Ross Douthat
08/19/2021 18:32
Clarín.com
The New York Times International Weekly
Updated 08/19/2021 6:32 PM
"If appreciating some of the ideas in the 'Confessions' of St. Augustine were enough to be a Christian, then I would be a Christian," a friend told me a few years ago.
But believe in a God?
Believe in
miracles?
I still can't get to that level ”.
Whenever I write about the
decline of
organized
religion
in America, I receive many emails expressing some version of this sentiment.
Illustration by Kenji Aoki / The New York Times.
Sometimes it is expressed in the form of pitiful disbelief:
I would gladly return to church, except for one small detail: we all know that God does not exist.
Sometimes it's a friendly challenge: Alright clever boy, what should I read to convince myself that you are right about the fairy from the sky?
So this is an essay for those readers:
a suggested plan for reasoning
a path to religious belief.
However, it may not be the plan they are hoping for.
Many
highly educated people
who hang around the door of a church or a synagogue are like my friend who reads St. Augustine.
They relate to religion on a community or
philosophical level
.
They want to pass on a clear ethical legacy to their children.
They find
certain godly writers
interesting or inspiring
, believing that the biblical cadences of the civil rights era are more poignant than secular defenses of equality or liberty.
However, it is difficult for them to take the
leap of faith, to
reach a state where the supernatural parts become credible and are granted the grace to accept the impossible.
For some, this difficulty only leads to
disbelief
.
For others, it can be an encouragement to act like they believe, to pray and practice, to sing hymns or follow kosher guidelines and wait for God to grant them full faith.
This is the advice they often get from their religious friends:
Treat
piety as
an act of will
and
in defiance of reasoning faculties, and you will see what happens next.
I have given that advice myself.
But there is another way of approaching religious belief, more difficult in some ways, but easier in others.
Instead of beginning by praying or practicing faith as a challenge to the intellect, one could begin by questioning the assumption that it is really so difficult, so impossible, to give credence to God's ideas and accounts of supernatural events.
The “new atheist” philosopher
Daniel Dennett
once wrote a book called “
Breaking the Spell,”
the title of which implies that religious faith prevents believers from seeing the world clearly.
But what if atheism is actually
bias
against evidence?
In that case, the title of Dennett's book is actually a good way to describe the materialistic biases of secular culture.
They are like a spell that has been cast on modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to
break it
.
So let's give it a try.
Imagine yourself in the past, in a time - ancient, medieval, before
Darwin
- when you thought it made sense for an intelligent person to believe in God.
Now consider why your historical self might have been religious:
not because "the world is flat" or "Genesis is an excellent biology textbook" (claims you won't find in the work of St. Augustine), but because religious ideas seemed to provide an
explanation
for the most important characteristics of the reality.
First, the idea that the universe was created with
intention, intelligence, and even love
explained why the world you were in had the appearance of something created:
not only orderly, subject to laws, and filled with complex systems necessary for human life, but also vivid, beautiful, and astonishing in a way that resembles, and at the same time exceeds, the human capacity for art.
Second, the idea that human beings are made, in a way, in the image of the creator of the universe explained why your own relationship with the world was especially strange.
Your 4th or 14th century self was obviously part of nature, an incarnated creature in an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to be outside of it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, a vision almost like that of God, constantly analyzing, tweaking, appreciating, issuing a moral judgment.
Lastly, the common religious assumption that humans are material creatures connected to a
supernatural
plane
explained why your world contained so many signs of a higher order of reality, the incredible variety of experiences described as "mystical" or "numinous", unsettling or terrifying, or just downright bizarre, ranging from basic feelings of unity and universal love to strange events on the threshold of death, to encounters with beings humans may name (gods and demons, ghosts and fairies), but that they never fully understand.
Did you understand all that?
Assumptions
Good.
Now consider the possibility that in our own supposedly disenchanted era, after
Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein,
all of that is still true.
I am not claiming that 500 years of scientific progress has left the world's great religions intact or unquestioned.
The Copernican revolution overthrew a medieval cosmology with a more orderly celestial hierarchy than ours.
Darwinism created as yet unsolved problems for the Christian doctrine of the fall of man.
Many events that seem supernatural now have a purely material explanation.
And the modern experience of globalization has had an inevitable relativizing effect, reducing confidence in the exclusive claims of any faith to the truth.
