... on the nature of Faith.
Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with
scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any
real significance.
(Professor Fred Hoyle)
Overt speculation on the nature of religious belief, whilst not exactly welcomed by church authorities, is not punishable today by death, or torture, or excommunication as it was in the Dark Ages. This is perhaps as well since critical examination of religious belief at this point in our history is perhaps inevitable in a society overwhelmed with scientific enlightenment which seems to increase in exponential fashion year by year. Such activity for the averagely intelligent, non theological, thinker is rendered more difficult by the vacillatory attitude adopted by church leaders on some doctrinal matters and by a complete reversal of their ground on some of the more fundamental matters of the faith.
The fact is that for hundreds of years the Christian church held fiercely to the literal views on creation expressed in the bible. This despite reasoned evidence brought forward without malice by some of the world’s greatest thinkers and innovators. In 1543 Copernicus’ seminal work , “The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs” outlining what is now known as the heliocentric theory, was published posthumously under a preface designed to disarm prejudice by insisting on the purely hypothetical nature of the arguments. Seventy years later Galileo produced confirmation of the Copernican theory only to be warned off by the consulting theologians to the Holy See who advised him to avoid theology and stick to physical matters. The story is well known. In 1616 his work was pronounced to be a heresy and he was forbidden to hold, teach or defend his view. Galileo chose to ignore this edict and in 1632 published “Dialogue on the Great World Systems” which was greeted with enthusiasm from every part of Europe except from the Vatican from where Pope Urban VIII ordered him to appear before the Commissary General of the Holy Office in Rome. In 1633 Galileo was interrogated by the Inquisition under threat of torture and shortly thereafter recanted and was sentenced to strict house arrest at the pleasure of the tribunal. Given the reputation of the Inquisition he got away lightly. In the eighteenth century Georges Buffon was threatened with excommunication when he ventured to suggest that the crust of the earth carries signs from which its past history might be deduced and, of course, the most legendary case of all, the so called Battle of Oxford when Darwin and T.H.Huxley, the champions of evolution and natural selection, routed Bishop Wilberforce who sought to challenge them on their own ground.
When the church tried to fight the findings of the men of science, as they touched on the place of man in the world, it failed. But it did not linger long in defeat. “... the church which had humiliated Galileo suddenly found that a belief that the earth was at the centre of the universe was no longer cardinal to its doctrine. The bishops who had thundered at Darwin and Huxley were suddenly content to abandon the literal truth of the story of Creation and to endow it, instead, with a more shining splendour as some mystic parable in the evolutionary process.” 1
Bronowski goes on to point out that whilst the church has irritatingly changed its ground on a number of fundamental issues the doctrinaires amongst the theologians still remain. “They too have changed their attitude and have learned to avoid any ground which is free to rational enquiry.” 1 Today the religious faiths take as their ground man’s hunger for certainty. “Do you want to satisfy this hunger ?” they ask. “Look about you: you will find no certainty except in the submission to some doctrine which is not accessible to reason. Where there is reason there grows doubt” they say: “nothing is certain except the irrational....... If today we want to find relief from the uncertainties of a changing world in some cosy arbitrary doctrine, then we had better face the likelihood that tomorrow the Dark Ages will return.” 1
Bronowski’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the certainty of the irrational is not nearly so cynical nor so fatuous at it might at first appear. Ask any priest of any denomination a straight question on a matter of doctrine and he will respond either by paraphrasing the doctrine or by saying that it is a matter of faith.
It is interesting to observe, in 1997, that the so-called Creationist Movement has gone back to the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Cedarville College near Dayton, Ohio, in the USA has an academic tradition dating back almost one hundred years. “It asks one thing of its faculty that in our age seems uncomfortable: that they accept the literal truth of Genesis, of the creation of the earth, man and all living things; and that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments ‘are of supreme and final authority in faith and life’.” 2 James Langton goes on to report that a contemporary issue of Scientific American devotes several pages to what it calls anti-science, noting with alarm that almost half the American public now believes that God created man within the past 10,000 years. Other surveys suggest that 60 per cent of Americans think that creationist theories should be taught in the country’s rigorously secular schools. It is bizarre that this movement should have gained such popularity in a country which is a leader in scientific and technological achievement. Clearly the echoes from the Battle of Oxford do not resound quite so loudly in the USA as in Britain, and the battle for the minds of its citizens on matters of faith is being vigorously enjoined.
