Dorothy Day, John Leary, and theology from below

As marvelously explained by my good friend Bob LaSalle, Jon Sobrino is a Salvadoran Jesuit and theologian. Sobrino suggests that there are two ways to do Christology—from above, and from below. I have always experienced this in a related way: that there are two approaches in Christianity.

            One type is based on the resurrection, and on triumph. It emphasizes victory over this world, and emphasizes Christ, in power, ruling over creation, at God’s right hand. Because we are in Christ, we are victorious. There is much emphasis on Pauline teaching. This way is often related to evangelical Christianity today. The other way emphasizes the cross, Jesus the Galilian and his life, and solidarity with the poor and lowly. I have been on both ways.

Indeed, when I was a teenager and a young adult, I was attracted to the Charismatic and Evangelical ways, and this way of victory. As a high school student, in the early 1970’s, I was deeply involved with a Catholic Charismatic group. I attended prayer meetings, read the Bible daily, spoke in tongues, and participated in laying on of hands for healing of myself and others. I made good friends there, and felt great joy and belonging. In college, I participated in an Inter-Varsity fellowship group, an evangelical Protestant group. I again met wonderful people there, and found much consolation. I still have much affection for the evangelical Christian communities: their warmth, their convictions, their commitment to living in charity and morality, their good cheer, their love of Scripture, their commitment to prayer, and their soaring music.

            In the end, however, I left this approach to Christianity. I think this was provoked in part by my experience of a major depressive episode when I was in college. I remained pretty depressed for a couple of years. In that context, I found no comfort in the faith that I knew; the high Christology left me alone and feeling somewhat abandoned. It too easily, for my comfort, became Puritanism (or a reflection of the old “Protestant work ethic”) at least for me. The Puritans or the Protestants developed the idea that one could judge whether someone was elected for salvation by their way of life; frugal, hard working, and then, by a slippery slope of thought, by whether they were prosperous[1].

This view, in the hands of some evangelical members, slipped into a simple sense that our earthly fate reflects whether we are “right with God.” Putting it bluntly, if we are right with God, things go well. If we are not right with God, things do not go well. This type of thinking, while not necessarily the original intent (or maybe it was, I don’t know), is too easily taken up. It is plain wrong, for its aim is to discern the spirit of God in others, but Christ already told us how to do that: the fruits of the spirit are joy, love, healing…not worldly success or failure.

Anyway, for me, this implication became exclusionary, alienating. I prayed all the time, I tried to do everything for God, yet I was afflicted, alone, depressed, and suffering. Like Paul, I could not evade my affliction. Thus I could not relate to or feel helped by the triumphant Christ, and instead of feeling consoled by this Christ, I only felt more alone and forgotten.

