1. Problems with
religious news
Have you heard the latest religious news?
I don’t mean reports on the failings of religious
institutions and their representatives. I mean news about the sacred, and its
effect on humanity.
No, I’m not talking about the latest apparition on a
refrigerator or taco shell. In such cases the news is only that some people
interpreted some natural phenomenon as having religious significance.
Journalistic fact-checking doesn’t extend to proving or disproving the miracle.
Science may not be able to explain it – science can’t explain a lot of things,
like why a particular potato resembles Abraham Lincoln. But this does nothing
to clarify or validate the religious significance of the event in question.
Take for example the dolphins who helped Elian Gonzalez
get to Florida. Peggy Noonan chided then-President Clinton for not seeing their
behavior as a sign from God. But aside from reporting on what is known about
dolphins and their proclivity for rescuing humans, the journalist can only note
the political implications of such religious claims (Noonan didn’t want Elian
sent back to Cuba), not their truth or falsity.
It can’t be news that God or Allah chose a side in the
latest war, because the primary evidence for His/Her choice is just: which side
wins. It might seem more convincing if the winner had been an underdog, but
even when the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem, hindsight reveals that it’s still
part of God’s plan. Prophecies before the fact can’t be distinguished from
propaganda; and when the dust settles, winners and losers will each draw their
own conclusions.
Nor do things get easier when dealing with individuals,
despite the fact that religion is often said to be a personal matter. The
journalist has no way of distinguishing the God-intoxicated from the insane.
She cannot, for example, assess the validity of religious conversions
experienced by criminal defendants or candidates for public office.
The bottom line is that the journalist cannot use
religious language, only mention it.
2. News in science and
religion
So
religion is regarded from a perspective outside religion – a perspective from
which news is expected. The way to do this is to look at the connections
between religion and science.
One
kind of connection involves the scientific assessment of religious beliefs.
Here the relationship often appears rather hostile. On the one hand myth,
poetry and legend are treated as mere historical reports, and are of course
found to be false. On the other hand, the same literal-minded readings lead
“believers” to attack science itself, and to demand that it be harmonized with
religious literature.
Contemporary
archaeology and cosmology notwithstanding, the important “news” here is already
a few centuries old:
Moses
still didn’t write the Torah
Human
beings still didn’t come into existence on the 7th day
Another kind of connection involves looking at the paradoxical aspects of certain scientific theories, giving them a metaphysical interpretation, and then associating this interpretation with religious motifs. Quantum physics and relativity are ideal for this exercise, and have inspired Capra, Zukav and countless others.
But you get only so much edification from seeing how science conflicts with common sense, and this limited epiphany is much the same whether the science concerns the movement of the earth, the microscopic world, quantum non-locality or the nature of fire. (Religion conflicts with common sense in a different way: it wants to change our habitual feelings and behavior.)
And
there is meager relevance in focusing on the limits of science. The fact that
contemporary physics posits a sort of beginning to the universe causes many a
writer, such as Gregg Easterbrook in his recent “The New Convergence”[1],
to rehearse Kant’s paradox, according to which neither a beginning nor a lack
of a beginning of the world is ultimately intelligible. Similarly, John Horgan
in “Between Science and Spirituality”[2],
claims that modern physics has rediscovered the “miraculousness” of existence. However, to those who are familiar with the history of
philosophy, his report only confirms a
lack of progress since the 17th century on Leibniz’s question “Why is there
something rather than nothing?” In both cases the implication is that since
contemporary physics hasn’t advanced beyond Kant or Leibniz (we might as well
add Plato and Aristotle), the religious doctrine of creation doesn’t look so
bad. Science and religion are said to converge in mystic wonder.