There is clear evidence of man’s belief in a superhuman controlling power. A large proportion of the world’s population owe allegiance, in name at least, to one particular faith or another, all of which have evolved over many millennia. Our Gods of today can trace their ancestry back to some ill-defined earth spirits conjured up in the imagination of primitive man. As the centuries rolled on religious faiths expanded, merged and separated, dogmas were initiated and doctrines developed and the process of social evolution moulded these ingredients together to provide sophisticated systems of belief. Then along comes some scientific discovery which makes a direct challenge to a fundamental area of the doctrine and within a relatively short space of time that doctrine is changed accordingly. This state of affairs offers very little comfort to the person who seeks from his/her religion a stabilising influence, nor to the person who looks to his/her religion to provide a source of inspiration and example against the pressures of the day.
The God of Christianity is also a changing God. The Old Testament depicts Him as a vindictive God inflicting misery on transgressors and punishment on the unfaithful. In the New Testament we find a God of love, a Father, a personalised caring God. These opposing characteristics present a pons asinorum for most non-theological thinkers, a conflict of views which presents real difficulties for those who seek to subscribe to a belief which purports to be true. “There have been thousands of religious beliefs in the history of the human race; and if they laid no claim to truth, there would be no great problem. But there are a number of worldwide religious faiths in existence today, each of which claims to offer the final and absolute truth about human nature and destiny and the real nature of things. The problem is not only to discover which one, if any, is right; but what to say about the ‘other’, wrong ones. 3 The problem is compounded when the nature of God is said to change, bringing to mind the time worn dilemma... “If omnipotent, not good: if good then not omnipotent.”
But are any religions wrong ? Darryl Reanney points to perceptions shared by many religions: “The thing that strikes one about the psychology of religion is not the differences in dogma (over which so much blood has been pointlessly spilled) but in the commonality of insight. At its root, that all men are brothers and that we should treat others as we treat ourselves.
Christianity: ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them’ (Matthew 7:12)
Judaism: ‘What is hurtful to yourself do not to your fellow man’ (Talmud)
Taoism: ‘Regard your neighbour’s gain as your own gain and regard your neighbour’s loss as your own loss’ (T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien)
Hinduism: ‘ Do nought to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain’ (Mahabaharata 5.15.17)
Buddhism: ‘Hurt not others with that which pains yourself’ (Udanavarga 5.18)
The unity of insight encoded in these sayings is all the more remarkable because they seem, for the most part, to have evolved independently, in different parts of the world under the influence of different cultural traditions and at different times during history”. 4
Another commonality between many religions is adherence to the doctrine that death is not the end of existence. The idea of rebirth or of life after death is one of the oldest beliefs traceable back to primitive man. This clearly has to do with the primal fear of death which is part of our psyche and which we endeavour to hide or to deny. We can do this to greater or lesser extent by taking refuge in a faith in which a God is seen as providing a safe haven for our souls.
Huxley claims that it is possible to worship and contemplate God in any of His aspects - as a personal, transcendent, all-powerful ruler of the world - as a loving Father, immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal - as exclusively immanent - as exclusively supra-personal. He goes on... “Nevertheless, it is easier to reach our goal (enlightenment) if we are not handicapped by a set of erroneous or inadequate beliefs about the right way to get there and the nature of what we are looking for. 5
Scientific enquiry has unravelled secrets from the microcosm of the atom to the great macrocosm of the universe and, having deduced the ‘rules’ by observation of the way in which matter behaves, have then been able to predict behaviour patterns for theoretical matter which they then go on to discover. Finding the answer to one question reveals yet another riddle to solve and so on in succession. Some philosophers tell us that this apparently uncanny knack of discovering that matter behaves according to plan is actually a function of mind, that matter will behave in the way we think it ought to behave. Whilst there may be some arguable substance to this proposition, it presents another apparent irrationality to cloud the real issue. If matter behaves in a predictable way and if, as a result of their observations, scientists can turn that behaviour to the benefit of mankind, then this is the substantive reality. This proposition is equally true in connection with those scientific developments that could prove to be detrimental to mankind.