            Meantime, I was spending my time with the homeless men of Somerville, working overnight shifts in a homeless shelter near Central Square. Walking down Massachusetts Avenue late at night, for the overnight shift. The Christ of Triumph did not seem to speak to this group of people, or to be something I could offer them, either. The guys in college with me at  Harvard who shared that passion for the homeless with me had names like John Leary and Brian Fallon; Irish Catholics who seemed to me to live what they believed. Brian went on to become a psychiatrist and I lost touch with him, to my sorrow; he married Jenny, whose last name I omit, who was delightful. John Leary was a classmate and he and I became friends and brothers. John started the Amnesty International chapter at Harvard. Together, we’d visit Haley House, the Boston Catholic Worker. John eventually helped that community rebuild and lived there for awhile during his five years at Harvard (one year out doing Catholic worker stuff and going to jail for actions of civil disobedience). There weren’t many young men like John Leary. He could argue logic with anyone on any topic of religion or politics (many late nights at Harvard were taken up with such things). I never saw anyone surprise him in an argument; like a master chess player knows the chess game to come, he understood the full extent of the logic all the time—even at the age of 21. That is an unusual gift! And he understood the implications. Non-violence? What about Hitler? People would throw out these kinds of comments as though they were trump cards, only to watch John take them apart with a gentle logic. He had already thought of that. As he saw it, life had to do with courage and the willingness to suffer mightily for the truth. If we cannot use violence, then sometimes we must be prepared to die. Survival is not the ultimate priority. This usually silenced his interlocuters, the way I imagined Christ silencing the Pharisees and left them pondering their own life. Challenged by his own logic, he sometimes did brave and risky things. Things some would call foolish. Once, thinking that antinuclear protests were all too easy in large groups among sympathetic audiences in liberal suburbs, he went down alone to south Boston (a blue collar, conservative, pro-military part of Boston at that time), and held his antiwar signs there. The local toughs beat him up good. He was not surprised by that either, but he had to do it. At that time (late 1970’s), there was no right-to-life movement like there is now. There were only bitter debates between feminists defending a woman’s right to choose, and angry pro-lifers who wanted to make abortion illegal. John, and his friend Lucy O’Keefe (another Irish Catholic), disliked the pro-life movement for its condemnation of women and its violent, coercive stance. Yet they believed abortion was wrong. How to oppose it with conviction and without violence? They walked alone to an abortion clinic, sat in front of the door, and offered the women who came there a word of peace and a place to stay either to think it over or if they wanted to keep the baby. They were arrested for trespass. Nobody gentler was ever arrested for trespass than those two. Later, when big intimidating “nonviolent” blockades of clinics became the norm, Lucy wanted nothing to do with it. Neither would John if he had lived to see it. Both would certainly have condemned those who kill abortion doctors and call it good.

            John was, to me, a witness to Jesus of Galilee. Had he lived, he would eventually have been imprisoned or killed for opposing injustice. Or maybe he would have become a Malkite priest in Syria, like his friend Charlie McCarthy. As it was, John died of an arythmia at the age of 23, jogging along the streets of Boston. These days, they spot these things and they fix them before athletes die. Back then, they didn’t. I saw him a couple of months before he died. He was visiting me in Detroit, thinking about what comes next, thinking about Jean Vanier and the community of L”Arche. John died in 1982. A loss to this world that can never be described.

 Multiply that by ten thousand for any war of your choosing.

            It was then I learned a lot about the theology of the Gospel of non-violence. Charlie McCarthy was a friend of John's. He subsequently was known as Father Emmanual Charles McCarthy[2], as he was ordained in 1981 to the Eastern Byzantine Melkie Rite of Catholicism; an eastern church in communion with Rome. He influenced John much and continued for decades afterward to preach the Gospel of the non-violent Jesus. Charlie had several children but kept his income below the taxable income level, so that he would not contribute taxes to the organized and legitimated violence of the state. Charlie was influenced in turn by John L McKenzie[3]. The books he recommended, by Father McKenzie, were cogent and lucid. Jesus as a man of non-violence, who explicitly rejected the option of violence, and instead sought creative transformation—conversion—of his enemies and of conflict. In this perspective, love your enemies is not submission, it is power.

            Here is an ethic, a system of beliefs (!) that stands in direct contradiction to secular humanism, to liberal thought, to human logic. Here is a direct contradiction between “the spirit of this world” and “the spirit of God.”

Ghandi, the modern master of nonviolence, could say in the 1920’s: when faced with oppression and violence, you have three options. The weakest is to do nothing, to be passive. The next is to be violent in return. This has the considerable disadvantage of perpetuating violence forever and failing to solve the root problem, but at least you aren’t  passive or merely a victim.

The strongest is therefore, nonviolence. Transform the situation and convert the enemy. This changes the entire dynamic and is therefore the most powerful. This is what Christ was all about.

