emergetism as fundamental principles until something better comes along adding that, at this time, nothing more plausible is in sight. Self-organization has an evolutionary aspect, and also a co- evolutionary or ecological one, because things evolve not in isolation, but with, against and in the context of everything else. I call myself a
5 This paragraph has been lifted with minor changes from a previous essay of mine, The Gods at Play, a humorous, but partly serious defense of polytheism, and what I called ludic or playful religion. I would like that piece be read in conjunction with this one. It can be found on the Web at http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc %20Essays/The%20Gods%20at%20Play.pdf The ecoDarwinian Paradigm, Talk 14. See http://www.secthoughts.com/WaS_Revised/Talk14.pdf

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Gnostic with large reservations, because the ancient Gnostics had some batty ideas. But it seems to me that they were and are correct in their two central claims: that the universe we live in was not designed to promote goodness and spiritual growth, and that transcendence of evil, to the extent this is possible, is aided more by knowledge (gnosis) than by obedient faith. All this to say that my religious ideas are not wholly intellectual that I am by no means immune to religious feelings. My serious thought, however, is that traditional religious belief can no longer be defended except as grand myth and poetry against a worldview informed by current science. As myth, however, it still has much to offer; and I have learned much from reading and thinking about it. In a way, my project here is to save religion from itself from taking itself, and being taken too literally. Like war, religion is too important to be left to the professionals with their vested interests, who do it for a living. religion as a cultural problem Another of my beliefs is that the conflicts between 'religion' and 'science' are wrong-headed, and poorly serve the society of which both are part. Society needs its sciences to be sure, but it also needs a vital discourse of values and human meanings that the sciences are in no position to supply or lead. Unfortunately, neither are the religions in their present state. With a few honourable exceptions,7 most religious leaders and their followers are choosing to stand on 'revelation' and maintain, essentially, that we have learned nothing of real importance about ourselves in the last 2000 years. Or in the last 1200, say, for Muslims. We can understand why the religious institutions are choosing this strategy, but it is doing a lot of harm. I doubt the public conflict will be healed any time soon but we can heal it in our own minds at least, along the lines I'm discussing here. In general, my approach is to look carefully both at science and at religion, and consider the respects in which each does and does not respond to (what I take to be) real human issues and needs. It will be seen that I have more complaints about religion than about science but not because I am prejudiced. The fact is that science, on the whole, is providing what I want and expect from it, while the established religions, unfortunately, are not. I'm aware, of course, that people's wants and needs are different. That is why I don't expect the public science-religion conflict to go away soon, though for myself there never was much conflict and now remains no conflict at all. As I see it, science and religion are both posing huge cultural problems today. The difference is that science is doing the job that it assigned itself;
7 Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas J J Altizer, Paul van Buren, to mention a few examples.

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religion, on the whole, is not. For culture and society, what science has done has been like giving a loaded gun to a baby. No one should then be surprised if people get hurt or die but then science never took, nor was given, responsibility for the uses to which its discoveries were put. Such responsibility is not within its scope or nature. Science does well if it conducts its experiments responsibly and ethically. It does well if it explains its findings in layman's terms and advises the public and the decision-makers on the opportunities and risks. But its findings are what they are. What governments, businesses, churches and the public decide to do with new knowledge is basically a political problem beyond the scientists' special competence or authority, though as citizens they will have opinions like everyone else. From religion's side, the case is different. The factitious certainty that makes it tremendously appealing at the beginning, when people are confused and uncertain, becomes a tremendous liability later on when changes are coming hard upon each other whether they are wanted or not. The history of Islam is exceptionally clear in this regard: At the beginning, Mohammad's inspiration united the Arab peoples and gave them a theocratic empire from the Pyrenees to India, and the most brilliant and progressive civilization of its time. Today, those same beliefs especially that Mohammad as the seal of the prophets, is absolutely the last word on every subject are a terrific liability, blocking much needed cultural change. The fact is that every belief system based on immutable revelation faces an identical trap; and the histories of Pauline Christianity, Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis have been no different: The assurance of certainty and changelessness is advantageous at the beginning when a young movement's need is for solidarity in the face of external opposition. Later, when a largely triumphant ideology has need for flexibility and sensible adaptation to change, that same insistence on certainty becomes a major handicap against still newer ideas and movements. This essay, then, represents my own search for a way to reconcile the modern findings with what I take to be the best insights of traditional religion. It is suggestion only. There is no claim at all that you should think and believe as I do, though I present what I consider some good arguments for the positions taken. But much is still unknown, much is left open here, and where I feel doubt or confusion or sheer ignorance, I have frankly said so. I've been looking for a world-view to articulate my sense of existential context, ground my sense of values, and complement what can be learned from modern science. Not finding such a theology ready-made, I've had to roll my own.

*****
The religious impulse is sometimes compared to a feeling for music. The atheist, it has been said, is simply tone-deaf unable to hear a divine Page 8

melody.8 This is surely true for some non-believers, but probably not for many of us. To speak just for myself, I can hear and feel the religious music quite well when I watch a sunset, say or listen to Bach's B minor Mass and I'm aware of the so-called "God-shaped hole" in my own psyche: the feeling of incompleteness, the wish for submission to, and protection by a Higher Power. But in me these feelings are overwhelmed by a highly developed gag reflex at superstitious or wishful thinking. For me, and many like me, it was never a serious option to live with one foot in the modern world but with the other in a traditional religion, and the choice was never in question. Notwithstanding, my spiritual life found nourishment. For one thing, because I understand that myth and metaphor are a category unto themselves, I have been able to read the sacred texts of several traditions without dismissing them as fairy tales, but with no inclination to take them literally. Some of them speak to me, some do not; but I can read them as speculative and visionary poetry, and judge and respond to them as such. Second, I been able to scratch my religious itch in the pursuit of several quasi-religious interests: aikido, BDSM sexuality, and several areas of philosophy. In particular, with some idea of 'Perennial Philosophy' and of modern ecoDarwinian science as well, it has been possible to think how religion and modern knowledge fit together. Finally, for about a year now, I have been visiting a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in Montreal, and learning from the experience. Their only dogma is not to have any dogmas, while their values and sensibilities are in good harmony with my own. This essay is the fruit of all these interests: my attempt to spell out requirements for a modern religion that would be both humanly vital and intellectually tenable.

A Clash of Paradigms

The conflicts between religion and science are unfortunate, even tragic, because there is nothing about an interest in nature to turn the mind against the great questions of theology. Nor is there anything about theology per se to turn the mind from a simultaneous interest in physical nature. Rather the contrary, in fact: People with the education, the leisure and the interest to
8 As in this passage from an article by A N Wilson in The New Statesman: "When I

think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue." Available on the Web at
www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism .

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pursue ideas in either area have usually given at least some attention to the other. When we talk about the wars between religion and science, we should keep in mind that throughout the middle ages, and even today, quite a few great scientists were deeply religious men while a number of monks, clergymen and pious laymen also made significant contributions to science.9 Before Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, the following individuals contributed knowledge significant enough to be remembered in the history of science, as well as in that of the medieval Church:

Gerbert of Rheims later Pope Sylvester II (c.9501003) Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (c.11751253) Albertus Magnus (c.11931280) Roger Bacon (c.12141294 Jean Buridan (13001358) Nicole Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux (c.13231382) Nicolas of Cusa, a Cardinal (14011464)

And these are only the most famous. Thus, the notorious Galileo affair, and the suppression and persecution, even the burning, of various scientists and thinkers who challenged aspects of Christian orthodoxy, is only one side of the story of the rise of science in Europe. Another side is the fact that numerous intellectuals and scholars in the Middle Ages and later were interested in theology and nature both, and saw no contradiction between these interests. Newton himself was such a thinker. Blaise Pascal was another. And it was not just that intellectuals who took an interest in theology could also take an interest in science. We understand now that medieval scholasticism itself, for all its focus on theology and Christian 'revelation,' was a major precursor and source for modern science, (the steady accumulation of technology in that period being the other major source). George Sarton, considered the founder of 'history of science' as a separate discipline puts it this way, comparing the 'Scientific Revolution' to a pregnancy:
"It does not follow, as so many ignorant persons think, that the medieval activities were sterile. That would be just as foolish as to consider a pregnant woman sterile as long as the fruit of her womb was unborn. The Middle Ages were pregnant with many ideas which could not be delivered until much later. Modern science, we might say, was the fruition of medieval immaturity. Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton were the happy inheritors who cashed in."10
9 A fascinating list of scientists who also contributed to Christian religious thinking can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science. James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Carlos Chagos Filho and Freeman Dyson are a few notable recent examples. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. 3 p.15

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People like Stephen J. Gould have talked about religion and science as two separate 'magisteria,' with non-overlapping jurisdictions. But this view too is slightly off the mark, because the magisteria do indeed overlap sometimes giving rise to conflict around such matters as heliocentrism, evolution and neuroscience today. As with the mundane conflicts of nations over choice parcels of geography, when religion and science have felt opposing stakes on a matter, no neat division of jurisdictions has been possible. the two paradigms Rather than see the resulting conflicts as wars between religion and science in themselves, a more fruitful approach might consider such battles as a clash of powerful institutions committed to different paradigms, to competing ways of looking at the world and making sense of it. One way, commonly associated both with ordinary human affairs and with religion, works from the top down, and tries to see things in human terms as outcomes of purpose, intention and creative authorship. Seeking to understand how something came about, you can ask who wanted it that way and why? Thus, historians wonder what Napoleon hoped to gain in 1812 when he marched his army into Russia, or what the men who met at Philadelphia were thinking when they drafted their Constitution in the summer of 1787. From this auctorial perspective, early thinkers wondered how the world came to be conceived by gods, eventually by a single God, who designed it, ordained its fundamental laws, and made it so. Until quite recently, there was no other way to explain how we came to be here, or how things came to be as they are. See one of Dennett's early books, The Intentional Stance, for a discussion of this way of thinking and its tremendous strengths. A different way of thinking, the ecoDarwinian paradigm as I have called it, began to emerge in the 17th century when some Western Europeans came to insist that their ruler was not a 'Vicar of God,' but the representative and servant of his people. It went further when Adam Smith pointed out that the economies of nations usually arranged and managed themselves, without central design or planning, through the myriad of selfinterested decisions taken by individual vendors and buyers without regard for the needs or welfare of the whole society. It went much further still when Charles Darwin explained how natural selection could give rise to new species of animals and plants. Today we know that systems at all levels of size and complexity, from atoms to biological organisms, from snowflakes to planetary systems, star clusters and galaxies, can self-organize without input from any external designer. We begin to understand selforganization or autopoiesis (i.e. 'self-making') as the effect is also called as an abstract phenomenon. We begin to use our still incomplete understanding of this effect to account for the unfathomable complexity of human brains and minds, and then of human societies. Page 11

the clash The clash of these two paradigms the auctorial and the ecoDarwinian underlies much of the political turmoil of our time, and vexes its intellectual life. Religious authorities and their flocks are clinging to the auctorial paradigm, and defending it in every way they can. By contrast, science and scientists today work wholly in the ecoDarwinian paradigm, and correctly regard the auctorial as obsolete and irrelevant for their purposes. The political right wants authority in religion and politics, but a freely selforganizing oligarchical marketplace otherwise. The political left is suspicious of all authority but has to accept quite a lot of it if it hopes to organize effective resistance against established wealth and power. Overall, the intellectual situation is thoroughly confused; and looking back now, I find that I have spent my life trying to sort through, and sort out, some of that confusion in my own mind, at least. Amongst the lay public, though not at all for biologists, even Darwinian evolution is still controversial. The far more radical applications of ecoDarwinian thinking in neuroscience and psychology remain, as I write this, almost completely unknown to the lay public despite an extensive popular literature on the subject. Relatively few people as yet can recognize the two paradigms for what they are: divergent modes of explanation with different domains of application. To solve a crime or explain some quirky feature of a new law or of your spouse's behavior, it makes sense to ask Cui bono? What was intended and who benefits? To discuss a work of art, it makes sense to ask who created it, and what intentions and influences moved the artist in doing so. But to understand the world, life, the mind itself, you have to ask how their patterns could self-organize and create themselves, because attributing them to some higher being's intention explains nothing at all, but merely invites still less accessible questions: Why did that being intend as he did? And where did he come from anyhow? the uses of myth This basic clash of paradigms auctorial and ecoDarwinian is linked to, but not quite identical with the conflicts between magical and causal explanation, and to that between myth and critical reason. Quite readily, though, the top-down, auctorial paradigm leads to myth a kind of magical, just-so story of "how the leopard got his spots." The bottom-up ecoDarwinian paradigm is linked with scientific method, and then with highly detailed and technical descriptions of mechanical interactions. But the sides do not line up quite that neatly, and the details are not important here. For our purpose it is enough to note: first, that myths are not just fairy tales, but genuine attempts, usually lived attempts, to structure reality and life in some intelligible fashion; and second, that critical reason, once it got rolling, brushed the myths aside in favor of what we call 'science' a techPage 12

nical, causal, ultimately ecoDarwinian style of explanation, validated through the abductive method of hypothesis and experimental (dis)confirmation. the death of God Accordingly, what Nietzsche called 'the death of God' has nothing at all to do with how many people go to church or call themselves believers. What he was pointing to, rather, is a pervasive style of life and thought based on science rather than myth, on critical and instrumental reason in place of the traditional folk-ways of a culture, on personal choices of interpretation in place of culturally received ones. In short, he meant the death of a tradition-based society and its replacement by a modern and post-modern one in which change (for better or worse) is institutionalized and taken for granted; in which you do not live by the same norms and values as your parents, nor can expect that your children will live by yours; in which you take your child to a doctor rather than a priest when he or she gets sick. And, not least, Nietzsche meant the kinds of doctor we expect today, trained in medical (rather than magical) practices trained not in a tradition, but in current (ecoDarwinian) biology, and required by law to treat the child according to accepted medical procedures and to the science behind them, whatever his parents believe. One key thought of this essay is that all human affairs, including religion as well as science, will need to take the ecoDarwinian paradigm on board as a new and powerful way of thinking. In the sciences this is proving relatively easy though by no means automatic in certain areas because the paradigm is congenial to its whole purpose and way of thinking. In religion the task is proving bitter and painful because the paradigm runs counter to ancient habits and traditions, and to established institutional interests. Yet some religious traditions too are finding it much easier than others because they place little importance on correct belief, but much more on correct practice. Three central claims will be made here: The first of these that the religious questions are meaningful cuts against the positivist argument that only questions with factual answers are valid or deserve to be taken seriously. The second claim that the world's religious traditions read as grand myth and not as factual truth still have much to teach is likely to annoy both the science-minded and the traditionally religious. I will argue that the traditional religious cultures are far from dead, provided they are intelligently read as myth, and then practiced selectively and critically. They remain as ancient genres of human thought and practice, but not as bodies of sacred revelation. The third claim that religious truths are plural and mutable stands in contradiction to dogmatists of all stripes everywhere. This essay represents a personal attempt to articulate a reasoned middle ground between the two extremes of relativism on one Page 13

hand and dogmatism on the other. Its body is a review of some ancient theological issues in the light of modern knowledge and thought. Modernity began and is correct to persist in rejecting the notion of 'Revealed Truth' as a contradiction in terms. Its core idea, the one that made all modern knowledge possible, is that all truth, to be worthy of that name, must continually update itself in the light of experience and critical questioning. Even strongly supported beliefs become falsehoods when they refuse the discipline of ongoing criticism. Religious truths are no exception. To retain validity, they must take current knowledge and conditions on board, and adapt to them in some honest way. In the past, great religious teachers have tried to do this. However revered by their devoted followers, they were neither gods nor takers of dictation from God, but fallible men and women with some good ideas and some bad ones as we will see below, that were always controversial in their own time, and that have temporal but not eternal relevance.

Where Did It All Come From?

Climb a mountain and behold the landscape. As night falls, watch the stars come out overhead. Wonder at this splendor, and ask yourself: Where did it all come from? "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Why is there anything at all? The traditional answer is that a god designed and made it a reply that really explains nothing, raises more questions than it answers, but handily serves to block all further questioning. We have a better answer today. What follows is a very brief introduction to the concept of self-organization a much stronger but wholly counter-intuitive explanation of the world we find around us. self-organization The basic idea is that order can emerge spontaneously in a system, without an external designer to plan and impose it; that this is observed in certain physical systems; and that many other systems can be interpreted as having been organized in this way. One of the simplest (and earliest studied) examples of such a system in physics are the so-called Bnard cells) that form in a gently heated liquid, as shown in the photograph below.11

11

See http://www.eoht.info/page/B%C3%A9nard+cells

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Contrary to our instinctive tendency to look for a designer and a patternmaker whenever we see pattern, the structure in this photograph happened all by itself, and can be explained as a purely physical process. In fact, we now know of many similarly self-organized systems from atoms and molecules, to ice and other mineral crystals, to stars and galaxies. Quantum physicists now believe that the whole universe is a structure of this kind, and are able to theorize (based on hard data both from particle physics and from astronomy) on how that structure came to be. A far cry from the creation story in the Bible which, nonetheless, seems to be correct that the crucial move was a separation of light from darkness, a pulling of order out of chaos! Reduced to its essentials, Darwin's idea of natural selection is just the simple tautology that Longer lasting patterns last longer than patterns which last not so long.12 For the case of biological evolution, this spells out to the familiar competition of living creatures to survive and reproduce. As Darwin recognized:

In any inter-breeding population there will be genetic variation, which is passed on to offspring in the constant reshuffling of sexual reproduction. Not all of these offspring will get to reproduce; their genetic patterns will tend to disappear from the gene pool, while other patterns become more frequent. Over time, provided these selection effects are fairly consistent, the
As Gregory Bateson put it. For a basic explanation of Darwin's idea, see http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_25

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composition of the whole gene pool will change in one direction rather than another. In this way, the characteristic traits of a given species may alter, to the point that a new species originates. But this is only one of the ways that self-organization can happen. Here are several others: Least action: Many systems, including those Bnard cells, configure spontaneously to minimize one of their parameters. Soap films on a twisted loop of wire configure to minimize their surface area. Below a critical temperature, bars of iron (and other materials) spontaneously magnetize themselves because alignment of the magnetic fields of their particles represents a least energy configuration for the bar as a whole. Lobster trap effect: The trap is a simple box with bait inside and a funnel leading in, so that lobsters can easily find their way into the box but cannot easily find the small opening leading out. Through wholesale application of this effect, molecules (and other components) can self-assemble into chains, sheets, lattices and other complex, highly ordered structures. The general principle is that a change process can be one-way only, or overwhelmingly more probable in one direction than the other, so that random contributions from the outside produce a steady accumulation of order. This is the explanation for the teleology now more respectably termed teleonomy of living organisms. It is a process of seemingly purposeful causation. It is the reason why a fertilized human egg cell develops into a living human baby, if into anything at all. Power law: Also known as the Matthew effect after Matthew 25:29: "For to those who have, more will be given . . . but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." This effect governs Google search results, and the more general phenomenon of celebrities who are "famous for being famous." It also governs the shape of snow slopes, sand piles, and similar situations in which stuff heaps up until it reaches a critical point of steepness and then breaks down in avalanches of varying size (which follow a power-law distribution, with small slides very common while larger ones are rare). Disease epidemics, shake-outs in the economic marketplace and many other phenomena show the same pattern. Self-similarity: One very simple way for a system to self-organize is to get itself in a loop. When this happens, we may see a tremendous amount of activity going nowhere. More interestingly, we may observe repetitive activity that gradually goes somewhere like the turning wheel that moves a cart. Such a system may be stable insofar as it repeats itself; at the same time it may be unstable, or only loosely stable, insofar as small changes accumulate until a 'tipping-point' is crossed, and some very large change results. The general form looks like a spiral: basically cyclic, but with a tendency to expand or contract or rise in level. Already Aristotle, writing Page 16

around 350 B.C., had noticed this pattern of self-similar growth. For any growth process of plant from seed, of chick from egg today's growth always begins where yesterday's left off. In bio-chemistry, self-similar cycles of this kind are called autocatalytic loops, and thought to be the origin of life itself. In many such systems, a small residue or gain accumulates in the successive repetitions, so that the trajectory is not a closed loop but a spiral. The system may experience small perturbations making it still more irregular. As the result of an unusually large disturbance, or eventually, after enough repetitions, the system may undergo what we observe as drastic, qualitative change of state, crossing a pass (a 'tipping point') into a different 'basin.' Providing only that some of these basins of attraction are easier to get into, and/or harder to get out of than others, a kind of evolution will result.

*****
A few thousand years before Charles Darwin, or before Ross Ashby who coined the term self-organization in 1947, Chinese Taoists had observed a tendency of systems to evolve toward a balance between the yin and the yang between centripetal and centrifugal forces, or between processes of intake and outflow; and these sages already spoke of ziran the self-so, that which happens by itself. The planets in their orbits would be one example of this yin/yang balance. The metabolism of a human body would be another. The debits and credits of any business would be a third. Having this concept of the self-so, Chinese religious thought did not need and did not develop the concept of a designer God. For better and for worse, Western thought took a different direction, which still seems self-evident to many people, and which we Occidentals have only recently learned to question. emergence 'Self-organization' and its synonym, 'autopoiesis' are convenient names for the fact well known to scientists by now that unlikely patterns can emerge spontaneously in systems at every scale we study from subatomic particles to galactic clusters, and to the universe as a whole. Looking closely at the world, what we find is a hierarchy of systems which are simultaneously parts and wholes,13 with interesting emergent properties not predictable from the several properties of their component parts. One simple example would be the wetness of water, which is not predictable from any properties of hydrogen and oxygen. We ourselves are another
13 Holons, as Arthur Koestler called them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy) and www.integralworld.net/edwards13.html

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example, with fascinating properties of life and mind, not at all predictable from the laws of physics, or from the chemicals that make up our bodies. For a third example, consider the properties of a star, not at all apparent from the properties of hydrogen atoms, nor from those of a large cloud of such atoms in what would otherwise be empty space. Yet those atoms exert a gravitational pull on one another so that the gas cloud tends to contract. (A Mattew effect: To that which has much, more will be given!) As it gets smaller and more dense, this hydrogen cloud becomes a center toward which more hydrogen is pulled from its surrounding region. The atoms of hydrogen move faster as they fall toward one another; and as they collide the cloud gets hotter, and the temperature near its center rises. Eventually, provided only that the initial supply of hydrogen was large enough, temperatures toward the center of the gas cloud rise so high (the atoms of hydrogen move and collide so violently) that the atoms begin to fuse, becoming the different kind of atom that we call helium, and many other kinds of atoms as well. What has formed, in effect, is a self-sustaining thermonuclear explosion that radiates energy and counteracts the gravitational forces pulling all those hydrogen atoms together. Gravity still works to make the hydrogen cloud contract; at the same time, thermonuclear fusion blasts it apart, and the equilibrium of these forces is the pattern we call a star. In the Bible, that pattern is explained in a very different way, at the tail end of a single sentence: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also." (Genesis 1:16). God is not so much dead as unemployed Now, to my mind, it's clear that astrophysics tells the better story. At the very least, it elaborates on the Biblical account to explain how God made all those stars. In this same way, it can be be argued, as the Vatican does, that Darwinian natural selection is merely a theory of how God made the plants and animals. Yet, in physics, biology and other areas of application, the science of self-organization does rather more than that: It makes the designer God unnecessary to the process, showing how the observed results could have occurred with no auctorial guidance whatever. God becomes superfluous to the process or at best, just another name, a not very helpful one, for the self-organization we've been describing. The point for us is that science has simply continued a trend the removal of inexplicable 'spirits' from nature that monotheism was itself continuing. There was a time when everything Man could see was considered to have its own spirit, analogous to human life and volition, that endowed that thing with all its properties and made it the kind of thing it was. The sun was the mightiest spirit, but every place, every living creature and every pebble had a spirit of its own. Later, a distinction came to be Page 18

drawn between inanimate objects and animate ones. Plants and animals and people were alive because they had spirits to move them and make them grow. Rocks, lacking spirit, would just stay where they were put. To die was to lose that indwelling spirit and then there were different ideas about where the spirits went. Polytheism left all these spirits in place, but classified them according to various governing principles each understood as a god or goddess that guided persons in various ways while other living things merely existed according to their various generic spirits: corn after the manner of corn, chickens after the manner of chickens, foxes after their own manner, and so forth. Because the governing principles (the deities) had different natures, they pursued different objectives, intrigued against each other and sometimes came into conflict using us mortals as pawns. The ancient Greeks thought along such lines, and their myths present a world of this kind. Monotheism collected all spirit all the good spirit, at least under a single divine identity, leaving the obvious facts of pain and evil as unsolvable problems.14 The world was created and set in motion by this single God who might intervene in its affairs from time to time, but which could otherwise run by itself. Men and women (made in the image of God) had free will and could do good or evil as they chose. Other creatures, innocent of good and evil, just did their things according to the properties they had been given. Spirit was definitively removed from nature and sharply distinguished from it: God was the single pre-existing and eternal Spirit, unknowable except as it chose to reveal itself to us mere humans. Nature was the material world that God designed and called into being for His own inscrutable reasons and that He would bring to an end in His own good time. Now, what science has done, at least since Newton's time, has been to make even this single transcendent God increasingly irrelevant to observed nature. Newton's concept of universal 'gravity,' a force of mutual attraction between any two masses anywhere, displayed the universe as a clockwork mechanism that could run forever, all by itself, once it had been set in motion. In the Newtonian scheme, a Divine Act was only required at the beginning, to create a set of heavenly bodies and give them their initial velocities. After that, no further supernatural intervention was needed. Star formation could then be explained through gravity alone, as we have just seen. Darwin's concept of 'natural selection' suggested a mechanism whereby new types (species) of living things could evolve to meet the changing conditions in their environment, and the challenges set by the further evolution of other species. The breeders of horses and dogs and pigeons had already shown what could be done by humanly-controlled selective breeding. The fossil record had shown that the global population of living
14 See Chapter 6 below.

