FOUR WAYS TO BE RELIGIOUS WITHOUT BELIEVING IN GOD
A humanist's search for meaning in the modern world
Whether we are religious or not is a matter of temperament. There are those for whom immersion in the practicalities of life, resolving the problems that confront them, taking care of business, so to speak, describes the boundaries of their existence emotionally and intellectually. They are completely secular people. That's OK; no moral judgment here whatsoever.
But there are others for whom mundane existence doesn't totally satisfy. However their intellect binds them, their emotional yearnings seek to transcend the bonds of merely quotidian preoccupations. They sense there is more to existence than what meets the eye.
The philosopher, William James, was among these dissatisfied souls. Unlike his atheistic and agnostic contemporaries, James took religion seriously. Seriously enough to investigate it thoroughly and conclude that it was on to something. He wrote famously about the The Will to Believe, but he himself could not bring himself to do so. When it came to religious practice he was forever the outsider looking in and feeling its pull but unable to go there. He didn’t attend church and he couldn’t pray.
James's affinity for religion, however, led him to believe that many people yearn for unseen realities, what he referred to as a “more” in the universe. He also affirmed that what gave people extra zest for life was what he termed their “over beliefs,” their philosophies that may go beyond immediate experiences. He thought such beliefs were among the most interesting of human preoccupations.
I am no William James, but I must admit that I, too, am caught between two internal vectors pulling in opposing directions. My intellect leads me rigorously, maybe even compulsively, to base what I am willing to believe on facts and the rule of evidence. Integrity is a high virtue for me, including intellectual integrity. Such commitment compels me to affirm that there is no dignity in believing what is irrational, mendacious or untrue, and I have tried all my adult life to build my character around such commitments.
Yet I strain against the merely mundane. I am prevailingly a secular person. Yet I once gave a talk in which I held forth on my views to which I gave the title “Why I am Not Quite a Secular Humanist.” Secular, a humanist, and this-worldly, I am, but a somewhat dissatisfied secularist. My temperament, wedded to a dreamy imagination, impels me to seek for more.
My problem has a much larger context. In the grandest scheme of things, we can incorporate it into the problem of modernity. In the pre-modern era, my forebears lived out their lives bathed in a religious environment – God, miracles, living by divine commands, the supernatural. The modern age can be defined as the dismantling of that realm and the gods. Its foundations are skepticism, science, rationality, empiricism, humanism, secularism, enlightenment and a preoccupation with this world. Yet for very many poeple religion of course endures, again, as a function of human temperament fueled by our faculties as narrative-making, mytho-poeic creatures.
How to resolve this dilemma? The age of Darwin created a generation of unhappy Victorian intellectual agnostics. Bereft of their traditional God, they created half-way measures. No divine custodian for them, but a “more” in the form of an austerely impersonal force or principle that lay beyond the natural world, and whose attributes did not contradict the laws of reason or nature. And so Herbert Spencer spoke of the “Unknowable,” while Matthew Arnold posited “a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” Somewhat before this period, but also overlapping with it, the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, postulated his “Oversoul.” It was an impersonal, spiritual reality that was imminent in all things, including us. To apprehend it was to meld the divinity in ourselves with the supervening divinity infusing nature. Again, impersonal and undifferentiated.
Felix Adler, the founder of my Ethical Culture Movement was among these neo-religious postulators. As a modern, he affirmed the empirical deliverances of science. But science could not endow us with what religion provided and that is a soul. Modern science, Darwin most radically, reduced the human person to nothing but the movement of molecules and chemical forces, no different, nor more exalted – nor protected – than the earthworm, the rat or the flea. Darwin gave us a brilliant theory of how we came to be, but he destroyed any secure moral status.
So Adler, idealist that he was, projected a spiritual realm outside the world of time and space, that originated out of the foundational and irreducible faculties of mind. He referred to it as the “Ethical Manifold,” a spiritual reality comprised of an infinite number of unique members united in an organic spiritual community, each member enhancing all others and the community as a whole. This ideal realm was most real, more real than the actual world of transient material things we inhabit. I see a bit of Plato lingering in his thought.
Adler's scheme was creative and brilliant, erudite as it was abstruse. He, alas, convinced no one and he left no disciples.