They said it couldn’t work. They still say that. And the answer is simply that the goal is not to win or to survive but holiness, and so sometimes we must be prepared to die rather than kill. But sometimes it works too. The British left India, even as Ghandi could not stop the terrible bloodshed of India’s partitioning—but maybe he would have, for he was hard into a fast to that end, had he not been assassinated by his own side for speaking generously about the Muslims. The Danes and Norwegians, I have heard it told, held out against Hitler longer than did the French, by their nonviolent non-cooperation. Solidarity brought down the communist tyranny in Poland. In each case, they suffered casualties as though they were at war, but they did no killing, and they left the world respected by all and achieving their aims.  The Egyptian revolutionaries of 2011, who so galvanized the world, brought down one of the most repressive regimes in the world by keeping control of their behavior and avoiding violence; in part because of that stance, the army soldiers would not attack them, and Mubarak fell. If the Palestinians were to adopt this stance today, world opinion would be unanimous on their side. The power of the idea would be irresistible.

            In 1933, Dorothy Day started a small project in New York City and called it The Catholic Worker. Inspired by the worker priests of France in the 1890’s, influenced by communist ideology to value the welfare of the workers and the poor, she started a house in New York, to provide food and shelter to the homeless. It was very simple. Do the works of mercy. When I was hungry, you fed me. When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink. Skid row in Manhatten was a tough place. She believed in anarchism. Not anarchy. Anarchism, of the strand that opposed violence and affirms the primacy of conscience in individual behavior over obedience to the state.

Nonviolence. She was a radical pacifist, and she and her type refused to go to war, even in world war two, the so called good war. They went to prison instead or, like Franz Jaegerstatter the German conscientious objector, they went to their death. This did not make them popular, but I have seen in my own life that when enthusiasm for war runs high, those who question it take a lot of heat. The picture can look a lot different later.

I visited that house in New York once, when Dorothy was still alive, in 1975, but I did not meet her. All I remember is that it was dark at night when I arrived, and the cockroaches covered the walls when you hit the kitchen lights at midnight, and the streets were devoid of green; no grass, no trees. Not like New York today, where the trees have been replanted.

            Eventually the houses spread, by imitation, around the U.S. Catholic worker houses sprang up in Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Los Angeles. They arose, they died off, they arose again. They never had a central organization. Anarchism, of the sort that eschews a major central organization. Not anarchy. Follow your conscience, follow it well, but avoid violence. 

This was the way that appealed to me when I worked with the homeless men of Somerville, when I felt my own life desolate. The way of Jesus of Nazareth. Walk among the poor. I began visiting the Boston Catholic worker with John Leary in college. When I got done at Harvard, I moved to Detroit, joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and began hanging out at Day House, the Detroit Catholic worker house. Here I met inspiring men and women: Tom Lumpkin (who to this day lives at this house, providing hospitality to homeless men and women, and staffing a soup kitchen to feed the long lines of the homeless in Detroit). When you do this kind of hospitality, you meet a lot of angry people. But you also meet a lot of brave people. Tom became a kind of Christian monk in the inner city.  A witness. Too bold to be tolerated in a suburban parish. How rarely the Gospel is really preached, I thought, hearing Tom talk. Bill Kellerman. Mary West. Peter Weber. Many others. Inspiring people. They gave me new ideas of what it means to follow Christ, to live a holy life.

            For awhile, I lived in inner city Detroit, and I tried to be among “the poor”, those angry, friendly, tough, violent, generous people of that harsh city. A helping hand or a fist were equally handy all the time. Faith in Christ made sense, impeccable sense, in that place. Crucifixion made sense. The cross made sense. I could see it around me every day.

In 1977, Oscar Romero, a Jesuit martyred in El Salvador, told the hundred thousand people of El Salvador gathered at a special Mass, that they were the crucified body of Christ. He said that on the occasion of the martyrdom of Rutilio Grande[4], another Jesuit in El Salvador killed for helping encourage the poor to live in dignity. Rutilio did not advocate violence, and neither did Romero. But they were killed, because there is power in nonviolence, power in teaching people that they have dignity. The power of the Gospel becomes very real indeed, and draws bullets in response. That teaching, that they were the crucified body of Christ, was extraordinary. It still seems to me a unique kind of teaching, one that is heard nowhere else, that is unique on the planet it its power.