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creatures had changed greatly over time, and that the creatures alive in the mid 19th century had not been created all together, in one fell swoop, but had evolved from ancestors who looked quite different. All that was needed, really, was to notice that nature all by itself could do the selective breeding trick. Of course, the evolutionists still had to show how complex organs like eyes and brains could evolve given sufficient time, and that the earth was old enough to afford that time. The controversy over these matters was reasonable when The Origin of Species was published, but the preponderance of evidence since then has upheld Darwin's theory across the board. It is still possible to argue that God's hand was needed at the very beginning, to create life in the first place, but it seems more likely now that organic molecules and living cells developed by themselves through processes of self-organization. While we may never know exactly how life formed on this cooling planet (for want of evidence to show what actually happened), the synthesis of organic molecules and living cells in chemistry labs is more than likely in the near future. The basic requirements are already known, several pathways to 'abiogenesis' are being studied, and experimental efforts to create artificial life are being made.15 The phenomenon of mind was the other area where supernatural interventions seemed to be needed. Already in the 17 th century the living body was conceived as an organic machine, but it seemed impossible both to Descartes and Leibniz (both of whom considered the question) that such machinery could feel and think. By the late 1800's, both neurologists (like Paul Broca) and psychologists (like William James) were already quite sure that a mind was something that a brain was doing, but they still had no real understanding of how this could happen. In fact, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that this problem began to be solved. In the early 'sixties, when I was a college student interested in psychology, that field meant either the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner or the psychoanalysis of Freud. By 1991, however, the biologist Gerald Edelman had published his theory of neuronal group selection, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett could publish a book with the title Consciousness Explained, becoming extremely controversial in doing so, but by no means looking stupid. As I write this piece, almost 20 years later still, though the philosophy of mind is still in turmoil, cognitive neuroscience is a well-established field with broad, multidisciplinary consensus on the relations between mind and brain, and no use at all for the Cartesian, dualist view that mind is a separate, non-physical substance.16
15 The emergence of life from non-living matter is an enormously complex area of research. The best overview I've found is the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis See overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience

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The bottom line is that here again, the intervention of God and the concept of a separate, metaphysically real spirit have become superfluous. Though many of the details are still unknown, it is quite clear now that we can have the conscious minds we know ourselves to be, emerging in just these human bodies, that doctors can probe and test while we are alive, and dissect after we are dead with no supernatural add-ons needed. In principle, all phenomena of nature can now be seen and usefully studied as patterns that emerge spontaneously through a self-organizing process. In this way, much more plausibly and intelligibly than by a god's fiat, the universe and everything in it can be accounted for at least potentially, if not completely yet with well-confirmed scientific theory. Self-organization is holarchical to use Arthur Koestler's term: The systems that emerge at one level, readily interact, combine and re-combine to produce higher-order systems, at higher levels of organization; and it is this property of recombination and holarchy that make the world's awesome complexity possible. From an assortment of atoms, molecules can build themselves eventually molecules capable of self-replication, on the threshold of life. In due course, these complex, self-replicating molecules can 'learn' to protect themselves with fatty bubbles, the better to control their working environments. Then they can evolve into eukaryotic cells, true one-celled organisms, which then specialize to flourish under different local conditions. Some evolve to capture energy from sunlight. Others evolve to prey on those solar-powered creatures, and on one another. They can evolve the trick of living together in colonies, and of cooperating with one another for various purposes. Now we have plants and animals with specialized organs and sub-systems. We have a whole ecology of living creatures, creating ever more complex and fantastic living conditions for one another. Some of these creatures evolve sophisticated brains and minds, the better to cope with all this complexity, eventually capable of telling stories to explain it all, and needing urgently to do so. In time, at least some of these puzzled creatures, even with their limited brains and sensory systems really begin to understand something of how their world works: how it (and they themselves) came to be. And here we are. Koestler's notion of holarchy updates the medieval concept of a "Great Chain of Being," with its auctorial God at the summit, and lesser beings arranged at successive levels below with humans in a level of our own, between the beasts and angels.17 Thus, a first result of our "theology for atheists" is to turn that "Great Chain" upside down: We must now imagine raw, quantized energy at the lowest level giving rise through selforganization to all the entities and beings in existence, right up to the Cosmos as a whole the self-organized universe and everything in it
17 See Arthur Lovejoy's book, The Great Chain of Being, and the entry on this topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being

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(which, following Spinoza, you can call 'God' if you like). In the last reckoning, self-organization is a cosmic process. 'Evolution' is really 'coevolution' an evolution of Nature and of the ecosystem as a whole, with changes in any region or sub-system calling for changes elsewhere to keep the whole system consistent and compatible with itself. Local changes alter a global context, which in turn establishes selection criteria on which all sub-systems must compete to survive. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. It is the context that rules and that creates itself. 'God' as a context What we've just seen is that a concept of 'God' can still be serviceable if we put aside the anthropomorphic and intentional connotations of that old word: Not for the material universe, and not for the 'laws' that appear to govern it, but for the self-organizing context of all existing particulars. The intuition of a mysterious 'power' underlying or transcending, if you prefer the material cosmos and its laws was indeed correct. The modern achievement, a theological achievement if you care to see it so, is that we now have an aptly descriptive name for that power, and the beginnings of a real understanding of how it works: It's the creative principle of selforganization, and the cosmic 'ecology' that develops from it as the context for all its parts. Admittedly, we don't yet know how or why the 'Big Bang' occurred where all that energy came from, why the fundamental constants worked out as conveniently (for astronomy, chemistry, biology and, ultimately, for us) as they did. But quantum mechanics admits it as a possibility, and physicists are working on the problem. It has been suggested that the laws and constants of physics themselves evolve to allow for higher levels of complexity.18 It has been suggested that Nothingness is unstable in some way, and subject to decay through some type of quantum symmetrybreaking into a Universe: a Cosmic Something. What's clear, however, is that we now have a way of thinking about Creation, more powerful and plausible than its mythic rendering as a speech act. No anthropomorphic God had to say "Let there be . . ." to create a cosmos. The cosmos we observe and live in could have happened all by itself. What does all this tell us about ourselves? We have been getting used to one of the implications since Galileo's time and it has not been easy. We don't reside at the center of the universe, and we are not first and foremost in the mind of any Creator God. No one designed this playground for our benefit. No one is supervising or judging our behavior. This universe is unimaginably vast, and we ourselves except to ourselves are unimaginably small within it. We are alone and free here. There is the
18 See Lee Smolin's book, The life of the Cosmos, and the entry on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos

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world as we find it, and nothing to fear or hope for but what we make of it. The human mind is an emergent feature of human biology; and when our bodies die, we are dead, and the universe goes on without us. That is the bad news, and many find it an unbearably bleak prospect. But two further points are worth mentioning before this discussion continues: First, our scientific understanding of nature is not nearly as mechanical as it used to be. We now see the cosmic order as organic and evolutionary rather than machine-like. Time and history have acquired a new importance. Sheer chance is also crucial, as we have always suspected. At bottom, self-organization is a weird combination of chance and overwhelming statistical likelihood. Life is indeed a crap game on one level; but on another, it's an organic, evolving process, with every part finding its place within the whole. The second crucial point is that humanity is not a finished masterpiece but a work in progress, a recent biological experiment whose results are not yet in. The long term consequences of our specialization in language, social living and tool use are still uncertain. What we can see is that something very interesting and potentially significant has happened: In us humans, matter has become conscious of itself and, to some extent, capable of thinking about, and imposing new selection criteria for its own further evolution. A cartoon I once saw gets it exactly right: Between the anthropoid apes and the true human beings, the missing link is us.19

What Am I?

"Who am I?" and "What am I?" are very different questions. The first is a question about social identity. "What significant roles and relationships am I involved with?" "How do I fit into them, and how well are these relationships working?" "What am I getting out of them?" It's the sort of question you discuss with your shrink. The second question, "What am I?" raises very different issues around the meaning of the word 'human.' It's the sort of question that people go to church or follow the science news to learn about. It's a question about the properties of humans as things, entities, amongst all the other things we see around us. It's a question that cuts beneath the surface formulae of society and one's place in it to ask what our lives are really about. Every religion is, among other things, a theory of what it means to be human. To believe and belong to a certain religion is to accept its conception of humankind and the patterns of life that follow. In that sense, fundamentalists have good grounds to argue that science has become the established religion of the modern state. The difference is this, however: The
19 A religious vision based on evolution and its consequences can be found in an essay called Learning to Be Evolution at www.co-intelligence.org/EvolutionLearning2BEvol.html

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traditional religions insist that their stories were revealed, and that they stand as permanent truths. Science defines itself, and takes pride in treating its stories as humanly and socially constructed. It works with suggestions (hypotheses) made by humans to other humans, with no claim that better suggestions may not be found next week, or next year. Is science just another religion? A religion (with or without God) demands existential commitment to its interpretation of life. By contrast, science sets up what one might see as a stock market of interpretations, inviting you to invest as you see fit in the ones you like. Yet, in the long run, the science-minded atheist too must make his existential commitments. Just like the believer, he has to place his bets and live by their consequences. For that reason alone, the core issues of theology apply to atheists and believers alike. what is Man? In this section we'll consider the story that science is telling about human nature and the human condition, focusing on points of agreement and disagreement with some important religious stories. "What is Man?" is among the most ancient of theological questions. How would the modern anthropologist answer it? The first point an anthropologist would make, drawing on the work of colleagues in the biology department, is that we humans are a species of anthropoid ape, with three close relatives still extant: the orangutan, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. In fact (he would point out), at the genetic level, humans are not all that different from worms or fruit flies. We are DNA-based creatures animate, vertebrate, mammalian, primate, anthropoid and hominid before we are anything else; and the genetic code is the same, and operates the same way, for all life forms that have been studied. All the anthropoids are social animals, capable of using simple tools; but amongst them, humans somehow evolved culture, language and symbolic representation as an extraordinary specialization. An intense competition developed in these areas. Several other anthropoid and hominid species have already been driven to extinction, and other surviving ones are in danger, but for now, we humans are masters of the planet. It's a dangerous situation, but it's the present reality: Biological evolution continues but a much faster, cultural evolution has been added on top of it. Though prophecies abound, nobody really knows where humanity and its ecosystem are headed,. The theological sea-change in Man's status might be characterized as follows: In the past, most religions saw Man as a special creation. When Darwin's theory came out, there was much dismay at the idea that humans were descended from apes, and at the further consequence (already foreshadowed by Galileo) that religious scripture cannot be read as a literal account. Though most mainstream religions seem to have accepted these Page 24

points, in some circles the shock still lingers. 20 For the religious and atheist alike, there is a question of emphasis at stake: No one doubts that humans have much in common with other mammals and primates; and no one doubts that as animals go, we are remarkable ones. The questions and arguments begin when one asks what else we are (if anything) besides symbol and tool-using minds, what predispositions and limitations the human mind has, and what role religion plays (or should play) in human existence as a whole. For the Abrahamic religions, Man is an immortal, individual soul. For Hindus and Buddhists, Man is a fragment of Cosmic Mind whose individuality is an illusion. Today, most non-religious people tend to see themselves as conscious minds steering their bodies through a world of other such bodies. But the emerging scientific picture is rather different from all these ideas. The modern recognition has been that mind and spirit emerge in selforganizing, holistic fashion from the firing of neurons, the body's metabolism, the physics, chemistry and micro-anatomy of the brain's synaptic connections. They are not supernatural add-ons, but emergent properties of a complex system like wetness, the example used earlier. From a theological perspective, what follows? Most obviously, the notion of a 'life after death' loses its metaphysical basis: There is no independent spirit to go elsewhere when the body ceases to function. Artifacts and memories do linger, however. People still visit the Great Pyramid of Cheops, built to ensure his own and his servants' immortality; we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey and we listen to Bach's music. My parents have been dead for 20 years now, and several of my teachers, friends and colleagues are dead, but, in some important sense, my relationships with them continue. A kind of 'immortality' thus adheres to some people; but memory, enduring artifacts, if any, and imagination above all, are the extent of it. In the literal sense, all these people remain safely and comfortably dead as we ourselves will be shortly. The view from science, then, is that our minds and spirits are not incarnated in mortal flesh, but emergent from its workings. It follows that 'human nature,' to the extent there is such a thing, is a function of human biology and sociology and communication theory. We are what we are partly because of our genes and their physiological expression, but also partly because social living and communication have certain intrinsic requirements (what I have elsewhere called a 'logic of conversation') that would be much the same for all sentient species anywhere.
20 For a discussion of Jewish views on evolution, see www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewsevolution.html; for a discussion of the Catholic position see www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp; For a discussion of Islam's position, see www.islamreligion.com/articles/657/ Of course these sites do not represent official statements.

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A second consequence is that what we call 'the human condition' is different only secondarily, from the conditions of the other 'beasts of the field.' Mammals that we can observe closely seem to know pleasure and pain as we do. They are driven as we are by hunger and thirst and sexual desire, and seem to have their own versions of arousal, startle and fear of most of the same physiological affects that are the bases of human emotion. 21 This is not to ignore or minimize the uniqueness of our humanity, but to put it in a different perspective. We were not 'made in the image of God.' We are the close cousins of chimps and gorillas, more distant kin of wolves and sheep and squirrels, more distant still of termites and cockroaches. That we can see aspects of ourselves archetypes or parodies of human traits in the animals, was not God's joke, but a predictable vestige of our evolution. A third consequence is that some features of our humanity that really do seem 'god-like' also turn out to have a biological and evolutionary basis. In particular, our remarkable 'time-binding' (as Korzybski called it) and our gift for language (and for symbolic representation in general) are seen to be extensions and refinements of some things that our primate cousins are already doing. Again, this is not to depreciate our humanity, but to see it in a more accurate context. That we understand this much about ourselves is a sublime achievement of the modern world, whatever human societies make of it, and whatever becomes of humankind in the future. Many now feel that modern science 'reduces' mind to mere matter, and/or 'degrades' Man to the level of the chimpanzee; but this is a profound and unfortunate mistake. We become more, not less than we were by understanding ourselves better. The cosmos is enriched, not impoverished by the discovery that its creative potential is innate. In the past, quite a lot of philosophical, religious and political thought has been flawed by simplistic assumptions about 'human nature.' The idea that Man is a fallen creature, made in the image of God but alienated, by his own sinful free will, from his Creator, is one such notion an influential idea responsible for much self-hatred and suffering. We know much more about 'human nature' now than was known in the Middle East three thousand years ago; and one thing we've learned is that all such characterizations are beside the point. Man is neither inherently sinful nor inherently good. Man, like other animals, comes equipped with a whole range of aptitudes and predispositions conducive to survival and successful reproduction in the world of his ancestors. These make it easy to learn some things, but harder to learn other things. They manifest as (what we consider) good and noble and wise behavior on some occasions, but as
21 This distinction between affect and emotion is crucial, but there is no space for it here. Briefly, emotion is cogntive and culturally conditioned. Affects are physiological reflexes that can be elicited and observed in infants. See the Wikipedia entry on Affect Theory at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_theory, and my essay on it at www.secthoughts.com/Misc Essays/Shame and Personality.pdf

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wicked and base and foolish conduct on others. All in all, we find that it really is meaningful to speak of, study and contemplate 'human nature,' but that this nature is far too complex to summarize in a sentence or even a few paragraphs. Many good books have been written without exhausting the subject. All we can do here is mention just a few of the recent findings that bear in some way on the four-year-old's questions that we began with: One of these was Freud's great discovery of the subconscious: our modern understanding that the authority of conscious volition over our actions is much narrower than previously understood. Obviously, and as the law has had to recognize, this has implications for our concepts of free-will and moral responsibility forcing a legal distinction, ultimately, between normally autonomous actions and blindly compulsive ones. A second point is that emotion cannot longer be understood as a disturbance or perturbation of clear perception and reason, but is rather a precondition for these. We perceive things (rather than merely ignore and overlook them) because they matter to us in some way; and they matter in just the ways that our affect and pleasure/pain systems take them to matter. If they scare us, we run away or hide from them. If they arouse or please us we open our eyes wider and pay attention. If they calm or soothe us, we settle down, and let ourselves be lulled. By and large, we enjoy and seek the things that are good for us in some way or good for our reproductive prospects. In a world of scarcity, however, the selection pressures were mostly to get it while there was plenty. Accordingly, the problem with temptation, for the most part, is not that the things we want are bad for us, but that we don't always go after them prudently, or know when to stop. A third point is that there really does seem to be such a thing as 'human nature.' The fantastic diversity of human cultures and the extraordinary malleability of the human animal are balanced by quite a number of features found in cultures all through history, and around the world. An anthropologist named Donald Brown has identified about 400 such features, of which the following is a very partial, slightly paraphrased list meant to suggest the flavor of Brown's findings: body adornment; cooking of food; customary greetings; dreams and dream interpretation; facial expressions (most of which are universal); figurative speech, metaphors and metonyms; moral sentiments; music and dance; sexual regulation, including incest prevention; toys and playthings; etc. Of course, one must be cautious how such findings are interpreted. Some of these universals may well be linked to genetic predisposition. Others are sufficiently explained by the intrinsic requirements of communication and social living. Either way, it's striking how much the world's diverse and divergent cultures have had in common. One thing that all humans have in common is a human body, with all the familiar properties thereof: needs, drives, capabilities and limitations, the lot. Having such a body, all human cultures and language deploy very Page 27

similar body-metaphors, which organize their user's subjective worlds in characteristically human ways. More is up; less is down. We get off on the wrong foot, We have things well in hand. We can't swallow an absurd idea, or stomach an unendurable situation.22 The question of 'human nature becomes highly political in disputes over various behaviors that may or may not be capable of reform both in individuals and in society as a whole. Are trading and profit-seeking givens of human nature? What about aggression and war? Is the female of our species less interested in mathematics and the hard sciences than the male by nature, or as a matter of cultural stereotyping? Is homosexuality a trait one is born with, or a sinful choice? Scientists now argue that such debates are hopeless, because any trait you care to name depends crucially on 'nature' and 'nurture' both. The neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, asked by a reporter whether nature or nurture contribute more to personality, is said to have replied by asking "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" We become the persons that we are through a process in which 'nature' and 'nurture' are intertwined. Our genes express themselves differently under different conditions, and somehow influence what is learned and otherwise taken up from lived experience. Still, the disputes continue, because the choice is finally a very practical one: To intervene or leave alone? To seek reform, or patiently accept? Recall that AA Serenity Prayer:23 "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference." In these nature-nurture disputes, it is that last clause "the wisdom to know the difference" that is at stake. human 'spirit' What can we make of the concept of 'spirit'? It's one of humanity's oldest and deepest intuitions. Most people cannot accept that we are only talking animals, and feel quite certain that a science that treats us so is missing something the most important thing. Without sharing any belief in supernatural entities, I think the majority is correct on this matter, though the biologists are also right. We have to think of ourselves as 'souls' with 'spirit,' as well as bodies-with-minds. How is this possible? What I would argue is that certain crucial aspects of our existence are attributable only indirectly, and at several removes, either to the bodys needs and imperatives, or to the minds capabilities to distinguish, connect
22 See Mark Johnson's book, The Body in the Mind, (1987), for many more such examples. An interesting paper by David S. Miall based on Johnson's work can be found at www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/BODYMIND.htm Perhaps attributable to Reinhold Niebuhr., but taken up and made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. For its history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

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and calculate. For these aspects, the concept of 'spirit' is appropriate, and the word itself, with its link to breathing, is convenient if we can put aside its historical, dualist connotations. Spirit is not a metaphysically real substance. That said, we all know what is meant by a spirited horse, or a spirited musical performance. When a Japanese school teacher wants to say Pay attention! the phrase she uses means Place your spirit ( ki)! In English, we speak of doing something halfheartedly, or with all ones heart. I doubt there is or could be a human culture for which this distinction was meaningless between the listless or apathetic and the "spirited." The concept points at something quite different from either body or mind, in the ordinary sense of either: the quality and directedness of a living creatures vitality that which energizes and directs both body and mind, mobilizing their resources, and pointing them at a goal. It is through movements of the spirit (so to speak) that things become important and draw forth our energies.. As that which guides and focuses the creatures awareness, spirit operates largely beneath consciousness, but its stirrings can be felt, and its manifestations readily observed. It's a collective term for all the affects and emotions e.g. fear, shame, guilt, anger, envy, desire, pride, and love preeminently working in combination. It's the faculty that allocates attention, interest and love to direct intention and volition at their highest levels. The infant begins its life as a tiny, self-absorbed bundle. 'Spirit,' we can say, draws it out of itself into relationships with important people, with sounds and brightly colored things with the outside world as challenge, puzzle and delight. Throughout life, the spirit expands where it can, and contracts when it must. Pain and hardship can prompt it either way: Some people seem to become increasingly expansive and noble of spirit magnanimous, in a word as the result of age and suffering. (Think of Beethoven, for one great example.) Others just get meaner, more bitter, egoistical and encapsulated. The logic behind the flood, ebb and selective directedness of our spirits What do we love? To what do we commit ourselves, and why? is surely the deepest question of psychology. Much more than mind or body, it is plausible to think of spirit as transpersonal pertaining not exclusively or essentially to the individual, but to a group, a people, a period of history. We speak of 'team spirit' ( esprit de corps) and of 'the spirit of an age' ( zeitgeist). Religions, in general, have tended to reify spirit and attribute it, in some fashion, to the cosmos as a whole. For good reasons, modern thought is rejecting that idea but the habit runs deep. 'Spirit' is a useful abstraction, not a real thing. All the same, we know it when we see it. Without spirit, the body is just a deteriorating machine whose workings are beyond understanding; and the mind is a device for classification, storage, and computation whose driving energy and values are likewise not to be understood. Only the language of spirit (or something Page 29

very like it e.g. energy or will or motivation or intention) allows us to speak of individuals and groups as coherent, intelligible entities. To this extent, the life of the spirit is life itself: the availability of a creature to suffering and experience. Actualization of spirit (one way and another) in the world of material things is perhaps our deepest notion of what life is about. the human condition As an account of the creation of the world in a series of divine speech acts, the story in Genesis 1 is merely quaint. But I've seen no text of comparable length that can match Genesis 3 as an account of specifically human life of the difference between woman-or-man and beast. The story it tells not taken literally, of course, but read as myth anticipates almost perfectly the views of modern anthropology. Until about 5 million years ago, our ancestors were just another species of ape, foraging for food, dodging the leopards, and reproducing our kind in the typical mammalian way. They were intelligent animals users, sometimes even fashioners, of rudimentary tools highly imitative animals, social animals. They were beginning to walk upright, perhaps to see better in the tall grass, and to leave their arms and hands free for carrying. They had opposable thumbs good for swinging in trees but also for holding a weapon. But, with all that already, they were still just animals. Roaming, innocent of Good and Evil in the savage, ecoDarwinian garden. They feared fire; they ate their food raw. They communicated quite a lot, with cries and gestures and grunts, but they had no language yet. They could teach their young by demonstration, but not yet by verbal direction and explanation. They could use and understand signs, but were still innocent of symbols. They had no names for things yet; they certainly had no grammar. And they certainly didn't know, or mind, that they were naked. They still had quite a lot of body hair, and it was mostly warm where they were living. They had no clothing yet and didn't need any. And they were not ashamed, of their nakedness or anything else. Shame, the subtlest and most recent of human affects was only rudimentarily available on their emotional palette. But over a few million years, all this changed; and Genesis 3, after the fairy-tale incident with the apple and the snake, is line by line a poetic account of what happened: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Three crucial developments here: distinct, but closely inter-related. On one hand, shame evolved, the affect that allows a social creature to (literally) turn away from and avert its eyes from an object desirable in itself, that it cannot pursue and enjoy. With shame, self-consciousness an (admittedly Page 30

limited) capability to "see ourselves as others see us," and a wish to manipulate the way they see us to our own advantage. And third, not just limited tool-using, which our primate ancestors already did, but a sophisticated craft (sewing) and culture, passed along from generation to generation. Then, God called to the man, "Where are you?" (Adam) answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." Shame is an affect, and fear is a much older one, but guilt is a human emotion and in this passage we get a hint of it. Adam, with his new fig leaf, need no longer feel ashamed of his nakedness. But he knows he has done something he was not supposed to. He even makes the connection between his new self-awareness and his disobedience. He hides because he can anticipate the future: he knows that punishment of some kind is coming. And God said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" The man said, "The woman you put here with me she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." Here we have true language not just one creature responding to another's call. And not just language, but one of its most basic uses: the making of explanations and excuses. Actually, it was really your fault, God, and that woman Eve's certainly not mine: That danged woman you gave me it was all her doing. Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." Passing blame is a game that two, or any number, can play. Already we have the rudiments of hierarchical organization and management. Then God curses the serpent to crawl on its belly and eat dust, but to Eve he says: "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." Why is childbirth and child raising so much more difficult for human females than for other mammalian species? Again, the answer is a central feature of the human condition: That relatively enormous, frontally bulging brain has to squeeze somehow between the bones and soft tissue of a woman's pelvis. It must be relatively immature at birth, both to facilitate that process and to allow for so much post-natal development, shaped by input from the ambient world. It must remain clingy and dependent for years after that to acquire the culture of its tribe to acquire, in other words, the versatility and cumulating ingenuity that's characteristic of human biology. Page 31