I am admittedly intrigued, as implied, by these half-way measures, by these attempts to lift our sights beyond the merely secular, one dimensional world we inhabit. But I can't go there. I am too much the naturalist, remaining too wedded to this world and the natural realm. To the extent these positors of a transcendent ontology reject a supernatural divinity I am with them. But to the extent that they maintain the existence of a real, spiritual realm, however impersonal and beyond the world of nature, I can't follow them there.
So where does this take me? I am left with constructing a religious world-view out of nature and the experiences our normal faculties provide. Can this be done? Yes, it can. I will provide four ways in which we can engage religious experiences without God, spiritual beings or an independent, free standing, spiritual realm. Here they are:
The first type, which is the most common, is what is frequently called “nature mysticism.” It is the classic sunset experience. It is the sublime realization that we are children of nature, made of the same stuff as the stars, the stones the trees, and the earth. We are the products of nature, of the same primordial evolutionary forces that have molded all life indeed of inanimate matter, and to nature we return. The religious mystic looks over the natural landscape, contemplates the immensity of the oceans, gazes at the stars and says to herself “I am that, and that is me.” The felt connection - and felt connection is the operative term - between self and the enveloping natural world brings heightened feelings of wonder, of awe, of a paradoxical sense of comfort that comes from a realization of one’s smallness. Perhaps in special moments, it evokes feelings of sublime peace and the sense that it is a blessing to be given the gift life and to be able to contemplate it all.
It is in search of such experience that people, myself among them, feel a sense of spiritual uplift when hiking on the wooded trail, or paddling a canoe down a quiet stream, or seeking out magisterial vistas from mountain promontories. It is why people head to the woods seeking spiritual renewal, which the contrivances of urban landscapes could never deliver. For Emerson it was in the woods, that “all mean egoism vanishes.” And for Wordsworth, the greatest of the poets of nature mysticism, nature was “The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide the guardian of my heart and soul, of all my moral being.” Mysticism involves the transcendence of the ego and relative unification with our environment, and pristine, tranquil nature is perhaps the most friendly place to find such experience.
The second type of religious humanism is what I call “reverent agnosticism.” Reverent agnosticism can be illustrated by a metaphor rendered by Isaac Newton. Looking at his extraordinary achievements in creating modern physics, Newton said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a little boy playing on the seashore; and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”
This is the human condition before the unknown. From the perspective of the agnostic, the cumulative knowledge of mankind is merely the tiniest speck amidst an ocean of ignorance. Not only do we confront truths that are unknown and to be discovered, as Newton, put it, but we also confront unknowables. We can only know the world from our narrow perspective. Our knowledge is limited by our senses and the range of our marvelous, but finite minds. Outside the range of our mind and senses, we may conclude that there exists a much broader reality that is simply beyond the ability of our faculties to know, just as X-rays are beyond the range of our sight. It is as if our minds are like searchlights reaching out in the darkness. The beam of light extends only so far. But we know by deduction that there is reality beyond the point our beams of light can ever reach. Or, to invoke an apt metaphor -- it is as if we all live out our lives in a room that is completely sealed. In our case, sealed by the limitation of our faculties. Because we know that we are inside, we intuit that there is an outside, but we can never know what reality is like outside those boundaries.
This ignorance before a vast Unknown is the stance of the agnostic. It calls us to recognize our limitations, and thereby engenders a sense of humility before an infinite universe.
This sense of limitation before an infinite universe, generates not only a sense of humility, but as with the nature mystic, a sense of wonder, indeed reverence, for the very fact of existence, and gratitude for even our limited ability to discern a parcel of the tapestry of reality, however small.
The third type of religious humanism moves us closer to the human realm, and was outlined by the American humanist and pragmatist, John Dewey. I refer to it as Deweyan idealism. In contrast to Felix Adler, Dewey did not believe that ideals are inscribed in the universe. Rather he held that human beings create ideals out of their imaginations, but as he put it, they are not made out of imaginary stuff. Our ideals arise out of our frustration as problem solving animals. We experience a frustration such as being earth bound, and through our imagination we formulate an ideal response such as a rocket ship. That ideal then becomes a motive force in inspiring us forward to creatively resolve our problems and place us in a more effective, fruitful, relationship with our world. Take any problem and any ideal that comes out of it, let it inspire you toward more effective integration with your environment, and Dewey frames that relationship with the ideal as religious.
What Dewey did was to remove the religious from religion. Religion pertains to the institutions, the creeds, the rituals, the accouterments we usually associate with traditional religion. For Dewey we can have a religious (some would prefer “spiritual”) relationship with any ideal that inspires and moves us toward greater creativity, satisfaction and integration with our world. It is to be found in our vocations, in art, in science, in music.
