Swimming the Sacred River

In general, Sacred River is not intended for intellectual meta-discussion of religious naturalism, but this is an interesting issue that is worth exploration. Naturalism, as a philosophical orientation, explicitly denies the existence of anything that is outside of nature, and at this point in our scientific understanding of the universe, that includes personal deities, non-corporeal intelligences, meta-terrestrial dimensions, and occult/New Age forces. At the same time, religious naturalism recognizes that Nature includes a large dose of mystery—while our store of reliable knowledge increases daily, there are questions for which we might never know the answers. For some people, the way of articulating this sense of mystery, and the awe and reverence that attends it, is to use “god-language”. The question is, how does such language fit within an orientation that does not recognize the objective existence of personal gods?

For the most part, this discussion takes place in the rarefied atmosphere of theology and philosophy journals. We can read about how God is used metaphorically to describe authenticity, freedom, process, unity, goodness, energy, connectedness, love, or the sacred object of worship. But there are several problems with this approach, the worst perhaps being the usage of a vague term to describe something that is already vague or intangible. Rather than bringing clarity, saying “God” further diffuses the object of consideration.

This is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of people in the world do not use God as a metaphor. In general use “God” is first and foremost a pronoun, a name for an objectively-existing Supreme Being. Second, it is a homonym for deity, of which many in human culture are not necessarily “Supreme” but nevertheless are superordinate to the normal order of physical reality. When a religious naturalist uses god-language, a general audience will likely not understand that it is metaphorical, thereby undermining one of the key elements of RN, namely that it rejects supernaturalism.

This is not to say that metaphor doesn’t have a place within religious naturalism. Sacred River actually makes this idea a core component of its approach. Perhaps the one thing that makes humans special is our use of symbol, which arguably underlies language, logic, mathematics, music, art, poetry, and even culture itself. It is important for religious naturalists to develop stories, icons, and experiences that can provide social cohesion, ethical illustrations, and opportunities for meaningful profundity (a sense of deep significance or transcendence usually involving a change of perspective different from ordinary states of awareness). This is how a religious movement is able to mature.

However, using god-language is neither necessary nor advantageous for our movement because, at its root, the concept of God is antithetical to naturalism. It is fair to say that we currently lack adequate language to describe the more sublime elements of the religious experience within a naturalistic orientation. But using God does not advance the development of such a language; rather, it keeps us stuck within a pre-scientific context. It is akin to using God to fill in the gaps of scientific knowledge, which is neither accurate nor useful in terms of promoting understanding.

Another issue to consider is cultural. One of the greatest benefits of the RN perspective is its universality: nature is nature everywhere. However, “God” is largely a construct of the West—by using it, the speaker is limiting the context to those places where god has meaning. It seems obvious that religious naturalism has much more in common with Eastern religions than with Abrahamic. Using god-language to describe the RN perspective excludes a large portion of the Earth’s population who see the world in a similar way as we do, at least when compared to Western theists. By using naturalistic language only, we universalize our message.

Carl Sagan once said, “A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.” I believe that religious naturalism, or some variant, will be that religion. Like it or not, science and the concept of God, even as a symbol, are not compatible frames of reference. In the deepest parts of our minds, God is both a stand in for a lack of knowledge and a non-conscious elevation of our parents to the status of immortality and omnipotence. For us to mature as a naturalistic religious movement and also as a species, we must let go of God. It is not enough to transform him (and God is a “him”) to a metaphor, claiming that the supernatural elements have been banished. As long as God is used to describe the sublime within nature and ourselves, supernaturalism will survive, even if only in a silent form. We no longer need to anthropomorphize the universe.

Naturalism states that only the natural is real; that the universe as a whole lacks purpose and intelligence; that nothing exists, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific examination; and that all physical events are caused by other physical events in accordance with universal laws. Religious naturalism is a reverent orientation towards Nature that excludes supernaturalism; that responds to Nature with awe and wonder; that recognizes the mysteries inherent in existence; and ideally will develop a morality grounded in promoting human flourishing and ecological stewardship. The concept of God is not necessary and does not advance any of these principles, while it can be said to work against them. Yes, that includes the issue of mystery. Using God to explain mystery (such as why there is something rather than nothing) is generally just a way of trying to dispel mystery rather than accepting and abiding in it.

Letting go of God is necessary to fully embrace naturalism—which I write with a full understanding of how easy that is to say and how difficult it can be to accomplish. Rather than using a supernatural term to describe that which we see as sacred within Nature, let us instead consider those those things as sacred in themselves. That is what religious naturalism is all about, discarding the supernatural and exalting the natural. Instead of “Love = God = Divine”, religious naturalism says “Love = Divine”.