            I find that sort of thing very challenging. I wish I could say I was some kind of witness to it, but I am not. I can only tell about it, because I marvel at it. It makes me think Christianity is powerful, and hard to do. There really is nothing like it, nothing that I know of, that draws people to such extraordinary solidarity, courage, generosity, and freedom. I want to be even a faint shadow of that (though I do not want to be a martyr!).

            People forget that there are martyrs not only in the ancient Roman times, but also today, many of them: not only the martyrs of Nazi Germany like Franz Jaegerstatter, but the martyrs of Latin America. Many American Christians do not even know this. This is the Gospel from below, the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed. Indeed. How much this truth compelled and challenged me and still does.

            And how little I ever really lived any of it, as I grew successful, and comfortable, and older, and less willing to sacrifice for others; as I came to have more to lose, and thus less enthused about change in the structures that keep some of us lucky, and “the others” unlucky.

            But I remember it, and I carry it, all the same. I am like a sleeper cell for the abandonment of material pursuits. Someday I may yet awaken.

---

[1] Perhaps Max Weber coined the term “Protestant Work Ethic.” In any case, the evolution of the Puritan or Protestant Work ethic is a complex story; I settle for a caricature here to make my point. Ironically, though, Protestants or Puritans in the Reformation period were dedicated anti-Catholics, and the New England Puritans of the 1600’s were also believers in reforming society—and persecuting those they disagreed with. The echoes of this attitude in the enthusiastic “right wing” of contemporary American politics is apparent. Thus, my disagreements with the Puritans, at least as they are characterized here, run pretty deep.

[2] Rev McCarthy to my knowledge is still living,  preaching , and writing. He is a pastor in Damascus and his work is described at www.centerforchristiannonviolence.org

[3] Also, see McKenzie’s book, “The Power and the Glory” (recently republished by Wipf & Stock Publishers) for trenchant exposition of the non-violent Jesus and compelling challenge to Catholic and other church teaching that defend war and violence as acceptable for Christians.

[4] Rutilio Grande, 1928-1977, was a Jesuit priest, servant of the poor; his life story is remarkable and for any who think that there are no longer true martyrs, read his life story. He was a martyr for the faith, killed, like Christ, for proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and for calling to account those who abused them. Grande’s death converted Romero to the Gospel of justice for the oppressed, and Romero in turn inspired thousands. The film Romero is an unforgettable portrayal of the two men’s lives and martyrdom.  These are lives that only seem to occur among Christians, and so have inspired me to continue to seek God in Christian ways as best I can.

Religion, science, atheism, and fundamentalism

Religion, Atheism, and Science

I often encounter people who challenge my faith. This was not only true when I was in college at Harvard; it is true now that I am a professor working in the academy, especially in the fields of science, and now that I live in a progressive enlightened city like Portland. Many of these individuals think think religious faith is silly, illogical, even harmful. They are proud to be humanistic atheists, and they proclaim their atheism with head held high. They see it as the most intellectually honest position and also the most free and affirming. They see religion as contradictory to science. I don't, but we'll come to that. First, in talking with those who don’t share my faith, I realize immediately a problem. I want to talk about God. How can I or anyone talk about God? It is bad enough that the word “God” is laden with excess meaning and “baggage” for everyone today, so it is difficult to hear what we mean. 

But even worse: what I want to talk about defies language in the first place.

What answer can science possibly make to this? Talk of God refers to a dimension of human experience beyond understanding, yet absolutely important. It begs for understanding, it invites to new horizons. To dismiss it as “indigestion” is possible only for unimaginative minds. Lives are changed, for the better (and I suppose, sometimes not the better).

Here I am helped by Elizabeth Johnson, in her book “Quest for the Living God.” I share the conviction she traces in her introduction to that book, straight from the central arc of Catholic teaching, traced through Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, on up to twentieth century Catholic writers like Simone Weil, Flannery O’Conner, Thomas Merton, and Karl Rahner. That conviction or “idea” is simply this: God is not a “thing among things” and therefore cannot be described in language.