Next, to Adam God says: "Because you listened to your wife . . . cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field." All creatures have to hustle for a living to eat what they can find or catch, without being eaten themselves. But humans did not have to toil did not work in this Biblical sense before agriculture was invented. Hunting and gathering are still done for sport, by people who buy their food at the supermarket, because they are interesting, pleasurable activities. Irksome, monotonous, obligatory toil came into the world as a side-effect of agriculture, the novelty of which was still on people's minds when those early Bible stories were composed. Almost everybody since then has had to work for a living plotting ways to get others to do this irksome work for them, and dreaming about early retirement. Then, finally: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Here is the essence of the human state as our thinkers have always recognized: a time-binding creature with foreknowledge of its life's end; a peculiar animal somewhere between ape and angel made "in the image of God" yet still basically meat-ware, destined for death and burial. Of course, there is much more to be said about 'the human condition' about the enormous gulf between the existence of an orangutan, gorilla or chimp, and that of a human, but this is not the place for it. The point is that a religious text written about 3000 years ago, already catches, with such precision, so many features of our state. This said, Genesis 3 tells a story that the modern mind cannot wholly accept. First, granted that all lives are frustrated to some extent and that some are utterly miserable, I doubt that most people certainly, not the relatively prosperous people outside of Third World countries experience their lives as a curse. Many people are quietly unhappy, some are really miserable, but most of us seem to get along somehow, taking pleasures and satisfactions where we can find them. Even in poor countries, this seems to be the case. People work for pennies, and unbelievably hard. Even so, they find ways to make themselves happy. Second, people today feel supervised and judged by the state, by their families and by their neighbors, much more than by this myth's vindictive God who sets up his children for failure and then punishes them so harshly. Believers today, at least in North America, are more apt to see their God as a buddy or 'co-pilot' than as a bullying supervisor. In sum, there's some unpleasant self-pity in the Genesis narrative. It presents only the downside side of the human condition the drawbacks, not the advantages, and certainly not the richness of human experience. Page 32

Humanists, wanting to emphasize the other side of the story, have had to look elsewhere for inspiration. While the life of a man or woman can be more wretched than that of any beast, it can also be longer, safer, more comfortable and more interesting with much greater opportunity. We joke about the good life that our cats have, and indeed, some cats live very well. But how many people, given the choice, would seriously prefer to be cats? Also, the Genesis story is misleading politically self-serving for its priestly narrators and their patrons in pinning the less pleasant aspects of human existence to an act of disobedience. But with those two large reservations, its account of the human condition is accurate and powerful, and still very much worth reading. identity as love One key difference between the Abrahamic religions at the western end of the Eurasian land mass and the Indic religions of the far east centers on their respective concepts of personal identity and its importance. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the individual self or 'soul' is a real entity with a unique being and destiny. The care and cultivation of that soul was seen as a central purpose of life. By contrast, in the Hindu, Buddhist and other religions of the far east, the sense of unique self-hood is downplayed, and even regarded as an illusion.24 The mainstream modern view is tending toward the western model, though traditional attitudes linger. On one hand, the focus of interest for science is on the human generality what all humans tend to have in common (and it is clear that there's a lot). But, at the same time, there is also great interest in how individuals come to be the unique beings that we are, and how we can become still more so more individuated (to use Jung's term), or more self-actualized (to use Kurt Goldsteins's and Maslow's). Love is the key to individual identity, as the great mystics taught and as science has amply confirmed. When the Sufi poet Rumi wrote "Looking at my life, I see that only love has been my souls companion," he was speaking a theological truth that any modern psychologist would endorse. Of course, they wouldn't mean just sexual or romantic love. Nor would they mean just the selfless 'Christian' love called 'agape.' They'd be thinking of love in all its varieties and flavors, including all the negative emotions e.g. fear, anger, disgust, shame precisely as negations of love: different ways that love can be perverted or thwarted. If you object that such a catch-all concept is useless, they would reply that it points to and exhibits a basic unity in mental life: Beneath all the competing suggestions and impulses that drive us must be this control system that aims our
24 As in the Buddhist doctrine of anatta ('not-self'). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta for example.

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conscious attention, adjusting its intensity and its coloring. To love something means to take an interest in it; and it is love that controls the quality of the interest that we take. They might add that it makes sense to think of all attraction and repulsion as positive and negative forms of love for the same reason that it makes sense to think of positive and negative numbers. And they would say that all those negative forms of love oppose and hinder the growth of identity, while only positive love promotes it. You can see the roots of love in the avid attention and bonding of a young child and this, I think, is what the mystics found admirable in children, and deserving of adult emulation. As every parent feels sometimes, children are not very nice people yet. About proper social behaviors and attitudes, they still have everything to learn. But what is so attractive in children is their capacity for spontaneous love, and it is this quality that they teach by example while they develop as individuals in doing so. findings A mountain of stuff has been written about human nature and the human condition, always in some tradition and from some perspective. To that mountain, I add my pebble by writing this drawing my conclusions from my experience and reading, just as you draw yours. Here's a brief summary of key modern findings as I see them, selected and framed for relevance to the theological questions we started with:

not a thing but a process . . .

A first point is that language the grammar of nouns and verbs radically misleads about what I am, what we all are. I am not an entity with given traits that does things, but an evolving process that began when my father's sperm cell fertilized my mothers egg, and that will end with my last breath and heartbeat. Along the way, that process came to generate a concept of self, and to project that concept to others. I would not say, as Buddhists do, that the self is an illusion. But it is the (largely unconscious) process that comes first. That is why I contradict myself constantly, and can surprise myself on occasion. That is why "Life is what happens while I am planning something else" why I can never know for sure when I get up in the morning what I will be doing two hours hence. I may be able to do what I was planning. Or, maybe something will happen to change my plans to make my old intentions irrelevant. This is why life, on the whole, feels much less like driving a car than like sailing a boat. The car tracks a paved road as you adjust the steering wheel; but life, like a sailboat, goes where the winds and currents take it. A skilled sailor much of the time can still go where he intends, but only by adjusting his intentions to the circumstances, tacking upwind as necessary and possible. It is the same in daily life: It's good to Page 34

have goals, and plans for reaching them, but we may need to change these at any time. There is a life history an accumulation of experience and a continually updated and re-edited life story. But there is no essential self prior to that life, with its means and manner of living. "Existence precedes essence," as Sartre put it. A human self constructs itself autopoietically on the fly, in its ongoing processes of living.

not unity but multiplicity . . .

The idea of an essential, pre-existent self is mistaken in another way: Buffeted by competing suggestions and by conflicting impulses, by nature we are not unities but multiplicities. The 'individuality' and coherence of a self are not a given but a great achievement. You can watch a young infant achieving a degree of coherence, literally week by week. At first, the only coherence it has is the evolved, instinctive coordination of a human organism, which can do the things necessary to sustain its life, but otherwise it is pulled every which way by immediate sensations, both within and outside its little body. At the most fundamental level, this is just what it remains throughout its life, but it is richly sensitive to social cues and, with amazing speed and sureness, it develops into a little person, with its own yesses and noes, and its own face to meet the faces that it meets. In this way, we can re-read the story in the Gospels 25 about the man whose name was Legion: It was not that the man was possessed by a myriad of demons that Jesus was able to cast out, though that was how the story had to be seen and told in the language then available. Today we'd explain that the poor man's coherence had come apart under stresses of some kind, and that Jesus was able to calm him and help him restore that coherence. Today we speak of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and multiple personality disorder (MPD) not demonic possession.

not 'freedom' but autonomy . . .

A misleading idea of the unitary self leads to misleading concepts of 'will' and 'freedom.' The dualist idea of a 'soul' in its 'body' always faced this problem of 'free will' how the soul could be free, sovereign, and morally responsible, yet at the same time conditioned by the body's present state and history and by its social milieu? Discoveries in psychology and physiology seemed to exacerbate this problem: The more we learned about 'body' and 'mind' and the connection between them, the less 'freedom' there appeared to be. In fact, this notion of metaphysical freedom is a confusion of language. In the absolute, metaphysical sense, nobody and nothing is 'free.'
25 In Mark 5:9, Luke 8:30 and Matthew 8:28-34.

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Everything is involved with and conditioned by everything else, while the whole cosmos appears at bottom as a random process with the statistical patterns that make self-organization possible. But 'randomness' is not the same thing as 'freedom,' in the philosophical sense. To avoid confusion, we need a different vocabulary. What we experience and live by is not metaphysical 'freedom' but practical 'autonomy' a very different matter. Our brains receive and process competing suggestions from the world and from their own bodies; we experience them; weigh them autonomously on their merits; and then autonomously, again synthesize streams of activity in response based on all that we are and became. We do all this by ourselves; nothing (usually) does it for us, or forces us to do it one way rather than another. But none of this is 'free' in the sense of being unconditioned. It is thoroughly conditioned from beginning to end. Actually, the problem of ' free will' is not a theoretical problem of philosophy, but the very practical problem of taking responsibility for one's actions: of forming coherent intentions, consistent with the self that I conceive and present to others; of behaving ethically; of making promises and keeping them. All this has to be learned. What calls for explanation is not that we sometimes fail in this coherence but that we mostly 'keep it together' as successfully we do. Of course, it makes sense to think about and try to explain why coherence and autonomy sometimes fail. But fundamentally, what we need to explain is how they are possible at all how the organism's physiology can construct as much coherence and autonomy as it usually does, given circumstances in which coherent activity is needed.

what the head is inside of . . .

Pursuing this line of thought, we arrive at the concept of situated cognition:26 that perceiving and thinking are inseparable from motor activity, and that we exist as participants in our environments being neither passive observers nor fully intentional agents. Rather, one's possibilities for effective activity in the world are always conditioned and contingent on one's physical situation. As James Gibson put it, "It's not what is inside the head that is important, it's what the head is inside of" The crucial idea here is that we can be much smarter in concrete situations than in the abstract, and that (being social animals) we learn more readily in social situations than completely alone. These principles are being applied, and possibly over-applied today by educators facing demands to improve an education system in many ways inadequate for the role it is expected to play. But the principles themselves are sound: It's true that
26 An overview and critique of this idea is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition

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solitude processing time without distraction is needed for digestion and creativity with what one learns. And I'm the last one to feel that philosophical abstractions aren't interesting and useful. Nonetheless: Social interaction certainly provides a motivation that can be difficult to sustain working alone. Situated movement with a partner or an opponent, and even with recalcitrant physical matter generates feedback that suggests what you can do next and prompts you actually to do it. This explains what is happening in the acquisition of complex motor skills (e.g. in martial arts or dancing) when people cannot explain exactly what they are doing or why, but have become remarkably adept at generating intricate sequences of real time activity under never exactly replicated conditions. A Zen proverb puts the idea of situated cognition, at least a version of it, very well: "Live in the valley as if it were the mountain-top. Live on the mountain-top as if it were the valley." With others, you need to create space and independence for autonomous thought. In solitude, you must imaginatively re-create the interlocutors and counter-players of a social life. This saying seems to contradict Gibson's aphorism while affirming it at the same time. While agreeing that the surroundings are of first importance, it puts a claim that the head can create its own surroundings. And so it can, up to a point.

the wolf and the sheep . . .

I once heard a lecture by Albert Low, director of the Montreal Zen Centre, about two games that he said all living things were playing. The first of these, "Look at me!" is a game of self-assertion. Look how strong I am! Look how beautiful! Look how smart! Insert whatever adjective you pin your chances on, but the underlying game is the same: to show the people who are important to you, society at large, and the whole universe that you matter that they must pay attention to you and your wishes. The second game, "What am I?" is about belonging, membership and identity. To assert yourself, you have to be someone and something; you have to find an identity. Well, how to do that if not by giving yourself to something acknowledging that you belong to a family, to a tribe or nation . . . and ultimately to 'God' the cosmic context as a whole? The central problem of life, as Low explained it, was to reconcile and keep a balance between these antithetical games, that pull in opposite directions, but ultimately complement one another. I was impressed by the talk, and by the man himself. Only later, thinking it over, did I recognize his model as an ancient and familiar idea: In the Republic and also in the Phaedrus, Plato likens the soul to a chariot pulled by two horses, one well-trained but the other completely willful and unruly. The charioteer struggles to keep his vehicle on the road, and keep it from turning over. He doesn't always succeed. Freud's tripartite theory of mind is much the same, in less poetic lanPage 37

guage. There is the hungry, willful 'id' representing the body and its desires. There is the 'super-ego' a voice of conscience representing the internalized strictures of society and the significant others. And then there is the 'ego' the sense of self keeping these antithetical forces in balance and managing their common life. In yet another version, the Russian master Gurjieff wrote somewhere that to receive the rewards in store for him, a man must keep unharmed "both the wolf and the sheep that have been entrusted to him." Again, the same idea: the voracious wolf (the id) out for what he can get and making a great display of his prowess, contrasted with the docile sheep (the superego) who keeps safe only by sticking with the flock under a shepherd's protection. Whether or not the 'wolf' and 'sheep,' 'id' and 'super-ego' correspond to physiological sub-systems in the brain, they represent a valid logical distinction between two aspects of mind. There is the physical being man or woman driven by the needs of its body. And then there is the social being, driven by needs to belong, to be loved and esteemed and generally to connect harmoniously and lovingly with others. There must also be that third aspect a sense and narrative of self acting as referee between them when they pull (like Plato's horses) in different directions. On this account, the inner Christ figure who 'walks beside,' or 'dwells within' would convey an authentic truth about the mind, albeit in poetic, mythologized language. People who over-identify with the ravenous 'wolf,' are quite likely to see their inner 'sheep' not as an aspect of themselves, but as an external companion or visitor an imaginary friend who comforts and supports them in times of grief and trouble. Children readily invent imaginary friends and comforters for themselves. Why shouldn't grown-ups do it too so long as they know that that's what they are doing?

*****
We are making progress here. The first person of the Trinity, the auctorial God, is almost abolished by modern, ecoDarwinian thought: transformed into mere 'context,' turned upside down and stripped of all foresight and intention. The second person survives more or less intact: reduced (if one sees it that way) from a separate and divine companion to an aspect of one's own self. God the Father may be dead or unemployed, but the Son, the 'divine' presence within, is alive and functioning. The 'Greater Power' in AA's 12-Step Program remains a serviceable concept. Now let's see what happens to that trinity's third person the Holy Ghost.

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The Context

If the science of self-organization is our modern replacement for 'God the Father,' and if loving, transcended aspects of mind now take the place of 'God the Son,' then the Trinity's third person, the 'Holy Spirit,' can be identified with that cosmic context we keep mentioning. This is not merely fanciful. Though the theology of the Holy Ghost 27 is contentious in Church history, that Spirit seems to have been conceived as a sort of divine context hovering over the world, protecting things and people, sustaining them, restoring them. Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem comes to mind:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears mans smudge and shares mans smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.28

What we are reading here is the poet's contrast between a human context of industry and trade and a 'divine,' natural context of daily and seasonal rebirth? One way to think about our spiritual predicament today is to see it as a breaking down of this distinction. We understand nature too well now, and we exploit it too ruthlessly, to see much contrast between human processes and natural ones. Systems are systems: We design and build them to interface advantageously, and as seamlessly as possible, with the given natural ones. Many people today practically all urban people find the contexts of their lives much more in human, socially constructed systems, than in natural ones. We live in systems and through them: systems to keep us warm and comfortable against the climate outdoors; systems to travel from place to place; systems to connect us to the Web (the global information system), and to exchange information with it. We fit ourselves into these systems, as much or more than we use them for our purposes. This is not really new. Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sage, warned against the co-opting effects of systems on their users more than 2000 years ago, in his story about the gardener and the well sweep:29
Tzu-kung . . . saw an old man preparing his fields for planting. He had
27 Pneumatology as it is called. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatology and Pope John Paul II's encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem of May 18, 1986. A summary is available at www.catholicpages.com/documents/dominum_et_vivificantem-summary.asp God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918). See http://bartleby.com/122/7.html

28

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hollowed out an opening by which he entered the well and from which he emerged, lugging a pitcher, which he carried out to water the fields. Grunting and puffing, he used up a great deal of energy and produced very little result. "There is a machine for this sort of thing," said Tzu-kung. "In one day it can water a hundred fields, demanding very little effort .and producing excellent results. Wouldn't you like one? The gardener raised his head and looked at Tzu-kung. "How does it work?" "It's a contraption made by shaping a piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end light and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over! It's called a well sweep." The gardener flushed with anger and then said with a laugh, "I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. . . It's not that I don't know about your machine - I would be ashamed to use it!"

Putting aside one's first reaction that the gardener is a bit mad one can see his point: The effects of any system go far beyond convenience and labor-saving. Rather, its artifacts become a part of the landscape; the rhythms of working with it inscribe themselves on its users' body. McLuhan's dictum that "The medium is the message" makes a similar point: The text, the machine, the system are always much more than what they manifestly, say or do. They include the experience of using them, and the whole context of life that they produce. Returning to Hopkins' poem, where Catholic theology and the poet see God's spirit acting in nature and shaping it, we today are more inclined to observe systemic contexts, exerting their shaping influences sometimes for better, sometimes for worse on all persons within their scope. We notice that human and natural systems alike have their beneficiaries and their victims. We note that the man-made systems often have unintended consequences more important than their intended ones, while natural systems are typically mixed in their consequences, and backed by no intentions at all. What we might call their context pressures further some human interests but hinder or crush others. Thus, what we lose in mystery, we gain in honest insight; and our task in this section is to review some basic ideas about systems and contexts, with an eye, as always, to the questions we began with. Whether with warm or icy breast, and with 'wings' bright with sunshine or occluded by industrial wastes, a context framed by nature and Man's activities together "over the bent world broods," exerting its pressures and thus influencing the lives of every individual. Of this mixed, ambiguous
29 From The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson translation. Available on the Web at www.terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu1.html

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context, what understanding does the modern mind form? context pressure If you check the dictionary, or look it up on Wikipedia, you'll find that 'context' is one of those annoying words that cannot be clearly defined, but only pointed at in various ways: It is the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is the meaning or function that emerges from the assembly or interaction or interweaving of those parts. It is the whole, comprised of parts, which is itself a part of some larger whole. Fine but such pointings are open to the objection that when you get right down to it, context is only an abstraction, an idea. Hence, for example Margaret Thatcher's notorious speech, often quoted (out of context, just as I am about to do): "They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first." [italics mine] Thatcher was right, up to a point. The problem with her remark is that if there is no such thing as society, then neither are there any such things as families, because these too are just reified abstractions. Next, we must notice that the men and women who comprise families and the society are themselves just bundles of cells, which are themselves comprised of molecules, which are comprised of atoms which . . . We go crazy this way. When you look closely at anything, it disappears . . . It turns out that all the things that we see and name and talk about are just reified contexts concepts assembled in the mind, that could be just as easily disassembled. But all these contexts are real in the sense that as wholes, they exert a pressure of functional coherence on their component parts, that can partly explain why the parts are shaped as they are and why they behave as they do. Darwin's 'Natural Selection' is one form that context pressure takes. The pressure of a whole piece of writing on each of its paragraphs and sentences and word-meanings would be another example. The requirement for customary behavior at a given social event would be a third example. Contexts must be understood as real because they generate the real entities that we actually see and use and deal with, and because they generate definite pressures upon their parts either adjusting them to fit better, or replacing them with more suitable components. Cosmos and society are the vast contexts that shape us. If they aren't real then nothing is. context and agency Above, in Chapter 4, we've already seen that the human 'individual' is not an entity but a process, that the coherence of our intentions and activities ultimately of our lives is not a given but a great achievement, and that life Page 41

on the whole feels less like driving a car than like sailing a boat. However different their methods and assumptions, psychotherapy, religion and mind-body disciplines like Yoga, Zen and the martial arts are alike in teaching a more balanced concept of agency. 30 Psychotherapy works to replace fantasies of omnipotence, and anxieties of remembered helplessness with a more realistic grasp of our own powers. A religious understanding of accomplishments and sufferings as happening by "Gods will" aims to correct the human sense of agency with a sane recognition of its limits at some risk that the human ego may then be inflated into seeing itself as Gods agent. Those Oriental disciplines share the paradox of practicing very hard to do as little as possible in the hope, eventually, of being able to do a great deal, and exactly the right thing, with next to no effort at all. In each case, the paradoxical goal is to become purposeless on purpose, as Eugen Herrigel complained to his teacher.31 Whether it is the Christian or Muslim talking about the "will of God," the Taoist talking about "going with the flow of things," the Zen Archer talking about letting the shot happen "when it is ripe," or the modern psychotherapist talking about unconscious wishes and intentions in every case, the core idea is that we are not always or only agents who operate on conscious volition. There are times for that. But there are also times to let go and accept, or let go and act spontaneously whatever theory we use to rationalize doing so. The notion of context helps us think not just about the limits of agency, but about the factors that lie beyond it. Context as such is one and indivisible what makes a whole out of its parts. But we can see context as exerting a variety of suggestions and pressures, stemming from different sources, and I will mention three of these here: 1) Our goals, our plans, our ideas about the future, furnish one dimension of context. People looking forward to 'The Rapture' are obviously living in a different world (a different context) from the rest of us. Those who think that environmental degradation are real and significant effects live in a different world from those who think such effects do not exist. To varying degrees, all our hopes and fears about the future exert comparable context pressures on our actual lives. This happens because in large part we live instrumentally, choosing and acting today in expectation of consequences tomorrow. 2) History and tradition likewise exert context pressures on our lives through the stories we tell about ourselves and about communities we feel
30 31 From the French verb agir, to act. This paragraph is lifted from a previous essay of mine, At the Limits of Agency (2003), available on the Web at http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc Essays/At the Limits of Agency.pdf Herrigel's complaint is found in his little classic, Zen in the Art of Archery and the rather pedantic but informative review by Yamada Shoji at www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/jjrs/pdf/586.pdf

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that we belong to. 3) We live in groups of various kinds, and then in society as a whole. These too make demands that shape our lives. 4) Finally, the indirect form of communication called stigmergy32 is also worth mentioning as a crucial dimension of context. It's the name for a
method of indirect, to-whom-it may-concern communication, first studied in connection with ants and termite colonies. The idea is that marks written onto the

environment, either deliberately or as a by-product of other activities, can be encountered and read by others, and taken by them to suggest or guide behavior. A human city, like an ant hill or a termite colony, is an example of stigmergy in action. That concept of stigmergy helps us to make the distinction that Hopkins wants between "man's smudge" (which is stigmergic through-and-through) as against regenerating nature. It also exposes a basic fraud in Hopkins' poem: the contrast of pure and good nature with dirty, exhausted society. The reality, of course, is that people build homes and cities, because pristine nature is not so comfortable. Nature per se can be harsh or cruel, and human societies have some redeeming features. Together, they provide the context of our individual lives, and we can see today how this context is highly complex and largely self-organizing as we ourselves are.