There are, of course, religious naturalists who do not have a problem with god-language, Dr. Goodenough being one of them (edit: although she herself does not use the term to describe her own beliefs). In no way is this essay an attempt to censure them. Neither am I calling for a “war” against believers in God (or those who use that term metaphorically), except perhaps in those cases where faith is used to justify hatred, suffering, discrimination, or willful ignorance. What I am attempting to do here is to persuade religious naturalists and those of like-mind to consider letting go of a word that muddies the waters, evokes supernaturalism, and inhibits the development of a naturalistic language of reverence. Chet Raymo said it best—When God is gone, everything is holy.

The following comment was written in response to a theist named Bridget from the last Dawkins post [here is her original comment]. I wanted to present this on its own page since I think it begins to address some core issues in Sacred River.

Where does the evil and good come from?

“Evil” and “Good” aren’t substances or states, but moral judgments on behaviors and ideas. All judgments are products of the human mind grounded in the evolutionary necessity of primates to live together in a reasonably harmonious way. We are beginning to find the basic building blocks of human ethics, which are related to such issues as fairness, resource/mate protection, incest avoidance, and reciprocal altruism (to name a few).

As in language, the moral building blocks have evolved into complex structures that are now largely culture-based. These structures form in every group (churches, schools, workplaces, clubs, and even whole cities and nations), and the majority of them are implicit, meaning they are unspoken mandates and rules of thumb that guide how group members behave and interact. When someone violates a rule, everyone knows it, even when that rule isn’t written down. Humans are simply wired this way.

Although the underlying purpose of morality is logical—the creation of social rules that allow humans to live together in groups—individual morals or moral sets are not always rational or even beneficial. At one time, for example, slavery was considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans and was even justified with the Bible. Many people would now consider slavery to be an unambiguous evil.

This is why there is a movement to push morals into a principle-based system rather than attempting a set of absolute rules. For example, increasing fairness and decreasing suffering are “good” principles, but what those look like will change along with a changing society, just as the acceptability of slavery changed with the Civil War. This is but one benefit of a non-theistic perspective—we can approach goodness from a reasonable and compassionate place rather than by attempting to fulfill rigid decrees, regardless of their relevance or logic.

Where does the “self” come from? And please don’t say the self is a set of neuronal connections…that is ridiculous and has not been proven.

The experience of self does indeed stem from complex neural nets in the brain, although the total self certainly includes the whole body. This might seem ridiculous to you, but there is a great deal of empirical evidence for it (and no evidence to the contrary). True, we learn more about the creation of self all the time as we learn more about the brain, but it isn’t the mystery you are making it out to be.

What we call the self is constructed from many psycho-neurological mechanisms, including temperament, emotions, personality (a la the Big Five), subjective perception and awareness, motivations and bodily needs, working memory and long-term memory, worldview and heuristic sets (e.g. social roles), and what you would call thinking. The self is an emergent phenomena that arises from the integration of all these functions, each of which are borne in the brain and derive from a combination of genetics and experience, and shifts according to environmental priming (a great example of this is an experiment with Chinese-Americans: one group was shown American symbols and the other Chinese symbols: each group then interpreted a single image, with the first group preferring a Western concept of individualism, with the other preferring an Eastern communal perspective. So based on how they were primed, different “selves” came to the fore).

To learn more, I strongly recommend “The Developing Mind” by Dan Siegel.

I’m afraid you might be falling for what our ancient ancestors fell for: the assumption that anything we don’t fully understand in nature must be due to a supernatural agent. It’s as if to say that if something in nature is amazing and beyond our comprehension, it couldn’t have “just happened”. But why not? There is no reason to think that anything in nature required an external agent, and the more we learn about the universe, the more we must conclude that indeed no agent could have caused any of it. Nature is self-sufficient; that is part of its majesty.

Pascal’s Wager essentially states that it makes the most sense to have faith in the Biblical God because if he is real then a believer will earn entry into Heaven while a nonbeliever will suffer for eternity in Hell, whereas if God is not real, both lose nothing (unless to say the believer loses his sense of reason, which seems a fair stake for the chance of eternal bliss). The matrix looks like this:

Pascal’s Wager is frequently offered by modern Christians as justification for faith, even though Pascal himself said that the wager is only enough to consider finding faith. Nevertheless, they will say,  “You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain…and if you’re wrong, then Hell awaits you!” There are, of course, many logical shortcomings in this wager. For example, it doesn’t include the possibility that:

* The Christian god isn’t the correct deity
* God’s judgment is arbitrary
* God might also reward honest unbelief or punish dishonest belief
* Belief isn’t a necessary or adequate criteria for entry into Heaven

So, let’s take these issues into consideration in the following table, assuming the religion is Christianity with a “good” non-believer and an undefined believer:

When we add these choices, then the best choice is to be a good non-believer, because she has the best possible outcome—she gets both reason and Heaven if God is real and rewards those who act good. Likewise, in this choice and the choice where God is not real, the non-believer gets to have a fulfilling life of doing good deeds, without any unnecessary emotional, physical, or material sacrifices in the name of faith.