In the life of the individual, faith arises in many ways--it is transmitted by family, or one has an experience that draws one in to conversion. I suspect it is extremely rare that one sits back and thinks their way to it, though perhaps this does happen. In the life of communities and civilization, religion arises as a consequence of a direct experience of God. After this, religion, not the other way around. The trappings of religion: Theology and belief and ritual, all come after there has been an experience. Even now, theology evolves not primarily by abstract thinking, but by communities experiencing God in new ways, and then reflecting on it. Therefore, “God’ is a language symbol. What of the reality, the real God beyond anyone’s concept of God? Does the real God care a whit about the “god” in which we profess to believe?

According to Johnson, Catholic teachers consistently have held that all that is said about God is, if true, also at the same time not true.

I could put it this way: Statements about God are not scientific forensic assertions. They are rather poor attempts to fit into words realizations and experiences that cannot be so fit. Simon Weil put it better: our beliefs are to be taken not as assertions to be affirmed or denied but as mysteries to be contemplated.

Thus all poetry; thus all theology. God can only be spoken about using analogy, or metaphor, or symbol, or story. God cannot be described.  

Theism, as Johnson also puts it, is the opposite of this teaching. It is the conviction that God can be described, using factual language, as a thing among things (only bigger and better), as a philosophical polemic, and then either embraced or denied. It denies the paradox of true and not true, denies the reliance on metaphor or analogy in our language. Its two children are siblings who don’t get along at all. One sibling is liberal atheism that rejects such a God. The other sibling is traditionalist fundamentalism that affirms such a God.[1] Thus some scientists will tell me that I cannot be a scientist and a believer, and some Christians will tell me, after reading what follows, that I’m not really a Christian. Some atheists and some Christians will agree that I am not a Christian! This is because I will reject many tenets of fundamentalist religious doctrine. Ironically, then, while I am a scientist some scientists will say I cannot be, and while I am Christian, some Christians will say I am not! 
    One could say there are a range of logical positions. One can ask the basic question, "is there more?" To this, one can choose the range of belief, from "definitely not" to "I don't know" to "yes, but with the following qualifications" and on into different forms of specific belief. Science can co-exist with any of these positions; religion cannot co-exist with the "definitely not." But in each case, if we say there is or is not "something more" we must choose "which one do we  mean." Which God do we reject--or affirm? Both atheists and many Christians reject the old fashioned punitive accountant in the sky. So which God do we reject, or affirm? This begs the question of how science and faith can coexist, or whether we must be atheist if we are to be thinking people.

            So, what of atheism? Atheism attracts many good people, in part for its simplicity, reliance on reason, and focus on making this world better rather than waiting for a heaven later, which is seen as a failing of religion. However, conceptually, atheism doesn't work for me. It is rejection of the theistic God, which I also reject. I am a person of faith. I am an intellectual, a scientist, an academic, but not an atheist. As an academic in the United States, I live much of my time in a place where spirituality is often kept quiet and where religious (at least, Christian religious) profession and practice is sometimes looked on with considerable suspicion. It is claimed by many secular humanists and by some religionists that reason (science) and faith are opposites. I don’t think so.  Nor am I alone.

The West of the past 150 years is one in which religion has ceased to be taken for granted, and is instead challenged by secular atheism as well as relativism. At the extreme, public intellectuals have been going on the offensive again lately to promote atheism and attack faith and religion—and even sometimes to disown fellow scientists who practice religious faith as intellectual hypocrites. So, there will be some in academic who will disown me for affirming my identity as both man of science and man of faith.

Indeed what science is better equipped to challenge religion than psychology? I am a psychologist. Psychology demonstrates the human tendency to find pattern even where there is none, to make meaning even where there is none, to infer causality where there is none, to reason in a way that comforts our needs, rather than reflects reality, and to think by image and intuition rather than by cold calculation. My holding to both science and faith is dismissed by some of my fellow psychologists as merely proof of the power of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the human tendency to ignore information that threatens our identity and rationalize our way around the unpleasant input[2]. I also have met people outside academia who tell me that one cannot both be scientific and believe in God, so this theorem is also ‘on the street.’

