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Faith, Mystery, and Civilization

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 05/03/2007 - 17:11

Andrew Sullivan's final post in the Sullivan Harris debate on faith is reasoned, passionate, elegant, and well worth reading. (For those of you who are wondering, I jumped the gun when I spoke of the "aftermath" of this debate in an earlier post.)

He defends his position by appealing to the two extremes of human experience: mystery and contingency—the eternal reality beyond our comprehension, and the palpable danger of fundamentalism at this specific point in history.

Because he focuses on mystery, I'm going to take time out from my ongoing series on that topic to discuss some of the points he makes. Sullivan argues that he is...

...indeed bound by reason - up to the point where reason tells us little or nothing at all. We may disagree where that boundary is. There is more space beyond my reasonable barrier than yours, more content, more meaning. But since I do not claim that my faith must in any way impinge on your life or on anyone else's, I fail to see how my Christianity is less reasonable than your different, and more modest embrace of mystery. Or less reasonable than Einstein's dictum, relayed in Walter Isaacson's new biography:

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

I am more religious than Einstein, because I have experienced the love of Jesus and his redemptive, transformative power. But I fully concede that this is a gift, not a theorem. I hope it's clear I think no less of you for not seeing it or for seeing only so far as Einstein...

The quote raises some questions for me. It seems to imply that

  1. Mystery is the realm beyond human comprehension.

    No argument there.

  2. The realm of mystery, for Sullivan as a believer, is larger, somehow, than it is for Harris, as an athiest.

    This, I am not so sure of. For one thing, it's not at all clear to me what this can mean. Does Sullivan want to say that there is more that is beyond his comprehension than is beyond Harris' comprehension? That doesn't seem likely. His claim that there is more content and meaning for him, would seem to imply that he comprehends more of the realm of mystery than Harris does. But surely that is an oxymoron, since mystery is precisely that which cannot be comprehended.

    Let me hasten to say I am not interested in taking cheap shots at Sullivan's position. I have, in fact, defended it in the past, here, and here. But I do think that there is a lot of confusion around the use of the idea of mystery by religious people, particularly when it is used to position religion as somehow privileged in it's access to mystery.

    In this case, I am honestly not sure what Sullivan means. Neither of the above possibilities seem to make sense. A third possibility would be that Sullivan has knowledge in an area where Harris only experiences mystery, but that doesn't seem to fit either—wouldn't such knowledge have to come within the bounds of reason, if it were, indeed, knowledge? If he really does see farther than Harris or Einstein, isn't he either seeing something that is really there, in which case he's talking about knowledge, not mystery, or else seeing what isn't really there, in which case he's talking about delusion, not mystery.

    I do have one other theory, which I will come back to, later.

Sullivan goes on to argue that faith will always exist, for three, quite different, reasons.

  1. Humans have a biological and evolutionary inclination toward faith. Atheism will never occur, spontaneously, among humans in large numbers.

    There are several separate ideas tangled together in this assertion:

  • Faith equals religion, which equals belief in God.

    This is not true. There are untold numbers of Buddhists, for example, who have no belief in God, but who certainly practice a kind of faith.

  • It is possible to have a biological inclination toward something as specific as a belief in God.

    This may be the case, but it seems more likely that humans have an inclination toward trusting those who seem to know (especially their parents, when they are young), a tendency to want to understand which leads to acceptance of explanations of things they can't find out by themselves, a tendency to enjoy repeated community experience, etc.

  • Atheism does not occur spontaneously among humans.

    Those Buddhists would, strictly speaking, have to be considered atheists. They also would seem to have "spontaneously occured", as have most of the bloggers over at Science Blogs.

  • No civilization in human history has been free of faith.

    Again, a couple of assumptions:

    • Civilization, in the sense of large numbers of people more or less working for a ruling class, is a good thing.

      I'm not so sure of that. We tend to conflate ideas like art, science, and technology, with the idea of certain types of political structure. Remember that most of those civilizations, which had a state religion which function as a propaganda arm for the ruling class, were essentially dictatorships. And also remember that humans had developed art, culture, language, hunting tools, the use of fire, etc. before the first of those civilizations.

    • A hidden assumption: No civilization has been free of belief in God.

      Again, a certain amount of conflation is at work. There have certainly been civilizations where the predominate "faith" was not at all a belief in God, as Sullivan would define God. Remember those Buddhists.

  • Even someone as rational as Einstein had a veneration for ultimate mystery: that force beyond anything we can comprehend.

    Again, no argument.
  • Sullivan then argues that, because faith will always exist, it is important not to undermine non-fundamentalist faith, which is our only protection against the dangers of fundamentalism.

    This is an odd point in his argument for me, because I think he is quite probably right. Whether or not humans will ever become predominantly atheistic, it is quite obviously not going to happen tomorrow. Even though I am no longer religious myself, I have a real appreciation for the kind of moderate religion that Sullivan represents, and I do think the religious world as a whole is better off because it exists.

    But the flip side of this point is that it is not at all an argument for the truth of his religious point of view, if by truth you mean the kind of truth one finds in science, or everyday discourse (like: "your keys are on the table" or "the dog is sick"). Once again, we come back to idea that Sullivan and his "Christianists" are not just at different places on a continuum, but are playing different games altogether.

    In the end, Sullivan sees Christianity as a practice: a discipline, a tradition, and an experience. On the other side are the Christianists, and perhaps Harris, who see it as an alternative to science and reason.

    Strange bedfellows.

    But this is how I make sense of the quote we began with. For Sullivan, the discipline and models of his faith are the tools he uses to relate to mystery. He thinks this gives him a better contact with mystery than an atheist has.

    I don't think he's necessarily right about that, even though I do think there is room for, and value in, his kind of faith. But that's another topic, which I hope to get to in Mystery 101.

    At least, that's what I think today.