However, there are also important ways in which the progress of science and the experience of modernity have reinforced the reasons for considering
the idea of God
.
The great project of modern physics, for example, has led to speculation about a
multiverse
in part because it has repeatedly confirmed the strange suitability of our universe for human life.
If science has debunked certain specific ideas about how God structured the natural world, it has also made the mathematical beauty of physical laws, as well as their apparent calibration for the emergence of life, much clearer to us than they were. for people 500 years ago.
Similarly, remarkable advances in neuroscience have only exacerbated the "difficult problem" of consciousness:
the difficulty of figuring out how physical processes alone could create the lived reality of conscious life, from the simple experience of color to the complexities of reasoned thinking.
So remarkable is the failure to uncover consciousness in our dissected tissue that certain materialists, like Dennett, have clung to the idea that both conscious experience and the self must be basically illusions.
Thus, the self that we identify as
"Daniel Dennett"
does not really exist, even though that same illusory self has somehow discovered the true nature of reality.
This idea, like the belief in a multiverse of infinite realities, requires a leap of faith.
Both seem less parsimonious, less immediately reasonable, than the traditional religious assumption that mind precedes matter, as the mind of God precedes the universe ... that precise calibrations of physical reality and the irreducibility of personal experience are proof that
consciousness came first.
In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long history of successful efforts to understand the material world — also serves as proof that our minds have
something in common
with the mind that designed the universe.
As much as religious believers (and non-believers) may be concerned with the confidence with which our modern technologists play God, the fact that humans can play God is quite strange, and a better reason to think that we are made in the image and likeness of God from what was believed in the Middle Ages.
I think there is some confusion on this last point among scientists.
Since their discipline advances by assuming that coherent laws, and not miracles, explain most features of reality, they consider that the process through which the universe is explained and understood perpetually diminishes the importance of the God hypothesis.
However, the God hypothesis is constantly vindicated by the understandability of the universe and the ability of our logic to unravel its many secrets.
In fact, there is a quietly theistic assumption in the entire scientific project.
As David Bentley Hart says in his book "
The Experience of God"
:
"We assume that the human mind can be a true mirror of objective reality because we assume that objective reality is already a mirror of the mind."
The resistance of religious theories corresponds to the resistance of religious experience.
The disenchantment of the modern world is a myth of the
intelligentsia
: it never really happened.
Instead, throughout the centuries-long process of secularization, the decline in political power, and the cultural prestige of religion, people continued to have near-death experiences, demonic visitations, and mind-blowing divine encounters.
They only lost the
religious structures
through which those experiences were interpreted.
If we read the recent account of the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth of his pilgrimage from disbelief to Christianity, through Zen Buddhism and Wicca, we will find a story of mysterious events that would fit perfectly in the late Roman world in which Christianity took shape .
Except back then he might have been a Platonist instead of a Buddhist.
Or we can read "Living With a Wild God" by Barbara Ehrenreich, a memoir by a hardened skeptic of organized religion, which describes
mystical experiences
that came to her spontaneously, with a biblical mix of
wonder, terror and mystery.
"It was a furious encounter with a living substance that came to me through all things at once," Ehrenreich writes.
"One of the reasons behind the terrible lack of words for the experience is that you can't really look at the fire up close without becoming a part of it."
Thus, lightning from heaven continues to strike both non-believers and believers.
The unbeliever is more likely to be puzzled by what it might mean, or to be more resistant, as Ehrenreich continues to do, to the claim that it should point to the idea of God of any particular religion.
The same is true of experiences that appear to be spells and possessions, psychic or premonitory events, or brushes with the strange "tricksters" that used to be read as fairies and are now interpreted, in the light of science fiction and the space age, as aliens.
In the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth or fourteenth, they continue to occur, often enough that even the intelligentsia cannot completely ignore them:
Read about ghosts in
The London Review of Books
and Elle Magazine;
accounts of strange psychic phenomena can be found in the pages of The New Yorker.
You could see this resistance in the 19th century, when Protestant belief weakened, but seances and mediums rushed in.
It can be seen today when institutional Catholicism is weakening, but the demand for exorcisms is increasing.
It is something that the secular mind now admits and actually expects.
