Swimming the Sacred River

Ursula Goodenough, one of the leading speakers in the Religious Naturalism movement, once pointed out that while the story of Nature can induce awe and wonder, the scientific knowledge of universal processes rarely inspires religious feelings. That is one reason why this spiritual movement isn’t “religious scientism”. It simply isn’t enough to think that Nature is great in and of itself—religion is, ultimately, about the human condition. Unless a spiritual movement appeals to one’s core existential concerns, it simply will not be of much use.

Goodenough also explains that religion answers two basic questions: How Things Are and What Is Important. I agree with her that the answer to the first question is, well, how things actually are. The single best method we’ve come up with to figure this out is the scientific method. This is not to say that there aren’t an infinity of questions—of course there are. Science will never have it all figured out; that is a very good thing, because otherwise things would become very boring. At the same time, I maintain that we can scratch a few things off the list: what we know about the physical origins of the Earth, the general process of evolution, the biopsychosocial basis of human functioning, geology, engineering, and astrophysics pretty much rules out 99% of religious theories regarding How Things Are. Moreover, the scientific method is far more effective in finding out new things that we never even knew we didn’t know.

If religion is no longer needed to answer How Things Are, that really leaves What Is Important. Of course, religion isn’t strictly needed for that, either. Philosophy and reason have done a pretty good job of constructing systems of ethics that are more flexible and relevant than the rigid rules of scripture. I maintain, as one example, that humanism is a more noble and pragmatic moral system than most of those put forward by major religions. Science is also starting to inform ethics—for instance, evolutionary ethics is a nascent system that recognizes that morality is itself an evolutionary adaptation.

So, if religion is not needed to answer How Things Are or What Is Important, then why is it still here? I have offered some preliminary ideas:

• Safety—this is possibly the underlying motivation for religion, to reduce existential anxiety.
• Affiliation/Connectivity—humans are designed to seek connection, and this can range from joining spiritual communities to seeking mystical Union with God. Of course, people are also keyed to work within hierarchies, and religion can offer a sense of great power and authority.
• Mystery—people want to know stuff, and the answers that religions give are often more comforting or comprehensible than what science offers. Religion can also address questions that actually have no answers, such as why bad things happen to good people.
• Agency—religion can give people a sense of control and competence, leading to a sense of worth.
• Exaltation—humans want to feel good, and religion can (often when fulfilling the above needs) provide happiness, comfort, pride, ecstasy, and a sense of profound specialness.

Religion addresses these things, especially the base issue of existential anxiety, in a more direct way than nearly any other human endeavor. These needs and drives are fundamental features of being human, and as long as that remains true, religion will endure.

But religion isn’t just a theoretical construct—it is an experience. When people say they want to be spiritual, what they often mean is that they want to feel spiritual. But what does it mean to feel spiritual? What differentiates a spiritual feeling from any other kind? As I wrote in that last essay, a religious experience is one that involves some shift in perspective related to an embodied sensation that is interpreted to be religiously meaningful. Such an experience involves (1) pre-existing beliefs or schemas, (2) a somato-emotional event, and (3) an interpretation involving religious concepts. Such a shift might be dramatic or it might be gentle, ongoing or fleeting, (seemingly) paranormal or tellurian. And, as a general rule, religious experiences occur within the context of some established model of belief and practice, while each experience is yet unique and individual.

But that doesn’t tell us what it feels like. I don’t have a strict answer for that one, especially since there is such a huge variety of religious practice, but I’d like to offer an initial hypothesis. I think the core sensation of a religious experience is meaningful profundity. By that, I mean a sense of deep significance and/or transcendence from normal states of being. I think it also involves a sense of super-reality (or hyperreality, depending on who you ask), a kind of connection with, experience of, or insight into a level of reality that is normally beyond everyday awareness. This can have any number of emotional expressions, of course, ranging from the perfectly tranquil to the wildly ecstatic.

I suspect that the great spiritual drought of modern times involves a lack of meaningful profundity in so many people’s lives. This is one possible explanation of the rise of fundamental evangelical religion—despite the fact that those religions offer a model of reality that has no relation to how things actually are, and often promote actions that are diametrically opposed to their fundamental doctrines, the sense of significance they give people helps them thrive. I don’t think it’s an accident that the avatar of this movement is the mega-church, with thousands of members; being surrounded by so many people in thrall to the Good Word certainly must feel momentous. The drive to experience meaningful profundity lies behind the irrational and unshakable faith in obviously ludicrous notions, ranging from personalized gods to a 6000-year-old Earth; people are often more than willing to sacrifice reason and critical thinking for the sake of it.

We are also willing to do very strange things for the sake of meaningful profundity. If you really think about it, religious practices can be downright bizarre—speaking in tongues, twirling in one spot, drawing various shapes in the air, fasting and weird diets, putting oil on each other, flagellation, dunking people in water, and of course wearing all those funny clothes. Clearly we are talking about something that drives people to think and behave in very strange, often nonsensical ways.

It should be noted that what is experienced as meaningfully profound is both deeply subjective and mediated by social constructs. In other words, nothing is objectively profound, we can only experience things as such (yes, this is essentially the same argument I made in the last essay on divinity). Now then, I said “mediated” by social constructs—let me explain what I mean by that. Many people have experiences that are triggered by things like entheogens, physical exercises (e.g. dancing; exhaustion events), focused contemplation (i.e. meditation), and various other circumstances that can lead to an intense set of sensations. But in themselves they are not meaningful—only by understanding them within the context of some kind of social construct can they become integrated in an intelligible way. By connecting an experience to a larger construct—often an established religious one—then a person can decide what it means, as in what import it has, its implications and significance.

And so, we come to the relationship between sensation and worldview, a dynamic complexity from which emerges religious experience. A religious worldview mediates various experiences, while adaquately-intense experiences can alter one’s worldview. This dance is why in our brief 10,000 or so years of civilization we have seen virtually as many different religions (although there is evidence that basic religious ideas have been around for at least 300,000 years).

But science has really thrown a wrench in the works, because it is so significantly superior to religion in regards to exploring and understanding the workings of Nature. Similarly, reason (often based on scientific data) can produce more relevant, just, and pragmatic ethical systems. But as noted, science and reason rarely evoke meaningful profundity.

This is the challenge for religious movements that aim to align spirituality and science. It’s one thing to talk about the magnificence of Nature, and another to experience it as meaningfully profound. Not impossible certainly (just read Emerson’s Nature), but difficult, especially in our highly urbanized, technology-dominated culture. Moreover, naturalist religious movements do not often articulate aims for us beyond environmental stewardship or group-level behavior; there is little guidance in terms of what is good for an individual to accomplish. We need some set of ideals that we can look to for who we are supposed to be. And we need that experiential doorway that leads us to meaningful profundity.

If I have my way, this will not be a top-down process. It is possible to offer some general outlines for practice, and I plan to do that, but I think it will be much more valuable if a set of practices arises organically out of experimentation and community discussion, grounded in a set of general principles. This is why so much effort is going into the development of those principles first—we need to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish before we can know how to accomplish it. I look forward to this part of the adventure and I hope you will join me as it continues to evolve.

All Posts, Praxis, Religious Naturalism, Theology