If the believer is good, then he has two extra chances to get to Heaven, but no one can know for certain what qualifies as “good enough”. The undefined believer might be “good enough” in choice #3, but has nevertheless made unnecessary sacrifices that the non-believer did not make. If God is not the Christian god, then there is equal risk of the unknown, making a rational and good life that much more worthwhile. If God is not real, then the believer does not have zero loss: he has, as Dawkins’ writes, squandered his “precious time on worshiping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.” And Hell becomes less one-sided, since the believer might get there if he is not adequately good (e.g. the mass murderer who repents in the gas chamber).

On top of all this, we then need to take into account the likelihood of God’s existence. There are already many arguments out there about this, but I will keep it at this: God isn’t necessary. God is not necessary to explain the origin of the universe, universal laws and processes, or how we humans came to be. There is no question in science that is best answered with “God”. This doesn’t prove his non-existence, but it does make it very, very unlikely, especially when we consider the countless number of gods humans have created and the complete lack of observable evidence for any of them. Virtually every universal theory that has arisen from religion has been shown to be wrong; why not just admit the concept of supernatural dualism is wrong altogether? With this in mind, we have to put the choices on a scale, with the existence of God being very unlikely and the non-existence of god being very likely.

The fundamental problem with all of this—as has been pointed out by non-theists many times before—is that one cannot be threatened into genuine belief. Faith requires that I honestly think that something is true. Any fear of being wrong does not, in itself, provide evidence that something is real.

And finally, I present my own Naturalist Wager:

If there is a creator God, then he created the universe and the world and humans. He also created your brain that is able to observe and reason and feel compassion. Looking at and learning about His creation using direct observation and empirically-based reason would honor His gifts, while making the world a better place for every human would honor the heart He gave you. If a loving creator God is real, it is reasonable to believe that He will reward you for your faith in Him and for the use of the reason and compassion He gave you. If God is not real, then you will have made excellent use of your life by fulfilling your ability to learn about and find wonder in the natural world and by making life a bit more worth living for those who remain.

A virtuous person is one who intentionally seeks personal excellence. Of course, what defines excellence has been a topic of contemplation and debate for the entire history of humankind. Plato recognized four virtues: temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice. Christianity looks to traits such as faith, love, meekness, and chastity as important virtues. Submission to the will of God is the central virtue in Islam. The Buddha extolled compassion. Humanity, filial piety, and loyalty are Confucian virtues.

In all, there are countless traits and actions that world religions and cultures have put forth as exemplars of excellence. Starting with this foundation, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues have outlined a list of human strengths and traits that potentially lead to well-being—knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence, each of which have a sub-list of yet more traits. No doubt research will continue to look into the scope and outcomes of various human traits.

Sacred River offers its own system of four cardinal virtues: Courage, Integrity, Beneficence, and Openness. These are not presented as immaculate virtues in the sense of a divine or revealed ideal. Rather, they are ways of being, both in action and attitude, in service to our central spiritual aim—leading a more meaningful, fulfilling, and joyous life.

Our understanding of the world is informed by Science—we express our relationship with the world through Art. This is the matrix of knowledge and imagination, of empiricism and inspiration, of curiosity and creativity. This marriage of Science and Art lies at the heart of Sacred River.

A quick thought for tonight… Something that my partner, Janet, and I like to say is that we are “non-theists” rather than “atheists”. Certainly we are atheists in a technical sense—we do not believe that god(s) exist. But right or wrong, atheism has come to mean more than that simple statement. For many, I suspect it also indicates an anti-religious attitude or at least an absence of religion. And those things do not quite describe us.

I make the distinction because I agree with religion professor Loyal Rue when he asserts that humans acquire meaning in the form of narratives. As such, religions can be seen as more than systems of beliefs and practices, but as cultural narratives that provide meaning, guidance, and a sense of identity. For example, it isn’t enough to simply have a list of things that are important—religions must also tell stories that explain why they are important. And on a deeper level, religion tells the human story, the narrative of who we are as a people and how we fit in the larger world.

