Reviving a Dead Language

Taking back Faith-Talk from Fundamentalism

1990 — 1994

"I want you to go on a pilgrimage."
"What's a pilgrimage?"
"You'll know by going."
"Will it be dangerous?"
"Ultimately dangerous. You will be killed."
"Will you go with me?"
"Oh yes, my delight, always. Here goes."
The world you never knew turns upside down...a shattering hammer blow - you grab a breath, and for your very life you scream!

The Human Condition

For two thousand years we have been talking our way past the event in which we and our Accompanist named ourselves, in which we self-identified, or "came out," so to speak. And in this latter day, the language no longer speaks to most of us. It is moribund, perhaps dead. To those who want to keep it that way, hey, pretend I'm from Mars. To those who are willing to risk a change, I say let the dead bury their dead. Let us attempt to revive the language. The pilgrimage is hard, our progress is doubtful, the end looks grim, and we need to talk.[1]

We need to talk about what grabs us. Each of us is grasped by some higher good, truth, cause, whatever. Something most important, some ultimate concern. Something he or she relies on, depends on, believes in, or trusts. Something which, if threatened, brings anxiety, if destroyed, despair, if affirmed, reassurance. This state of ultimate concern is Faith, a state of being which includes piety, doubt, and unbelief. It is as much a part of our being as Space and Time, which give us a place to be and a while to be there. For shorthand to name what we're ultimately concerned about, a short word, God.

We can have gods — gods like our employers who threaten or disappoint, gods like success who disappear, gods like our nations who may abuse or ignore, gods like truth who are limited by what we can conceive them to be. Or we can have God, the great undefined term, that fishes us out of our desperate situation by the hook of our Faith.

Our situation is the Human Condition of estrangement or alienation from ourselves, each other, nature, and God. Let me give some examples. We are estranged from nature: If I spit on your cheek, you will wipe it off - but you probably don't compulsively pick up other people's litter. If you were more acutely aware of your participation in (the opposite of estrangement from) nature, litter or any kind of pollution of the world would bother you as much as filth on your body. We are estranged from each other - do you know anyone's innermost thoughts and feelings, even those of someone you love? We are estranged from ourselves - do you always know why you do everything you do, and why you feel what you feel? We are estranged from God - what does your participation in God feel like?

You can name other estrangements than these four. Karl Marx noted that we are estranged (alienated) from the work of our hands and minds. How many of us can say after a year's work - look at what I made, isn't it great? Just be careful which estrangements you concentrate on, why, and what you do about them.

The condition of estrangement is necessary for what we call normal life, because without it, you would be dead or institutionalized. If you could not distinguish between your self and what is other than your self, you might mistake an oncoming car for a figment of your imagination, and forget to get out of the way. Better to put you in some safe place if you were in that condition.

This state of estrangement from ourselves, each other, nature, and God is what Judeo-Christians call Sin, and Buddhists call Delusion. It isn't something someone else did. It's who we are. It is ordinary Human Consciousness as we know it and share it. In the allegory of Genesis our Human Consciousness is called the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the apple we ate from the tree.

Ah, the Apple! In eating it, the first people symbolically chose Human Consciousness, a choice we all make after the fact. We act and feel as though we had chosen Human Consciousness. We embrace it, we die rather than give it up, and we teach it to our kids. We each eat the apple, given us by our first and most beloved tempters, Mom and Dad.

Of course, Mom and Dad have to work with difficult material. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, (Book 1, Chapter 7, Mentor Books, New York, 1963, translated by Rex Warner) describes at length how we are born into Sin. Every baby is an egotist, ready to sacrifice everyone else to its desires, like the retarded man who raped his neighbor and then stabbed her to death so that she wouldn't "tell on" him. That is to say, we are born into a condition of estrangement - some of which our parents heal, the rest of which they educate to resemble their own.

Our parents are aided in this project of education by our desire to be good, something planted in us by Providence (which you can attribute to either genetics or God). Because we desire at least to think of ourselves as good, many people think that we actually are good, and use humanism as a basis for moral philosophy. Since the example above or say, the existence of war, undermines their basic premise, I view their arguments with suspicion.

If all this sounds grim, remember that Sin, like Faith, is a state of being, a part of the Human Condition. And if we each learn our particular style of Sin from our parents, we also learn Faith by trusting in their unconditional love, for a while, if we're lucky. After that we discover, "Life's a bitch, and then you die."

 

Evil

Which brings up the Serpent. Believe it or not, there are people in the world who will do bad things to you for no particular reason. They are hooked on acting out of their own willfulness. They really get into this estrangement business. To them, making their estrangement worse feels good. Consider, for example, the employee who sabotages the careers of those with whom he or she doesn't get along, because the exercise of such power makes him or her feel more secure. (I could use criminals as examples, but criminals are not necessarily worse than non-criminals, they're just less socially acceptable.) Such people are going overboard with their attachment to Human Consciousness - they are getting into Human Evil. The tempting serpent is a fine symbol for this phenomenon.

I think that the serpent may also be a cover-opposite in the following sense. The customary interpretation of the serpent is that it represents the devil tempting the original couple to disobey God and obtain knowledge, to develop a consciousness independent of God. But Human Evil is characterized by a demonic will to selective unconsciousness. The story of the serpent in Genesis may thus be an expression of the writer's own Will to Unconsciousness, in which he or she condemns Humanity's receipt of consciousness.

I like to use racism, sexism, and homophobia to illustrate this concept of Human Evil as a Will to Unconsciousness.[2] One variety of white racist tries to assert his self-worth by lynching his victim, because he dis-identifies with him - the black man is "one of them, not one of us." Another type of white racist can campaign tirelessly against abortion, without even thinking of all the black inner city babies who die needlessly from lack of prenatal medical care. Not all white racists hate blacks, some just forget all about blacks as they get lost in their abstractions. And of course, black racists claim that only whites can be racist. In all cases, a will to selective unconsciousness closes the mind of the racist, sexist, or homophobic. They are like sleepwalkers who will do anything, sometimes even lie and kill, rather than risk waking up.