Here
a lack of news is naively presented as news, and the absence of
knowledge is presented as agreement. But at least the headline is encouraging:
A third kind of connection
not only evokes an affinity between science and religion, it promises real
progress, if not a new age, resulting from their convergence. John Brockman is a recent
example[3]
of those who imagine a convergence of the arts and sciences, and thus the emergence
of a scientific humanism that would succeed where religion has failed. Brockman
feels that there is a natural scientific optimism which must overcome the
pessimism of academic cultural studies, and he grounds this optimism in the progressive
character of science. Humanists, he thinks, need to abandon their utopias and
derive their hope from this real, measurable progress. They only need to
subject the concepts and experiences of their domains to rigorous analysis and
empirical testing, and they too can enjoy progress. This is most exciting when
contemplated in connection with the ultimate questions of human value and
purpose, which most humans pursue in religious terms.
But
is any of this new hope new, or even plausible? I don’t think so.
The
attempted reduction of the humanities to science has been going on for
hundreds, if not thousands of years, notwithstanding all the philosophers who
see it as reducing apples to oranges. In fact, the famous vacuousness of some
late-20th century humanities professors was due, in most cases, from
just such attempts – from inappropriately dressing their language in the forms
of research programs, methodologies, technical vocabularies and so forth.
The
convergence of science and religion finds its most concrete expression in the
application of technology to religious experience; but here again the news is
not new, only a familiar promise. Drugs, biofeedback, sensory deprivation
chambers, and all the technologies of enlightenment invested with such hope in
the 1960’s, have so far been great disappointments when it comes to the mass
propagation of spiritual understanding. There is no reason to think that
bioengineering or information technology can make a fundamental difference.
Getting someone to temporarily feel like a saint doesn’t mean she will act like
one. Learning to push more buttons in the brain doesn’t tell us what it should
mean to be human.
In
short, there is no technique for living a valuable life, and spiritual
insight is not a kind of information. The headline
Religion
to get scientific
just won’t wash.
It isn’t that religion
forms a special domain of knowledge that science can’t invade; it’s that
religious understanding isn’t knowledge at all, in the sense
corresponding to causal explanation. Religion doesn’t talk about God in
anything like the way in which physics talks about atoms and gravity. Religious
understanding is practical rather than theoretical, and spiritual education is
more like the apprenticeship of an artist than the study of math or science.
And
that’s why the notion of progress, so essential to science and to the
journalistic appetite, doesn’t really apply to religion. Science progresses
because every individual achievement, even those requiring great genius, can be
passed on almost for free. Neither the engineer who exploits it nor the
scientist who builds upon it has to make the same effort as its discoverer. A
high school student can absorb thousands of facts and principles, each of which
cost someone a lifetime of toil.
But
spiritual insight is not transmitted nearly so cheaply. For it involves moral
as well as intellectual education – the training of habits and feelings as well
as thinking. The years of discipline invested by the teacher can only be
inherited by the students through an equal expenditure on their part.
Memorizing formulas and learning concepts isn’t enough. It’s about personal
priorities and perspective – seeing the Big Picture. It’s about maturity and
acceptance of reality. And religious morality makes infinite, open-ended
demands which guarantee that their pursuit will be a lifelong process.
This
accords with Aristotle’s statement that a truly happy and valuable life can
only be judged as such when it is completed. Ultimate value is not a momentary
phenomenon, but pertains to processes and journeys, to whole lives and
communities. The pursuit of ultimate value is ever-changing, and has unique
features for every generation and individual.
Much more than the
question of the progress of one life or generation over another,
religion is concerned (as the Bible shows over and over) with the tendency of
succeeding generations to backslide – to fail to reach the moral heights
already achieved. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants as in science,
in religion we usually find ourselves clinging to their ankles.
Cultural and political
innovations are necessary in religion, precisely because of our tendency to
preserve the outward forms (ritual, law and belief) at the expense of the vital
insights they were meant to convey. But it’s not what’s new (the forms), it’s
what’s old (the insight) that matters.
3. Two Aspects of Religion
Let
me stress the point about spiritual insight being something different from
factual knowledge. The mistaken assumption is that science and religion are two
different ways of explaining or knowing about the world. It is this
assumption that lies behind the expectation of religious progress or news, as
well as the three ideas discussed above: that science contradicts religion,
that science and religion overlap or converge, and that religious goals can be
pursued scientifically.