My final variant of religious humanism I refer to with the inelegant term “non-instrumentalist holism.” This requires explanation. What I mean by this is a subtle appreciation for the invisible values that we derive from the tangible things of world. To be spiritually or religiously sensitive is to be focused on the ultimate values for which things exist, and not on the things themselves.
To be spiritually sensitive is to be aware of the ultimate purposes or ends for which instrumentalities exist. When we perceive the beauty behind the painting, and within the music, we have touched the spiritual. When we intuit the complexity and design of nature, we have touched the spiritual. When we perceive something as mundane as law and government, but see them as but practical mechanisms that reflect the values of justice, equality, freedom, and cooperation, then we have gleaned the spiritual dimension that stands behind these instrumentalities. Likewise when we discern timeless human truths in a novel or poetry. To perceive the timeless ends behind he things of this world is to touch the spiritual or the religious and so endow our lives with a sense of edification that enriches us in ways that matter most.
This concept of “non-instrumentalist holism” can be applied most importantly to our relations to others people.
When we first encounter another person, the first thing we see is a form, and then a face. We then experience their gestures and hear their worlds. Only then do we develop a more holistic sense of who the person is. Sometimes we like what we see. Sometimes we are unmoved. At other times what we experience we are inclined to turn away from. But if we are willing to make the extra effort, if we are willing to apply ourselves a little harder, as we apply ourselves to any task, what we often discover is that the person is more complex than he or she appears on the surface.
Every life from the inside out is a story. If we simply skim the text, we miss the story underneath. But if we apply ourselves a little harder, a coherent story may emerge. Each person’s story is a composite of joys and tragedies, or struggles and triumphs, of dreams and frustrations. And each person in his or her triumphs and struggles is unique and precious to him-or herself. As I would not find a distinctive work of art something to discard or hold cheaply, so I need to honor the indwelling humanity of the person, however flawed that person may be on the surface. Just as the beauty of the painting transcends the value of the canvass, so the worth of the person transcends the creature of flesh and blood whom I encounter before me.
It seems to me that every human encounter presents me with a choice. I can choose in instrumentalist ways to ignore the humanity of the other and abuse him or her. Or, I can choose to treat people as ends in themselves through common courtesy and decency, through being honest with them and defending their interests and rights. Whether dealing with a serving person in a restaurant, a homeless person on the street, a child an employee, a friend, or a stranger, I can choose to value them cheaply or strive to appreciate them in their humanity, in their wholeness, and with an intuitive sense of the other person as a subjectivity in his or her own terms.
This non-instrumentalist appreciation of human beings is the consciousness that gives rise to ethics. But the appreciation alone of this indwelling, priceless dignity of the person is not the culmination of a spiritual-ethical view. The fully ethical condition emerges when my own humanity touches and actively builds connections with the other. It arises when I experience the joy of the human bond, when we sing together and celebrate together, and when we work together under the inspiration of justice to serve the good of humanity. It emerges even more, when I enter into the life of the person who is down and enable him or her to think well of him- or herself It emerges when I express myself to another with support, empathy and caring.
It emerges, also, in a grander sense when I understand myself to be part of the unfolding tapestry of the human experience, and then dedicate myself to the realization of what is best in me and all others with whom I share a common destiny.
Ethics so understood, is the vibrant connection. It is the lived relationship. It is what elevates us beyond the banal, the self-interested, the mundane. It is the warp and woof of our highest purposes.
I have few doubts that the God-believer will look at my sketch of naturalist religion and judge it wanting. He or she will say that to be truly meaningful religious experience must provide a sturdy cosmic connection. It must guarantee that the universe take note of our existence and log it down for all eternity.
By this eternal standard my religious experience is too transient, too wispy, too much a product of human psychology to be meaningful.
To which I, ,the humanist can only respond, “Perhaps this emergence out of human psychology is all that religious experience ever means or ever has truly meant.”
Thanks so much, Marilyn. I am so pleased you are enjoying these essays and that are overlapping with your own thought. It is a joy and lifts the spirit to resonate with beauty, the glory and awe of nature. May it continue!
Joe after reading your essay, I can truly say it's a piece of intellectual art. I feel enlightened by your words and now feel more content than ever with the choice I made years ago. Living in a world of diverse religions, I am a spiritual being embracing nature and the beauty of all living things.