Now in Genesis, when Adam and Eve attain Human Consciousness, God kicks them out of Eden (I told you we'd need to be institutionalized) and into a world where it isn't safe, where things don't always work the way we want them to. This is presented as a punishment,[3] but think about it. For a child to become a fully independent, free, and functioning adult Human Being, he or she has to endure the pain of leaving home, and learning to make his or her way in the world. Only then, when he or she is independent of the parent, can he or she be free to know the parent as the parent is - rather than merely as a granter/witholder of the child's wishes.

The nice thing about the physical world is that we can make our way in it. It is a rational place - much of it can be understood by the methods of science. And when we understand the world, we gain power in it. We do not have to propitiate God to make our universe work. Because of this, we are free to know God as God, rather than merely as the granter/witholder of our wishes. This freedom comes at a terrible price - fire, flood, famine, disease, and other disasters - collectively called Natural Evil by theologians, and our doing nasty things - Human Evil. Our freedom is presented as punishment in Genesis, because it feels that way sometimes. It is called the Fall, and it was so serious that all Creation fell with us.

 

Grace

In short, the Human Condition of estrangement (Sin) and the possibility of Evil in its Human and Natural varieties establish our radical freedom in our relationship with God. That's the bad news. The good news is that our radical freedom is the freedom to know God through our Human Condition of ultimate concern (Faith).

Now to really know something, you must participate in it. Those who really know music are musicians, those who really know chess are chess players, those who really know science are scientists, etc. So when I say we are free to "know God," I mean that we are free to participate in our ultimate concern. And I mean participation as inter-being, as antidote to being estranged, apart from.
Participation in God! An outrageous concept, familiar to Buddhism in which everybody can become a Buddha, but foreign to Christianity! An uncomfortable concept, too, for when Jesus spoke of it ("I am in the Father and the Father in me...") people crucified him. After all, participating in God risks God's participating in us - we might be overwhelmed, annihilated, we might loose control of ourselves - it might feel like Hell! At least our estrangement is familiar, comfortable, protecting from that awful fear. And so we shield ourselves with a little willful misunderstanding, a little Will to Unconsciousness.

But is it too late? Maybe God participates in us already. I would find it hard to say anything good about a god who simply watched me suffer without feeling it with me and through me. Now Jesus called ordinary people his brothers and sisters, children of God, and himself the Son of Humanity. Perhaps he was a person who was conscious of his participation in God and God's participation in him, and who declared this state of consciousness to be possible for us - indeed promised it to us.
I call this participation Grace. When we are made aware of it, it may have the character of Unconditional Love, or of Judgment.

 

Judgment and Redemption

Grace, or participation in God (or God's participation in oneself — it cuts both ways), can feel bad. After all, participation implies knowing, and knowing God implies knowing something of what God knows about me. If I can't stand knowing certain things about me, if I spend a lot of energy denying those things, if I re-invent my entire perception of the world so I won't have to notice those things - Grace will come as a threat. In our cultures, so many of which are shame-driven, having one's pretenses exposed is the ultimate punishment - so much so, that some of us will face anything except that exposure even when it happens. America's fallen televangelists, all of whom are planning comebacks, are some of our more glamorous examples of how the power of denial can resist ridicule, financial loss, and even jail.

This knowing who you are implied by participation in God — if it is against your will, it feels like Judgment. Now if you experience God's Grace as Judgment, you will avoid awareness of that participation, so as to avoid the terrible feeling of it. This may leave you in a state called Despair, the "outer darkness," but you can probably paper over your awareness of that state, too. Then you can really be bad. To illuminate this point let me now praise a famous atheist.

Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus,[4] a brilliant description of the Human Condition of finitude in Time. In it, he determinedly pursues the question of Life's Meaning without any reference to God, and concludes that it has no meaning - that Life is Absurd. The Absurd Man (the person aware of this absurdity) devotes his life to a continual rebellion against this meaninglessness, and even comes to experience all of life more deeply because of it - to revel in it. Dare I say that experiencing all of life more deeply is indeed participating in it? Dare I say that the book's closing line, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," signals a breakthrough in spite of Life's Absurdity, a leap of Faith, a glimmer of awareness of one's participation in one's ultimate concern?

On the other hand, many religious people use the three-letter word God to avoid just such awareness! They prefer to think of God as wholly somebody else, who makes decisions about reward and punishment according to predictable rules. This way they can determine who is "saved" by observing who is following the rules. They can allow themselves to feel confident of God's mercy without risk of participation in God. In particular, they can judge others without letting themselves know their own Judgment. Jesus made fun of them when he said, "First remove the log from your own eye, so that you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye!" It's this false rule-based (rather than God-centered) idea of Judgment that enabled the Inquisition to burn heretics, thinking it was in better taste than crucifying them.

This knowing who you are implied by being aware of your participation in God - if the knowing is voluntary, it feels like complete acceptance. After all, you know who you are, God knows who you are, and you are still kept in participation. Another name for this complete acceptance is the experience of Unconditional Love, or Redemption.

Unconditional Love sounds great, but the fear of Judgment is in us all. We all have our little secrets, even from ourselves. And so, we have to ease ourselves into the experience - to stimulate our eros to lubricate the interaction. This activity is called meditation by Buddhists. Christians, Jews, and Muslims call it Prayer.

 

Prayer

Now the popular idea of prayer in Christianity is intoning a stream of words. Jesus criticized this practice and instituted what is now called The Lord's Prayer, which has brevity as its most obvious virtue. The idea is to get past the words to the business of prayer - of intentional awareness of our participation in God and God's participation in us. Because our own fear of Judgment (being made to know who we are) stands in the way of our awareness, voluntarily knowing who we are - Confession - is one of the tools we use to help us pray. This Confession goes beyond a mere recital of misdeeds, or of good deeds left undone, or even of a blanket statement covering things we have yet to acknowledge to ourselves. Confession is participation in ourselves - the antidote to self-estrangement.

If we voluntarily know who we are, who do we find ourselves to be? A partial answer is found in the African-American spiritual which asks, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"

Let your imagination travel back in time and space to Jerusalem during the week of the Crucifixion. Where would you fit into the scene? What role would you play? Would you be Peter - ready to pick fights, only to chicken out when the going really gets tough? The soldiers who were just following orders when they drove the nails? Judas - wanting the security of conventional authority more than anything else? Pilate - who was trying to please his bosses by keeping law and order? Herod - earnestly seeking, but when the Truth comes in an unexpected form, throwing it away? The priests - who believed correct doctrine to be more important than compassion? One of the crowd, too self-effacing and too afraid to interfere? Maybe one of the two apostles who gave up on their man and sneaked out of town after the execution was over? You see, at the Crucifixion, we humans came out to Christ as crucifiers.

