Holy bookclub, Batman: The Gods of Fish and Men

Some recommended reading this time. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Excerpt from Heaven, by Rupert Brooke.

 

I came across the poem ‘Heaven’, from which the above is an excerpt, in a book I’m reading at the moment, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. The title alludes to another book I’ve mentioned before: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Both are collections of the respective authors’ contributions to the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology – the knowledge of god accessible not by revelation but by experience and reason. In 1901 James used his lectures to argue for the role of science in the study of religion, and set out his vision of what that might mean. Sagan - an astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence – used his lectures in 1985 to set out why he felt the proper exercise of scepticism does not preclude a sense of the sacred in our approach to the universe, but why human religions, such as they are, fail to capture it. Awe and wonder - says Sagan - are the only proper reactions to the majesty of creation, all the more so if we take modern ideas about its scale and complexity seriously. Indeed, it’s precisely the appreciation of this scale that makes earthly religions seem so parochial – for all the swarming diversity of human religious forms, they do not represent the full set of logically possible types of gods, beings and forces. Rather, they seem to speak to a much smaller set of conspicuously human concerns. Hence the poem: from a neutral perspective, would the anthropocentrism of our revealed religions appear all that different from the poem's fishy theology?

Sceptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. - Carl Sagan

Another book I’ve read recently – Religion Explained , by anthropologist Pascal Boyer – also draws lessons from the ways in which human religion varies and the ways in which it seems to embody common concerns. He starts by outlining why religion unto itself is a phenomenon demanding an explanation, as a peculiar form of human behaviour and not just a specific manifestation of general cultural activity. He also set out why he thinks the common garden explanations typically proposed – religion as Existential Consolation, as Primitive Science, as Failure of Proper Thinking and so on – fail to do the job: no one of them accounts for the all the actual ways and manners in which religion is practiced. His proposal is that religious ideas and ritual activate a specific set of evolved psychological tendencies – that facilitates their general plausibility to mankind – in combination with specific violations of the expectations of those systems, explaining the endless interest such ideas engender. That’s a little lacking in detail I know, but I don’t want to get drawn into the detail here and the argument is set out in entertaining psychological and anthropological detail well worth the read even if you don’t buy his perspective. I’m not personally sure he succeeds in providing an explanation of religion in isolation. What I want to draw out here is the sense in which its easy to point to religious or spiritual feeling when you see it, but much harder to separate it off as a proper category all unto itself.

 “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” - Carl Sagan

One domain in which people sometimes seek to maintain a thick and fast division between science and religion is ethics – insomuch as the latter is meant to be a proper source while he former is not. I’m all for appropriate wariness as regards the naturalistic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) – deriving an ought from an is – but another of my recent reads has got me thinking about the ethics embedded in the practice of and motivation to do science. Its fiction this time, Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson. Among other things, it’s an exploration of the ideals embedded in science – the perfectibility or at least improvability of knowledge, the attempt to view things from outside of a human-centric perspective – and the treaty-model of Antartica as a ‘scientific resource’ as basis for our relationship with the natural world at large. It - along with the author’s excellent Mars Trilogy – is a compelling attempt to feel a way between humanity’s right to make use of the natural order to feed and sustain itself, and our duty as custodians to the very otherness and awe that we can all rightly agree is the only response to creation.

Carina Nebula

  “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

 

NOTE: I recently came across this website (for which there also a .co.uk version too), which I can recommend if you are thinking of looking for any of these titles: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/. They “…collect and sell books online to donate books and fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than 8 million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.”

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Everybody Hurts - and everybody wants to tell you why.

Before, we spoke about Weird Shit. Today, I’d like to talk about Shit that’s actually…well, Shit.

I doubt you’ll find it controversial if I suggest that a strong candidate for poster child of the personal power of religious belief is the respite it can bring from suffering. One of the mainstays of debates on religion is the so-called Problem of Evil. In the abrahamic context, the Problem is the alleged inconsistency of a (one would really, really hope) benevolent god - who also happens to be omnipotent – and the existence of a world that quite patently, when you come down to it, isn’t all gumdrops and roses. I’d rather not get into the details of the centuries of philosophical wrangling that have occurred around this topic, but I do recommend this – by turns calculating, funny and insightful - wiki on the solutions  that have been put forward for this very sticky wicket. Indeed, I would say the real problem is one of Inconsistent Evil, rather than Evil per se. But that’s not our topic. For today at least.

What I draw from the boundless popularity of this trope is not the power of the argument itself but its topic – suffering, both in terms of specific unpleasantnesses and that more general, existential booboo lurking in all our souls – and the fact that any system of thought that wants its time in the sun has to grapple with its existence. Most religions seem to havethe same general responses: You deserve it (it’s your – or better yet, her - fault); it’s good for you; it doesn’t really exist if you would only look at it the right way. You pays your money, you makes your choice. I would say even ‘Science’ has its ideas on the subject. If you are partial to a bit of evolutionary psychology, you might contrast the environment Homo Sapiens sprung up in and the one in which it now finds itself. Take our appetite for sugar say, arguably adaptive in one context but ripe for maladaptive abuse in a context where such goodies are all too readily available. Or the ideas at the core of cognitive behavioral therapy, where anxieties and phobias are understood as the entraining of biological safety mechanisms like ‘flight or flight’ - that broadly and in aggregate are probably not a bad thing to have – to inappropriate stimuli or appropriate stimuli to an unhelpful extent.

Riffing on the theme that traditional doctrinal hooks are often not all that revealing about the beliefs of those that purport hang their hat of on them, do you find any of these answers – including the evolutionary one – all that convincing. At best, they might be – if we’re being charitable - explanations. But are they any of them consolations? 

I don’t know about you – and I would very much like to hear about you – but the perspectives that have helped, be they religious or not, have had some common features. They help you to see the hurt as not personal, not something that you have to worry about or register beyond the time in which they happen. They get you to count your blessings. There but for the grace of god go I. They let you submerge your ego into something, someone or some way bigger that yourself. They provide you with vistas that put your hurt into perspective, to count – carefully and with fuller knowledge of the alternatives – your lucky, lucky stars.

On the personal level, I suppose an explanation isn’t much use even supposing one or any is right. After an explanation, you still have to ask yourself - what now? At that point, I’m willing to let you have your life jacket, if you’ll do me the favour of letting me have mine.   

Photo by Agnonymous.

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