I might be a non-theist, but I am not non-religious. I believe that it is possible to develop a robust system of ideals, practices, ethics, and narrative meaning that serve all the primary functions of religion without any need for supernatural elements. In fact, that is exactly what we are trying to do with Sacred River, and what has already begun with the bourgeoning Religious Naturalism movement.

This is not to say that I do not respect those who apply the term atheist to themselves. By some accounts, there are as many as 700 million to one billion non-believers out there. That’s a lot—by comparison, there are approximately 900m Hindus, 375m Buddhists, and 14m Jews. Technically, I am of their number, but I want to see religion reformed rather than abolished. And a big part of that will be spreading the perspective that religion does not need God.

In general terms,  tolerance can be defined as acceptance (even if grudging) of people who look, act, or believe differently than you do. This is a fine principle that falls under the Third Virtue, Beneficence. If Nature tells us anything, it is that variety is a fundamental property of a healthy system, and so even on a pragmatic level it makes sense to promote tolerance of difference. Homogeneity might be easier, but it would be static and, well, boring. Far better to celebrate diversity, no?

On the whole, I think it is better to err on the side of tolerance when faced with an uncomfortable difference. After all, who are we to say what is the right way to live? Religious Naturalists don’t have a holy rule book, and so we are forced to use reason and empathy to determine which things are acceptable and which aren’t.

Okay, so far we’ve come a long way. Let’s see what we have—at the core of Sacred River is the central aim of increasing a sense of meaning, fulfillment, and joy in one’s life. The three central pillars of Sacred River include religious naturalism, allegoricalism, and progressivism. From this, we can say that sacredness is found within the lived experience of engaging with the natural world as understood via the natural sciences, but with an acknowledgment that religious objects and events can act as powerful doorways to our deepest emotional centers, which can allow for a sense of meaningful profundity. Behavior is guided by an ethic of humanism, which states that humans are worthwhile in their own right and that we are morally mandated to promote liberty, opportunity, and fairness in society, while also developing within ourselves increased health, agency, knowledge, and wisdom. The central key to progress is intentionality, the human tool that drives directed change.

Much of what we’ve been exploring so far has been theoretical, especially in regards to what underlies the religious impulse and letting go of supernaturalism as a way of interpreting nature. This is important, and no doubt many more theoretical essays will be written. A significant part of spirituality is the development of a particular worldview, and that is what we’ve largely been working on. However, it’s vital to point out that a spiritual life is an active life. Since we do not have any mysterious “essence” that makes us more or less spiritual, being spiritual must include having a spiritual practice.

The world is a confusing place in many ways. It is a dangerous one, too. It makes perfect sense that the evolutionary process would promote curiosity and the ability to discover and understand—by learning about the workings of the world, our ability to survive and even dominate nature increased exponentially. Eventually, our curiosity led to the creation of science, a highly effective, if imperfect tool for figuring out what things are, what they do, and how they do it.

A popular refrain states that science cannot answer all questions. That is undoubtedly true. Embedded within the universe are processes and events that will be forever beyond our ability to analyze, predict, or understand.

The part of us that desires to know things seduces us into thinking that there is a deeper level of reality that can be grasped by a special tuning process of the mind. After all, the brain is the only real mediator of experience (and therefore of all knowledge), so it must be possible to manipulate that tool to perceive and grasp this hidden reality that sits beyond the keen eye of scientific examination. An extension of this perspective argues that some people in the past have indeed achieved this and developed translation systems that allow every day people to have access to this hidden wisdom—astrology, tarot, gematria, Cabala, goat entrails, tea leaves, entheogenic ritual, bibliomancy, augury, palmistry, scrying, Ouija, runecasting, and any other number of countless methods.

In her classic book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough writes:

As a religious naturalist I say “What Is, Is” with the same bowing of the head, the same bending of the knee. Which then allows me to say “Blessed Be To What Is” with thanksgiving. To give assent is to understand, incorporate, and then let go. With the letting go comes that deep sigh we call relief, and relief allows the joy-of-being-alive-at-all to come tumbling forth again.

Here Dr. Goodenough is briefly addressing a core existential challenge: to come to grips with reality. As one who looks to science as the primary instrument for understanding reality (or at least how it works), it can be daunting to accept that we humans (and myself in particular) have no real importance in the Grand Scheme of Things. The universe does not care about us. As absolutely amazing as life is, especially the emergence of self-awareness, life itself has no Ultimate Purpose. There is no Plan for us—there is absolutely nothing that we have to Learn or Accomplish, no preordained Destiny to fulfill.