Of course, the other fear we can have is better called awe, as in awful, because God as the "Wholly Other," the Mysterium Tremendum,[5] is difficult to snuggle up to. Buddhists and Hindus are familiar with awe from the section of the Bhagavad Gita[6] in which Krishna appears to the warrior Arjuna in his pure or "unmanifested" form (rather than as Arjuna's friend and chariot driver) and scares Arjuna so that his hair stands on end. Adoration is a way of using our capacity for love to overcome awe, which for Christians means adoring God's participation in Jesus.

Now for Christians, God as Jesus during parts of his life is easy to love. The baby Jesus who knew our helplessness, who needed our love to survive. The crucified Jesus who experienced our own condition at its most painful by knowing defeat and death without God.[7] The resurrected Jesus who forgives us even though he knows us at our worst, who undoes our evil, and who invites us to participate in him. (Christians would do well to remember that Jesus during his ministry was often hard to tolerate, because he radically challenged our attachment to our estrangement, our Sin - he didn't get crucified because everyone thought he was a nice guy.)

God as Jesus is easy to thank for his forgiveness and his invitation to us to join with him in spite of our being crucifiers. Thanksgiving for God's Forgiveness (God's participation in us in spite of who we are) eases our Confession, and stimulates our Adoration. Lastly we have Supplication - asking God to look after our cares, giving our less than ultimate concerns to God. It is a way of unburdening ourselves of distractions to prayer.

And so we have ACTS, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication,[8] as devices of prayer, not for God, but for us. As techniques, we have speaking, singing, dancing, silence, sitting, and all of the Eastern forms of meditation,[9] and Western forms of contemplation. We also have everyday life.

 

Witness

When we use the language of faith to describe what we have experienced so far on our pilgrimage of life, we bear Witness to the truth as we see it. The activity of Witness has been cheapened by those who put dogmatics before truth, and who believe the truth is so limited that it can be expressed in only one set of words and in only one style. I would like to revive an idea from the Apologists, the earliest Christian theologians: God is one, and Truth is one; therefore, all truth is of God's Truth. This includes the truth of science, of history, of philosophy and logic, and of subjective personal experience (which includes art), as well as the truth of faith. In fact, the various styles of truth help us to correct our religious ideas when we stray from the truth.

Now the point of reviving the dead language of faith is to enable us to talk about our thoughts, emotions, and experiences regarding our ultimate concern. By doing so we can help keep our less than ultimate concerns - the ones we tend to fight over - in perspective. The dispassionate languages of philosophy and psychology can be of help, but we can use the language of faith, with its emotionally charged symbols to express what really gets us.

For example, we all know deep down that we live a heartbeat away from death and a thought away from madness. Since this is too terrible to think about, you probably shove this idea into some dark corner of your mind until accident, loss, or illness brings it roaring out. But hiding from it is the way of self-deception, which is ultimately the way of fear and despair. How to face it squarely, how to find the courage to have the in-spite-of-everything kind of joy that returns after any loss, whether of possessions, loved ones, health, or life?

You could propitiate some invented god, pretending he/she/it may protect you, at least for a while. That's what you get with the language of belief. On the other hand, religious philosophers as far back as Lao-Tzu fought against this idea with the saying, "Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat all creatures as straw dogs."[10] As I said above, the possibility of evil is the price of freedom, which is apparently necessary for soul-making.

You might do better just to ask for a little companionship - which we can help each other to seek with the language of faith. The faith expressed by St. Paul when he wrote, "I am certain of this: neither death nor life ... nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and God's love, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord." Or as Muhammad recited, "And certainly We created man, and ... We are nearer to him than his life-vein." In other words, we can derive strength and comfort from a sense of being constantly and lovingly accompanied. A childish delusion, perhaps, but one shared by such people as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, and many others as the source of their perseverance, courage, and happiness. It calls us to the radical courage and joy that we all need in order to really do anything - like treating ourselves and each other with the kind of kindness that makes peace.

 

Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

I hope that these few definitions may help people of faith to translate their particular idioms of faith to one another, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, or of whatever faith in which people hope to participate in ultimate Truth. I would now like to make a few remarks that may facilitate such dialogue between Christians and Buddhists.

I've heard Christians say that Buddhism has no God and no sense of Sin. I think that Buddhists insist so strongly on receiving awareness of their participation in God that they refuse to name God as separate from themselves and creation. I think they consider the naming of God to be a symptom and a cause of estrangement from God - in other words, they think naming God is itself Sinful (deluded or estranged). The Buddhist concept of Delusion is equivalent to the Judeo-Christian concept of Sin with the shame de-emphasized. The removal of shame from the center of attention makes it easier for the Buddhist to confront his or her Delusion, to Confess.

There are many other things Buddhists and Christians have in common, including a sense of social activism. In comparison to the Christian Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, beginning Zen students vow to liberate all beings. The Ten Oxherding Pictures[11] (which illustrate the process of coming to Enlightenment) show the sage returning to the market square to help the people - and who can forget the Buddhist monks who burned themselves to protest the Diem regime in Vietnam? The Buddhist emphasis on Enlightenment before social activism is similar to the idea that one should learn to swim before diving in to rescue someone else from drowning.

What the Christians uniquely have, that the Buddhists lack, is Scandal. The central scandal in Christianity is the ongoing reaction of humanity, especially religious humanity, to the scandal of the God Who Shows Up As A Human. Jesus Christ, the iconoclast, is made into an icon. His humanism is transformed into theism, and his anti-dogmatic, anti-legalistic, anti-institutionalist teachings are transformed into the dogma and legalisms that support one of the most enduring of all human institutions - the church. The contradiction between the need to institutionalize Christ's message in order to transmit it and the content of the message itself testifies to the power of our estrangement to distort any truth that can be spoken. That we can still hear the message testifies to God's participation in us breaking through our estrangement.

A pale version of this tension endures in Buddhism, which renounces dogma and legalism by incorporating "nots" in so many of its expressions. There are concepts of No-Mind and Non-Action, which any Zen devotee will tell you are not what you think they are. Or are not. Buddhist "nots" are their concession to the power of our estrangement to distort any truth that can be spoken. Therefore nothing is said, and the language of Buddhism becomes a code that takes more years to understand than the reality about which it does not speak. And yet Buddhists have communicated truth from teacher to student for millennia.