*****
We are back in James Gibson's territory: "It's not what's inside the head that is important, it's what the head is inside of." What my head and yours are inside of, and directed by, is a context with dimensions at least like those we have just described: the natural environment (or what's left of it) before the human smudge; that social smudge itself with its amenities, its absurdities, its splendid achievements and its ugliness; the individual humans with whom we communicate and interact; and then our remembered histories and traditions; and our anticipated futures. For Buddhists, all this is just tathata or 'suchness' the way things are. the modern context At age 6, my daughter Maya had an interesting conception of history, with just two epochs that she called 'These Days' and 'The Olden Times.' Roughly, These Days for her was everything that had happened since the railroad or electric lighting came in since about 1850, give or take. The Olden Times was everything before that. So, automobiles, and the lunar landing, and personal computers were these days, but the Pyramids, and
32 Literally, 'signs causing work' from two Greek words, stigma and ergos. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

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King Arthur, and Columbus (more or less contemporaneous, you understand) were the olden times. What struck me at the time was that she had it exactly right: If you were going to divide world history into just two periods, this was the cut to make. The two hundred years before 1850, from Newton's time to the midVictorians, can be regarded as a time of transition; or you could push the threshold all the way back to 1450 and the beginnings of the Renaissance. Clearly, these days did not begin all at once: The change came gradually, then faster and faster. But it was really only in the mid 19th century that modernity began to be felt on a global basis and even then, it was mostly in Western Europe and North America that the contexts of life were really changing quickly. President Lincoln and his wife had four children, only one of whom lived to adulthood cruel for them, but not unusual in those days. My daughter's great grandmother made her first big journey in 1902, at the age of 9, traveling by camel from Baghdad to Cairo with her family; but she lived to commute across the Atlantic by jet every few years to visit a daughter in Montreal. Today, with reasonable medical care, almost all newborns live to adulthood; and, in the 'developed world' at least, globally dispersed families are more the norm than the exception.

*****
What we mostly think of in connection with religion 'these days' stems from a so-called axial age, between about 800 and 200 B.C., when an extraordinary crop of thinkers left their mark: Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), the authors of the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah to mention just a sampling. 33 The dates and persons we choose don't matter much. One could argue, for example, that Zoroaster who probably lived earlier, or that Jesus and Mohammed who lived somewhat later were also Axial Age figures. What seems clear is that humans in the Fertile Crescent became reliant on agriculture about ten thousand years ago, settled down soon after into city-states and empires, and finally evolved a new self-understanding that found religious (and philosophical) expression all across Eurasia in a relatively short time span thereafter. Today, I believe, there is a second such age in progress transitioning from a predominantly agricultural civilization to a techno-industrial one, with comparable implications for human ideas about Man and Nature. We might date this 'second axial age' from the time of Sir Isaac Newton,
33 That name, axial age,' the date range and the thinkers identified are the work of Karl Jaspers in a book called The Origin and Goal of History (1949). An essay on Jaspers' historical thought can be found at www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.4-1Cho.pdf

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toward the end of the 17th century. Newtonian mechanics showed that the motion of cannon balls and of planets were governed by the same laws, and proved the power of a new empirical, abductive mode of inquiry and explanation. The stream of discoveries and inventions that followed led to the Age of Enlightenment, and then to the world as it is today, with all the hi-tech features we take for granted, and all the new ideas now challenging old habits of thought. As I write this, a movement called transhumanism ( H+ as it's also called)34 is pushing for a deliberate, full-spectrum application of technology to improve and enhance the human condition. Numerous ideas are in the works, for example:

slowing and even reversing the aging process to increase the number of active, healthy years; improving the body in various ways through cosmetic surgery, drugs, prosthetic and bionic implants and genetic modification; improving human cognition memory, mood and emotion, thinking skills, information management through various means, both ancient and futuristic. Uploading an individual's memories and consciousness to cyberspace for a potential posthumous and/or post-biological existence.

Three novel branches of engineering the so-called GNR technologies of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics are converging to remake the world. While the lives of individuals are changing in various ways, society itself is being transformed by novel methods of manufacture, a novel relationship to information, and a novel penetration of the human sphere by technology and its toys. Of course, no one knows how to distinguish the feasible innovations from the 'vapor-ware,' nor the terms of uptake of such innovations as they come to pass. What seems clear though, is that such changes are potentially at least as drastic as those effected ten thousand years ago by the neolithic revolution and the rise of agriculture. Clear too is that all this change has existential implications as well as economic, social and political ones. This is why it makes sense to speak of a 'second axial age' as human self-understanding scrambles and struggles to comprehend the novel conditions of human existence, and cope with its novel terms. Perhaps the central issue of that first transition was its discovery of the individual. From being slaves of their tribal gods, people came to see themselves as private souls, confronting and/or split off from some univer34 See for example, http://www.aleph.se/Trans/ for advocacy and resources on the trans-human agenda.

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sal Spirit. Today, as in the ancient world, questions of self-hood and identity again are coming up for grabs; and it is hard to know how they will settle down. On one hand, communal identities are breaking down as people move around and, more and more, come to think of themselves as private atoms in a global marketplace, making autonomous personal choices. But there are pulls in the opposite direction as well. More and more, we seem to be living in voluntary association networks of various kinds, and in increasingly intimate association of Man and Machine. We may come to see ourselves more as Borgs, cybernetically enhanced hiveminds in the Star Trek sense, than as autonomous individuals.

Personal Truth

The last three chapters have made at least a start on the great questions that we began with. Some modern answers centrally involving the shift to a paradigm of self-organization, the embedding of mind in Nature and the replacement of myth by critically-tested knowledge have been suggested. It will be good to pause at this point to raise a further question a metaquestion really about the nature, possibility and status of religious knowledge. Accepting that our basic theological questions are valid and necessary, can the varied ways that people have answered them count as knowledge in any sense? What truth (if any) can there be in connection with such matters? Can we agree that society stands in need of a discourse of values and meanings that the sciences are in no position to supply? Can we agree that such a discourse, dealing as it must in unproveable beliefs and values, must be essentially religious even if called by some other name? Can we agree further that the present 'culture war' between religion and science is not a healthy situation? If so, then it makes sense to ask what the rules of religious discourse ought to be assuming that people are actually trying to make sense on this subject, and to leave off hating one another in the name of Peace and Love? If religious knowledge is a matter of 'revelation' messages and manfestations direct from some universal God then the problem is to decide which such 'revelations' are to be accepted on faith, and which are spurious, or inapplicable in this particular culture. A further problem will be to interpret original revelations correctly and authoritatively, and to decide when some previous teachings ad interpretations are obsolete. A Christian rejects Mohammed's messages and the teachings of Islam. A Muslim accepts Jesus as an authentic prophet, but regards the Christian teachings as superseded. A Jew has no use for either Christianity or Islam, finding religious authority neither in the New Testament or the Koran but only in the Tanakh35 and in its rabbinic debate and commentary. Immense,
35 What Christians call "the Old Testament." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

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sometimes contradictory law codes and legal systems exist in all these traditions. Persons who reject the concept of divine 'revelation,' face a different problem: Aware of the diversity of religious ideas, and of the passion with which such ideas are held, at best we have to see religious ideas as 'personal truths,' or 'poetic truths,' if they are to count as truths at all. The problem is to be good pluralists, accepting the diversity of religious and ethical teachings, while retaining a prerogative to judge some religious ideas superior to others not just as a matter of taste or 'culture,' but on some firm philosophical ground. We need some kind of religious epistemology, or must avoid religious discourse entirely.36 three modes of unbelief As I see it, the religious skeptic has three basic options:

The simplest is to reject the categories of spirituality and religion entirely. This position leads to some form of secularism or humanism, with whatever ethical and/or political concerns. Rules of discourse will still be needed. The second is to 'believe in belief,' as Daniel Dennet put it. 37 It is possible to adhere to a system of beliefs and practices, not because you think that system is true in any objective sense, but because you wish to avoid certain consequences of rejecting it the loss of consensus, self-confidence, mutual trust, or whatever. To yourself and others you cling to fictions for their emotional or social value, indifferent to any question of truth. This position leads to some form of relativism, emphasizing the importance of fidelity to some particular culture (your own), while refusing to discuss whether one such culture should be preferred to another. The third option is to embrace some idea of mythic or poetic truth which takes religious ideas and practices seriously but not literally, as living myths which are not at all like scientific propositions or the observations of daily life, but subject to their own standards of validity and veracity.

Each stance has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it's the last that I'll discuss here, because it is the one that I find interesting. The secular humanist stays on the publicly observable surface of life, declining to think or talk about intangibles: all that cannot be factually posited. The numerous persons who 'believe in belief' strike me as intellectually dishonest and somewhat cowardly in refusing the challenge that modern knowledges
36 37 See http://www.iep.utm.edu/relig-ep/#H5 for a discussion. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzbt6QY6NuY

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poses for their traditional faiths. It's in the direction of 'poetic truth,' if anywhere in genres of literature, religion and the arts that connote much more than they can clearly state that we might hope for theological progress. the idea of 'personal truth' Part III of Handel's Messiah opens with a soprano aria based on a text from Job 19:25 and 26: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, And that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Now, as an atheist, I believe nothing of the kind; yet I am moved by this piece, indeed by the whole oratorio, every time I hear it, and feel an emotional response to it though I am in no danger at all of becoming a Christian. My problem is to make sense of this response, given the skepticism that accompanies it. While it has been argued that the very hope of redemption and resurrection is evidence of its possibility, and of the worldview that underlies it, I dismiss this as wishful thinking: The hope that a story is true does not make it true. My Jewish sensibilities (such as they are) regard the whole Christian story as a misreading of certain passages in the Old Testament. Even so, I do respond to it on some level; and on that level, I need to make sense of the 'knowledge' that the singer proclaims. What follows is my attempt to do so: Let's assume for the sake of discussion that our soprano is not just a performer singing the role that Handel has given her, but a religious woman who actually believes the lines that she delivers. At the same time, she probably knows quite well that there are persons in her audience (like myself) who do not believe in any 'Redeemer' at all. She may know too that she can muster no serious argument (however many invalid ones) for her belief. In that case, she will have to recognize that she is not claiming knowledge like physicist's belief in quantum theory or the biologist's in natural selection. But she still wants to claim her belief as a form of knowledge because it feels absolutely valid for her. It's like saying, "I believe that my mother's husband, the man who helped to raise me, was my father," in the absence of a DNA test to verify the point. This man acknowledged the singer as his daughter, and related to her as such. Should it turn out that her biological father was some other, previously unknown gentleman, she would no doubt be shocked at first, but her relationship to the man that she had thought of all along as her father would not be much affected. Probably, she would continue to call him, and think of him as 'Dad,' as she had been doing all along. My thought is that the soprano's 'knowledge' of her supernatural father is similar in kind to her 'knowledge' of the earthly one. In both cases, what is at stake is belief and trust in the relationship, and the daughter's resolve to play her part in that relationship. The facts of the situation are largely Page 48

beside the point. In general, we can say that belief means trust or reliance on someone, or something, or on a certain state of affairs. Knowledge, usually defined as "justified true belief,"38 means justified trust or reliance on that which is believed. So we see that trust in a relationship can be a kind of personal or private 'knowledge' (more than mere conjecture, at any rate) to the extent that one has justified confidence in that relationship. We can, and frequently do, make our choices and plans by trusting to beliefs that may not be objectively or publicly true. Some of these beliefs may prove untrustworthy in the light of future experience. But life would be impossible if we did not rely on such working beliefs. And these will include the rules-of-thumb by which we evaluate suggestions made to us on what is to be trusted. When the soprano affirms that her redeemer liveth, what she is really saying is that she will rely upon and live by her Christian faith. I do not share her faith, but must admit that the trust and expectation she is declaring will probably not be falsified by experience in her or my lifetime. What she seems to be declaring then is a choice of strategy a strategy for living and dying that may or may not prove superior to mine in 'eternity,' but not in forseeable time. I have no way to prove that her strategy is mistaken. I might try to convince her that her hopes are misplaced, but don't expect to be successful if I did so. In the last resort of argument, all I can say is that her 'personal truth' is different from mine. I might think her truth superstitious; she might think mine heartless and materialistic. We can either call each other such names, or just agree to disagree. More interesting is the fact that we are living in each other's realities somehow, whether we like it or not. When I hear her aria I feel its emotional power and am moved by it. Loaded as they are by great music, her text is, after all, powerfully suggestive. By the same token, when this woman's baby gets sick, she will probably take him to a doctor trained in my notions of science. We feel the force of each other's suggestions and must do the work of evaluating them, whatever we decide to do. In the end, both of us are living not so much in a stable world of facts and information, as in a flux of suggestions to see and handle our affairs one way or another. 'Personal truths' are just a choice of suggestions, ultimately of strategies, that we decide to live by. At this personal level, 'personal epistemology' can only be a discourse on which such strategies are worth trusting. in a structure of concerns Nietzsche's insight that "There are no facts, only interpretations"39 has been
38 39 Though there are some very technical problems with this definition which need not concern us. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem From Nietzsche's compiled and edited notebooks, the so-called Nachlass.

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the point of departure for a great deal of post-modern confusion part of which, unfortunately, originates with Nietzsche himself. His famous dictum is itself subject to interpretation; and it can be taken to mean that understanding is always and only an act of pure power through which some particular perspective and interpretation is willfully imposed on the reality at point. To understand it in this fashion is to take a valid insight and push it to absurdity. Nietzsche was correct that all supposed knowledge depends at its root on fundamental acts of interpretation. It is true that when people with sharply different cognitive strategies approach a given question, it will be difficult for them to do anything but fight and too often not just verbally. Difficult, but not impossible as I'm about to argue. Reason between such opponents is possible, if they really want it, because authentic understanding of any matter stems not just from willful interpretation but, at the same time, from attentive submission to the reality at point. Granted that this combination, interpretation-with-submission, can usually be performed in different ways. But when there is anything significant at stake, the interpretations cannot be arbitrary. There will be costly, even lethal consequences, if one's interpretations do not adequately capture the reality of the situation. When people seriously differ in their understanding of some matter, there is a way for them to reason together, should they wish to do so. They don't need to fight if they would prefer not to, because the public understanding of knowledge of that matter is a whole structure of mutually respectful argument, amongst the interlocutors. In effect, they can agree to disagree, listen attentively to each other's viewpoints and concerns, and then base their public policy (if some is needed) on a mutual acceptance of the differing concerns, and on the political fact of disagreements too strong to be ignored.40 In fact, we do this all the time in a marriage, on executive committees, in the nation's parliament or legislature whenever holding a relationship together is felt to be more urgent than the need of differing factions to get their own way. Between rival religions (seen as alternative strategies for human existence) public truth is again just the structure of argument amongst the rival interpretations. It then depends on the interlocutors' conduct of that argument whether the resulting structure will have value as knowledge. If their discussions bring out the underlying realities and areas of concern, if their conflict does not distort these too much, then their argument can achieve very great knowledge value, with however little consensus. At the other extreme, truth is proverbially the first casualty of violent conflict; and the interlocutors have no one but themselves to blame if their struggle just
40 For a full treatment of this claim, see my book, Sharing Realities (2005), available on the Web at http://www.secthoughts.com/SR_menu.htm and at http://www.scribd.com/womabat

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leaves them more bewildered and helpless than they were before. an epistemology of religious experience I conclude that while there can be no authentic religious dogmas, there can be more and less valid religious perspectives. As perspectives will differ, we must seek the solidarity of our communities not in doctrinal uniformity, but in mutual respect and concern and tolerance. People will look for meaning in manifold, not altogether compatible ways but we can still respect and cherish them for the sincerity, intelligence and magnanimity of their search. Unfortunately, this liberal conception of religion is more difficult than may appear on the surface, for at least two reasons: First it pins observances not to an orthodoxy of doctrine celebrated on customary occasions, but to a spiritual integrity which must be practiced every day of the year. It does not use religion merely to recall and make token obeisance to certain values too important to ignore, but too difficult for every-day practice. Rather it seeks for practicable values and ethical standards by which it hopes and intends to live. It accepts that impracticable ideals may do more harm than good. Second, in its epistemology, its theory of spiritual knowledge, this idea of religion must be pluralist without becoming relativist without rejecting either the possibility or the legitimacy of making ethical and cognitive judgments. It understands religious truth first as a matter of personal and spiritual relationship, but second as a public structure of discourse and secular concern. It accepts that people are fully entitled to their private beliefs and values and to their personal habits and practices so long as these do no harm to others. But it insists that to enjoy such rights, people must also subscribe to a covenant of mutual respect. The alternative, as we've been learning, is intellectual and moral chaos. To my mind, one of the most interesting statements ever made about religion is due to Anselm of Canterbury, varying slightly a statement by Augustine. "Credo ut intelligam" Anselm said. "I believe in order to understand.41 His point, as I read it, is similar to Nietzsche's. In both cases, the claim is that useable knowledge cannot be drawn on purely empirical or deductive grounds, just from observation and reasoning. Always, knowledge requires certain prior commitments, taken on faith. Religious belief systems are interpretive schema strategies for giving meaning and navigating a course through life. They are seen by some as 'revelations' from God, but by atheists merely as the inspirations or hallucinations of someone's unconscious mind. An atheist like myself will say that life, society and the cosmos speak continuously to everyone willing to listen. But it tells different people different stories some good or great, some very bad. Making sense of inspiration always remains an
41 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_of_Canterbury#Writings

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exercise for human experience and intelligence. The best thing to do with Anselm's (or Nietzsche's) dictum is to turn it into a question that can only have a mixed answer partly public, but partly private to each group and individual: What do we believe to make human sense of the world that we are living in? What should we believe that really helps us to understand?

The Problem of Evil

We should begin by stating this problem clearly: Once we drop the fantasy of an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful God, there is no need to explain why bad things happen to good people because there is no reason why they shouldn't happen, just at random, in the nature of things. Nor is there any special problem in the fact that we pursue our own interests at the expense of other living creatures and other people. All living things must do that. Even the plants contend with one another in their scramble for ground water and sunlight. The cycles of predation and regeneration are just nature's way of doing business. Earthquakes just happen, and find all the explanation they need in the language of tectonic plates that float and grind over one another on the Earth's mantle. The shark's teeth and the snake's venom find all the explanation they need in terms of evolutionary advantage. Without a supposedly benevolent God to hold responsible, the fundamental brutality of existence needs no special explanation, though for good human reasons, we should probably soften it where we can. I am not pushing social Darwinism here; quite the contrary. But I am making a point about human understanding: Pain hurts, and should be ameliorated where possible, but why painful things happen is not an intellectual problem. By contrast, evil not to be confused with natural calamities on one hand or with natural violence on the other is a human phenomenon, and really does call for some moral explanation in human terms. 42 Cruelty and folly are not common in nature: Cruelty means the pleasure we take in hurting one another, and in devising ingenious ways of doing so. Folly means acting against our better judgment following worse policies when better ones are known.43 In short, the problem of evil is to explain the staggering amounts of effort and ingenuity that people spend to make each others' and their own lives more miserable and often shorter than they would be in the natural order of things. This problem is vitally important in the modern world, because our technical capabilities to improve the human condition are matched ulti42 43 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil for an overview of thought on this subject. Barbara Tuchman's definition. See her excellent book The March of Folly (1984), with a review on the Web at www.stoneschool.com/Reviews/MarchOfFolly.html and a precis at www.belgraviadispatch.com/2007/04/quotable_9.html

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mately, perhaps over-matched by our capabilities to make things worse. Evil today is first and foremost a political problem. As a species, we are clearly not doing as well as we might hope with the powers we now have at our disposal; and there is a good chance that we will destroy ourselves altogether, shifting the planet's ecology in the process. The potential for evil on this scale beggars the imagination and exposes my limitations as a writer. In this essay as a whole, but especially in this Chapter, I have to ask the reader's indulgence. theories of evil Merely to classify existing theories of evil is a formidable problem, and various schemes for doing so have been suggested. It's far beyond this essay's scope to offer any comprehensive classification here, or to review the history of such attempts by others. I'll do no more than mention, in no particularly systematic way, a few ideas on this subject that have been historically influential merely as some indication of the complexity of the problem, and as background for the discussion that follows on escaping evil as best we can. The Chinese saw a Tao (Way) of things, both in nature and in society. To depart from that Way was not exactly evil in the Western, Christian sense but it certainly wasn't good. Non-cooperation with the Way would certainly waste a lot of effort, and might well cause your ruin or death. It would sow confusion in the minds of others and chaos in society as a whole. Seen as self-destructive, it was therefore considered a form of ignorance as (it was felt) no one would rationally and knowingly do harm to themselves. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all held to a similar idea of evil as ignorance, and therefore of possibilities for moral education. For all these thinkers, people did not always know right from wrong. Nor was this difference always completely clear. But people could reason about such matters; they could learn and they could be taught. At least in principle, man was perfectible and individual men and women could improve themselves. Reason, education and the emulation of virtuous others were the ways to do so. Where the Chinese saw interpenetration, balance and ultimate harmony between light and darkness, water and sunshine, good and bad, yin and yang, the Persian followers of Mani saw a cosmic war between opposing forces, played out within the souls and lives of individuals. Though Manichaeism died out as a separate religion,44 it had a strong influence on Christianity and other faiths. Through the figure of Augustine who was a Manichean before he became a Christian, it survives to this day as a major heresy and underlying mood of Christian thought.
44 For accounts of this religion see www.crystalinks.com/manichaeism.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

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The Christians wanted evil as a strong power in the world, but not so strong as to be co-equal with God. Ultimately, they would define evil as an absence of God and Good. Then they would tie themselves in theological knots, trying to explain why a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God would allow evil to exist at all. The theory that they developed in response to this conundrum, makes evil native to the soul itself, due to some 'original sin' or flaw in human nature. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that sin was disobedience, as already mentioned.45 In the past, serious Western thought had always tended to see freedom as a matter of "perfect obedience to perfect law." Modern thought by contrast is tending to see it as "a dance on the edge of the possible,"46 where you are free to try your luck and take the consequences. The traditional (auctorial) idea conceived of a central unity, health and goodness that we could not help but fall away from due to some wrongness in ourselves. It may be some primal act that caused the wrongness. It may be just the way the gods made us. It may be evolution and our primate ancestry. Whatever specific trait is chosen, all such myths attribute the world's evil to some defect of human nature. You can take your pick of original sins. The most frequent candidates (apart from disobedience) are greed, anger, and hubris: overweening, sinful pride (not to be confused with the healthy pride in one's own powers and accomplishments that also stays mindful of one's limitations.) In the Greek tale of Pandora the sin is just idle curiosity. In what seems to me the most plausible of such stories, Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs, it's a shriveled soul's desire for power, leading to its renunciation of love. Several theories of evil within are less specific: Kant talks about Man's 'unsocial sociability' our simultaneous dependence upon relations with others, and need to distinguish ourselves at their expense. Many writers, notably Ernest Becker, have pointed to the tension between ape and angel, flesh and logos, as the cause of human evil. In their view, the unbearable tension of infinite imagination trapped in a finite, mortal body must be relieved somehow transmuted into a causa sui project, and then acted out, at whatever cost to others and to oneself. Carl Jung and several followers have developed a theory of evil based on the phenomenon of projection. Rather than see ourselves clearly and honestly as beings with mixed motives some base, some noble; some selfish, some generous or loving we have this tendency to attribute all the good to ourselves, and all the evil to others. As a common and very dangerous trick of politics, the leader flatters his own constituents and attributes all evil to malignant, sub-human enemies, either across the border, or lurking treacherously within the state itself. The 20th century's genocidal history can be explained very well along these lines. The trick itself is an ancient evil, and it still works very well.
45 46 As already discussed in Chapter 4. In Stuart Kauffman's phrase.

