Religion has been on my mind recently, both because of a plethora of articles surrounding faith or more specifically the lack thereof (features on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and author/intellectual Christopher Hitchens) and also the idea of energy healing. Let's start with that. As I detailed earlier, a friend (actually the New Ager above) introduced me to "tapping," which posits that pain is the result of electrical energy blockages. Now, I'm not a medical doctor and really don't know about the electrical systems of the body, but I'm skeptical about random energy blockages. Especially because scientists haven't found them.
And then I read Alan Lightman's "Does God Exist?" (which also talks about Dawkins) on Salon, a treatise addressing the science-religion divide. Lightman begins with the Central Doctrine of science, which was new to me: "All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws are true at every time and place in the universe. " Which boils down to the fact that the laws are predictable and verifiable, even if scientists don't know all of them yet and are tweaking the ones scientists have identified. This is scientific materialism (if I'm keeping my terms straight).
If there is a God (which classical theologians define as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent), did he invent those natural laws and then take a hands-off position? Or does he function even now within those laws or perhaps counter to them through miracles? Lightman explains:
We can categorize religious beliefs according to the degree to which God acts in the world. At one extreme is atheism: God does not exist, period. Next comes deism, a prominent belief in the 17th and 18th centuries and partly motivated to incorporate new scientific developments with theological thinking. Deism holds that God created the universe but has not acted thereafter. (Voltaire considered himself a deist.) Next comes immanentism: God created the universe and the physical laws and continues to act but only through repeated application of those fixed laws. While immanentism differs philosophically from deism, it is functionally equivalent because God does not perform miracles in the world, and the Central Doctrine of science is upheld. One can argue that Einstein believed in an immanentist God. Finally comes what some theologians call interventionism: From time to time, God can and does act to violate the laws.
Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God. Following the discussion above, all of these religions, at least in their orthodox expressions, are incompatible with science. This is as far as one gets with a purely logical analysis. Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other Gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
So, where do I fall on this spectrum? Well, beginning with the classical definition of God, I don't actually believe in him. And so I often have called myself an atheist. Except as I grow and grow older, I find this term doesn't fit exactly. I realize that the answers to the questions of the universe are unknowable to me and that this fact might actually define and enrich our human paths. Am I prepared to say that nothing exists beyond what science tells us? No, because I believe, in many ways, that science is in its infancy of understanding the universe: as I understand it, science can name and can sometimes describe processes but cannot always identify cause or make predictions. It's like the toddler who can make the "moo" of a cow but doesn't understand much more than that. Take margarine, for example: for years, it was a healthy safe substance; now it's not. Science hadn't gotten it right the first time. Same with fen phen. Or HRT. Or Pluto. Acknowledging Lambeth's objections before he posts, I'm not downplaying science's contributions (like penicillin and vaccinations and artificial hips), just pointing to some weaknesses.
Will science find a way to identify those electronic energy blockages? Or ghosts? Or miracles? Or the human soul?
Or do they just not exist?
With my exploration of alternative healing, my burgeoning distrust of some aspects of science and specifically Western medicine, my continued study of Buddhism, my personal exploration of prayer, I am more agnostic than atheist. But I'm still perhaps too much of a materialist, caught between science and religion, because I almost automatically doubt and distrust non-scientific answers in the beginning and cannot easily accept otherwise (like energy healing and ghosts and heaven). I wish I didn't need it, but I like proof or at least reasonable or rational answers (even if I question the institutions and academics who provide them). I don't have faith, if that is the belief in that which cannot be proven.
However, I do like his alternative definition of faith:
Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.This is a kind of faith I can have, more hope than proof.
Lightman posits that, while scientists are obsessed with the "well-posed problem" that can eventually be answered because it is posed with such clarity and specificity, artists and humanists don't care about such problems, seeing that there are either no answers or multiple answers to the big questions. Questions like "why are we here?" and "what is the meaning of life?" The questions are the point. Not surprisingly, I am starting to fall in line more with this view of the world than the scientific one, even if answers that fly in the face of science are still very discomforting to me. But I am coming to understand that there is more in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of in my philosophy.