I think Christians and Buddhists can enrich each other's experiences of the truth, of our concerns both ultimate and mundane. We differ in details like Reincarnation,[12] which is an Eastern expression of the same anxiety that Westerners express with concepts like Heaven and Hell (which Jesus used to great effect). Nevertheless, we are grasped by the same Truth, in spite of ourselves.

 

Christians, Jews, and Muslims

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to dialogue between Christians, Jews, and Muslims is what we have in common. We think we know who God is, and that God is just like us, except smarter, more powerful, and sometimes more kind or just. The insistence that God be as wedded to a particular personality as we are is a kind of idolatry, a making of God in our own image. We even imbue our idol of God's personality with our own prejudices, like homophobia, sexism, and racism. It is also idolatrous in that we make our ideas of God's personality more important than God - so much so, that if given a choice between God and our conceptions, we choose our mental images over God. Finally, it is estranged in that by assigning God a specific personality (or personalities) we distance ourselves from awareness of our participation in God. To use Martin Buber's language, God becomes a He instead of a Thou - someone we talk about rather than to. Joseph Campbell summarizes all this in a footnote[13] which I quote here:

This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshipped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world. In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final - which makes it comparatively difficult for members of these communities to go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.[14]

In other words, we find much to argue about with each other, because we make our concepts of God as small as we are. A more constructive approach might be to view our ideas of God's personality as symbolic devices, as ways we and God choose to interact, and as pointing beyond personality to God. Then we can begin to talk.

And yet it seems Islamic Fundamentalists would silence dialogue with violence. As long as they use the Qur'an to appoint themselves God's avengers rather than choose The Victory, they condemn themselves and their neighbors to war. The Qur'an proclaims as The Victory not a conquest, but a truce - which became a victory through the friendships it made possible. Rather than consider this, Islamic Fundamentalists have persecuted the Bahai since they began Muslim-interfaith dialogue more than one hundred fifty years ago.

 

The Language of War

Fundamentalism seems to be a religion in itself - the content may change from place to place, but the form is usually the same. The theme is that religion should be a set of opinions that one holds in order to be a member of the in-group, the "saved," as distinct from the out-group, the "lost." The strength with which one holds the prescribed opinions is taken to be a measure of the holder's virtue. In turn, the strength of opinion is measured by the degree to which the holder conforms to certain expectations of behavior (individual and communal), and especially by the extent to which the holder attempts to persuade others to join the in-group, or at least to coerce them into exhibiting desired behaviors. It is this last characteristic, the desire to coerce behavior, that leads Fundamentalists to reach for the blunt instrument of the law - that makes Fundamentalism a political force - in India, the Islamic nations, Israel, and America.

The absurdity of using the law to coerce righteousness is most patent in Hinduism and Christianity. Hindus produced the Bhagavad Gita with its doctrine of involvement in the world without attachment to the world, which stands in stark contrast to the sight of Hindu Fundamentalists attacking Muslims in an attempt to destroy a mosque which they believe stands over Ram's birthplace, or the demands of Hindu Fundamentalists seeking to establish their faith as India's state religion. Similarly, Christ's victory, achieved by allowing his opponents to overpower him, contrasts strikingly with the attempt of Christian Fundamentalists to seize political power in America in order to control sexuality, language, science, and education.

This power seeking is motivated by making the holding of opinions and the following of rules the ultimate concern of the believer. Now if our ultimate concern is God, making anything else our ultimate concern, including our beliefs or our ethical concerns, is idolatry - becoming ultimately concerned with less than ultimate things.[15] Such idolatry sets the believer up for experiencing anxiety when the idols are challenged, because the believer wants more than anything to avoid experiencing doubt, disappointment, and "loss of face" if the idols are exposed. Therefore the believer protects his or her idolatry by attacking those who appear to threaten it. In many countries such attacks take the form of individual and communal violence. In America and Israel they take the form of political power struggles.[16]

Therefore, when I look to the language of faith to speak peace, I mean faith as a state of being, rather than belief, which is an act of embracing opinions. The language of belief has been, to my knowledge, the language of war.

 

The Grammar of Peace

If I look to the language of faith for the vocabulary of peace, I look for its grammar to a man who, when he lets his hair grow, looks like the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. The Reverend John E. Tompkins is a licensed psychotherapist who teaches a course called, "Teamwork Communications Skills," at my laboratory. I have adapted the material below from his course notes, with his permission. He is also working on a book, currently entitled, The Emperor's New Words: Leadership, Communication, and Self-Propelled Personal Growth. See also greenlanguage.com!

First, consider the following example: You come home from work to hear your spouse complain, "Your mother thinks she's too good to eat my cooking!" This said in the presence of your mother creates instant conflict. How about an approach a'la Joe Friday - just the facts? Suppose your spouse had said, "I cooked up a nice pot roast for us, and your mother made rice and steamed vegetables for herself." Little invitation to conflict there. Let's look more closely.

In the first sentence, an inference about your mother's inner mental processes is stated as if it were a fact. The underlying external reality, the facts themselves - your mother may be hoping to lower her serum cholesterol by avoiding red meat - are suppressed in favor of the inference. Moreover, the underlying internal reality, your spouse's anger at an inferred insult to his or her culinary skill is also lost in the transmission. And that is serious because your spouse is losing a bit of self. It's easy to do such things in English. Our politicians and press do it all the time, and it's probably even easier in other languages which value indirect forms of expression. Fortunately, there is a way out.

Let us consider that people have observations, thoughts, feelings, and wants. An observation is a statement of observable fact - a description of something that could in principle be photographed. "My computer is on the desktop," for example. "My computer is not on the desktop," describes a situation that cannot register on a photograph, because a photograph can only show a desktop with some books and papers on it - who would guess that I expected a computer to be there? Such a statement is a not-observation. I can use it to imply an accusation - that the person I'm addressing is somehow responsible for maintaining my computer on the desktop, and, in a failure of vigilance, has allowed it to vanish. Such a not-observation might evoke a reaction along the lines of, "Am I your computer's keeper?" and start an argument. So, I try to stay with observations, because we can more easily agree on what is than on what is not.