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Against the idea that evil is intrinsic to human nature, there is a contrary opinion that people are naturally good, but turned toward evil by the world around them. Rousseau wrote about "the natural goodness of man,' and blamed human evil on the corruption of society. Hegel wrote about "the cunning of reason" the way that situations 'make use' of people to produce unintended consequences. Social Darwinists excused the evils of society as only natural in a competitive world. These alternative conceptions of systemic evil arose in the course of the Enlightenment, partly in reaction to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and the innate corruption of human volition; and they remain every bit as controversial as you might expect. Arguments get started because ideas of systemic evil tend to mitigate the guilt of the individual wrong-doer, while placing the blame somewhere else: on his upbringing, on his relationship with the victim, or on society as a whole. Those doing well out of a social system are naturally reluctant to concede that the moral responsibility of its criminals is at all mitigated by systemic failings. Criminals, the poor, and any who would advocate for them are inclined to the contrary attitude. As with the nature-nurture controversy, both sides are wrong and right: Wrong-doers, juvenile and adult, have to be punished, less because they are 'guilty' than to make the point that misdeeds have consequences. People who cannot learn this have to be locked up again, not so much because they are guilty as because they are dangerous. These are personal opinions, of course; and I am not arguing for them here, but for the more general point that the concept of systemic evil cannot absolve individuals of personal responsibility, but must be considered nonetheless. I believe Dennett was right that responsibility is something that we have to learn to take. Marx and Kenneth Galbraith were right that a system that relies on the selfish acquisition of wealth as the motivator of economic activity is both very effective and very dangerous. Where these truths leave us isn't clear, but I would like to take the concept of systemic evil just a little deeper before we leave it alone. This concept depends on an assumption that, by and large, both for good and evil, people become what the world invites them to be. This is not a deterministic truth, only a statistical one, but it is fairly reliable nonetheless. It's true that many young people fail to achieve the positions and roles they are invited toward. A very few transcend their obvious career paths and become something strikingly different than was expected of them. But most of us hear and follow the suggestions that life makes to us, becoming book keepers or school teachers or financial traders or dope dealers more or less along the paths that we find prepared. In effect, there's a game going on around us that we are invited to join. We cannot help but be influenced by the world's invitations and very many accept them as is, especially when the suggestions come from authority figures and when Page 55

their friends are doing the same. If the game is evil per se, or if it requires or invites doing evil to succeed, it's still much easier to go along than not. As the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments showed, and as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib reconfirmed, humans readily become slavemasters and concentration camp guards when the conditions prompt. modern evil In the modern world, systemic evil has a new importance . It's not that the crimes themselves are new far from it: extortion, usury and enslavement, genocide and democide were all too common in ancient times, as they still are today. But the technical means for good and evil are much greater than in the past, and the stakes and scale of play are correspondingly bigger. Many more bad things are foreseeable and preventable, when the political will exists to do so is not blocked by special interests. 'Public opinion' has emerged as a factor to be reckoned with, but correspondingly, as a factor to manage. These are the chief historical trends that I can see: the explosion of technical means, the corresponding challenge to political wisdom and will, the expanding role of 'public opinion,' and the gathering public awareness that our political systems are failing, and that we are not being adequately led or managed. Today we don't see any one root flaw in human nature so much as a general unsuitedness of people to our individual lives and to the problems that we collectively face. We see very high levels of mental illness and huge stresses on relationships. We see fundamentally decent people doing terrible things with the best of reasons and intentions. We see ambitious people doing bad things to advance or defend their interests and careers with the rationalizations a) that it is their job to do them; and/or b) that if they don't, then somebody else will. Instead of outright slavery or serfdom, we see a 'labor market' which makes people compete for unpleasant, low-paid work that they'd really much prefer not to be doing, except for the pay-check that they need to live on. Of course, this indirect coercion is an improvement on the more direct methods of mobilizing a work force from the owner's viewpoint and usually from the worker's as well. My point here is not to complain about the abolition of slavery but to suggest how systemic evil now operates. Adam's curse that bit about "the sweat of thy brow" is still with us. The relative improvements of high technology and liberal democracy have not only left in place the evil of coerced labor; but now compel people to work hard to win the privilege of a remunerative job, however nasty or unpleasant. As in the past, we see people scrambling to escape the necessity of brute labor in every way they can; and the means for such escape are more varied and more ingenious now than ever before. And as one outcome of that scramble, we see a pattern of exclusionary Page 56

ownership that concentrates the privileges of rental income into the hands of absentee proprietors fewer and fewer of these, with little concern for the needs of their workers or that of the land from which their wealth is taken. At the same time, we see corresponding concentrations of political and managerial power, largely inter-convertible with wealth, collaborating with the proprietors to keep the whole system working: mobilizing, controlling and coordinating the inevitably discontented laboring class, and keeping its collective nose to the grindstone. We see hypocrisy and mendacity developed as teachable sciences and professions 'public relations,' and 'advertising' they are called 47 to manipulate people's beliefs, feelings and choices to commercial and political advantage. Finally, we see this whole system in the grip of an addiction to growth, on a shrinking planet where economic expansion is becoming increasingly difficult. Without growth, there is mass unemployment and the organized discontent turns to real anger and then to violence. This has happened often enough before but, as I write now, the pattern is looking less like a periodic dip in the business cycle, and more like an incurable and ultimately fatal condition. Contemplating all this, we catch a sense of how modern systemic evil really works: If 'fascism' is defined technically and non-pejoratively as 'the working alliance of big business with big government,' we see that some form of fascism is an inescapable feature of modern large-scale organization. When the system works well, it can be fairly benign and even comfortable for most people. When it works poorly, the tides of rage have to be channeled somehow. Then scapegoats and lebensraum are needed, and the system turns really vicious. For our purpose, the conclusion is this: The stark, personal evils of more primitive times have been defused and blunted (not everywhere, but in many places and to a considerable extent) by a systemic evil that uses individual persons, high and low, for impersonal, collective purposes of control and growth. There is a widespread feeling, which I share, that this whole system is approaching a crisis of some kind an Omega Point, a Singularity,48 or an ecological collapse. Not just theology, but eschatology too remains a relevant field for thought.

Amazing Grace

Plato's 'Myth of the Cave,' written in the fourth century B.C., may still be the best point of departure for a generic discussion of 'salvation', or 'en47 48 See overviews at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising These terms are due to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vernor Vinge respectively. See overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point

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lightenment' or 'liberation,' or 'grace,' to pick the most versatile word I can think of. Though these terms stand for distinct ideas, with different theological meanings in different religious traditions, they share a common intuition that our chronic human state is one of delusion, constraint and affliction. The idea is that people are not and cannot be truly free because we do not see or think clearly but "through a glass darkly." Our senses don't take in the world as it is. Language, habit and society constrain and shape our thinking. We live in fantasy worlds of our own and each others' making. To show us this dismal condition, Plato's myth asks us to imagine ourselves as prisoners chained our whole lives inside a cave, with no knowledge at all of the real world outside. We are chained facing a wall, with a fire burning behind us in such a way that all we see of reality are shadows. One of the prisoners is released, gets a glimpse of the bright, three-dimensional world and runs back to tell the others what he has seen. But they, of course, think that he is crazy, preferring the shadows they can see with their own eyes to the free man's truer account.49 Plato used this metaphor to push his theory of ideal forms, more real, more perfect, more beautiful than their endlessly changing, never completely pure instantiations in the material world. Other thinkers philosophers, theologians, psychologists, novelists and poets have used it to make their own statements about this world's evils and limitations (what there is to escape from), and about their own loves and dreams (what they hope to escape to). For Christians, it is a question of escape from the bondage of Original Sin, and of return to God. For Buddhists, our bondage is to the cycles of existence, and escape means getting off that wheel of endless thwarted desire. For many philosophers, it has meant seeing into the real nature of things, prior to the limitations of our senses, the self-deception of our minds, the pitfalls of language and the conventions of society. On the other hand, many people show no such feeling of spiritual 'imprisonment.' They take the world as they find it, feeling material constraints, of course, but with no sense of affliction of the soul. For purposes of this discussion, let's accept that intuition of 'imprisonment,' 'deludedness,' 'sin,' or whatever, and ask a further question: How can we escape or be released from the afflicted state? How can we make ourselves OK in the world, and the world (as it is, the bad bits with the good ones) OK with us? We need a generic term for this happy state, and I will use 'grace' (stripped of its specifically Christian meaning) because that word's ordinary usage seems to cover most of its specifically religious ones, as when we speak of a graceful movement, or of "grace under pressure" the graceful handling of a difficult situation.
49 A short film version of Plato's myth can be found at http://platosallegory.com/

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theories of grace With this inclusive usage, we can say that every religion puts forth a theory of grace, and distinguishes itself from its rivals in the character of that theory the version of grace that it promises and in the practices-forgrace that it sanctions, administers and supervises. There have been, in fact, an amazing range of such practices: from human sacrifice to modern psychotherapy and consumerism, with everything that humanity could think of in between. Amongst these theories, some interesting controversies have developed, and it is worth reviewing these for some perspective on where matters stand today. Anciently, grace was not so much a personal matter as a tribal or communal one, closely connected with the bounty and indulgence of nature. Hunters appeased the spirits of their prey to assure good hunting in the future. Agricultural peoples prayed for rain (but not too much of it ) and for clement weather generally. First and foremost, grace meant a sufficiency of food, which was a gift of the spirits or the gods or of the One God. And their gift had to be reciprocated with a human gift of some kind an offering of something that the gods would value.50 Later on, the idea of grace as natural bounty came to be supplemented and even replaced by an idea of it as release from collective or personal guilt. If the gods withheld their favors, or sent some catastrophe, they must be angry about something; and they would be angry because you did something wrong. So the logical thing was to accept some punishment, learn from it, and try to do better in the future. What sort of punishment? Well, you could kill someone, or scourge yourself, or pay a fine that is, give up something valuable by way of atonement. In this way, the idea of sacrifice as gift got mingled and confused with a very different idea of sacrifice as accepted punishment. But either way, a theory of grace was at the bottom of it: grace was to be earned or restored by giving up something valued either because the gods too would value it, or as a kind of 'fine' for the wrong committed. Later on, the concept of grace became more psychological, and the questions about it became more abstract: Is grace a gift from God or an achievement of the individual soul? If a gift from God, is it given arbitrarily or for sufficient reason? If grace is an inner state, can it learned? If a gift from God, can it be earned? Does it come gradually, or all at once? Assuming that grace can be earned (at least, to some degree) is this done through right belief (faith) or through good works? If through right belief, then which exactly? Creeds become desperately important when theological errors are grounds for divine punishment. If through good works, then again which exactly? What can we do, what lies within our power, to be
50 For an overview of the concept and meanings of sacrifice, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice

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granted or win the hoped-for escape from deprivation and darkness? emotional peace Today, an adequate theory of grace must come to terms with the death of God, and with the great paradigm shift from an ordained to an evolved cosmos. If grace is not a gift from God, we have to find or create it for ourselves; and for that purpose, at least two findings from modern psychology seem relevant: First, our discovery of the unconscious mind accounts for many failures of grace 'the psychopathology of everyday life' and for our experience of 'the supernatural.' Insights, dreams and inspirations, slips, impulses and temptations, all seem to come from outside ourselves certainly, from outside our conscious minds; and for thousands of years it seemed as if a whole world of invisible spirits of angels and demons was needed to explain them. In reality, as we now know, such mental events come not from outside, but from deep within. We are only partly aware of what our brains are doing, just as we are only partly aware of what our hearts or stomachs or kidneys are doing. The fact is that much of what we plan and do happens all by itself, with no conscious awareness or even intention on our part. In particular, the cognitive role of the emotions the fact that things draw our attention and engagement along lines that our emotions shape means that the mainsprings of perception and volition are experienced (more or less) as givens. We can say yes or no to them, up to a point. We can learn to accommodate them in better, safer, more socially acceptable ways. But what and whom we love (or don't love) is basically beyond our powers of rational choice. We love first. Only later can we find ways (somehow and to some extent) to accommodate and rationalize our feelings. Between them, these findings yield a perspective on grace that I will speak of as inner peace, or wholeness, or balance, though managerial terms like 'emotional intelligence' and 'emotional competence' are more common now.51 The idea was hot a few years ago; and Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence (1995), was a best-seller. There's a lot of current research in the area, though little agreement yet on what emotional competence consists of, exactly, or how it should be measured. But educators, personnel officers, child psychologists and parents, have come to recognize that people's cognitive abilities, our specific decisions and over-all, long-term happiness are strongly dependent on our competence in recognizing and responding to our own and other people's emotions. What seems clear is that emotional 'competence' is partly an endowment, but partly a learned and teachable skill. Goleman saw it as having four
51 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_competence and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

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components: the ability to read and be guided by one's own emotions; the ability to control one's emotions and impulses in adaptation to changing circumstances; the ability to sense, understand, and respond to others' emotions; and the ability to inspire and influence others while managing conflict. All this strikes me as a step in the right direction, but not quite correct or sufficient. For my purposes, the managerial focus and orientation toward success is beside the point, because I'd see emotional 'competence' as only partly agential and social, and something of a misnomer. My sense is that we're in the grip of our emotions as much or more than we could possibly manage them; and our emotions are only partly oriented toward 'success' in dealing with others. First, and above all, we need to live with ourselves and with the world (natural as well as social) that we find around us. Though I applaud the new recognition of emotion as a key aspect of cognition, and am clearly in favor of some form of emotional education, and self-education, I have big reservations about the notion of emotional competence either as a testable trait or as a trainable skill. At the same time, I doubt it can properly be seen as a form of innate intelligence For these reasons, and thinking of the Hebrew blessing, 'shalom,' I prefer to speak of emotional peace, or inner peace (until someone can think of a better word), and to align it with the religious concept of grace, whether this leads to worldly success or to martyrdom for a cause, to eternal bliss or to simple personal happiness. The point for this essay is that traditional religious concepts like grace, salvation, enlightenment,liberation, the lot of them, can now be re-thought and are being re-thought in purely natural and psychological terms. Rethought in this way, the old theological quarrels around these concepts become readily intelligible because a modern notion of inner peace is replete with similar problems and paradoxes: Is grace inner peace a personal matter or a communal one? Well, it's both really. Obviously, feeling depressed or anxious or ebullient or grandiose is a personal state. Yet emotions are contagious and people have this well-know capability to make each other miserable. Amongst psychotherapists, for example, it's a commonplace that the wrong people show up seeking help. Many of their actual clients are fundamentally OK; it's their husbands or wives or parents or children the people driving them crazy who should be coming in. And then, it's well-known that whole groups, peoples and societies have their own form of mood-swing disorder, with bullish periods and bearish ones, periods of excessive optimism and of excessive despair. In buoyant crusades and panicked retreats, politicians and preachers make careers giving voice to the public mood, while common people are swept along by the speeches they are hearing. The upshot is that inner peace, grace, is a public good as well as a private one. It's barely possible but not at all easy to keep your sanity when all about Page 61

you are losing theirs. As with the old thinking about grace, inner peace certainly requires relief and release from crippling emotions like anger, fear, shame and guilt. How is this release to be found? It's not exactly a skill or an achievement, but neither is it just an accident of heredity or fortunate circumstances. People can and do find peace by living well and by seeing and thinking truthfully, but not just as an act of 'free will.' We cannot steer our emotions, as one would drive a car but we do influence them toward the better or the worse by the choices, including choices of belief that we make. inner peace is neither a matter just of virtuous actions nor or of sane and truthful ideas, though an unhealthy lifestyle, bad deeds and crazy ideas can do a lot of harm. What's clear over-all is that thinking of grace as a matter of inner peace makes it easy to see how the old theological controversies arose, while making nonsense of their orthodoxies and inquisitions. There can be no absolute truth (or error) about grace. There can be no one right way to find peace. It is and is not a personal state that can be found. There is no single true form that it must take. It is not even something that one can have, but more like a place that one must find, and try to stay in. It feels great to be in that state of peace, and it really sucks not to be there. All you can do is encourage the best in yourself, make peace with the worst, stay away from wherever peace isn't, and hope for the contradictions to work out. taming the bull The stages of liberation the normal life-journey of a spiritual 'seeker' are described in a famous sequence of verses and drawings, called Ten Steps in the Taming of a Bull, or more simply, The Ox-Herding Pictures.52 Well known and loved by Zen Buddhists, these ten pictures and the verses that go with them provide the best definition I've ever seen for the concept of 'grace' or 'inner peace' the clearest statement I know of what it means to follow a spiritual Path. Taken together, they answer the question What does it mean to become 'enlightened' or What gets liberated in a 'liberation'? Self-acceptance is a part, but not the whole of it. The positivethinkers who merely preach self-acceptance and self-esteem never face the problem that these are difficult to sustain without some basis in reality. By contrast, success in making friends with and taming your 'bull' and riding him out of the closet (whichever closet you are in) is a very convincing basis for self-esteem convincing not only to ones self, but to others as well. The 'Ox' or 'Bull' is that primal energy that animates and drives each
52 These pictures and verses are easily available in many versions on the Internet and in books about Zen, so there is no need to reproduce them here. For the version that I've relied on, see http://www.zen-mtn.org/zmm/gallery3.htm. The drawings are by Master Jikihara; the verses by Master Kakuan Shien.

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one of us. Its relation to our conscious, civilized selves has long been recognized as something of a problem. Should it be allowed to run wild? In English we have an expression about a bull in a china shop. Should it be dominated, repressed and finally killed by superior intelligence and selfdiscipline? For a long time, the Western world believed so, and the Spanish bullfight represents that outcome. In Yoga and Zen practice, the desired outcome is a taming and re-integration with this bull, and the Ox-Herding Pictures show the steps through which such taming is accomplished. $ The first drawing is called The Search for the Bull. The man feels that something is missing, but does not know what it is or where to find it. He wanders through the world looking for something, he knows not what. This is the stage of ignorance.His life feels empty and meaningless, but he has no idea what is missing. Trying to figure out what that might be, perhaps without even knowing it, he is already on a quest, though not yet on a clear Path. $ The second drawing is called Discovering the Footprints. The man catches hints of a missing vitality, but has not yet seen or named it. But now, at least, there is a trail to follow. His searching becomes more focused, more systematic. $ The third drawing is called Perceiving the Bull, and shows a picture of the bulls hindquarters poking out from behind a tree. It is well said that Any path can be a Path, but finding ones own is no easy matter. But now, at last, the search phase is over. The man has found a practice that turns him on, as we say. Now he can recognize it, knows where to find it. $ In the fourth drawing, called Catching the Bull, the man actually lassoes the huge animal and tries to hold. him. Finally, he comes to grips with what he has been seeking. He actually gets into a serious practice joins a zendo, a dojo, a yoga class or whatever. But now the real struggle begins. $ The fifth drawing, called Taming the Bull, is about the actual reintegration. Authentic practice has a double nature. On one hand, it seeks to liberate the ki, the vital energy of existence. On the other, it seeks to bring it under control to tame and domesticate it, so to speak. In martial arts and most other serious disciplines, this issue is critical. Which impulses and fantasies should be expressed and lived and which accepted but just left to the imagination is something that everyone needs to learn. Martial arts people, especially those whose aggressive impulses brought them to the dojo in the first place, must learn to stay out of fights and avoid injuring their practice partners. People into macro-biotic eating must avoid pursuing their diets to the point of anorexia. Those into BDSM must keep their game within safe-and-sane limits, and play only with consenting adults. People on any Path must learn not to annoy or bore their friends with their Page 63

preoccupation. $ The sixth drawing is called Riding the Bull Home. Here we have the image of the minotaurthe man and bull as one. The man sits on the beasts back playing his flute53, as the animal slowly wanders homeward. No guidance is needed. The bull can find the way for both of them. Here we have the image of perfect wholeness, perfect integration. It is what every true Way offers: mind and body, conscious and sub-conscious, thought and desire, no longer quarrelling, but in harmony. It is a wonderful promise, but it is not the end of the story. $ The seventh drawing is called The Bull Transcended. It shows the man inside his thatched hut looking out its window, as the bull grazes peacefully near by. In some versions the animal has disappeared entirely. Its verse begins, Astride the bull I reach home. I am serene. The bull too can rest. The idea, I think, is that the man has travelled so far along the path, and is now so fully at one with it that there is no longer any separation between himself and his practice between himself and his unconsious. This is grace, or inner peace, that we've been speaking of. But it is still not the end of the story. $ The eighth drawing is called Both Bull and Self Transcended, and it is just an empty circle. The text (I quote one version in full) reads:
Whip, rope, person, and bull all merge in No Thing. This heaven is so vast, no message can stain it. How may a snowflake exist in a raging fire? Here are the footprints of the Ancestors.

Sometimes likened to an abyss, sometimes to the summit of a high mountain, the Void can be a terrifying place. Nothing can live there, but the creatures of all dreams and nightmares are starkly visible. It is the background of every figure, the Emptiness in which all ideas (even the idea of Self) are formed. A scary place it can be, but the Void is also the ground of creativity. This is the peak experience to which every true Path leads. $ The ninth drawing shows a simple landscape with a tree and stream, and it is called Reaching the Source. Man and bull are not seen: There is just the natural world. Man and bull are at home in it, and could be anywhere. From the mountain top, one can only descend again, to the lush valley. From the Void emerges Nature, the lovely, savage garden of terrors and delights. We are beyond good and evil; pain and pleasure. All opposites are alike as constructs of our own minds and bodies.
53 Yes, you have a dirty mind. I do too!

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$ The tenth and last drawing is called In the World or In the Marketplace. The man, now grown elderly, jolly and rather plump, is back in society again. In some versions he is surrounded by children. Perhaps he is playing with them; perhaps he is teaching; one could not easily tell the difference. From one perspective, it is as if he had never been away. But what we see now is a man at peace not only with himself, but with society around him. He is out of his 'closet' has found the place where he need not bend himself out of shape to please anyone. He can simply be himself, because his vital energy, his self-discipline and his ego his sense of himself are one. what's a heaven for? Traditionally, heaven has been imagined as a place of infinite and eternal grace. Perfect bliss . . . but doing what exactly? Playing the harp might be amusing for twenty minutes or so. Fluttering around with those new wings would be good for few days. But before long, the novelty would wear off along with much of the joy of being here and not in the other place. With an eternity to kill and no demands on our time, we'd get bored and the place would no longer be heaven. Then what? The question is worth asking, because there is talk now of recording people's minds their conscious and unconscious, their personalities, memories and all and uploading these to potentially immortal life on the Web. It may be only a matter of time before the dead really do pass on to eternal life in a cyberheaven. As it is, modern society can come close to providing a kind of heaven on earth certainly for those who can afford the rent. Admittedly, the need to work for a living (and to win and keep a steady job), is a major impediment to heavenly bliss, but suppose a negative income tax made the necessities of life essentially free, so that people worked only because they wanted extra luxuries, or because they enjoyed the stimulation and status of their careers? This is not impossible: The major obstacles to it now are political rather than practical and the political climate might change. As it is, in the 'developed' world today, nobody has to starve, very few women die in childbirth, most infants grow up to lead long, healthy lives; basic education is free; and knowledge is freely available on the Web. There's plenty of interesting stuff happening, and really no excuse for boredom. Yet many people have more leisure time than they know how to enjoy and use. So the question of how one would deal with an eternity of leisure, free of all deprivation, danger and constraint makes for an interesting thought-experiment.