The wonders of the natural world and of the universe of which we are a part may be sufficient to establish the belief, for some observers, that there may be a master plan to it all. The evolutionary process does nothing to detract from this plan, indeed it is argued that it represents the process of biological development in all living creatures and spiritual development in man. But science, like religion, has suffered a number of credulity setbacks (knowledge advances) in recent years in the form of unorthodox and unpredictable behaviour of sub-atomic particles. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the development of the science of quantum physics. On the eve of the millennium there is such an enormously diverse range of fields to which quantum physics has been applied that it represents a significant impact on the lives of all of us. But the behaviour of quanta can appear to be bizarre in the extreme. “the inescapable and unpalatable fact is that the behaviour of quantum objects is totally unlike anything you have ever seen.” 6 Classical mechanics proved wholly inadequate to explain quantum behaviour and an entirely new explanation was needed. Heisenberg who received a Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work on quantum mechanics introduced the notion that the very act of observing an experimental situation was sufficient to jolt the object on which measurements are being made. This jolt, which is not insignificant to an object of microscopic dimensions, thus ushers in an element of uncertainty into the measurement. Despite the uncertainty, despite the effects that some particles can appear to be in two places at once, despite the necessity to consider ‘backwards-in-time’ motion in particle collision dynamics, quantum mechanics has become the underpinning feature for all modern science. Without quantum mechanics there would be no nuclear power stations, no semiconductor industry, chemistry would be in the dark ages, no molecular biology, no understanding of DNA, no genetic engineering. In the quantum world events are conditioned by probabilities. Things either happen or they don’t but neither possibility has any reality until it is observed and observation, as we have already seen, introduces an uncertainty into the outcome. The quantum world is so strange, and unpredictable, that when setting out an exposition of quantum phenomena Tony Hey says... “To avoid running into a frustrating psychological cul-de-sac try to be content with mere acceptance of the observed experimental facts. Try not to ask the question ‘but how can it be like that?’. Physicist Richard Feynman says ‘nobody really understands quantum mechanics’.” 6
In other words the lay public are being asked to accept the findings of science, in relation to quantum mechanics, without question and as a matter of faith. However, the difference between this faith and the faith demanded by religious leaders is that the scientists are able to demonstrate clear evidence of the application of quantum theory in many aspects of everyday life. June Deery endorses this view - “Religious faith causes one to believe in something that one knows is not verifiable. Scientific faith, on the other hand, is belief in what can be verified even though one does not verify it oneself.” 7 So while the scientists can provide some ‘reward’ for our faith in their abilities, religious faith perhaps needs a jolt to establish itself in the mind of man. Whilst observation of the natural world may, of itself, be sufficient to convince some of the existence of a master plan to the universe there are many caveats, not least the bizarre behaviour of sub-atomic particles from which the whole universe, and ourselves, are constructed. Logic and observation alone or together cannot provide any direct evidence of the existence of a God but observation coupled with what has been termed a ‘mystical experience’ may be sufficient to support faith in a divine attribute. The Religious Experience Unit at Oxford University founded by Sir Alister Hardy has collated many thousands of reports of mystical experiences since the 1960s. Many of these describe a feeling of ‘oneness with nature’, a ‘sense of knowing’ and deep contentment. 8 It is not unreasonable to infer that even more people have been fortunate enough to have had such an experience but have not been able, for one reason or another, to recognise it for what it was. In consideration of mystical experience Bertrand Russell says... “I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I wish to maintain is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force, rather than a creative one. Even in the most logical realm it is insight that first arrives at what is new.” 9