The atheistic science argument “against religion” has generated a flurry of books and blogs dubbed by some observers “the new atheist noise machine.’[3] The arguments and ideas[4] are not actually new, but are getting renewed publicity and discussion. At the same time, scientists have been explaining their faith, at least disproving the idea that all academics are atheist agents.[5]  

Well, are there really no contradictions between religion and science?

The criticisms upon religion from a logical-scientific (or even logical positivist) viewpoint can take many lines. The most common stem from the idea that religion is merely a factual belief in absurd statements. It is compared by these skeptics to believing in the Easter bunny or Santa Claus, or UFO’s or paranormal powers; although the failure of the analogy is obvious--serious scientists never believe in Santa Claus but sometimes do believe in God. I will attempt to articulate in a moment my own response to this, which, like many others, rests on a rejection of the premise—religion has nothing to do with factual belief in absurd statements.

However, in the atheists defense, many religious people do seem to treat the belief assertions and dogmas of their religion as if they were facts about the natural world that could, for example, compete with science in explaining how biology works. Thus, the erroneous assumption of many atheistic critics is also an error made by many fundamentalist religious believers. For example, they claim that evolution contradicts religious teaching, as if the history of geology is somehow related to the core meaning of Holy Scripture.

A second line of objection to religion is driven by a perception that religion is a major cause of intolerance and bloodshed in our world. This line points to the wars of the middle ages in Europe (e.g, The 100 Years War), the Catholic Inquisition, the long conflict in Northern Ireland, the contemporary conflicts involving Muslim-identified peoples, religiously motivated attacks on or intolerance of gay people, and many other examples. Part of the motive of the French Revolution was the rejection of Catholic authority, symbolized by the formation of the Culte de Raison, or Cult of Reason[6]. They held, like many contemporary atheists, that reason will free us from superstition and tyranny, of which religious authority is seen as a part.

This is not entirely wrong. Religion has spawned a great deal of hatred and inter-group conflict. It is sometimes difficult to determine whether these are truly accidental misuses of religion, or somehow core to the nature of religion, at least in its fundamentalist forms. At the very least, it is obvious that we can see disturbing contradictions between what is universal in religious teaching—anchored in compassion and justice--and the intolerant and hateful behaviors that people claim are justified by devotion to their god or their religion. At the same time, the line of argument fails as a logical objection to religious faith per se. One can point to as many examples of exemplary behavior by religious people as to reprehensible ones, and great religious figures are at least as easy to identify as great humanist figures. Further, one can point to as many examples of atrocities by atheists and humanists as by religious societies, suggesting that we cannot so easily explain the world’s agonies and conflict (if only we could!). Stalin killed many to eliminate religion; the atheistic regime in Beijing remains busy eliminating religion in Tibet; the atheistic regime in Burma did the same until recently. Even the French revolutionaries, in their devotion to pure reason, slaughtered many too (though perhaps not as badly as their enemies, still slaughter is slaughter). We can accurately judge no approach to life based on its worst.

The nature of inter-group conflict among human groups is a topic of intense scientific study in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. There are laws to be learned and noted there, but one central message seems to be that tribal identification (religious or otherwise) drives inter-group mistrust and violence. Not religion per se, but religion when it serves as the defining identity of a tribe bent on conflict. Thus, abolishing religion (if it could be done) would likely do no more to end fratricide, homicide, or genocide than would abolishing atheism. Sadly, the history of human inter-group conflict tells us something about our human psychology, but little or nothing about the meaning of religion, even less about the meaning of religious experience or lived religious faith.

So I hold that both of these initial attacks on religion (that it is illogical and that it is hypocritical) are not fundamentally effective. They do not persuade me, upon close inspection. However, there is a third line of conflict between science and faith that is not specious or, at least, that gets to the essence of the matter. It is often overlooked even by critics of religion.