However, if your claim is that religious experience is for the most part an error of interpretation, it is a substantial concession to recognize that it persists through ages of reason, as well as ages of faith, and endures even when cultural authorities, medical and scientific discard or dismiss it.
Similarly, when evolutionary theorists today look for a reason why people so readily believe in spiritual powers and non-human minds, they are also making a concession to the plausibility of religion, because most our evolved drives and appetites correspond directly to something in reality itself.
Of course, religion could be the exception: a desire without a real object, an uncorrelated set of experiences outside the mind, sustained by a combination of illusions, the desire of mortal creatures to believe in the imperishable, and the inevitability of the imperishable. what the debunkers of supernatural fraud sometimes call "residue," the bit of strange events that fall outside our current scope of explanation.
However, today, in secular and educated circles, any natural human desire to believe coexists with the opposite kind of pressure, that of dismissing supernatural experiences so as not to appear deceived or discredited, which in turn leads to people
underestimate
the scale and scope of such unexplained debris.
Take, for example, the case of near death experiences, which were a culturally hidden phenomenon until Raymond A. Moody began collecting testimonies in the late 1960s.
After decades of research, we know that these types of experiences are common and surprisingly congruent in certain characteristics: not only the tunnels, the bright lights and the encounters with dead family members, but also the psychological consequences, marked by a shift towards greater altruism. spirituality and cosmic optimism.
Perhaps all this is nothing more than a mental illusion (although some of its features are not exactly easy to explain by existing models of brain function), the result of some evolutionary advantage to feel at peace on the brink of death.
However, the simple fact of admitting its persistent existence is noteworthy, given how easy it is to imagine a world in which these kinds of experiences did not occur, in which no one returned from the threshold of death with a tale of light that whether his life was changed and he was infused with love or in which the experiences of the dying were just a random dreamlike jumble.
In such a world, that absence would be a pretty telling argument against religion: You say we should expect some kind of spiritual survival after death, but people approaching the door only see Livia Soprano's "big nothing."
But then making an investment is also a fair thing: in this world, where such experiences happen in a perceptible way, they must be considered as a point in favor of taking religion seriously.
And if you read fully and with an open mind, I promise you, those kinds of points add up.
All of which amounts to saying that the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents considerable evidence of an original intelligence that presides over a world subject to laws and well done for our minds to understand, and at the same time , of a panoply of spiritual forces that seem to intervene in an unpredictable way in our existence.
That combination fits reasonably well with the cosmology offered by many of the world's major religions, from Christianity, with its creator God who exists outside of space and time, and its ministering angels and holy intercessors, to Hinduism, with its singular divinity that finds incarnation in a pantheon of gods.
Almost as if the ancient creeds had always had a somewhat plausible understanding of reality.
But wait, you say: since Hinduism and Christianity are quite different, perhaps this attempt to break the spell will not get us very far.
Postulating an uncreated divine intelligence or ultimate reality doesn't tell us much about what God wants from us.
Assuming an active spiritual realm does not show that we should all return to church, especially if these experiences appear cross-culturally, which means that they do not confirm any specific dogma.
And you have not addressed all the important problems of religion: what about the problem of evil?
What about the way institutional faith is used to oppress and shame people?
Why not deism instead of theism, or pantheism instead of either?
These are fair questions, but this essay is not titled:
"How to become a Presbyterian" or "How to know which faith is true."
The decipherment I offer here is a beginning, not an end.
Create an obligation without saying how exactly to fulfill it.
It opens the door to other discussions, between and within religious traditions, that are not easy to resolve.
The difficulties of those ancient arguments - along with the challenge of dealing with religion as it is embodied, in faulty people and institutions - are a large part of what keeps the spell of materialism intact.
For finite and suffering creatures, religious belief offers important kinds of hope and comfort.
But disbelief has its own consolations: it takes a vast area of ideas and arguments, practices and demands, supernatural dangers and metaphysical complexities, and whispers:
Well, at least you don't have to spend time thinking about it.
But actually you do.
So if you find yourself on the uncertain threshold of whatever faith tradition you feel closest to, you don't have to heed the inner voice that insists that it is necessarily more reasonable, sensible, and modern to step back.
Instead, you can acknowledge that reality may not be as materialism describes it, and take on the obligation of a serious human being preparing for life and death alike: move forward, step forward.
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