Thoughts are statements of mental processes, ideas or opinions which are presented as such. For example: "I think I benefit from helping others." The corresponding not-construction is the not-thought, as in, "I don't think she cares." The hearer can only guess what the speaker thinks she does feel.

Similarly, feelings are statements of emotion or sensation presented as such. For example, "I am very angry," or "I feel warm." Not-feelings are statements about what the speaker does not feel, which often contain an "implied should." For example: "I don't feel happy with her leadership." This leaves open what the speaker does feel - respect, awe, disappointment, terror, etc., and implies that the leader should somehow "make" the speaker feel happy. This "implied should" can be read as accusing the leader of failure. Moreover the idea that the leader can make the speaker feel a certain way is dishonest, because it attempts to displace responsibility for the speaker's choosing to feel an emotion onto the leader.

Finally, specific-action wants are statements in which I say what I desire in specific, do-able, observable terms. Such statements describe a feeling of desire concerning a possible reality that can be observed or measured. For example: "I want you to attend our meeting next Tuesday." The hearer can fulfill the want by performing a specific action, which the hearer and the speaker can both observe and acknowledge. Not-wants are statements like, "I don't want you running in the street," in which the speaker states what is not wanted. The implication is that the hearer should try doing random things until he or she meets the speaker's approval.

Now you may notice that we English-speakers make rather little use of these grammatical constructions. We tend to favor other constructions which allow us to "dis-own" our observations, thoughts, wants, and feelings - that is to dis-own (or discard) our true selves. The not-constructions above are part of the repertoire. The rest is supplied by substitution.

Substitution of a thought for an observation is called an inference. For example: "Your mind is obviously elsewhere." This statement contains the inference that the hearer is inattentive, without stating the factual basis for that inference. The hearer might think the previous statement more offensive than an observation like, "I notice that you look away from me when I talk to you." Of course, I can really get someone's dander up with the not-inference, the substitution of a not-thought for a fact, such as "I see that you don't care what I say."

I could also substitute an inference for a want, using an inference-want like, "I want you to listen more carefully." A specific-action want might be, "I want you to look at me when I talk to you." The latter construction is much more helpful to someone from a culture in which attentiveness is signaled by looking away from the speaker. Not-inference-wants are statements in which a not-inference is presented as a future observable, as in, "I don't want you acting bored when I'm talking."
Finally, we come to the ways in which we can evade expressing our emotions, feeling-thought mergers. Here a thought is substituted for a feeling, as in, "I feel taken advantage of." The speaker may feel any of a number of emotions, which are glossed over in favor of the inference "taken advantage of," which in turn glosses over any possible observations that the listener might judge independently. Of course, we can also have not-feeling-thought mergers, as in, "I don't feel appreciated in this group," which use a not-construction to add the accusation of an implied should - in this case that the group should somehow make the speaker feel something, and has failed to live up to its duty.

Mr. Tompkins defines owned messages as ones in which the speaker acknowledges responsibility for (or ownership of) his or her own observations, thoughts, feelings, and wants. Conversely, he defines dis-owned messages as ones in which the speaker evades such responsibility. This evasion is typically expressed in the form of the above not-constructions, inferences, feeling-thought mergers, and inference-wants. Given that Mr. Tompkins estimates that English-speakers typically use about 80% dis-owned constructions, you might imagine that we often misplace the truth itself, as well as our true selves.

I would now like to put all this in the theological context of the previous parts of this piece. I believe that if I acknowledge or "own up to" who I am, I feel God's Presence as accepting and loving - as Forgiveness. Conversely I believe that if I seek to deny or evade who I am, I will feel God's Presence as threatening and punishing - as Judgment - because in God's Presence I must ultimately fail in such evasion. A theologian might call "owning who I am" confession, and say that if I confess, God forgives, and if I deny, God judges. So I try to make owning my observations, thoughts, feelings, and wants part of my spiritual life, and encourage others to do the same. (Note that the statement, "There is no God," is a not-inference.)

Now when I'm in a conversation I forgo classifying statements according to the definitions above. I simply listen for the "nots", the "shoulds" (actual or implied), and the substitutions of thoughts for feelings, or thoughts for facts. I also note the substitution of "you", "we", or "somebody" when the speaker really means "I", and the "but" which implies a "not." The question is now, "How can I use my awareness of owned and disowned speech to help make peace?"
In negotiating situations, I can decode the parties' dis-owned speech for what I think they mean, translate my decoding into owned wording, and test my understanding by speaking my "owned" paraphrase to them. I find that this helps the parties to the negotiation (including myself, if I am one of them) to come to a greater understanding of themselves, as well as each other.

I note that the dis-owned style is deeply ingrained in our culture, including our religious institutions. This is useful when it helps us to communicate in a shorthand that everyone understands. It risks conflict when many of us are using the same shorthand to mean different things.
To illustrate this last idea, consider classifying the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3-17) in terms of "not-want", "inference-want", etc. Then, consider paraphrasing them as owned specific-action wants. Would many of your friends agree as to the paraphrasing? When I tried this I found that my paraphrases were long, culturally and historically relative, individualistic, and difficult for me to remember. I suspect that the disowned style may be God's way of putting me on the spot - in order to understand and keep the commandments (which are memorable and timeless as stated) I must own them.

 