That is this, the most important intellectual issue for faith and science concerns the assumption of materialism. Strictly speaking, science is materialistic: it must assume that all phenomena can ultimately be explained by material or physical laws.

Yes, the simplistic premise that God as a “thing” among other “things” in the world (only bigger) is easily dismissed with little effect on lived faith, for well-lived faith already knows God is not a “thing among other things, only bigger”. But more pointed are questions like this: How can there be a self (soul) without the brain to generate the self? How can there be a spirit without a body? Religion, if it asserts a literal spirit realm able to violate physical laws, seems to become incompatible with the fundamental tenet of science. (Thus, when we hear of religious miracles, a scientific position would say that if it really did occur, then someday, science will explain how).

Here, we have a conflict, if we assert that faith requires the “belief” in the “concept” of spirit. Taken literally, this turns into an intellectually absurd debate about whether the “spiritual” can break physical laws. Francis Collins, in his popular book on religion and science, says “why not?” Maybe it can. I suppose that's possible. But I don’t know that this is a requirement of a life of faith. It may be simply that the spiritual can do things, and does so through the material universe and through its laws, yet is not itself a physical or material force. It is not present to us to find parking spaces or even cure our particular problems. The spiritual is about something else entirely.

So then, what is spirit? Spirit is an experience—not a content assertion or a material principal competing with science. Science and spirit are in different realms just as logic and intuition are different ways of knowing, just as forensics and love draw on different spheres of the psyche. Science may “account” for an experience by physical laws, without shedding light on the existential truth that was thereby experienced, just as science may explain why in a mechanical or forensic sense we are moved by great music—without telling us anything about the moral truth revealed through the music. Science can tell us how the material world works, but not why it exists, or why we should care, or what is most important to care about. Science can give us probable facts, but it cannot give us values.

The challenge for science is to recognize the limits of science and the limits of language. The challenge for faith is to recognize the legitimacy of science in the realm of explaining all material phenomena, including the material dimension of our “spiritual” experience. As I already suggested, I doubt that science can account for what we know as God, any more than it can account for the tears we shed before beauty, without reverting to circular arguments (one begins by doubting God and then uses logic to “arrive” at this conclusion, or one decides that beauty is merely subjective, then proceeds to conclude the same). Theology faces the same circularity when it attempts to confirm God’s reality on intellectual grounds (it first assumes God, then proves God).[7]

Put another way, the proverbial philosopher’s stone remains in hiding: Any rationale or intellectual system requires a non-rational starting point. No starting point is certain enough to provide an infallible argument. This state of affairs is likely inevitable, for we know from both psychology and physics that our sensory experiences are incompetent to inform us of objective reality: he who trusts only his own sense perception trusts an unfaithful messenger. We must and do construct our experienced reality, and live by what we perceive.

We face illusion and even contradiction in all directions: when it comes to whether or not to place my ultimate “faith” in reason or in my religious views, logic cannot help me. I must make an existential choice. Everyone must make an existential choice. The paradox and the tension cannot be escaped, rather we make choices into it.

It is illusion to think that one’s total faith in reason and sense to the exclusion of faith in God is not a choice of faith, just as it is illusion to think that one’s faith in God can be proven by reason. It is an illusion to think one can read the Bible literally; literalism is an interpretive stance. It is an illusion to think one can take reality at face value: reality is mediated by our perceptual biases, expectations, and beliefs. Psychology demonstrates all of this.

My choice is already obvious to the reader. For me, there is no contradiction between intellectual honesty, or for that matter science, and the walk of joy and longing that I call my faith and spirituality, and which I practice by conscious choice within the structures of an established religion. There is no more contradiction in this than in being a scientist who is in love, or in being a scientist who is moved by poetry. One does not get into arguments about whether love is touching on something true, or whether poetry is touching on something true, or whether the music in a great symphony expresses something true, but we get into arguments about whether religious faith is touching on something true. Such arguments are absurd, in that they are not “solvable” by logic or argument but only by direct experience, interpreted subjectively.