Yes, acknowledging all that is a serious downer, no doubt about it. It very much goes counter to the human need to feel special, valuable, and safe.

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.

What is divine? What things are sacred and what makes them so has been debated since the notion was invented. For many religions, even up to this day, sacredness has been seen as a kind of extension of a transcendent personality. In this general perspective, God, say, is inherently sacred (being God and all) and anything that God does, creates, or influences becomes itself holy. Of course, this orientation requires a dualism, where some things are sacred and some things are not. The not-sacred things/events/actions can range, depending on who you ask, from the blandly mundane to the wickedly profane, depending on those things’ relation with the source of sacredness.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

Stuart Kauffman, a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy, has a wonderful essay on emergence theology over at edge.org. In it, he outlines three essential views: theism, postmodernism, and (what I consider) religious naturalism. His argument is that emergence theory is superior to reductionistic views when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe, and also provides a valid substrate upon which a modern ethical system can be developed.

To my mind, there is no such objective thing as essence, at least in the sense of a soul, genius, augoeides, higher self, or other non-corporeal form of self-being. In relation to this, I also do not recognize different spiritual states. By that, I mean that any experience of a “spiritual state” is a purely psychological phenomenon. This is not a bad thing at all; in fact, I am a big proponent of seeking such experiences. But they are purely subjective—no one is “more spiritual” than another person in any essential, objective sense.

There is a reason I put these two things together, spiritual states and essence. Religious transformations have not been shown to change the fundamental nature of people—such experiences can often change things like attitudes, aims, and beliefs, but not personal capabilities, bio-psycho functioning (with a caveat given below), or personality (a la the Big Five). Rather, such transformations often are aimed not at the biopsychosocial self but at one’s essential self, frequently in terms of being “born again,” “initiated,” or “attained.” The idea of attaining to objective spiritual states is an ancient one, although it takes a good number of forms, depending on the model one is working within. It’s useful to remember that those models are all manmade.

To our knowledge, humans are unique in that we have intentionality. We possess both self-awareness and the ability to make choices within a range of action possibilities. It is a gift of the most recent addition to our big brains, the neocortex, the outer rind of neurons that, among other things, allows for judgment, reasoning, and language. We take all this for granted, of course, but it is truly astounding—math, art, science, music, architecture, poetry, engineering, sports—these are all unique to homo sapiens.

Religion

Another major product of our neocortex is religion. It is arguable that religion was really just the earliest form of natural science, using available data and human reason to explain and predict various phenomena, such as seasonal changes or various illnesses. It has been a long strange trip from that point to modern religion. Although some religious movements still try to explain the physical world (such as the many Christians who use the Bible to determine the age of the Earth), most have moved into the more abstract domains, such as morality, transcendence, and the afterlife.

So far, we have briefly examined two of three pillars of a developing spiritual orientation—Religious Naturalism and Allegoricalism. The final pillar is Progressivism.

In a very general sense, progressivism is a worldview that recognizes the worth of human life and seeks to maximize freedom, opportunity, and fairness in society. Further, it aspires towards improving the well-being of all—via education, the arts, technology, social justice, health care, economic opportunity, et cetera—while also balancing human interests with those of the natural world. A progressive vision, therefore, seeks to enhance the liberty and fulfillment of both individuals and groups while simultaneously cultivating social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Progressives seek to manifest this vision through the promotion of diversity, empathy, pragmatism, critical thinking and debate, innovation, and cultural participation.

I have three statues of Ganesha in my home, despite not believing in his objective existence. Although I take delight in their artistic beauty, that is not why I have them (or not the only reason I have them, anyway). They act as a kind of cognitive/emotional shorthand, or more precisely, a symbol of things that I consider sacred. The statues themselves are not sacred—they are lovely configurations of common metal—but the concepts that Ganesha represent are. And they are sacred for one simple reason: I choose for them to be, and having their physical analogs in my living space connects me with them in a meaningful way.

Wikipedia has a good article on Religious Naturalism. I mention this because that pretty much describes me. The basic definition states,

All forms of Religious Naturalism agree that the natural world must be placed at the center of our most significant experiences and understandings. [...] Religious Naturalists affirm the human need for meaning and value in our lives, drawing on two fundamental convictions in those quests: 1) the sense of nature’s richness, spectacular complexity and fecundity and 2) the recognition that nature is not only the realm in which we live out our lives, but that we and who we are – our physical bodies, our amazing brains with their capacity for human sensibilities and understanding, and even our predisposition to be religious – are actually part of nature.