Notes

1. For my thoughts in this section I owe much to Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith, Harper and Row, New York, 1958, and The Courage to Be, Yale University Press, 1952, and Roshi Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen, Anchor Press, New York, 1980. This section is a condensation and amalgamation of their ideas, with a few of my own. Scott Peck has informed me that they are also similar to ideas he states in A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered, Bantam Books, 1993. One might suspect that our ideas have converged because they are expressions of what Harold Bloom calls The American Religion (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992). On the other hand, I suspect Dr. Bloom of some strong misreading of our cultures confrontation with the Gospel.
2. On the other hand, when one encounters human evil in its collective form - a malevolent crowd of otherwise nice people - it is easy to form the impression of some transpersonal organizing demonic force or personality. Anthony Stevens, in The Roots of War: a Jungian Perspective (Paragon House, New York, 1989), presents an interesting account of the psycho-social mechanisms by which such crowds are gathered. I think each one of us must search his or her heart to find the cause, however.
3. A perhaps deeper truth is that, considering how we act and think, and the ways in which we abuse the idea of God, viewing the Fall as punishment may be more reasonable than many of us would like to suppose. See "Killing Christ" at this web site.
4. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Vintage Books, New York, 1955.
5. For more on these concepts see Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1975.
6. There are many suitable translations. I use Eknath Easwaran's translation, Nilgiri Press, Petaluma, CA, 1985, as well as the commentary on the Gita by Mohandas K. Ghandi, Living from the Heart, Siftsoft, Pembroke Pines, Fl, 1985. The reference is to section 11, a misleading translation of which was remembered by Oppenheimer as he witnessed the worlds first human initiated nuclear explosion.
7. Mark 15:34 quotes Jesus last words on the Cross as, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
8. For this handy mnemonic I am indebted to Rev. Jack Schieman.
9. See Anthony de Mello's Sadhana: A Way to God, Image Books, Garden City, NY, 1984, for examples of Christian meditation exercises.
10. Lao-Tzu, Te-Tao Ching, translated by Robert G. Henricks, Ballantine Books, New York, 1989.
11. See The Three Pillars of Zen, cited above.
12. Reincarnation is accepted by Jewish Kabbalists, however. See Perle Epstein, Kabbalah, The Way of the Jewish Mystic, Shambalah Publications, Boston, 1978. I also note Jesus' odd pronouncement that John the Baptist was Elijah (Matthew 11:14).
13. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1973, p258.
14. Available from Vintage Books, New York, 1967.
15. Ethical systems suffer from the same incompleteness as systems of axioms in mathematics (see the discussion of Goedel's Theorem in Science and Faith, at this web site). That is, whatever a person's ethics, it is always possible to put him or her in a situation in which his or her actions will be morally ambiguous, at best. (On the other hand, if life were simple enough to fit into a rule-book, it would have no purpose.) Thus, while living ethically is necessary to participate in human societies (we absorb the ethics of our societies to fit in), or to even begin living an authentic life, living ethically as an ultimate concern exposes the ethical person to anxiety and disappointment when he or she of necessity fails to live ethically. It is then that concepts like forgiveness, that transcend ethics, become important or even understandable. "I know that nothing good dwells within me," (Romans 7:18) is the ultimate conclusion of the ethical person. In other words, ethics are a necessary beginning rather than an end in themselves.
16. Such idolatry is not exclusively the property of Fundamentalists, although they tend to be the most overtly violent. In America, some "politically correct" people are idolatrously concerned with rewriting our history in terms of a limited sense of justice based on race and class.

Science and Faith

Working together in the cause of Truth

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas...In the meantime, science substituted for the personalities to which religion ascribed phenomena...and in doing this it trespassed on the province of religion; since it classed among the things which it comprehended certain forms of the incomprehensible. - Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 1862

 The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. - Albert Einstein, speech at Princeton Theological Seminary, May 19, 1939

Trust versus Doubt

"How can you possibly believe in God?" asked an incredulous psychiatrist, when I mentioned that I had been doing a kind of "peer counseling" through a program sponsored by my church.

"We physicists are a positivist lot," I replied, echoing a thought my wife had a few days earlier. "We tend to trust what we experience. For psychiatrists, it's more difficult, because one's own perceptions become a subject for analysis." He changed the subject abruptly, but after a while he began to remark on the beauty of the sea outside the window, and how his perception of that beauty could not be the product of natural selection, because it had no evolutionary survival value whatever. I shrugged my shoulders. "Maybe it's a gift," I said.

Behind his question lay a world view, popularly thought to be the scientific world view, that faith is unnecessary-that all of reality is in principle knowable by logic and experiment. From the Enlightenment until the 1930s it was a world view that seemed justified. Then Kurt Gödel proved and published a theorem which stated, in effect, that within the framework of any self-consistent (non-contradictory) non-trivial set of axioms (logical rules assumed to be true) it is possible to state propositions whose truth or falsehood is undecidable in principle. In other words, there will always be truths which cannot be proved or deduced, even within the confines of the mathematics, the "Queen of the Sciences."

Now this theorem applies to the science generally, because science seeks to explain the world by means of a collection of self-consistent theories, which are subject to possible disproof by experiments. Any self-consistent theory can be axiomatized, which means that it is subject to Gödel's Theorem. Any inconsistent theory is unsatisfying to scientists (even though it may be quite useful), because experience has shown us that inconsistencies usually indicate regimes in which the theory breaks down. Such theories are eventually replaced by more consistent ones, and we are back at Gödel's Theorem. Thus, the idea that we can necessarily "know it all" through the scientific method is dead, and has been dead for the better part of a century.

As a scientist, I'm glad of it - it frees me from the need to try to know it all. I can enjoy science as the investigation and contemplation of the material universe - a vast thing, more intricate, surprising, generous, beautiful, and terrifying than we could possibly imagine without looking deeply into it. But the Theorem begs the question, "What can we know and how can we know it?"

What scientists can know starts with Decartes', "I think, therefore I am." The problem is that no amount of logic will get me from "I am" to "you are, too." If I entertain Decartes' radical doubt, then with my logic I can at best conclude that everyone and everything in the universe is a figment of my imagination. I need something more. Decartes turned to God. I need at least to trust myself and my perceptions - I need to trust that you and the world are really there. This attitude of basic trust in oneself and one's surroundings is at the core of all scientific knowledge. It is a leap of faith more naive and childlike than practiced by many religionists. It is the leap of faith we all take in order to become human. Every baby is a natural scientist in this sense - exploring, trying things out, seeing what works, discovering its power to grasp, finding its toes, trusting it's all real. I call the leap naive positivism.

Now in addition to the basic trust or faith of naive positivism, science embraces doubt. Acting alone, I cannot do science, because I may deceive myself. I must share my discovery with a community of scientists, any of whom can repeat my discovery, and so confirm it. And if they cannot repeat it, then maybe I was wrong. With their help I can search for the cause of my error, or of theirs.

This communal aspect of science is similar to the communal aspect of faith. I experience something, I talk about that experience with members of a community of faith, and they share their insights concerning it - its meaning, its possible validity, whether or not they've experienced similar things, and so on. And just as science has standards and criteria for the validity of an observation, most religions have standards, too - their dogmas and their myths, and the wisdom of their sages. These things are used to give names to (and thus to communicate about) experiences of the ineffable. Thus, (ideally) both science and religion embrace doubt[1], and attempt to deal with it by sharing experiences within a community. This sharing is itself based on belief that perceptions that can be shared are real.