This argument then is rooted in religion being represented as being about content assertions, rather than being about expressing a lived experience.[8] Do I need religion to live an ethical life? No. Do I need religion to be happy? No. Why then do I practice my faith? For me, my human experience and human experience as I observe it in the world, my identify, who I am, cannot be described or adequately expressed without the language of faith. The language of science and of reason alone doesn’t cut it when it comes to expressing the world of love, nor the world of deepest human aspirations, nor our greatest lamentations and sorrows—nor my experience of spirit, vivid and transformative and joyful.

Not for me. The full range, depth, complexity, and meaning of human experience cannot be addressed by logical systems of thought, nor even by art or poetry. It is only expressed fully when these are combined with religious sentiment and religious apprehension. If I give up my rational thinking ability, I give up an essential element of how I know and learn. If I give up my religious apprehensions and expressions, I give up a fundamental portion of my humanity.

When I add the layer of faith to the layers of science and art, then life is transformed, as if from black and white to vivid color. To try to sum up:

Religion cannot tell us how the double helix parts to form life;

Nor by what chemical transformations the stars whirl and burn.

Science cannot tell us how to live,

Now why we should bother to go on.

Science can give us options but cannot tell us which to choose.

For that depends on what we have valued,

And our religion, our faith, tells us what we have valued.

Philosophy can provide reasons and ethics,

But cannot express the full depths and range of the heart,

Nor encompass life’s anguished lamentations.

Poetry can express the fullness of the heart, emotion and magic,

But cannot touch our awe at the ineffable and call us to life transformed--

Without becoming faith and religion.

None but faith reflects the longing of the soul

In love with the hidden fire that lights all that is.

And so we need science, and philosophy, and poetry,

But likewise without faith and its symbols I cannot express the full range of my humanity.

Confuse these things and be confused indeed;

Each in its sphere, and life may open before us.

---

[1] I am indebted for the entire thought in this paragraph to Elizabeth Johnson, who articulates this view in her opening chapter of Search for the Living God. However, as I recount in subsequent chapters, I arrived at this understanding long ago in my faith journey by another route.

[2] For an example blog post, http://greaterthanlapsed.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/cognitive-dissonance-faith-and-lacks-thereof/; for an experimental study that supports a dissonance model of religious belief in the face of challenge, see for example: Rational processing or rationalization? The effect of disconfirming information on a stated religious belief. D.C. Batson, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(1), Jul 1975, 176-184.

[3] As near as I can ascertain, this term was coined by  American University communications professor Matt Nisbet; http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2007/08/19/why-the-new-atheist-attack-mac/

[4]  Two well-publicized examples: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Hatchet Book Group, Warner Books, 2007)

[5]  Two much-cited examples: Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief; Free Press, 2007); Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? (Penguin Press, 2006).

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason

              [7] But what of the eminently practical question of life after death? Here it is not a matter of reconciling symbol and literal, for either we live after death or we do not. For now, science concludes that life after death would violate our known material laws, but cannot disprove life after death. But science is still in its first days, with a million years to go. Someday, life after death may be proved by means currently unimaginable to us. People of faith meantime may “believe in life after death” but at risk of suborning logic; they must recognize this belief as one that cannot be proven, that may someday by techniques yet unimagined be tested, and disproven. Yet it functions nonetheless to bring us a compelling story about why and how to live. For me, “life after death” is not an important foundation of my faith. My faith is about encountering God now, not about speculating on things I cannot know. The Buddha, and the Christ, were less concerned with this question than with urging men to reform their lives here and now, for the sake of this life.

[8] Karen Armstrong’s Case for God (Knopf; 2009) elegantly traces this history and makes an interesting argument that we have a uniquely modern confusion, seen as an historical trend through the centuries, in which fundamentalism and atheism in their current form arise from the same logical error.