*****
Heaven as I imagine it, is not a place, but a state of being. Or rather, a free, easily reversible choice between two states the embodied and the purely Page 65

spiritual. In general, embodied souls experience relatively few constraints compared with those they knew in their earthly lives, while disembodied souls have almost none. Only time continues to have meaning for them as even perception, thought and feeling exist in time, and take time to notice. Disembodiment is the default, though souls can switch from one state to the other at any time, with just a few moments for the transition. In general, the disembodied state is much like living in a well upholstered 'den,' with unlimited books, films, art and music at your disposal. But that den is as big as the whole cosmos: The disembodied can travel at will, to watch mortal life going on around them, anywhere in the universe. By contrast, embodied souls assume the constraints of matter with their physical bodies. The motions of their bodies are just what they were used to unless they incarnate to a different form which, of course, will then take some getting used to. To travel long distances, they just discarnate, go where they want, and then reincarnate, or not, as they choose. On the advantages and drawbacks of embodiment, more below. I began this fantasy by saying that heaven is not a place, and in general this is true. However, there is a place where souls first arrive and where they congregate when they choose in whatever form (or formlessness) they choose. Here they can present themselves and interact as they please. As in the Norse Valhalla, the embodied can even fight and kill each other for the sheer joy of it (if that is their idea of joy), but the souls of the slain just return a bit later. Indeed, the central feature of heaven is that nothing here has permanent consequence except in mind and memory. But in heaven, you can learn from experience. Or you can spend eternity committing the same follies and the same mistakes. Sooner or later, everyone learns that there is nothing to be gained by making others miserable. In heaven, the dead finally learn to make themselves and each other happy. That's what the place is for. Scripture gets this point exactly right: "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a [smudged, distorting] mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 54" Knowing and being known, with everything available and nothing to be afraid of, the souls of the dead can open to themselves and to each other and, for the first time, take complete pleasure in their state. Like rented costumes, bodies of all shapes, sizes, genders and temperaments can be tried on for the experience. The delights of flesh can be studied to one's heart's content at an eternal smorgasbord of the senses where one can never feel stuffed. But these assumed bodies can be sloughed off just as easily when flesh becomes distracting, as it sometimes does. One way to understand the arrangements in heaven is through Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs,' which is also a hierarchy of desires and loves. In heaven, the two bottom levels are no longer in question. Body needs and
54 1 Corinthians 13:12

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security needs can be taken for granted. The middle levels comprised of social needs for love, belonging and esteem are what the set up is really for: One works at them with the other souls; and the skills of mutuality can be learned at last, because there is nothing to compete for, and nothing else to hope from others. Souls please and teach each other, or go somewhere else. It is as simple as that. Just as on earth, the highest needs on Maslow's scale are solipsistic in the last reckoning: You live alone, you die alone, and you work out your salvation alone your 'self-actualization' as modern people call it. As with all earthly 'spiritual practices,' the highest state is contemplation; and in eternity there is endless time for that. There's no reward here, and no retribution. Forgiveness is easy because the evils suffered and committed in mortal life have no material consequences in heaven. Self-forgiveness is more difficult, because the memories of one's own evil and folly linger on, as bitter or shameful memories, to be lived down and put aside as best one can. Souls in need of punishment (as many are) can arrange it for themselves as they do with their other needs. They can leave off once guilt is satisfied. It's understood up here that the Dantean scheme of hell and purgatory and heaven was truthful in a certain way, except that these are not three separate places, and that no one (no one but oneself) is passing judgment. In heaven, we just put ourselves through the experiences that we need, tending toward those that bring joy and grace. Who could hope for more?

Bad Ideas and Good Ones

As I see it, science is to religion as house to home as professions like surveying and structural engineering are to landscaping and interior decorating. When you buy a house, you hire a surveyor to verify the property lines; you hire a structural engineer to verify that the house is sound, and warn you of major work that may be needed. Your mortgage and the sale itself may be contingent on these inspections. But once you actually move in, you face the very different issue of making your new place livable of turning the new house into your home. For this a different set of skills are needed; and you may hire different specialists for example, landscapers and interior decorators to help with the necessary decisions and do some of this other kind of work. If we liken our world to a rambling, cluttered house that we've just inherited, on a remote island somewhere, then the central task of science is to describe the place to understand how its facilities work, and to identify the opportunities and threats and challenges that we'll be facing as we live there. By contrast, religion and the arts are in the business of making the place familiar and comfortable to the extent possible, and then of steeling us to meet its threats and challenges. We can best think of religion, like music, literature and the graphic arts, as an interpretive and decorative pursuit. Once we know what the house is like, we have a lot of choices to Page 67

make and a lot of living to do before we can feel at home. As knowledge advances, the religious emotions live on. There is every reason why they should continue to do so. Yet traditional religious answers and practices no longer deserve to have the last word. They are suggestions from the past worth considering, but in need of questioning in the the light of current knowledge and one's honest sense of reality. Seen this way, one finds that many of the old traditions need serious revision or editing to remain playable like an ancient theatrical work that needs some help from a good translator, and then from a skilled director. Others may remain interesting as museum pieces or historical specimens, but no longer as anything else. In decorating one's home, one makes some good choices and some mistakes: some choices that add to the convenience, comfort and aesthetic pleasure of the occupants and their guests but some that detract. There will be trade-offs involved; there may be unfortunate necessities. Just the same is true of our religious and spiritual choices. Like other memes, these ideas and practices evolve, and they do so by getting themselves copied, accepted and followed. They catch on and spread because they are good at doing so. They don't necessarily contribute to human happiness, and some have been really bad for us.

9.1

Some Bad Ideas

Here is a personal selection of the very worst religious ideas, followed by my selection of some very good ones: magic and the supernatural Perhaps religion's central bad idea was that of magic and the supernatural. It may have been inevitable; and it is still showing surprising powers of endurance, considering how thoroughly it has been discredited. Our idea of 'the supernatural' seems to be a by-product of what what Daniel Dennett has called the intentional stance our method of predicting other people's behavior by imagining what we would do if we had their beliefs and their desires. Human brains evolved to handle two distinct classes of events those of the natural world and of the interpersonal, social world respectively. It can be shown experimentally that infants have different expectations regarding them. They expect all the edges and corners of a solid object to move together if someone pulls or pushes on it. They quickly learn that they themselves can produce such motions through the push and pull of their own little bodies. At the same time, they are fascinated by human faces and quickly learn to recognize familiar ones. They develop

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expectations based on the expressions they read. By age five 55 they develop what child psychologists call 'theory of mind,' explaining peoples' actions through attributed intentions, which are in turn explained by attributed beliefs and wishes. What cannot be explained by mechanical cause-andeffect is seen as an effect of intention by a visible agent if there is one, or by a hidden agent if there isn't. With these results in mind, magic seems not so much a bad idea as a hard-wired cognitive tendency: Whatever cannot be explained by physical action, or by some obvious social process must be the intention of some 'god' or 'spirit' some invisible, and supernatural agency! It leads, however, to the superstitious conclusion that the world is controlled by person-like spirits who, like earthly potentates, are hungry for appeasement and flattery but can be petitioned for favors. With that idea in mind, it's obvious that the most important thing you must do to get what you want in life is to get in good with those gods and keep them on your side. It raises a question whether your gods are more powerful than your enemy's gods, or vice versa. It raises a persistent fantasy, reinforced by everyone's experience of infancy, that your every action and indeed your very thoughts are constantly monitored and judged by vastly powerful beings who may smile upon you, and even care for you, but may get incomprehensibly, devastatingly angry. The typical result is to keep grownups in a mindset of childish dependence, blocking off the adult insight that what goes around comes around, and that your own bad choices will eventually hurt you. revelation Uncertainty is painful. Uncertainty about the fundamentals of life and death is the most painful of all. One way to reduce it has been to posit an event, usually in the distant past, when some Prophet, Messenger or Enlightened One was vouchsafed a 'revelation' of the way things are, or will be, or ought to be usually as a transmission from some deity or other supernatural being.56 Such tales of revelation become the basis for claims of spiritual authority, and they can be profoundly comforting to persons who seek a sense of meaning in their lives, but can find no basis for meaning in the secular arrangements to which they must conform. Power elites also like them, because they legitimate the existing social arrangements, making change seem blasphemous or unthinkable. Religious leaders especially like such stories as they call for vivid re-telling, and become a basis for priestly authority.
55 Or much earlier, depending on the experimental task chosen as a criterion. See http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/documents/Astington-EdwardANGxp.pdf and http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think.html See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation

56

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At the outset, myths of divine revelation help groups and whole societies to come together, and collaborate on vast and arduous projects like a 'crusade' or a holy war. But they become serious hindrances later on, when conditions change, when small adjustments and compromises avail better than selfless idealism and sweeping transformation. They make powerful vehicles for the socialization of young people for the leading of immature minds into the paths of their elders, at the cost of discouraging everyone, young or old, from thinking for themselves. As a matter of historical experience, we know the gods whisper continually, through the unconscious, to everyone prepared to listen. But it is only to be expected that different people, with different backgrounds and priorities, will hear very different messages. Granted that some of these 'personal revelations' are very much better than others, and that societies tend to need some broad vision as a basis for law and policy, the idea that any such vision carries universal and permanent authority has done a lot of mischief. divine judgment Another bad idea is that of divine judgment and retribution. While it may feel intolerable that the wicked should enjoy the fruits of their crimes, and go unpunished in this lifetime, and still more so that their victims should never be compensated for their suffering or rewarded for their patience, the notion of justice in the afterlife is fatally flawed first because there is no evidence for any such system; second, because the fear of 'Hell' has never been an effective deterrent, though it certainly did make a lot of people anxious; and third, because the supernatural 'judge,' interpreted by secular priests, proves to be biased and corrupt. The idea of divine judgment does harm in two other ways. First, it invites some people to think of themselves as 'elect' and of many or most others especially others of notably different ideas, customs, tastes or habits as 'damned.' In doing so, it undercuts a sensible pluralism: the urbane willingness to live and let live. A further side-effect of the notion of divine judgment has been to institutionalize the idea of magic (see above) into a variety of schemes of propitiation and sacrifice, that comforted the populace but proved extremely lucrative for various temples and their priests. The notorious 'sale of indulgences,' that financed St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, angered Martin Luther and triggered the Reformation, is one extreme example of such a system. The practice of massive human sacrifice, as organized by the Aztec priests, is another. But even apart from such enormities, the idea of divine judgment inevitably corrupts the practice of communal worship, with attempts to bribe the god for special favors.

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the city of God I call this bad idea 'the city of God' after the title of Augustine's book, but it is much older than Augustine, and it is not specifically Christian. The Jews had their version of it, as did the Hindus and the Chinese: a spiritually homogeneous society based on uniformity of religion and on perfect obedience thereto. It is a bad idea because brings the genre of religion into the courts of secular law by setting up an unrealistic standard, which then requires enforcement thereby justifying purifying purges, inquisitions and legal punishments for ordinary human behaviors, thus interfering with civil liberties and the development of civil society. Attempts to eradicate minor sin, inspired by ideals of purity and uniformity, always have consequences much worse than those of the sins themselves. The spasms of purification in human history e.g. that of Savonarola in Renaissance Florence, or that of Prohibition in the 1920s in the United States always fail, and never last long. On the whole, some degree of sin has always been preferable to the rule of zealots. Universalism >>??

9.2

Some Good Ideas

Religious leaders were only human with the usual human fallibility, and with ambitions and interests, at odds with their ideals. And religious groups have typically demanded more reassurance, justification and collective glorification than any church could reasonably offer. So it's hardly surprising that some religious teachings had evil consequences, or were wrong-headed from the outset. But religious thinkers also arrived at some ideas that were not just good, but truly great. After those bad ideas above, here are some great ones that I would mention: the limits of agency There is a near unanimity of great religious teachers that we are not the authors of our own lives. Chinese thinkers saw a 'Way' of things a Tao as the ultimate principle by which all things occur. Western Abramic traditions saw the will of God. I like the version attributed to John Lennon that "Life is what happens while you are planning something else." This does not mean that planning is useless or futile. It does mean that our plans don't have the last word, and that we may be forced by events to change them. It means that all outcomes emerge from the context in which our plans are conceived and executed. You can call this ultimate context 'God' if you are so inclined, though my own view is that the anthropomor-phic associations of this term create more problems than they solve. The brute fact is that human agency is limited in at least four ways:

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Even the absolute ruler of the mightiest miltary state will be seriously deluded (as so many have been) if he thinks that he can reliably get his way, simply by giving an order. He will find himself limited by nature, by history, by the actual, present situation that he faces. The tide will come in despite whatever royal command. Second, the ruler has to work his will through the efforts of subordinates who will have interests of their own, or may be incompetent, or may just misuderstand their orders. For whatever reason, there will be flaws in the chain of execution. Third, power, planning and skillful administration are perpetually finding themselves thwarted by happenstance, by the random the missing horseshoe nail, the storm that wrecked Phillip II's Armada. Fourth and most subtly, there is the fact of ecological closure and feedback. Actions have undesired (and often unforeseen) consequences What goes around comes around. You tend to get what you asked for good and hard!

The human problem, then, is just as the AA prayer puts it: One needs serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what can be changed, and wisdom to know the difference. Religions at their best have often taught an ethic of wisdom, courage and acceptance, though sometimes reluctant to let their people 'off the hook' of unlimited personal responsibility. the divine 'spark' To my mind, the idea of a divine 'spark' or 'soul' in each individual is one of religion's greatest ideas. Whether you think of it as a 'spark' or 'spirit' or 'breath' or an 'inner light' is just a matter of interpretation and language. The physiological perspective of mind and spirit as emergent in the functioning of a human body and nervous system grounds that conception in flesh, teaching us to think of mind as a process or system and not as a static 'thing,' but it does not make mind less wonderful. Behind all terms for mind or spirit or soul, there is a root idea, well conveyed by the mutual bow of Japanese, or the 'namaste' gesture of Hindus,57 that there is something of ultimate dignity and value in the person
57 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namaste

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you greet and deal with. One ethical consequence of this idea is the 'Golden Rule' that others should be treated as you would wish to be treated yourself perceived and dealt with as ends in themselves, not just used for one's own purposes. A more abstract consequence is the idea of 'inalienable rights.' Inevitably, there is going to be the issue of who plans and manages and who labors of who takes orders from whom. There is also the dismal fact, well known to bosses at all levels, that it is easier to take away nearly all of people's freedom than just the portion of it necessary to accomplish a purpose at hand. To its credit, religion has sometimes tried to teach that this is wrong. Sometimes it has helped slaves retain some sense of human dignity and birthright. More often, perhaps, religion has been co-opted by a ruling class to keep the slaves more docile in their chains. This tension has pervaded organized religion. But if it has kept the slaves quiet, it has also given them a sense of dignity and given at least a few slaveholders some qualms . Sometimes places of worship have been centres of organized resistance. The church as such has always played a political role, and been an object of political conflict. Historically, therefore, religion has been important, even vital, both for downtrodden peoples and for their masters. universal law As Paul Davies put it in his Templeton prize address, "All the early scientists such as Newton were religious in one way or another. They saw their science as a means of uncovering traces of God's handiwork in the universe. What we now call the laws of physics they regarded as God's abstract creation: thoughts, so to speak, in the mind of God. So in doing science, they supposed, one might be able to glimpse the mind of God. What an exhilarating and audacious claim!" The idea of universal law was a religious idea long before it was a scientific one; it was an idea that made science possible. Today, scientific 'law' is seen largely as metaphor; the idea of a cosmic designer and lawgiver has been abandoned by most sciencentists. Chance and necessity intertwine: an element of randomness in Nature seems inescapable.58 But scientists are still looking for the regularities and necessities of physical change for that which is constant and reliable in the midst of all that change. They will continue to do so. And chance itself has turned out to be more orderly and more creative of order than had intuitively seemed possible. the trans-personal
Although transpersonal psychology is relatively new as a formal discipline, . . . it 58 See Jacques Monod's discussion of this connection in Chance and Necessity (1972)

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draws upon ancient mystical knowledge that comes from multiple traditions. Transpersonal psychologists attempt to integrate timeless wisdom with modern Western psychology and translate spiritual principles into scientifically grounded, contemporary language. Transpersonal psychology addresses the full spectrum of human psychospiritual development from our deepest wounds and needs, to the existential crisis of the human being, to the most transcendent capacities of our consciousness. Caplan, Mariana (2009)

The school of transpersonal psychology has come in for its share of criticism for the vagueness of its definition, for weaknesses of scientific methodology, for its (alleged) metaphysical preconceptions and neglect of the problem of evil, and and for other sins as well. Nonetheless, the mere existence of such a school attests to a tradition of 'timeless wisdom' or 'perennial philosophy' that many modern thinkers and scientific psychologists have felt a need to reckon with, and take into account including, for example:

the idea of a cosmic Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; an intuition of something in ones own mind and being that is similar, or even identical, to this Reality; moral intuitions of right and wrong, perhaps along the lines that Jonathan Haidt has been studying; the idea that "no man is an island," in John Donne's great phrase; that we are connected, one to another, by subtle ties that transcend every neatly obseservable category except our common humanity; the idea that normal adulthood, with its rational selfinterested ego, is not the limit or nec plus ultra of human personality development.

Transpersonal psychologists are concerned "with the study of humanity's highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness". Issues considered include spiritual self-development, a sense of Self beyond the ego, peak and mystical experiences, etc. Though several important pyschologists, notably Albert Ellis and Rollo May, have either rejected or expressed serious reservations about transpersonal psychology as a scientific sub-discipline of their field as a whole, the trans-personal as a category of human experience must be counted as a good idea. If nothing else, it serves as a counterweight to methodological individualism, in suggesting that not all cultural or social phenomena can be explained as Page 74

outcomes of motivated behavior by individual actors. communal worship With reservations to be discussed in Chapter 10 [>>??], it must be admitted that communal worship was a good idea. In the ages before rapid transport and mass media it was a necessary one. Every village had to have its temple where the people gathered, where the rites were performed, where the priests did their thing. That these places were conceived as earthly dwellings for god(s) is mere rationalization to an unbeliever like myself. The fact is that the buildings, the rituals, the periodic gatherings served a vital social purpose that could be achieved in no other way. Even today, with all the technology that make it possible for people to communicate and constitute themselves as a group without coming together physically, the habit of doing so, the feeling that doing so is 'a good thing', is still very strong. Around the world, many people continue to 'believe in belief' though they no longer believe in the divinities and rites themseves. Apart from the fact of gathering congregation itself, the central feature of communal worship must be the celebration of a jointly held worldview, value system and mood. This mood will vary with the religious calendar and with the public situation: Contrition and renunciation over the weeks of Lent followed by joy on Easter Sunday in the Christian calendar, for example. Thanksgiving at harvest-time in practically every tradition. Bellicosity and a summoning of energies on the eve of war. Inevitably, the cognitive content of worship, the shared emotions, beliefs and imagery, will be have to be simplified, sometimes dangerously or very misleadingly so, for popular appeal. But, depending on the values, judgment and skill of its leaders, communal worship (spiritual or political or both) can be significantly educational, and there is no way that a society without such ritual sharing could hold itself together. To that extent, in spite of its hazards and shortcomings, communal worship must be counted a good idea.

*****
It should go without saying that the judgments of this chapter were just my own well considered, but not divinely inspired. No more can be said for this essay as a whole. It would have been tedious to keep repeating this point, so I have left it for now. But in a way, that has been the central point throughout: The essay's premise has been that religion is not a matter of divine revelation nor of sheer tradition, but a genre of human practice and thought. Once this is agreed, it becomes possible to think critically about religious teachings and to follow personal taste and need in one's observances. It becomes possible as well to contemplate human religious history as a whole, condemning Page 75

what one must, but admiring what one can. If we can agree at least that people should be free to follow their own judgment in what they like and dislike, believe and disbelieve, there will inevitably be disagreements. In fact, there will inevitably be disagreements whether we accept their legitimacy or not. We cannot and should not hope for any grand consensus, uniformity or permanence in religious matters. No uniformity is possible without jihads and inquisitions, and there would be no authentic consensus even then. Rather, we face a competition of differing suggestions from various traditions and lines of speculation, and find ourselves "condemned to be free," as Sartre put it, with our religious needs, priorities and sensibilities differing from one person or group to another, from place to place and from time to time. Ultimately on no one's authority but our own, we have to distinguish bad religious ideas from good ones, and shape our lives accordingly. At best, we can only offer suggestions on these matters to one another, and try to explain why we make and buy the suggestions we do.

10

Religion For Atheists

Some months ago, partly by way of 'research' for this essay, I began to attend Unitarian Universalist (UU) services at a church in Montreal and may well become a member eventually. As many members of its congregations are agnostics or atheists, it is a matter of debate even within their own congregations, whether the UUs should be considered a religion. What they offer, however, is a self-consciously spiritual practice in a community setting; and so for my purpose, I can call them a religion without hesitation. My experience with them informs this essay as a whole, but especially the discussion in this chapter. Essentially, what is today called 'spirituality' (as in 'spiritual but not religious' SBNR), is a private and personal project aiming at transcendence, or just at personal growth and a meaningful life. Dubbed Sheilaism by Robert Bellah and Richard Madsen in a book called Habits of the Heart (1985), this stance is mostly reviled by leaders of religious institutions but proclaimed and advocated by many who reject all religious authority but look for growth and meaning in their own lives. Until quite recently it was my own position, and it remains so to a large extent. Where spiritual projects tend to be private and solitary, religious ones are public ranging from small meditation and discussion groups to huge, established churches requiring facilities (if only a room to meet in), and organization (if only for the timing of meetings). In this way, religious life is essentially paradoxical: an attempt at public sharing of private feelings and aspirations, and at the constitution of community based on that sharing. Spiritual life, where it is shared, is characterized by friendship and intimate dialogue imperfect, but loving on the whole. But religious life is inherently politicious, with its adherents bound to one another through a mixture of common and competing interests. Both have their characteristic Page 76

failings and dangers: The spiritual life is at risk of eccentricity, perversity and private evil. The religious life is at risk of fanaticism and the persecution of apostates and rivals especially when perpetrated by a theocratic state with its resources of law and punishment and propaganda. The spiritual life is episodic but perennial. Religious life is perpetually becoming ossified, but reborn through the devotion and efforts of persons who are authentically spiritual. With these clear differences, the tension between these projects is manifest: The spiritual growth of comunicants is one raison d'etre for any religious community, but will be a threat to that community at the same time. The religious project creates institutional forms and laws that individual spiritual projects will constantly transgress and challenge. Much as with biological evolution, most of these transgressions may be detrimental but many will be at least neutral, creating variations of mindset and custom from which fresh culture can evolve. From time to time, there will be truly novel ideas that the Old Guard will need to digest somehow through reform or reaction or both. The period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Western Christianity was one such episode on a world-historical scale. The publication of Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, and the religious response thereto is a more recent one. But lesser challenges within local communities are continually happening. They are the leaven that keeps religions bubbling, so to speak keeps their communities from settling into inert clumps. Religious groups don't like to acknowledge too loudly that, in many ways, they are human institutions much like states or business corporations. But their leaders understand very well that that is what they are and must be. To keep buildings open and functioning, to pay salaries for whatever necessary work cannot be organized on a volunteer basis, they must have revenue. They compete for market share or for monopoly, if that is within reach. They engage in 'public relations,' advertisement and propaganda to get their message out, bury scandal, attract new followers and retain existing ones. They assert and defend their jurisdictions, making and enforcing religious law, and adjudicating disputes. Historically, they have wanted obedience; and even the most liberal religions hope for loyalty and regular attendance, and volunteer efforts from their members. In general, they face complex problems of administration and personnel just to provide their basic services. Correspondingly, their tolerance for dissent and controversy cannot be infinite; and there is a long, sad list of spiritual seekers and reformers who endured persecution, and sometimes torture and death at the hands of their own religious groups. One thinks of the crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans but at the request of his fellow Jews, the burning Jan Hus and Michael Servetus at the hands of their fellow Christians, the persecution of the Sufis by their fellow Muslims, for just a few examples. There have Page 77

been many, many others.