The view of religion as a
science of the divine is encouraged by the widespread use of the words “belief”
and “faith” to characterize religions, as if to be religious is to hold a
certain kind of theory. (The fact that these words also carry other
connotations of trust, patience, goodwill, etc., only adds to the confusion.)
It is also encouraged by the Bible’s blending of objective history with legend
and myth.
Of course someone will
always remind us that religion is about a way of living. The question is, how
does religious language relate to religious living? Does it say “Do X because Y
and Z are true”? Or does it instead do something to affect us directly, like
comedy, drama or rhetoric?
I want to say that it is the latter – that religion is about
doing and feeling rather than knowing or believing. To the extent that this
is true, there can be no further question of overlap, convergence or conflict
between religion and science. But anyone who holds such a view has a lot of
explaining to do, for there seems to be a lot of evidence for the primacy of
belief... People pray and sacrifice because of their belief that this will
cause rain to fall or our team to win the game. People risk death because of
beliefs about the afterlife. People feel as if everything hangs on a particular
miraculous occurrence not being just a story but real – the “good news.”
All this is undeniable,
just like the existence of countless thoughts and practices so unsavory or
irrational that we don’t know whether to call them religious or just
superstitious. We need to distinguish, not exactly between religion and
superstition, but between two separate, more or less contrary forces which
together constitute religion as we know it. The philosopher Henri Bergson
called them its static and dynamic aspects[4],
which he understood as the result of independent evolutionary forces. But his
distinction is roughly the same as the traditional notion of public or exoteric
and secret or esoteric meanings attaching to the same symbols, which
implies a greater interdependence between the two perspectives. This, together
with the view of religion as lifelong education, leads me to call them simply
the naďve and the mature varieties of religious practice.
Bergson saw “static”
religion, with its mythic language and ritual, as serving primarily to unify a
community, by creating a group identity as a basis for morality. In contrast,
the impulse Bergson terms dynamic religion calls on the individual to shake off
habitual conceptions of self, and to identify with a universal society of love.
It is the religion of the saints, the mystics and the great moral exemplars –
those beacons of love and hope who persuade by their presence. It involves no
hypothesis or belief, but a direct intuition of new human possibilities. It is
the source of the ideas of egalitarianism and the universal value of human
life.
Its proponents inevitably
have only disdain for rituals understood as magic, rather than in their social
and psychological functions; for prayer as selfish demand rather than
cultivated gratitude; or for religion as theory rather than practice and
experience. For them the greatest miracle is found in the texture of everyday
life itself.
Instead of the dogmatic
positive theology of the literalists, they adhere for the most part to a
negative theology whose purpose is to reject all objectification of the divine.
While in naive religion everything is based on God’s “existence”, the mystics
insist that He is beyond existence and nonexistence – which is another way of
saying that to use “God” as the name of an object of possible knowledge is
hopelessly beside the point.
But
in the religion we encounter every day, the two aspects are thoroughly mixed
up. The same person can be motivated by the religion of love and entranced by
the religion of magic. Mythic language can serve both ends, being taken now
literally and now figuratively. The adult who takes it figuratively may yet let
her children understand it literally. And the language of justice and universal
love is easily adapted to partisanship and warfare.
Nevertheless,
for journalistic purposes, the distinction should be observed.
If you’re going to report
that science has debunked religion, don’t imply that the rug has been pulled
out from under whole traditions, throwing out the saints with the sorcerers.
Don’t apply the same standards to children and adults, to fairy tales and moral
parables.
If you’re going to report
that science and religion have converged in wonder, don’t confuse the mere lack
of an explanation with spiritual ecstasy and passion for the world, on the one
hand, or with a validation of mythology-as-science on the other. Don’t confuse
wonder with unsupported belief.
And if you’re going to
report that science is bringing progress to religion by making it into a
technical discipline… well, just don’t. You are only continuing the misguided
attempt to reduce essential spirituality to its literal-minded shadow.
