What If It's Not About Belief? Part I

In the exercise of mystical contemplation leave behind the senses and the activities of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual... that thou mayest arrive, as far as thou mayest, by unknowing, towards union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge.
- Dionysius, Mystical Theology

[W]hile the soul is self-recollected and forgetful of all things, it is then prepared for the inflowing and teaching of the Holy Ghost, who will withdraw Himself from thoughts that are without understanding.
- St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel

The mystic does not claim that one way of comprehending reality, of being at home in the universe, is superior to the other. He claims rather that for his fullest humanhood, a person needs both.
- Lawrence LeShan, How to Meditate

We've been watching this short BBC series called The Atheism Tapes, which is a collection of interviews conducted by Jonathan Miller with various distinguished British and American atheists. Richard Dawkins is of course on there, as well as my philosophical living hero Daniel Dennett. Arthur Miller too, interestingly enough.

It's of course fascinating, and we haven't watched all of them yet, but I find myself already wondering why these outspoken atheists never seem to have any sympathy whatsoever towards a way of looking at things that I guess I would call spiritual. Why is a rational, empirical point of view the be-all and end-all for them with regard to any sphere you can think of?

It's not that I disagree with them, exactly. I think they're perfectly right that: 1) the idea of God is redundant and inferior to other ideas as either an explanatory or a moral guide, 2) there are in fact many good reasons to disbelieve in the idea of Him, and especially 3) organized religion has been and continues to be a very dangerous element in our culture. But I also think there's a baby somewhere in there whom they're overlooking in the zeal of their bathwater disposal, filthy though the water may be.

Being both a science-loving atheist and one who has had profound, transformative spiritual experiences, I'm always looking for ways to reconcile these two aspects of myself. Is it not possible to be level-headed and logical without closing oneself off to aspects of human life that transcend rationality? Or, conversely, can I not embrace a mystical attitude without slipping necessarily and hopelessly into the realm of fuzzy thinking? I'm quite certain that the answer is yes; that reason and spirituality CAN be reconciled without watering down either one, though each may have to give up some of what it perceives as its domain.

Unfortunately, there are surprisingly few thinkers in the history of our culture who have had anything very useful to say about such a reconciliation. Certain scientists (Darwin, notably), after publishing theories that are so powerful in their explanatory powers as to be ostensible nails in God's coffin, have gone on to say that it is of course thanks to God's infinite wisdom that our universe works in such a nice, elegantly predictable way. Or other, similarly unconvincing things. No one really believes these footnotes any more than the scientists who write them do.

Then on the other side are the sort of new age spiritualists who try to incorporate scientific ideas in their kooky, acausal views of the universe. Especially quantum physics. Fair enough, I guess — the principles of quantum mechanics are famously weird and unintuitive, and no one seems ever to have come up with a good way of imagining exactly how the heck they work, even though everyone agrees that they do work. So why not hitch your particular God wagon to them in order to lend it some seemingly rational credibility? Well, it turns out that whatever affinities with their personal brand of kookiness the spiritualists find in physics are usually completely metaphorical, and usually based on a very poor understanding of what the theory of quantum mechanics does and does not actually say. It's interesting that Albert Einstein — a noted atheist, mind you, or at least agnostic — could never bring himself to believe in quantum mechanics precisely because it ran so contrary to his intuitions about how God runs the universe.

Two people I can think of who do have interesting and spiritually enlightened things to say about religion as seen from a scientific viewpoint are William James and Joseph Campbell. The former I already raved about on this very blog a little over a year ago. The latter is an American comparative mythologist who mapped out most of the world's known religions and myths, past and present, taking a sort of psycho-anthropological interest that was objective enough to be non-judgmental, without being so objective as to sterilize exactly what is interesting about the subject matter, i.e. the unscientific "truths" and mystical states of being that are to be gained by partaking in the rituals and legend systems in question. It's actually a very similar stance to that taken by James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Campbell gained a lot of posthumous notoriety from a series of interviews with Bill Moyers that aired on PBS in the late '80's, called The Power of Myth (plus a companion book of the same name that came out a bit later). Although I was somewhat familiar with his work, I didn't see the series at the time. But Alison and I rented and watched it on DVD just before picking up The Atheism Tapes. It got me and my capricious brain all worked up, hearing someone speak so rationally about what is essentially an irrational — or maybe "pre-rational" would be a better word — aspect of human nature: the urge to commune with the infinite, unknowable mystery behind all being.