10.1 Godless Religion

What can remain of religious thought and practice for people who don't believe in any personal, or anthropomorphic God? My line is that religion as a body of 'revealed truth' or obligatory belief and practice is superstitious; that superstitious religion is worse than none at all; and that the 'Sheila-ists' who want some kind of spiritual life without either the conviviality or the constraint of participation in a religious community have as a valid a stance as anyone toward the whole business. Yet I believe too that religion without superstition is possible, and I acknowledge potential benefits from the communal, religious enterprise even for unbelievers like myself. Four central functions of religion seem to remain valid and vital perhaps even more so without God than with him. community making and support One central function of religion has been a social one, having little to do with spirituality as such. The village temple or church served to tie communities together, providing a facility and occasions where people who lived and toiled on separate plots of land would come together, exchange gossip and celebrate (what they jointly conceived and construed to be) a shared reality. At various times, notably in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, religion was a cement that held society together that actually constituted society to a large extent. You can still see the role it played by taking a drive in the Quebec countryside, or any similar area, and imagining the village as it must have been back in my daughter's 'olden times,' before automobiles, electric lighting and radio. Under those conditions, the little church was a nucleus of the community's life: the pulpit was its only 'mass medium'; and the church basement was its meeting room, social hall and community center. Modern transport and communications, international commerce, and the anonymity and pluralism of the modern city made a large difference in this respect: By the time of the Reformation, from the 16th century onward, religion was becoming more disruptive than unifying. Tolerance and religious freedom evolved, (where they did, and to whatever extent they did), because society now had to be held together by different means. Think as you will but obey the law was the core of the new arrangement. At first, (e.g. in Elizabethan England) the law tried to specify at least the forms of communal worship. But even this proved too divisive. The ageold alliance between State and Church broke down as the institutional interests of various faiths became subversive of political allegiances and as ad hoc political alliances crossed lines of religious faith. That is the situation today. Saudi Arabia and Israel perhaps excepted, there are few Page 78

places in the world today where religion can provide a basis for national solidarity. And even in these nations, their insistence on this religious basis comes at steep and obvious social costs. Finally, in most places in the Western world, people were just left alone to worship as they wished. Today, there is broad agreement that killing people and public nudity (except, perhaps, in specified situations) are no-noes, but many finer points are contested. Hence the 'culture wars' we read about in newspapers. What we atheists need to remember is that communities still need to be constituted, maintained and justified somehow, and that some sharing of worldview remains indispensable if not in detail, then at least in broad generalities, and on some crucial points. In such matters, limited consensus is a social necessity. Where plural customs cannot be tolerated, codes of behavior must be enforced. And these codes, however contentious and politicized today, must be seen as religious issues of a sort at least in the sense that they were matters of religious authority once upon a time. celebration Partly instrumental for community maintenance, but partly a major end in itself, there is the function of framing and celebrating the passage of life and its seasons. In themselves, the rituals that serve this function are just conventions but social life would be impossible without them. As 'rituals' here, I include patterned social events and interactions of every kind: not just formal ceremonies and religious services, but holiday celebrations, sports events, political rallies and every other social occasion structured by established custom. We can see all rituals as technologies of a sort, designed and/or evolved to manufacture, reinforce and deploy the sentiments that transform a mere population into a functioning group and society. Time out of mind, in every culture known, formal language and gestures, stylized dress, music, dance, food, drink, talismanic objects, and other elements have been used to suggest desired states of mind and to create or reinforce desired relationships. It's likely that these technologies of ritual originated in magical and religious efforts to influence 'the gods' in their control of human events, but the uses of ritual are also completely necessary and modern. A wedding ceremony is a ritual, as is a funeral. So is a Thanksgiving dinner, or any sit-down family meal. So is getting dressed in an acceptable way to go to work. Even sex is often dressed up with ritual elements: a good dinner or show beforehand, bedroom music, candles, incense, etc. We can and do devise private rituals for our private purposes and relationships. We devise personal rituals for the management of our own selves: 'psyching' ourselves to get up in the morning, work through the long hours of a day, relax in the evening, go to bed at night. Parents create little rituals for their young children. Older kids and adults find their own rituals, and learn to manage themselves. Page 79

The seasons turn, and lives are lived. What anthropologists call 'rites of passage' are needed for the milestones of both. The seasons of the year metaphorically represent the seasons of a lifetime, and both require some adaptation; both must be proclaimed and noted by the community. The need to do this is a purely human and social one, in no way dependent on the existence or non-existence of deity. For these celebrations, religions and distinct varieties of non-religion, for that matter will differ in their protocols, their rationalizing myths, and in the public moods that they induce or encourage; but the basic milestones of time and life are much the same everywhere and for everyone. We are born and must be given names, recognized as new people and welcomed into the community. We grow up and graduate into adulthood. We mate and proclaim publicly that we are now a couple, not two separate individuals. We die, and our dead bodies must be disposed of somehow. Atheists need such 'rites of passage' as much as anyone else. Whether these proceed according to some traditional formula or are designed ad hoc, to meet the beliefs and tastes and budgets of the interested parties, to arrange and preside over these rites remains a necessary function that requires a certain prestige and expertise. Call these officials 'priests' or 'ministers' or 'chaplains,' or just install them as civil servants. Neither these titles nor the rituals of celebration really matter much. There is a necessary social function here that must be performed in some way commonly understood and satisfying. The rituals of particular interest for this essay are the 'sacred' or semisacred ones that define people's identities in relation to their communities and groups. Indeed, from this perspective, religion and society blend seamlessly into one another, as society is conceived, organized as its individuals themselves are defined, given specific idendities and mobilized through such characteristically religious means. Society itself becomes a sacred institution, invoking all the religious emotions of awe, love, veneration, and so forth, and offering (just as religions do) a public ground for people's identities. Seen from this angle the notion of 'secular society' is almost a contradiction in terms; and 'religion' is just the commonly held theory of what it means to be human.

*****
The elements of ritual act in combination, mutually reinforcing one another: In a chanting ritual, for example, rhythms, body movements, melodic line and words all work together, binding not only the participants, but anyone in the room or hall where it is taking place. About the only way to avoid that suggestive pull is to walk away from it, because human beings are social animals and our emotions are contagious. As in the theater, there is a willing suspension of autonomy. You tend to give yourself to the Page 80

situation, if only to take it in.59 Leni Riefenstahl's notorious film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress60 still serves to demonstrate how powerful, even lethal, the effects of ritual can be. The theological point I want to make is that very little of a ritual's power stems from the occasion or beliefs it serves, considered on their merits. On the contrary: occasion and belief are energized, and ultimately defined by the rituals (not stopping at ritual murder) mounted on their behalf. Any belief system can be a religion, any individual can be made into a god, when the technologies of deification are cleverly put to that use. Any individual and belief system can be demonized when the same social technologies are deployed to do that. Modernity has these applications down to a science, and any discussion of religion must take them into account. For very many participants, the belief or god or occasion is chiefly an excuse: The ritual itself is what attracts worship. Where beliefs can matter, however, is in the decision to join a group, and to take part in and support its rituals. Beliefs are like flags that people wave, to show which side they are on, and where their loyalties lie. Relatively few people seem to care about getting them 'right' in the abstract sense of holding true ones. Rather, it's important to hold the right beliefs for the groups that you are part of, or want to be part of for the people whose alliance you need. Back in the '80s, in the heyday of the New Age movement, I remember a friend of mine telling me that he was happy to see auras and worship crystals and feathers if it would help him get laid. Nothing I ever read or heard taught me more about the nature of religion as a "cement of society," in David Hume's great metaphor: a binding agent that holds society together. meditation and prayer Just sit down in the middle of a situation and let it to speak to you. That's really all that meditation is. It is a useful way of dealing with uncertainty or overcoming fear that in no way depends on a God to be effective. There are many styles of meditation which need not concern us here. Some like the process to be as austere and simple as possible. Some people use candles or beads or icons to focus their minds; some use chanting and rhythmic body movements to empty them. Some use incense and flowers to calm the mind and sweeten its mood. Some imagine a person-god who speaks to them, while others just sit and breathe and wait patiently for whatever comes. Prayer goes in the other direction. It is a matter of speaking to one's context, rather than of letting it speak to you. Without a personal deity who listens sympathetically and dispenses favors, this may seem meaningless.
59 60 See Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power for the classic study of these effects. Available on the Web at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcFuHGHfYwE

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But it needn't be. Atheists too can benefit from the effort to express their thoughts and feelings in focused, coherent fashion, even if no one is listening. Four types of prayer are commonly recognized, covered by the acronym 'ACTS': Adoration is an expression of praise and wonder at the creation. Contrition is an asking for forgiveness. Thanksgiving: is the expression of gratitude. Supplication is an asking for something. Now, it's obvious that these 'ACTS' will not be the same for a secularminded atheist like myself as for (e.g.) a Christian. In the first place, as I don't believe in a designed 'Creation,' it makes no sense to praise a Creator. But I can express wonder at a self-organizing cosmos so creative of complex patterning ultimately of self-aware patterns like ourselves, able to perceive and understand as much as we have about that fertile complexity. On the other hand, my adoration for this world has serious reservations. I feel plenty of wonder at it, but this world does not seem to me completely good by no means ideally configured for human happiness or spiritual growth, or even moral responsibility. Had any God ever offered his Plan to me for review and comment, I would certainly have had complaints and urgent questions about it. In this respect I have great sympathy for the Gnostics, and sometimes describe myself (as in this essay's opening chapter) as an ecoDarwinian Gnostic. My 'contrition' remains fairly limited because I lack the JudaeoChristian consciousness of sin, broadly defined as any deed or thought that violates the ideal relationship between an individual and God. Certainly I have done bad things in my life. I can feel regret for some of these; some guilt; some shame. But I lack the idealism necessary for the Christian sense of sin. I don't feel the shame or guilt of 'betrayal of God' that seem to surround that concept. At times I have been greedy, lazy, selfish and ignorant much like everybody else. But "I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam" as Popeye the Sailor said. I have to live with myself and forgive myself for the wrongs I've done. Not expecting to be magically atoned for by anyone else, I can only pay the debts that I feel I owe, and then forgive and accept myself. Thanksgiving comes easily. Life and 'the context' have been good to me. To be sure, I have not gotten everything I ever wanted, nor have things always gone as I would have wished. But I cannot feel that I deserved better than I got, or that I had it worse than others. I can give thanks wholeheartedly for a very fortunate context, and to a few significant individuals who helped make it so. Supplication must be a problem for atheists. But if we have no one to ask for favors, we can still hope and try to be clear on what we hope for. We can ask ourselves to work for what we want and to work smarter or harder. Page 82

To the ACTS model, two further categories of prayer have been suggested: expressions of Lamentation and requests for Faith. The first is clearly as possible for atheists as for believers; it is as crucial for one as for the other to stay with sadness and accept it not to drown it with drink, replace it with anger, or deny it in any other way. But an atheist must see the prayer for faith as a form of self-hypnosis. He will not pray for faith, but for quite other qualities, like clarity, confidence and wisdom.

*****
In a cult film called The Ruling Class, Peter O'Toole plays a schizophrenic British aristocrat who inherits a title. When a psychiatrist asks him why he thinks he's God, he replies that every time he tries to pray he finds he's talking to himself. That's it exactly. If atheists want to preserve a notion of prayer, we either have to speak vaguely about 'some higher power' (as they do in Alcoholics Anonymous), or else develop some much clearer ideas about inner speech a deliberate practice of talking to oneself, both individually and in groups. On a website called Bicycle Meditations, Claire Petersky makes the following suggestion for non-theistic prayer. Seeing no way to improve on it, I quote the whole passage:
What you want to do is to find parts of yourself that are doing the act of prayer, and you want to find the parts of you that are able to hear the prayers. You may have a part of you that is very hurt can you find a part of yourself that has healing energy? You may feel yourself full of regrets or resentment is there a space within you that has forgiveness? Sometimes we need to ride many miles before we can find a place within ourselves that can heal, forgive, love. I think all of us can find such a hospitable place, even in an internal wilderness of rage, guilt, or despair. And when lost in the wilderness, it can be a matter of survival to find a place of refuge. It's that part of oneself that can be healing, loving, kind, forgiving, that you need to send those prayers to. No god(s) necessary.

Now, in this passage as in the discussion that precedes it, meditation and prayer are seen as private matters. As they are to a great extent. But they have a public dimension also, from which they may enter the domain of religion. Meditation and prayer, as defined above can be performed by groups as well as by individuals, and they can be performed by groups that don't necessarily share the same beliefs, nor even the exactly the same values. Provided they have enough in common barely to constitute a group, they can stand up and sing hymns; they can sit down together and invite their situation to speak to them. Obviously, it will do so to each one of them individually, in whatever way and to whatever extent it does and the individuals themselves will speak to themselves, to each other, and to their Page 83

sense of the world and situation they are in. They will do so as individuals, of course but as they do it, the make-up of the group will be subtly altered, and their situation will be altered insofar as they now confront it as a group and not as so many individuals. There is no evidence at all that sick people will get well because their friends are praying for them; and I am claiming no such thing. I'm saying only that there may be shared awareness and sensibility and even political will toward whatever joint awareness and effort. Contagion of emotions, after all is a well-known group phenomenon, and not a wholly positive one. Moods of anger and violence have been easier than moods of reconciliation and peace to evoke and share. religious education There was a Jesuit saying, "Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man." Their idea, presumeably, was that the really crucial religious education ocurred in those first years of life, before the adult ego with its critical faculties was fully formed. The atheist might wish to argue that no religious education at all should be given to children, to ensure that any such teaching later is received in a critical spirit. A different position, the one I will take, is that basic religious education begins in infancy, or even before birth, whether one likes it or not, and that even for the young children of atheists, some conscious and deliberate education in religious values, traditions and thought is both feasible and desireable. If spirituality and religion are understood along the lines of this essay, then religious education is simply about the contexts of life, and about one's options for understanding and dealing with them. Well before babies are a year old, one observes in them a sense of the kind of world that they are living in. You can see anxious babies and angry babies; and you can see alert, cheerful, loving babies. This is the beginning of religious education, and it begins with the way that new human creatures are being cared for and played with. For older children and early adolescents, religious education can go anywhere, but always with a very real and very important job to do as much for the children of secular atheists as for those of the most devout parents: These kids have to learn to thrive, both materially and spiritually, in a world that is always complex and difficult, and that can sometimes be very cruel. Some traditions on this subjects are wise and still helpful today, while others are thoroughly obsolete, and may have been wrongheaded from the beginning. For adults, the rule in religious learning is just caveat emptor let the buyer beware! For children, much of the necessary judgment is still in the hands of adults; and again, for the children of secular atheists as for those of the most devout, one must hope that the judgments made are wise, loving and intelligent and that the influences to which a child is exposed will leave them capable of wise, loving, intelligent judgment in their turn. Page 84

By late adolescence a parents' responsibilities in this area are very limited. The young person's religious education is essentially in their own hands, under such influence and authority as they will seek and accept. Beyond the happenstance of life, the best religious education at this stage is just free, friendly dialogue between older people and younger ones.

*****
Over-all, the conclusion of this discussion of "religion for atheists today" is that some features and functions of traditional religion are still feasible for non-believers, while a few are indispensable. Secular societies like our own have learned to dispense with religious authority and uniformity in such matters, while quite a few are still in transition. Several religious groups offer at least a partial resolution of the issues at stake by constituting their community on broadly shared values rather uniform beliefs and practices, and by offering their laity (the contributing 'customers') a great deal of input into their actual rites and services. For various reasons, I doubt that this solution will soon prevail in society at large, and one may doubt that it ever will. In a great essay,61 Bertrand Russell wrote, just in passing, about "man's cruel thirst for worship." The phrase is exact: The desire to belong to something larger than one's own self, answering all questions about the meaning of life at one stroke, has been a perennial human temptation and thirst, leading to great folly and wickedness probably more often than not. But Russell was in fact more sympathetic to that desire than the cynical opening paragraphs of this essay might suggest: The briefest review of his career shows that he gave himself constantly and tirelessly to all sorts of projects and causes. Believers try to give themselves to God. Russell, a committed atheist, gave himself to mathematics, to philosophy, to a succession of political causes, to an impressive list of women, and to four children. Thus, one could say, and Russell would probably have agreed, that some kind of religious education is needed as much by atheists as by anyone, to learn taste and discretion in the giving of self.

10.2 Religious Authority

Religion has always been of interest to people who wanted to use its concepts, language and ideas to ask and explore fundamental questions, but also to people who wanted ready-made answers that would close down those difficult, time-consuming questions and leave them free to get on with the day's business. We must expect these types to be divided on issues
61 A Free Man's Worship, available on the Web at:

http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/A%20Free%20Man%27s %20Worship.htm

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of religious authority: the seekers detesting it while more rooted persons are in favor. But nobody can question everything. Even seekers find established custom convenient in the areas where it doesn't pinch them in all areas where they don't wish for change. And those others, persons who prefer professionals to do their thinking for them, will find that the chore of thought can only be delegated up to a point. Both uses for religion are legitimate in principle, but both can be abused. The seekers outsiders, in Colin Wilson's sense have a potential to drive themselves and others crazy. Many dreams that find a ready audience are pretty shabby, sometimes bloody, when people try to make them real. Persons who want others to do their heavy thinking for them because their interests and talents lie elsewhere have every right to find a teaching and teacher of some kind and follow them. But they need to be careful whom and what they follow, and how far they allow their trust to take them. In the last reckoning, they cannot evade responsibility for the real-world consequences of their choice of leaders. Also, they have no right to demand that others subscribe to their preferred creed. The idea that one's own God should be everyone's, and his 'commandments' the basis of moral law for everyone, is poisonous nonsense. As a matter of social necessity, a tribe requires and seeks a uniform law within its borders, though even that much is problematical. But humanity is not and never will be a single tribe. We must recognize that there is permanent tension between these two approaches to religion, and between these and that of science. Organized religious groups, serving a clientele that mostly wants the painful questions shut down, have generally been nervous about their 'mystics' the people who had kindled the enterprise in the first place, and gave it a vital public life. These mystics, almost by definition, were inclined to give their own spiritual experiences more weight than any official teaching. Sometimes they furthered the institutional interests; more often they questioned and threatened them. In any case, they practiced and advocated a personal methodology of introspection and personal inspiration, that was inherently a threat to would-be 'authorities.' Such people have been burnt as heretics at least as often as they were acknowledged and venerated as prophets or saints. Sometimes, like Joan-of-Arc, they were burnt first, and venerated after once they were safely dead. The 'mystic' faith that 'God' continues to speak to anyone who will listen (shared by most philosophers and all scientists) cannot help but challenge established religious and academic interests that have usually preferred to seal the font of prophecy and revelation. All human institutions and their leaders want a God who ordains and legitimizes the existing order, but then keeps silent forever more. Many of their constituents and customers like to have such leaders over them because it relieves anxiety and absolves them of the need to make painful choices for themselves. My own view, expressed at length in this essay, is that religious observance and Page 86

participation can be worthwhile so long as that lust for timeless authority can be kept under control. The problem of religious authority connects with that of political authority, mentioned above in connection with the issues of law and membership. Every group faces the problem of deciding who is 'one of us,' and who is not. It has to attract the people it wants, but also keep out or kick out those that it doesn't. It has to discipline its deviants and dissidents, and typically make some effort to discipline its deviants and dissidents, and bring them back into line before it kicks them out. Unless sheer terror is the object, which cannot usually be the case, there will be some margin (however small) for legitimate difference and disagreement. Now, of interest to our discussion of 'religion for atheists' is the elasticity of such tolerance: In the early days, before things are clear and codified, and later on while a church or party feels secure and confident, the margin of tolerance is usually fairly wide. Under threats and stresses, however, that margin can narrow almost to vanishing. Now ideological 'purity' is at a premium; members are pressed hard to conform. Mild disagreements are treated as heresy. And the result can be that new ideas and the people pushing them are excommunicated and ostracized just when they are needed most. In what is probably the usual case, a few or many dissidents will be pushing for 'reform,' that is, for change of some kind, while the leadership with an effective majority behind them are resisting it. But there is another pattern as well, that we are seeing a lot of today. It can happen that most of a group's leaders are aware of a need for change, while the rank-and-file are tradition-bound and resistant. In this case, the leaders will probably be divided, wishing to retain their prerogatives of leadership as some seek to attract the reform-minded, while others fear to lose traditionalists. Most leaders seem to be other-directed types 62 who tap into, mirror and personify the groups they have come to lead. Probably all leaders must do this to some extent. But the great ones, at carefully chosen moments, seem to combine this mirroring gift with a complementary inner-directedness that puts them well out in front of, and potentially at odds with, their tradition-directed followers. Such leaders may develop a sense of the objective requirements of a situation, and may (or may not) be persuasive enough, against the sheer inertia of their tradition-directed members, to win support from the other-directed ones. But the wish for timeless authority is very strong. It is true that courageous figures like John Shelby Spong, Hans Kng, Eugen Drewermann, Sayyid_al-Qimni, are influential theologians today. It's true that numerous liberal theologians and clerics now urge religious beliefs and practices that do not deny but seek to build on the current state of knowledge. However, so far as one can tell from media reports, their
62 To use David Riesman's term. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd

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influence is still too weak to prevail in their respective religious traditions. At some future tipping-point they may win out against the institutional interests and the wish of congregants for religious authority; but, as of this writing, their time is not yet. Nonetheless, in the present writer's judgment, they have it right. But the wish for timeless authority is very strong. It is true that courageous figures like John Shelby Spong, Hans Kng, Eugen Drewermann, Sayyid_al-Qimni, are influential theologians today. It's true that numerous liberal theologians and clerics now urge religious beliefs and practices that do not deny but seek to build on the current state of knowledge. However, so far as one can tell from media reports, their influence is still too weak to prevail in their respective religious traditions. At some future tipping-point they may win out against the institutional interests and the wish of congregants for religious authority; but, as of this writing, their time is not yet. Nonetheless, in the present writer's judgment, they have it right.

11

Conclusion: Challenges for Religion Today

Unitarian Universalism seeks to update the beliefs and values of traditional religious thought to accord with the findings of modern science and the beliefs, values and needs of a modern, global society. It holds, on the one hand, that much has been learned in the last few thousand years while, on the other, that the ancients faced a human condition not wholly different from our own, and that their thoughts still have much to offer if only a sense of continuity between past and future. We are also religious pluralists: We insist that people can love, learn from and cooperate with each other even while they differ in their core beliefs. Anonymous Elevator Speech

One running theme of this essay has been that religion today is facing, but for the most part, not facing up to several radical challenges. First, there is the challenge of pluralism to the whole concept of a universal God and universal revelation in a multi-ethnic global society. Second is the challenge of science to religious traditions based on myths of the supernatural. Third, following from these two, there is a challenge of relevance: to attract and keep adherents to a vision of spiritual life in a pluralistic, technologically sophisticated world, grounded in advanced scientific knowledge. In this concluding chapter, I want to consider these challenges in turn, to imagine what truly facing up to them would require. The point that secular humanists and atheists need to remember is that the great mystics and theologians were neither deceptionists nor fools, though some of their followers were both. Lacking the experimental methods and facilities of science, they worked from a method of pure introspection and reasoning, usually within traditions of prior insight and discourse that they took as 'revelation.' They got some things right and some wrong. Some of their ideas were helpful suggestions in their own time, but traps or stumbling blocks today. On the whole, their teachings Page 88

deserve to be remembered and evaluated as the serious thoughts of wisebut-fallible humans, not as commandments of an Almighty God. At its best, religion has tried to serve some of mankind's deepest needs, and to express and teach some of its finest emotions and impulses. At times, it has been an oppressive, superstitious confidence racket. The history of Catholicism in Mexico, where I wrote most of this piece shows off religion in both these lights: On one hand, monks and priests like Bartolomeo de las Casas, Juan de Zumrraga, Miguel Hidalgo and Jos Morelos have statues and streets named for them in every city as the founders and builders of a new society. But people remember too the reactionary Church hierarchy that sided with the wealthy landowners on almost every issue, fought for its own privileges tooth and nail, and resisted all efforts to provide public education for the indio peasants. That opposes much-needed birth control to this day, albeit with dwindling success. Religion is now a good part of the reason why backward peoples remain backward, but religion is still providing a social framework for which modernity has no equivalent, and it is still addressing issues that science does not and cannot touch. Such frameworks are still needed; and so the crumbling of old ones is causing a great deal of anxiety, fanaticism and death. For that reason alone, religious thought needs to be considered seriously, and with a degree of sympathy. One crucial intellectual task today is to save religion from itself: from its own institutions, interests and entrenched authorities, and from its own worst impulses.

