WillSpirit!

This post is the first in a string of essays about spirituality. I apologize, but the early posts are long and hard to follow. They need revision. I hope to tune them up before long, and make the project more coherent and easy to follow.

After an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting today, when I heard people struggle with the concept of ‘God’ that underpins AA, I realized the time has come for me to insert a series of spiritual posts. I wrote some back when the blog first launched, seven months ago. They did not go over well. Partly, I suspect they were too much based on my personal experiences and beliefs. The minute one tries to verbally portray the broader influences that underly the universe, one gets caught in the trap of particularizing the universal. One can use allegory to allude to the larger ‘truth,’ but attempting to describe it directly is the same as trying to capture wind in a jar.* One can point to situations where something unusual seems to be at play, but the ‘mysterious’ as a noun cannot be encompassed with words.

Disclaimer: (*Note: when I included the ‘wind…jar’ cliche in the first draft of this post, I actually thought it was original. Only upon a later reading did I remember the words are part of the common lexicon: not my creation at all. This goes to show the possibility of mistaking a previously heard phrase or concept for one’s own. Also, even if an idea is thought up de novo, there is always the chance that others have already thought of it independently. This is a good time to insert the proviso that I will try to credit ideas that came to me from other sources, if I know them. But the only thing I can absolutely claim as my own is my specific way of writing and organizing these ideas. People have earned doctoral degrees and built careers around the subjects I am tackling; I am a rank amateur. I do not expect to break truly new ground from this starting point. I hope to spin things in a helpful way, and that is all.)

Any attempt to describe spiritual truths with prose is a bit like killing and stuffing a fox, and using it to explain all of biology. First, the fox has died, so the principle of ‘life’ itself can no longer be seen; spirituality is experiential, not something you can pick up secondhand. Second, by choosing a fox rather than a fig tree or a faun,selected aspects of biology (the carnivorous and cunning) get emphasized over countless equally important but vastly different qualities (e.g., photosynthesis, juvenile development, life as prey rather than predator.) ‘God,’ if it exists, must manifest in myriad ways, including many I can’t imagine. Finally, by choosing a single large mammal, one is pinpointing a certain size scale and temporal epoch. Life occurs across an enormous range of size and time scales. In terms of size, one could just as well choose a sugar molecule, a chromosome, a family of foxes, or the whole forest the fox lives in. Life is too expansive and complicated to be captured by a single stuffed fox. And so is ‘God,’ if I use the word to mean something that underlies and permeates everything. This ‘God’ entity would have been present in the big bang, and involved in some way with the evolution of matter, space, time, and life. It would be something that appears random and invisible under most circumstances, and yet connects everything and shapes our lives. If such a thing exists, then we can’t expect to do it justice it with a blog post. Or a bible, for that matter.

So my upcoming ‘spiritual’ riff will shy away from attempts to pin down metaphysical concepts. I will restrict myself to laying down principles that are more or less unarguable. The product, I hope, will open the door for others to recognize that faith, transcendent feelings, and belief in mysterious influences are not closed to those who adhere to modern science. I am convinced one can retain a rational stance, reject dogma and silly portrayals of divine forces, and still enjoy the benefits of faith. Make no mistake, although strict atheists see faith as a childish and outdated tendency without value, it has power to enhance one’s experience of life, offers meaning and purpose, and provides a measure of comfort in this difficult world. Why should it be unavailable to those who value critical thought? Even if science had proven that there is absolutely no basis for belief in forces beyond those we can immediately sense, there might still be reasons to reach for faith. However, nothing in modern empiricism has ruled out the possibility that influences we cannot measure play a role in our world.

I do not expect anyone to accept this viewpoint without justification. The series of posts to come will outline why I believe science can accommodate the possibility of a mystical aspect to the universe. In fact, some scientific findings point to the conclusion that the world is rife with mystifying influences. If you will keep an open (but still rational) mind, I think the following posts will justify views of creation that move beyond daily reality and open our hearts to depth, significance, and love. In service of full disclosure, it must be admitted that in order to achieve transcendence, we must at some point release our death-grip on rationality. But that does not mean it is necessary to contradict what we know to be true, or accept what common sense says is impossible. It only requires humility, and the understanding that ‘we’ (meaning humanity) can’t figure out everything.

These paragraphs set the stage for a series of posts that will, I hope, fulfill my promise to remove the roadblocks to spirituality set up by dogmatic atheism. Rational thought works. Logic possesses tremendous predictive power. But that does not mean that irrational influences and unsettling paradoxes do not exist. The ultimate nature of reality has not been settled by science. Few people, deep down, want to believe the world is bereft of mystery, or that transcendence is a silly dream. Strict atheists have a hypothesis about the universe, and shape their conclusions on the basis of incomplete evidence, just like the rest of us. I maintain my right to call myself rational, while holding my heart open for something that could be called ‘God,’ for lack of a less tainted word. In the posts that follow, I hope to show the rational soundness of accepting a higher power. Those who value reason, recognize the role of randomness in nature, and keep human tragedy in view can build faith without compromise.

***Click here for the next entry in this series.