Now not all perceptions can be shared. You can't share your perception of cinematography with a congenitally blind person, for example. Nevertheless, many people make the assumption that all individual, unshareable perceptions are unreal or imaginary. This is a kind of faith which I call naive negativism. A related expression of naive negativism is the belief that what can't be repeated is necessarily imaginary, a belief often held by scientists despite the observable time-irreversible evolution of our universe - strictly speaking, no event is repeatable. Naive negativism is based on a mis-placed trust (an idolatrous faith) in our ability to share and repeat all our experiences.

The critical difference between science and religion is one of technique and subject matter. Science is the discipline whereby we can discover the workings of whatever can be subjected to measurement at our will. It is based on faith in the reality of the physical world, and its techniques are logic, mathematics, experiment, and observation.

Religion (ideally speaking) is the discipline whereby we seek to explore our experiences of the Divine, and is based on faith in the Divine. (Some may prefer to call these experiences "psychological" rather than "spiritual," but I consider the two terms to mean the same thing, operationally.) The techniques are individual and/or communal prayer (including meditation and contemplation), myth (including writings and dogma), ritual (including silence, music, dance, and art), and, ideally, common sense.

Now I have heard many definitions of God, but "that which can be subjected to measurement at our will," is not among them. Nevertheless, science can speak to faith: If you distrust your senses and the physical world around you, I'm inclined to question your faith in anything else. In fact, I'm inclined to think that you may be abusing your faith to escape or deny something about reality that you dislike. And if your faith comes into conflict with physical reality, I'm inclined to think that you are straying from the path of awareness of the Divine, and becoming more concerned with your dogma. It is a signal that your faith may be idolatrous, as I think Creationism is.

Moreover, science, like a normally ordered life, is based on the acknowledgment of causality (the law of cause and effect) as it is called in Western philosophy, karma as it is known to Buddhists. Science is all about causality - if I do thus to this kind of system, it will react in such a way, even if the relationship between cause and effect is only statistical. Thus, science can speak to us and our spirituality, because the law of cause and effect is something we all struggle with in our daily lives. If we could (or would) know the consequences of our actions, we could, within the limits of physical reality, make choices that are truly free. Samsara (the world) is Nirvana - if we were willing to learn from the school of hard knocks, we would all be Enlightened.

On the other hand, faith can also speak to science: If you deny what you perceive because you cannot measure it, you blind yourself to reality by placing an idolatrous faith in your own power to measure. I'm thinking for example of experimental psychologists who deny the reality of "personality" in themselves, other people, and animals.

This is particularly ludicrous because experimental psychologists, themselves, know that the content of a creature's awareness is determined by its "umwelt," a German word meaning its perceptual "surrounding world." Scientists need to remember that our techniques of measurement are merely extensions of our five external physical senses - they do not necessarily transform those senses. In other words, if we are overlooking something, new measuring devices may only help us overlook it more carefully[2]. The attitude that "What can't be measured doesn't exist," is not only idolatrous (in that it is a mis-placed faith in our power to measure), it is unscientific.

To press the point further, the logical contrapositive (equivalent negative re-statement) of the naive positivist, "If I can measure it, it exists," is, "If it does not exist, I cannot measure it." These statements are to me self-evident. The naive negativist assertion, "If I cannot measure it, it does not exist," is the logical equivalent of, "If it exists, I can measure it," a manifestly arrogant and possibly false statement.

Now philosophers fused naive positivism and naive negativism together into so-called "logical positivism," the idea that anything that is measurable is real, and anything immeasurable is imaginary. Logical positivism is commonly mistaken to be the philosophical underpinning of scientific thought, but is itself only half true.

Shapes of Awareness

Consider the Venn diagram (Figure 1) of our relationship to our Universe. In Venn diagrams, an enclosed shape represents a set of things with a common characteristic. Naturally, the biggest, all-enclosing set in the diagram is the Universe itself. The set of all things in the Universe that we are aware of is our Umwelt. Anything in the Universe that is outside our Umwelt is outside our awareness, and some of it may even be unknowable in principle. Now it is meaningless to ascribe reality or fantasy to what we aren't even aware of, so the Real and the Imaginary are part of our Umwelt, rather than of the Universe at large. (These are basic categories - every child must at some point decide whether newspaper stories are Real or Make-Believe.) As discussed above, the Measurable is completely contained inside the Real. Now whatever is outside the Measurable is not-Measurable - that is, Immeasurable - and whatever is outside the Real and the Imaginary is neither Real nor Imaginary - it is Undecidable), either because of our limited knowledge, or in principle a' la Gödel's Theorem.

Figure 1. A Venn Diagram of our relationship to our Universe. Notice that everything that is measurable is real. Everything else in the diagram is immeasurable, and thus outside the purview of science. Our Umwelt is all that we are aware of, which is much less than everything in the Universe. Those things that we are aware of, yet are neither in the Real nor in the Imaginary, are Undecidable (or at least Undecided).

Now, as long as we're considering our Umwelt, I'd like to bring in an image from theology (Figure 2). Imagine the material universe of space and time to be a flat horizontal sheet, with time running from left to right. Perhaps the "spiritual," or the "eternal" can be considered as a vertical sheet, which intersects the horizontal, material universe in the "now." We humans spend a lot of time and effort to make sense of our perceptions by comparing them with those of our past, and our expectations of our future. We work very hard to live in both past and future, so that our attention is drawn away from the present, the now. (The intersection of the "Spiritual" and the "Material" may be like an infinitesimally thin line, barely noticeable, but if we would look up we could see forever.) Indeed, there is a time delay of a fraction of a second between an event and our seeing that event consciously - that's why drivers have a finite "reaction time" and why subliminal messages can be incorporated into movies - we are even biologically built to be a little behind the now.[3] Small wonder that wonder itself is so small a part of our Umwelt.

Figure 2. A diagram illustrating the idea that the "spiritual" or "numinous" may intersect the world in the now, which may constitute a tiny (infinitesimal) portion of our awareness or umwelt.