11.1 The Challenge of Pluralism

In Chapter 9's section on "the city of God" we counted religious universalism in our list of bad ideas. In its time, it was a natural corollary of the ideas of monotheism and universal truth, and of the notion that right social order, like the natural world, had been ordained by God and revealed to 'messengers' and 'prophets.' After all, if God once told us how people ought to live, was it not then incumbent on the faithful to live by those Divine commandments, and enforce them everywhere? So zealots thought. Yet even in ancient times this universalism ran against the pluralistic experience of great imperial and mercantile cities like Athens, Rome or Byzantium. Today it is altogether a hindrance to the kind of sensible pluralism that our world needs, and is gradually, painfully evolving. The challenge of pluralism for religion is to fully accept and come to terms with the ethical and spiritual complexity of a modern society, and to drop the impracticable notion of unique and universally binding revelation. There actually exist a few sects, notably the Unitarian Universalists, the Quakers and the Bah' (so far as I know) who have embraced the much better idea that concepts of righteousness can vary from place to place and from time to time, that men and women of good will must be expected to differ in their beliefs and religious practices, and that there is more than Page 89

one way to be a good human being. But even religious tolerance, let alone authentic pluralism and inclusivity remains unthinkable for certain sects. The pluralism needed remains difficult, and it is important to understand why this is so. The general point is that uncertainty of any kind is awkward and sometimes painful; and some people find it intolerable, even in trivial matters. Without special training and even then, only in special and limited areas we hate to confess ignorance to ourselves. Years of schooling, reinforced by most people's work experience reinforce a craving for certainty: We are expected to know the right answers. We are expected to act decisively, and know how to behave. We come to demand such sureness of ourselves. When public decisions are needed, there is political need for authority of some kind whether that of a tyrant or a majority vote. In a public space of any kind, even on the street, a distinction is needed between what is and what is not acceptable. Dress codes and rules of proper behavior have to be worked out, either by custom or law and thus, inevitably, with friction and politicking. Going nude on a a public beach? Going veiled in Paris? Gay sex? Erotic bondage and whipping between consenting adults? It can be argued, and sometimes is argued, that a religion that does not lay down at least general guidelines in such matters is no complete religion at all! "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!"63 Well and good but there exist too ways that are ugly and unpleasant, and ways that are ethically wrong. Pluralist as we may be, we still face the problem of distinguishing our pluralism from complete relativism. However liberal we may be, we still need to set the limits somewhere. At the very least, we will want to say that liberty ends where injury to others begins. To a first approximation, we can sum up the pluralist's position with the Wiccan rede, "An thou harm none, do what thou wilt!" More must be added, however, because the concept of 'harm' is elastic, varying from grievous bodily injury at one extreme to mild nuisance-value at the other. I won't belabor the point further: The challenge of pluralism is to strike a viable, tolerable balance between personal liberty and the requirements of social living. Inevitably, this can only happen as the evolved outcome of a long political process. Claims of religious infallibility and finality only make this process more difficult.

63

In the Neolithic Age, Rudyard Kipling (1892)

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11.2 The Challenge of Science

. . . it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. Richard Dawkins

I am not sure that Protestantism, science, bureaucracy and capitalism have really 'disenchanted' the world as Max Weber famously believed. It is at least arguable that they created new dimensions and possibilities for enchantment in the 'special effects' of cinema, for example, and in the realm of political self-delusion.64 What does seem clear is that numerous questions once unapproachable by science, and consigned to the realm of myth for that reason, now fall within the scope of scientific theory, experiment and measurement:

Why is there something rather than nothing? How did the universe come into existence? How old is the Earth and how did it come to be here? How did life and humanity arrive on the scene? What is a mind, and how do minds relate to and make use of their physical bodies? What is consciousness? To what extent, or with what limitations to we enjoy conscious volition or 'free will'?

The point is not that we can answer all these questions at present. I know that we cannot give definitive answers to all of them. But these questions and many related ones are no longer imponderable mysteries, as was the case until quite recently. Today they are puzzles or problems, within the scope of empirical and rational investigation. Since the heliocentric controversy in Galileo's time, the 'magisterium' of science has progressively invaded that of religion on all these frontiers. To that extent, Richard Dawkins is correct that Gould's concept of "Non-overlapping Magistera" (his 'NOMA perspective) cannot be sustained.65 What the present essay has argued is that although science and religion overlap and
64 65 See, for example, the discussion in Kristina Shull's paper Is the Magic Gone? at http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/anamesa/archive/fall_2005_culture/11_shull.pdf See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria, http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html and http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-holes-in-goulds-semipermeablemembrane-between-science-and-religion

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have sometimes clashed, they stem from fundamentally different concerns, both legitimate as objects of thought and investigation. Science is about the world as we find it. Religion is about the world as we adapt to it and appropriate it as an abode for human habitation. Clearly, their respective problem-sets will touch one another. Clearly the findings of science may crush the myths and hopes of religion, while concepts and preoccupations of religion may sway scientific investigation and discussion. Religion challenges science not to lose sight of fundamental human concerns, and to address these in some humanly intelligible and responsible fashion. The specifics of that challenge, and the response of science thereto might be the subject of another essay. At the same time, science challenges traditional religious worldviews with its empirical and theoretical findings; and it challenges traditional religious social teachings through the new powers of individual and collective action that science and technology make possible. We can detail these challenges from science for religion along several distinguishable frontiers: the frontier of worldview The questions mentioned above must all be answered differently today. We no longer see the origins of the Earth, universe and humanity itself in a divine plan and speech act. We no longer seek to understand these things in mythical terms but with empirically grounded theories. We no longer see the soul or mind as a metaphysically separate 'substance,' but as emergent sentience in an ultra-complicated physiological system. We no longer understand the individual as a locus of absolute freedom and moral responsibility but as a human animal, socialized to some specific historical milieu in some idiosyncratic, individual way. Over-all, we no longer see the world either as the manifestation of God's creative will, nor as a clockwork mechanism, but as an inconceivably vast, complex, self-organizing system that we now understand in wonderful detail though its most fundamental laws are still unknown. The scientific worldview is still incomplete and may remain so, but its successes to-date quite suffice to trash the claims of religion as a font of ultimate and eternal truth. Amidst the wreckage of these claims, the challenge for religion is to re-define itself more modestly as a genre of human thought and cultural practice. It can still claim to be and show itself to be a vital and necessary genre, but will have to abandon the old fantasy of universal, foundational authority in doing so. the frontier of economics and ecology As a by-product of this new, self-sharpening worldview, new technologies have been altering the means of livelihood altering society and its relation to the planet. On this issue, most traditional religions have been Page 92

ambivalent, authorizing human exploitation of the environment on one hand while preaching stewardship on the other. But until recently, human expansion and economic growth have been unquestioned values. Only within my lifetime has it become apparent that the Earth is not large enough to supply all the nourishment and resources that humanity might wish for, and not large enough to absorb and/or recycle all the garbage we generate and dump. A challenge for religion will be to lead, or at least follow, the necessary shift in values toward a 'spaceship Earth' mentality.66 the frontier of identity and community At the same time, the human relationships with work, society and community are changing, as the capabilities of technology expand while human functions are automated or de-skilled. The organization of human societies are under stress today from rapid technological change and from the economic expansion that technology makes possible. Time out of mind, as we have seen, religion has been crucially implicated in human social organization. It should be no surprise then, that the strains on human societies and civilizations are having a religious dimension. From this perspective, communism, fascism, maoism, islamism and even scientism can all be seen as religious movements. The organizing principle of modernity and with it, the spiritual and religious basis for a global panhuman civilization is a frought question, likely to remain so for generations yet.

11.3 The Challenge of Relevance

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but . . . One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung, The Philosophical Tree (1945), in Alchemical Studies

It was stated above67 that religion has always been of interest to two, very different, types of individual: the 'seekers' who try to use its concepts, myths and imagery to explore fundamental questions, and the 'saved' saved from doubt, that is to say in need of ready-made answers that will close down these great questions, leaving them free to get on with life's practical business. The latter of course, are in the vast majority. But there are enough of the former, especially today, to make the tension between these types a third challenge for organized religion and its leaders. I will call this the challenge of relevance, because its core (as I would claim) is to remain existentially relevant in a global society which offers so many
66 For further discussion, see the Wikipedia article on religion and environmentalism, and other web sites referenced therefrom at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_environmentalism in Section 10.2

67

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alternatives to religious participation and life. Between the challenge of pluralism and that of modern science, it's not so easy to be intellectually respectable and spiritually nourishing at the same time. This third challenge arises because the 'seekers' and the 'saved' want different things. Seekers are after insight and inspiration, and finally a renewed schema of belief and practice. They will not turn away from reason when 'faith' urges them to do so, but will insist that faith must not insult reason though it may go beyond it. Without understanding themselves perhaps, what they seek is integration with their own unconscious minds, with that inner 'Ox' of Chapter 8. What they seek might be characterized as some authentic, personal version of grace; but intellectual honesty remains among their virtues and values. The 'saved,' by contrast, are after solace, peace, and a spiritually satisfying narrative that lays their existential questionings to rest. Well able to deal with secular business from one mindset but with their intimate and personal affairs from another, they have a knack of context-dependent minding that the seekers lack. They live daily life as well as they can, saving up for Sunday (or whatever holy day) those values that are out of place the rest of the week, but that they know are too important to ignore. I once found myself wondering how the traditional Japanese, with a culture more ritualized and humorless than any other I knew of, developed Zen a religion of spontaneity and humor. My insight was that they did so in the same way, and for the same reasons that Christians developed a religion of meekness and loving kindness, while my fellow Jews developed one of purity, and obedience to a divine code of law. I suspect that every cuture evolves the compensations that it needs to cope with its realities without abandoning its ideals. Both uses for religion are legitimate in principle, but both can be abused. The seekers outsiders, in Colin Wilson's sense have a potential to drive themselves and others crazy. The answers that such people find for themselves can cause a lot of chaos and bloodshed when they 'catch on' as social movements. The 'saved' persons whose interests and talents lie in more concrete areas, and thus prefer others to do their heavy thinking for them, have every right to find a teaching of some kind and follow it. But they need to be careful whom and what they follow, and how far they allow their trust to take them. They cannot evade responsibility for the real-world consequences of their choice of doctrines and leaders. Also, they have no right to get upset that others choose different teachings and teachers. The fantasy that their god will be everyone's, his current preoccupations the basis of law for everyone and always, is lethal nonsense. The challenge for any worthy sect is to attract the participation of both types, while maintaining its integrity and spiritual balance. Even at some risk of instability, it must attract seekers who bring their own versions of spirituality to its temples. At the same time it must attract a flock of Page 94

faithful, keeping up their attendance, and their contributions of cash and effort, by dispensing the spiritual support and reassurance that such followers require. And, while doing both these things, it must keep faith with the inner wisdom of its own teachings, such as it be. It hopes, after all, to be a faith to live by something more than a circus with a wax museum of idols. As these demands are incompatible sometimes, the sect faces a dilemma: on one hand, it is challenged to stay alive and relevant for its authentic seekers. On the other, it is challenged to dispense an attractive but reasonably honest brand of 'motherstuff,' as I am going to call it.

*****
To introduce this term 'motherstuff,' I have to tell you about the time we drove from Ottawa my five-year-old daughter Maya, a lady friend whom I will call Talia (well before Carol's time) and myself going down to visit an old friend from New York City who was staying with his wife and two young sons at Camp Searsmont in Maine. My friends' older boy was also five. His younger brother was three. We got there on a Friday night, weary from the long drive, said hello, had a drink with our friends, and went straight to bed. Next morning, we took the kids canoeing and walking in the woods. Then the four adults sat around, talked and drank beer while the three children played on the beach. The weather was beautiful; the kids were getting along; it was great to be with our friends. One doesn't often have a day that good. In the course of the afternoon, it became clear that my friends had been alone with their two boys for several weeks already and would love to have an evening off. Talia offered to babysit for them, and I seconded the motion. It was agreed that our friends would drive into town for a romantic dinner alone while we stayed with the children. But there was one hitch: The city and its restaurants were some distance from their camp; to allow a few hours for dinner, they would have to leave around 6 PM, more than an hour before the children's bedtime. Talia and I, basically strangers to the two boys who had met us only the day before, would have to put the three kids to sleep. We knew that this might not be easy. To prepare her children, my friend's wife explained what was going to happen. Mom and dad were going into town for the evening. These two new people would stay with them and put them to bed. Their parents would come home later, while they were sleeping, and would be home for them in the morning when they woke up. Nothing to worry about. But the five-year-old boy had a problem: He and his brother needed their 'motherstuff' the family word for their routine of reading and singing and cuddling before they could go to sleep. With their parents away, they wouldn't get any, and this was not to be endured. Page 95

So their clever mommie did a lovely, poetic job of explaining that Talia was a mother too, and had her own ways of helping children go to bed. Wouldn't they like to try a different brand of motherstuff, just to see something new? The night after that, all would be as before. Not without misgivings, the boys agreed. Our friends took off when they had to; Talia and I let the children play until 7:30, then got them into their pyjamas and helped them wind down with two bedtime stories, a lullaby and a cuddle. Put to the test, Talia's motherstuff turned out to be perfectly acceptable and effective. Soon all three kids were peacefully asleep, remained so through the night, and found their parents at home next morning as promised. Remembering this incident, it occurred to me that that this nursery word 'motherstuff' is a perfect metaphor for some part a fairly large part of what organized religions can offer. Further: that humankind's various religions are peddling different brands of motherstuff, essentially the same in some respects but stylistically very different in others. And further still: that religious maturity can be seen in a people's acceptance and sympathy for the various brands of religious 'motherstuff' on offer. So understood, it's easy to see why religions will be fundamentally similar in their ethical teachings, yet very different in stylistic detail. Each 'church' is basically a franchise operation, not unlike Wendy's and McDonald's, offering its own brand of 'motherstuff' its own version of a humanly necessary commodity. The challenge for each is to market a product that is both popular and wholesome. I mean no disrespect here. We adults need our soothing too: to imagine the world not as a harsh, unfriendly, chaotic place, but in some kindlier, more orderly fashion. We know that we have to claw a living from the world somehow, and that life is going to kill us eventually. But we need to feel that our existence is meaningful in some way, that our choices matter, that our efforts are worthwhile, and even heroic to some small extent. We need to constitute communities and their institutions; and we need to justify and maintain their solidarity. So the 'motherstuff' of religion is something more than an 'opiate' or 'soporific,' though it can degenerate to that level, or be seen that way by a hostile, rationalist critic. But religions can also play an educational role analogous to children's stories and songs but (for adults at least) on a more adult level: stimulating the social imagination; mapping the world and its relationships in simplified terms that are intelligible without advanced education; framing life's harsh realities in terms that we can accept and endure. Definitely, it is a large step for adults as it was for my friend's children to recognize that one can listen to and even participate in a different scheme of religion, while still preferring one brand over the others.

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11.4 Concluding Remarks

A mans religion is the audacious bid he makes to bind himself to creation and to the Creator. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and to complete his own personality by finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs. Gordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion

Since I surely don't believe in any sort of personal Creator, I would have to put it a little differently. I would say:
A man's religion is the audacious bid he makes to account for and locate himself within his cosmos and world. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and complete his own personality by finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs.

But basically, I think Allport has it just about right: His notion of 'supreme context' is enough to frame the great theological questions that we started with: of what we are, how we got here, how we must relate to each other, and what our lives are fundamentally about. Plainly, it is a category mistake to ask someone if he or she believes in such a context. The right question, as applicable to atheists and pagans as to orthodox you-name-its, is to ask how people understand the contexts of their lives, and what conclusions (if any) and what sort of actions seem to follow. Some people seem to understand their contexts to include a personal God. Others understand their contexts very differently e.g. with a whole pantheon of specialized gods, or with an impersonal "God of the philosophers," or with no gods at all. Modern science-minded types like me see the contexts of their lives through a holarchical scheme with cosmological, astronomical, geological, biological and socio-historical components. Many people see their contexts primarily in terms of line-of-work or physical location the plot of land they work, the town they live in, the business firm that writes their pay cheques. Many cannot think about such matters in any coherent way. But no life is self-created or wholly selfcontained. We all come from and live in a context of some sort whether we know it or not. The problem we all face that children begin to face as soon as they notice differences between themselves and others is to understand and inhabit our contexts as best we can. We cannot do this in isolation, but always in relationship with others. How are those relationships to be conceived and ordered? It is this central, inescapable question that the world's religions have tried to answer.

*****
My attempt in this essay has been to treat religion as a worthy area of human concern and thought, and to draw the distinction between superstitious and intellectually honest religion as clearly as I can to see Page 97

what is left of that field when current knowledge and its fruits are also taken on board. Its central argument has been that society cannot do without a discourse of human values and meanings: a discourse that the sciences cannot provide because they have a different job to do. But neither can religion (precisely that necessary discourse) do its job just by clinging to ancient 'revelations,' and rejecting all that has been learned since these were first received. The fact is that we know much more now than was known in the 13 th century or earlier: We have a new ontological paradigm of self-organization without top-down intelligent design. And we begin to understand how mind can emerge in the functioning of a physical system why we do not need 'mind' or 'spirit' as a separate metaphysical category. Correspondingly, the material conditions of life have changed, largely because human technologies have become so much more powerful. Much now lies within the scope of human intervention that once had to be submissively accepted as 'the will of God,' because it was beyond our power to change. Kings used to die of ailments that are now easily treated with a few dollars worth of medecine, or by routine surgery. We feel limited today much more by political will and by economics than by technical feasibility. The world's traditional creeds, both religious and political, are grappling with these new conditions. One thing I have tried to clarify in these pages is the close interconnection between these sectors: why society itself must have a sacred dimension; why the phrase 'secular society' is, to some extent, a contradiction in terms though a spiritually homogeneous society is no longer possible. I doubt that we can have stable, competent, forward-looking politics today until the religious turmoil of modernity subsides and its religious vacuums are enduringly filled. I doubt that these things can happen without some sort of rapprochement between religion and science; and I doubt that any such thing can happen without much broader vision on both sides, and more intellectual honesty from the leaders, and (still more) the partisians of traditional religion. The emotional and social need for religious practice and thought is probably as great today as in the high middle ages when so many thinkers managed to be scientists and clerics at the same time, with no hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance at all. Even in our own time, there are people on both sides of the divide who are still trying to be whole in a painfully divided society, with partisans of 'Reason' on one side of a chasm, and those of 'Spirit' on the other. But wholeness is difficult, when these groups are speaking different languages and refusing to acknowledge each other's valid concerns. As I've tried to show, there really are deep and valid concerns on both sides of the 'culture war,' and the religious side is by no means bankrupt of valid achievments and insights. Its central problem, as I have argued, is that intellectually honest religion is no longer possible without a clear Page 98

distinction between knowledge and existential myth. Unfortunately, existing religious bodies and their leaders are deeply reluctant to draw that distinction and accept its consequences. Some are choking on it; some are getting it down, and a few are even beginning to digest it. But the cognitive change is drastic, and it is understandable that people are struggling with it. Across the board, in every area I can think of, our globalizing 21st century society is overflowing its institutions: Knowledge, education and selfeducation no longer fit within our institutions of learning. Folk practices of self-help and healing overflow the medical establishment. Political expression overflows the channels of organized politics. In general, new technologies and the expansion of knowledge that supports them seem to be changing society much faster than our institutions, customs and thought patterns can adapt. Nowhere is this condition of overflow more obvious or more dangerous than in the area of religion. I have no idea how this situation will play out, and expect that our spiritual confusion, like much else, will have to get worse before it gets better. But in this essay I have tried to show that the phrase 'religious thought' need not be an oxymoron, even today even with a 'dead' God in an over-crowded, blindly selforganizing world. There is little easy comfort to be had, but there are ways to move forward.

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Appendix: Some Relevant Quotes

The quotes below are chosen to suggest that my title, 'theology for atheists,' admittedly chosen to catch the reader's attention, is by no means so eccentric as may appear at first sight. From various perspectives, they support my view that the issues and discourse of theology are serious and urgent, that its stories need to be read as myth and poetry and not as literal fact, and that its dogmas are largely obsolete. There has never been a numerical majority for this view, and I am not expecting to see one any time soon. But there has long been a respectable body of opinion that religion and science, properly understood, are both of them more about questions than about answers; and that they have no real quarrel, but actually complement one another. I share this view, and have tried here to explore the implications of current thought for the ancient religious questions. I hope it will be clear from these quotes that a goodly company of thinkers would not find my agenda strange. That they are in no way committed to my conclusions should go without saying.
The first question of philosophy is not "What is the universe all about?" but "What should we do with our lives?"; i.e. its aim is not a System that shall be intellectually consistent, but the salvation of the individual. Now, I assert that this formula is a religious formula, whether we find it in St. Augustine or Bernard Shaw, and an important part of my aim in this book has been to try to point this out. Colin Wilson, The Outsider The difference between myth and science is the difference between divine inspiration of 'unaided reason' on the one hand and theories developed in observational contact with the real world on the other. [It is] the difference between the belief in prophets and critical thinking, between Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurdTertullian.] and De omnibus est dubitandum [Everything should be questionedDescartes.]. To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly large regions of space and time is science. H. Alfvn The more we know of things, the more we know of God. Baruch Spinoza Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place. Julian Huxley The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up

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arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity. Anonymous AOL Member The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Ralph Waldo Emerson Our religious institutions have far too often become handmaidens of the status quo, while the genuine religious experience is anything but that. True religion is by nature disruptive of what has been, giving birth to the eternally new. Marianne Williamson In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion. John Dewey The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of intellectuals from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole. John Dewey Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life. William James A man's religion is the expression of his ultimate attitude to the universe, the summed-up meaning and purport of his whole consciousness of things. E Caird The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. . . . Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live inwhether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or nois what we mean by having a religion. George Santayana Among all my patients in the second half of life ... there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. Carl Jung Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Alfred North Whitehead

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I stand before you as somebody who is both physicist and a priest, and I want to hold together my scientific and my religious insights and experiences. I want to hold them together, as far as I am able, without dishonesty and without compartmentalism. I don't want to be a priest on Sunday and a physicist on Monday; I want to be both on both days. John Polkinghorne What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. Albert Einstein For more than two thousand years it has been the standing assumption of the civilized European man that he has a soul, something which is the seat of his normal waking intelligence and moral character, and that . . . his supreme business in life is to make the most of it and do the best for it. A. E. Taylor, Socrates Religion without science is superstition and science without religion is materialism. Abdu'l-Bah In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed? Instead they say, No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. Carl Sagan Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world. Frederick Buechner In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts. Eugen Drewermann Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known. Michel de Montaigne

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But theological change happens through selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting. Yossi Klein Halevi Freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate . . . Imagine there's no heaven . . . and at once the sky's the limit. Salman Rushdie A universe in which the emergence of life and consciousness is seen, not as a freak set of events, but fundamental to its lawlike workings, is a universe that can truly be called our home. I believe that mainstream science, if we are brave enough to embrace it, offers the most reliable path to knowledge about the physical world. I am certainly not saying that scientists are infallible, and neither am I suggesting that science should be turned into a latter-day religion. But I do think that if religion is to make real progress it cannot ignore the scientific culture; nor should it be afraid to do so, for as I have argued, science reveals just what a marvel the universe is. Paul Davies Rational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessary conditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simple sanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep, elemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours the past, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the strength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to the future and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, as was that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernatural machinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims or else is worthless . . . What is called mysticism is a certain genial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mystic smiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force of his insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision, but he is each of these things in vacuo, and in the absence of any object . . . The Life of Reason, in so far as it is life, contains the mystic's primordial assurances, and his rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a manycoloured and natural happiness.

George Santayana

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