Like journalists who
reduce election campaigns to the least common denominator of dollars raised by
each candidate, those who report on religion only in terms of its naďve aspect
do a disservice to the actual needs of their readers.
4. No News is Good News
Maimonides maintained that
the literal interpretations of religion are pedagogically necessary for most
people, like the candy with which one bribes a young child to study. At the
same time he considered them to be, for adults, the greatest heresy and
impediment to worship, since they lead to the view of God as a thing.
The Christian “good news”
has both senses: it is an imperative to love, dressed up as a report of
miracles. But love itself is the miracle.
Buddhism says up front
that its teachings are a vehicle to be discarded when the destination has been
reached. The cynic might call it a bait-and-switch game.
Since the initial news
never turns out to be what it seemed, the really good news comes when we
understand the irrelevance of the supernatural to the pursuit of ultimate
value. From the truly religious viewpoint, no news is good news.
But there is an analogue
in mature religion to the desire for news and progress, and a corresponding
excitement. For the religious impulse in its purest form is not content with a
conversion experience in which one’s outlook is radically changed; it requires
not just being “reborn” or “enlightened”, but being enlightened again and
again. Its moral demands require such spontaneity, creative energy and
compassion that they must always remain an ideal (at least for 99.9% of us).
Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell terms this unsatisfiable demand “moral
perfectionism”, or the impulse that makes the self in society always aim at a
new overcoming of itself, since every achievement is also a compromise. Such a
sense of vigilance, and of the uniqueness of the present, is the opposite of
mere curiosity that wants to distract itself by jumping from one new thing to
the next. The uniqueness of the present, for mature religion, lies not in a novelty
of information, but in a new chance at realizing the moral ideal.
I said that the journalist
can’t use religious language, only mention it, in the same sense that the
journalist supposedly maintains political neutrality. But is neutrality
appropriate in this area? When I said that religion is properly practical
rather than theoretical, and that God is not an object of knowledge, I was not
reporting on how most people use these words. I was taking sides with the
mature uses of religious language over the naive. I was trying to change
the popular relationship to religious language. If such a change ever came
about, it would indeed be news.
To say that God is not an
object of knowledge, that only children or the uneducated should understand
mythic language literally – and therefore that any further reports of
disagreement between science and religion should be ignored – is already to
risk political opposition. The exoteric idea that faith in authority is itself
a virtue has, naturally, always been favored by authoritarians; whereas mature
religion inevitably opposes the exploitation of religion by political power.
At the same time, the news that religion in its essence is immune to scientific criticism is unwelcome to many bright young minds. Being young, they are naturally obsessed with the unique promise of their own generation. They have no time for wisdom that’s thousands of years old, but still requires a lifetime to master. Only with experience might they begin to learn the interdependence of novelty and tradition, and understand that we depend on our cultural history as we depend on our biology and our language.
Nevertheless the autonomy
of science and religion is a matter of such consequence that it is worth
risking the opposition of both believers and skeptics.
One reason is that the
reduction of religious superstition will not be accomplished by attacking
religion, but only by making it less superstitious from within.
But the main reason is
that dissolving the literal understanding of religious language is itself a
religious task. The alleged objectivity which reduces religion to its least
common denominator – to “belief” and literalized mythology – actually works against
the interest of mature religion, and so is not really neutral. The most objective
approach would be to acknowledge the different levels of religious meaning, and
the view of religion as a process. But then one still has to choose between the
perspectives of the naďve and the mature.
So I’m breaking the news:
Science and religion are in
perfect agreement
Apparent contradictions are due to interpretations of
religious language stuck at the childish level – and
both fundamentalists and skeptical detractors are equally stuck there. The
grandeur of religion, which is the grandeur of humanity animated by love,
remains untouched by the progress of science. But those who expect real
religious news – whether from the sky, from prophets, or from evolutionary
psychology and genetics – show that they have not heard its inner message.