It's an urge the militant atheists would classify simply as "curiosity." They would also say about it that although it can never be completely quenched, it's a fortunate result of evolution because it causes our species to engage in such noble pursuits as logic and philosophy and, of course, science. They would be wrong, as any theist will tell you, but why can't they see how simplistic and uncharitable a portrait they're painting of religious belief? If you want to attack what you see as a dangerous and widespread element of society, shouldn't you follow Sun Tzu's advice and "know thy enemy" as deeply and accurately as possible, especially if you have a super-intelligent brain capable of understanding and utilizing complex, subtle scientific and philosophical concepts?

I actually think the atheist brigade misunderstands this aspect of theism — which I am inclined to see as the most important and universal of all its various and mostly insane aspects — only because they themselves have never had anything resembling a deeply spiritual experience. I think they think they have, when they've marveled at the size of the universe or the complexity of an ant colony. But I doubt that they have ever had the feeling thrust upon them that "we are all part of one another and a part of the cosmos and that our separation, our alienation from each other, is illusion." [Lawrence LeShan, How to Meditate] If they had, how could they so seriously undervalue the urge to see things that way more often?

Here's how the 13th century nun, Angela of Foligno expresses the type of experience I'm talking about:

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, whereby I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine Power in a manner assuredly indescribable, so that through excess of marveling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying: "This world is full of God!"

Plotinus, in the First Ennead, says,

One that shall know this vision, with what passion of love shall he be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This! ... This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to beauty, and makes them also worthy of love.

This is no mere satisfaction of curiosity these people are talking about. It's more like direct apprehension of some kind of profound and previously unseen Truth, although we have to be really careful with that word, because it leads to the same impasse I'm trying to work my way around or through here. If someone says they have discovered a truth, then it's reasonable for another person to ask what exactly has been discovered and how it can be proven true. For the first person to then claim that this particular truth is personal and incommunicable seems like a cheat in the game of truth and knowledge, and you end up with two people who don't understand each other, each thinking the other is a complete fool.

But there is definitely some kind of very important experience that these people and countless others in human history have been fortunate enough to have — one which we can't just chuck out as invalid because we haven't had it ourselves and so don't understand what it could be like. The immediacy, inexpressibility, and personal quality of such an experience make it akin to an aesthetic one, or to that of falling in love, but with the work of art or lover in this case being the entire universe.

I'll revisit the analogy between religion and aesthetics a little later, because I think it's a particularly rich one, but for now let me just point out that the possibility of a relationship with God being something like this is actually admitted by Richard Dawkins. He brings it up towards the end of his Atheism Tapes interview, and it's the closest in the series that any of the titular atheists gets to real sympathy for their enemies, the theists. Unfortunately, he then says that theism of a sophisticated variety like this does not truly count as religion, in the usual sense of the term, and that anyone trying to smuggle God in through the door of mystical wonder is merely "playing with words." In fact, he would argue that the type of wonder scientists feel when contemplating the complexity of their subject matter is probably more profound than any that can be gotten through traditional methods of mysticism.

Why are these hard-nosed scientists so, well, hard-nosed? Why does their innate curiosity suddenly dry up when they approach anything resembling a subtle, personal understanding of the world that may not be completely expressible, but is nonetheless intensely gratifying and possibly invaluable to its owner? Why are they driven to categorize such an understanding in scientifically arguable terms, and to dismiss it as meaningless when it resists such categorization?

I think I might know...

(To be continued.)