Like Mrs Beaton who begins her recipe for jugged hare with ...”first catch your hare...” Russell is saying first have your mystical experience and then reason it out. There is no guarantee that you will arrive at any firm conclusion on the basis of just one experience but much depends on the type of experience, the depth of feeling which it engenders and the intellectual capacity of the individual having the experience. But for those who might doubt their capacity to reason it out for themselves there is great comfort in Professor Herbert Dingle’s words “...the essence of religion, as I understand it, is in what I will temporarily call ‘religious experience’, and the religious man is he who enjoys it. He may express it and try to rationalize it, but that is secondary. If he knows what it is he has the essence of the matter, even if he cannot express it in any form or give assent to any rational creed. On the other hand a man may paint ‘religious’ pictures which are masterpieces, and believe every word of the Apostles Creed, and yet have no religion in him.” 10 In other words Dingle is pointing us, perhaps unwittingly, in the direction of faith. So we have, on the one hand, the man who has a mystical experience and is able to identify the experience discursively and, on the other hand, the man who has a mystical experience and who cannot, or does not wish to, rationalise it, preferring instead to enjoy it for its own sake. In both cases the effect can be to lay the foundations of faith but, as Margaret Isherwood says: “ A seemingly gratuitous visionary experience can help us along the Path (to faith) but only if wisely used. It will not do the work of self-transcendence for us.” 11
Those who have had a spiritually uplifting mystical experience will often seek to bring about another although voluntary repetition is not something that comes easily. There has to be some preparation beforehand, the body has to be tuned, as it were, to make it more receptive. The mind must be cleansed of obstructive thoughts. Huxley counsels against the presence of negative emotions: “... negative emotions - the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger or malice which exclude love - are the guarantee that the visionary experience, if and when it comes, will be appalling.” 12
June Deery draws the conclusion that Huxley believed that mysticism differs from conventional religious belief and becomes more appropriate to the scientific age because he claimed that mystical experience is also verifiable even if not verified by oneself. He went on to say : “Mystical experience is extra-linguistic, non-mediated experience and therefore not through experiment but through transcendence mysticism is, in many ways, the ideal empiricism which science only approaches, because mystics claim that to experience is to know. This is my belief, my faith.” 7
There may be some substance to Huxley's belief. The essay on religion draws attention to the unwelcome effects of religious fundamentalism, a state of mind brought about as a result of a strong faith coupled with intolerance for alternative views. But would faith in science be any more acceptable given that science is likely to have equally strong fundamentalist views in a number of disciplines, not least those associated with the science of mind ? Probably not, according to Isaiah Berlin who was scathing about the effects of the application of scientific methods, without modification, to human affairs. "…the prerequisites of aptitude for some natural sciences, will, in the field of social organisation, unless they are modified by a great deal of sensibility, understanding and humanity, inevitably lead to appalling bullying on one side and untold suffering on the other." 13
Berlin's prediction paints an all too familiar picture in the tide of human history. One alternative to scientific faith or religious faith, and excluding the extreme solipsist approach of faith only in oneself, is to retain a healthy scepticism and keep asking the questions "How?" and "Why?" Curiosity is a great deal less dangerous than bigotry.
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Bibliography ...on the nature of Faith:
1 The Ascent of Man: Professor Jacob Bronowski, BBC Publications 1973
2 And on the fifth day, God created Dinosaurs: James Langton, The Sunday Telegraph, February 16 1997
3 Images of Eternity: Professor Keith Ward, Oneworld Publications 1987
4 The Death of Forever: Dr Darryl Reanney, Souvenir Press Ltd 1995
5 The Perennial Philosophy: Aldous Huxley, Chatto & Windus 1946
6 The Quantum Universe: Professor Tony Hey & Patrick Walters, Cambridge University Press 1987
7 Aldous Huxley & the Mysticism of Science: Professor June Deery, 1986
8 The Spirituality of Man: Sir Alister Hardy, Clarendon Press, Oxford
9 Mysticism and Logic: Lord Bertrand Russell, George Allen & Unwin 1917
10 A Threefold Cord: Viscount Samuel & Professor Herbert Dingle, George Allen & Unwin 1961
11 Faith without Dogma: Margaret Isherwood, George Allen & Unwin 1964
12 Heaven and Hell: Aldous Huxley, Chatto & Windus 1956
13 The Life & Opinions of Moses Hess : Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current Ed: Henry Hardy: p248,Pimlico 1997
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