Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part three

This is a continuation of insights that I wrote in my daily journal back in 2005, as I tried to navigate a transition from doctrinal Christianity to a Christian-spirituality-agnosticism.

But if God is in me, as in all creation, he is experiencing creation. He is in me in a way he is not in a rock, because in me he experiences consciousness. As I continued on 24 January 2005, if God pervades all of nature, “occasionally tendrils of the holy come together, coalesce, react, sprout into phenomena that deny explanation…All I know is that music and color and science are all more beautiful than we have any right to expect.” The next month I wrote, God pervades everything but does not actually cause anything in the Newtonian sense.

At the same time, I admitted the truth of agnosticism: “All of conservative Christianity is a scab that hides true religion and, in order to prevent the scab itself from being shed, doctrinal Christianity prevents healing.” It keeps you scratching at the wound. It keeps you going to church, instead of healing your mind and returning to clear and happy thought. “Religion is the great fester on the sick body of humanity.

“There is both senseless chaos and blessed order in the world. There is frightful chaos that is not God’s will…Each day we must reaffirm whether we concentrate on the beauty or on the terror. I have several reasons for choosing the beautiful. First, if I cannot be sure there is no God, then I assume there is. Second, our evolution has made us religious, and the mind requires some kind of religion just as the body requires vitamin C, so I might as well choose a healthy religion. Third, it is deeply, not intermittently, pleasurable to have a good religion. Just as our eyes and mind create a model of the world, with things such as color that are not really there, so our minds create religious order.

“…I swim through a reality of God’s thick presence. Thick light, the antithesis of Thick Darkness. [I am not sure what this means. But I just like the imagery. It helps me live. The Bible in several places used the imagery of thick darkness, the kind of foggy darkness through which you cannot even see a ray of distant light. I wrote a series of novels with this name. Thick light is the kind of light in which you cannot see the light source, but it is all around you.]

“Religion is a coping mechanism. We can face disasters but not chaos. The question Can I trust the world requires a religious, rather than a scientific, answer…We must simultaneously admit suffering yet affirm the good in the world. The mother telling the child everything will be all right, and religion telling us the same thing: both are equally truth or lie. No one would think of censuring the consoling mother.

“…the pursuit of goodness and love is worth it, even if no one ever hears a heavenly voice saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”

John Muir's Spirituality

This is a short entry to bring back to our remembrance the kind of spirituality that John Muir had. His spirituality would not be well-defined enough to satisfy modern creationists. Yet these same creationists seem to care nothing at all about what they consider to be God’s creation. It is the people that these creationists hate that truly love the Creation.

I quote from Wikipedia: In a letter to his fond friend Emily Pelton, dated 23 May 1865, he wrote, “I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord... without leaving any consciousness of loss.” Elsewhere in his writings, he described the conventional image of a Creator, “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.”

Muir remained, though, a deeply religious man, writing, “We all flow from one fountain—Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

Evolutionary Advantages of Religion for the Human Species

Something as apparently dysfunctional as fundamentalist religion would seem to have nothing to contribute to evolutionary success. But clearly any tribe that had a stronger religion could prevail in war over a tribe with less religious zeal. A tribe of religious zealots could always whip a tribe of religious philosophers, the Stone Age version of Unitarians and Quakers. All of the people in the prevailing tribe, and all of the genes in their bodies, would likewise benefit.

And there is another possible reason that religious memes have proliferated. The human mind desires the experience of beauty. While religion memes have fed the worst of human feelings and actions, it has also fed the best of them. We have a natural, and probably irresistible, passion for the beauty of nature, and for its green and flowering and chirping inhabitants. To scientists, this is an evolved human emotion Edward O. Wilson called "biophilia." To pagans, it is the power of the gods and goddesses of earth and forest and ocean. To monotheists, it is the presence of God within the observer. Religion is not the only medium for this feeling, but it is one of them.

It is easy to be inspired by the beauty of interesting landscapes, mountains and waterfalls and soaring birds and leaping whales and teeming jungles (so long as you are not actually walking through them and swatting the mosquitoes and pulling off leaches that fall on you like rain). But biophilia is an important force in helping people to love the places that are hard to live in. Consider these examples.

I taught a class at a field station one summer. One of my students was a young lady who grew up in western Kansas. The entire landscape of western Kansas is utterly flat and is devoted entirely to wheat. Granted, there are beautiful places in Kansas, but this was not one of them. I had just driven through this young woman's hometown to arrive at the field station. She said, regarding western Kansas, that it was the most beautiful place in the world.

I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which was beautiful at one time, before all of its natural wetlands were drained and almost all of its oak forests were cut down in the twentieth century, transforming it into farmland. In my childhood it seemed inexpressibly beautiful. It is a feeling I still get, if only a little, whenever I visit it.

Before we dismiss believing in the beauty of western Kansas or the San Joaquin Valley as delusion, let us briefly consider what humans have had to endure. Much human misery has come from the seeming indifference or even hostility of the environment. Floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts. But the successful humans were those that loved their lands zealously, no matter what nature did to them, and endured. Their religious memes may have told them that there were evil spirits in the storm winds, but the Great Spirit prevails to make the world into a cosmos in which we can continue to live. We love the land in which we grow up. This is biophilia. Biophilia has been one of our adaptations to survival. Enshrined within the memes of some religions, biophilia has helped to keep us going.

This essay is part of my new book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published by Prometheus Books.

The Evolution of Religion: What Is Next?

Religion is not a single thing. It is a complex set of things. What form it will take in the human future depends on which of its components come to dominate it.

Religion consists of a set of doctrines, as well as spiritual feelings and experiences. Spirituality, based directly on human experiences, will probably continue forever. Our brains have experiences such as the following, which I listed in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: ecstasy; loss of awareness of having a defined body; altruism; need for an authority figure; awareness of death; and belief that phenomena are caused by invisible persons. It is likely that each of these is caused by a particular brain function. They will never go away, except perhaps over a longer period of time than human civilization has yet existed; and we will probably always interpret them as spiritual experiences.

But the doctrines are memes. They are culturally transmitted. However unlikely it seems at the moment, these memes can die away quickly, over a very few generations. I do not expect many of them to die away, but I can at least hope that the more oppressive and destructive of them will become extinct. For example, the idea that God will send most people who have ever lived to a hell in which they will experience conscious eternal torture. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that it is acceptable to torture or harm other people. Another example: the idea that God has given our religious group the unique truth, and has not given it to anyone else. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that they can sweep aside other religious groups by whatever means necessary. The time for belief in God as Supreme Torturer and Dispenser of Unique Truth to Fundamentalists Who Can Enforce It (whether in Christian or Muslim garb) must end as speedily as possible. We should oppose these ideas vigorously and without interruption for as long as it takes to ensure their memetic extinction. One of the best ways to do this is just to educate people—about evolution and about the brain chemistry basis of our thoughts, for example.

And when we do so, should we happen to succeed at some point long after my life is over, what will we have? Perhaps, primarily, we will have spirituality—people who worship God by feeling the inspiration of nature and by living by the Golden Rule. People who think and act the way Jesus did when he was out in the hills. The component of religion that makes people better, not worse. This may be impossible, but it is a future worth working for.

This essay will also appear on my evolution blog.