If all this logic and set diagramming is opaque to you, consider the neutrino, a subatomic particle. If scientists had failed to find evidence of it in their experiments, they would not have proved that it didn't exist - rather, that it was other than described by the theory - that the neutrino must be different from what they had expected. (By the way, Pauli's "little neutral one" was found.)

Thus, naive negativism is not equivalent to the naive positivism upon which both science and faith rest. "There is no god," is said by people who really mean that they stopped seeking the god they expected - it begs the question of the God who comes as a surprise. And "Science will lead you astray," is said by religious people who fear loss of their expectations, because they don't want to be surprised.

But as our understanding grows surprises (like earth's roundness and human evolution) come. The universe - it's a gift.

Through a Glass Darkly

Naive positivism serves us well as a point of departure for science, faith, and daily living - at least for those of us who consider ourselves to be mentally well. But what if I have reason to believe that my map of reality is distorted? Even mere affective disorders like depression (as opposed to cognitive disorders like schizophrenia) can, as a close friend put it, "suck the meaning of life completely out of you." I offer the following thoughts.

So-called crazy people may be both out-of-touch and in-touch with reality at the same time. That is, while they have maps of the universe in which their categories of "Real" and "Imaginary" are demonstrably (measurably) distorted, information from the Universe does flow into their awareness. The noticeable distortions in their awareness (including their awareness of God) serve to express their inner world - a world which most of us conceal more successfully, even from ourselves. Entering their inner world risks disturbing my own, but it can also stretch the boundaries of my awareness. My point is that the mentally and emotionally challenged do have cognitive and spiritual resources, although they may be more basic than those the rest of us prefer to use.

On the other hand, I think that we all share certain basic alienations or estrangements - from ourselves, each other, the natural world, and God.[4] The collective, normative world view which we construct and socialize each other to adopt may itself be one of Delusion, ignorance, or (if you prefer a Western term that has been loaded with unfortunate connotations of shame) Sin. A Buddhist might say that we participate in a collective insanity, and that one must become Enlightened to break free of it. If this seems far-fetched, consider that (1) we pay and prepare teachers poorly compared to, say, lawyers, and (2) so much of what we painstakingly mine out of the earth we put back in landfills. Seems crazy to me.

If we encounter distortions in our everyday experiences, we can expect to encounter them in our spiritual experiences as well. An example are the makyo or hallucinations Japanese Zen Buddhist students sometimes experience during the intense concentration of meditation.[5] Zen masters recognize these makyo from the descriptions and behavior of their students, and help the students to direct their attention toward reality.

Usually an admonition from a master is enough for the student, but anyone under stress can have makyo, and sometimes to correct it one must resort to experiment. There is an old story of a widower who began seeing his dead wife's ghost after he had become engaged to marry again.[6] "She knows more about me than I know myself," the frightened man said to a Zen master. "Really?" said the master. "Place a bowl of dried beans where you sleep. The next time she appears, grab a handful of beans as quickly as you can, and ask her to tell you how many beans are in your hand." The man did this, and when he questioned the ghost, she disappeared forever. He had experimentally shown that she knew only what he knew - that she was a figment of his imagination.

Now this ability to test reality by experiment is impaired in mentally ill people. Others may sometimes choose to forget they have the ability when they fear that reality may be too challenging. For example, when people worship an idea of God that precludes God from, say, evolving humans from ape-like ancestors, they are more in love with their particular idea of God, than they are with God - they are in a state of idolatrous faith. Were they a little more open to physical reality, they might be a little more open to spiritual reality as well.

In addition to the possibility of hallucinations or makyo, our perception of spiritual reality may be distorted by perceptual threshold phenomena - in which we unconsciously fill in the details of that which we can barely perceive. There is the example of "N-rays" in which a scientist trying to detect faint flashes of light from a supposedly radioactive source was actually seeing normal random activity in his own optic nerves. This makes us doubt that "still, small voice" with good reason.

Moreover, even distinct perceptions of phenomena can be in error - as attorneys and psychologists know, eyewitnesses can make mistakes. On this basis we doubt not only what we perceive, we doubt the reports of others as well. This is particularly true when the witnesses attempt to describe what is beyond their power to describe - like the descriptions that aboriginal peoples might give to their peers of their first experience of riding in a truck, or an airplane.[7]

Since our perceptions are subject to hallucination, threshold phenomena, distortion due to our inexperience or inadequate language, and other error, I advocate participation in both science and faith. Science, with its disciplined testing of reality and its grace to doubt, helps us to be honest, and can sometimes serve to warn us if we begin to engage in idolatry. More than that, it leads us to deeper understanding and appreciation of material reality, which in turn can point us further into faith. Faith, with its emphasis on participation in the Divine, gives us the courage, motivation, and power to be. Without at least some faith - the faith that this day will somehow be worth surviving - we couldn't even get up in the morning, much less do science.

Now Scientology and the New Age Movement claim to do precisely this harmonizing of science and faith. Neither of these movements is at all scientific (they embrace the language of science, but not its reality testing), and both of them are deeply idolatrous. (There is even a New Age church I know of that attracts schizophrenics because its version of reality is more in synch with theirs.) They have arisen because many people's need for faith has been denied by a Christianity which has itself become idolatrous - selling out the Good News in exchange for the class values of whoever makes up the majority of the congregation or controls the appointment of clergy. Rather than believe the lies Christians tell, Scientologists and New Agers make up a few of their own.

A Short Course in Miracles

"Do you really believe in miracles?"

"What do you mean by 'miracles'? It seems you're driving around with four of them in the back seat," I said, referring to her children.

"You know, the plagues, Moses parting the Red Sea, the pillar of fire by night and smoke by day, that stuff."

I think people put too much emphasis on miracles, and ignore the miraculous in everyday life. The miracles of beauty and love, or life itself. The miracles in the most mundane aspects of our existence. For example, for most people, most of the time, it feels good to breathe. Now you would breathe even if it felt bad, because you have to. That it feels good is miraculous. I could say as much about other bodily functions, including sex. It would be perfectly rational (from the action of unguided natural selection) for the sex urge to come over us like a strange compulsion, without any association with feelings of pleasure.

That said, what about those wild miracles - the breaking in of the Divine to alter our ordinary collective reality contrary to our expectations? As for the miracles of the past - all I can say is the accounts in the various sacred writings are how our cultures remember the events described. Their truth is the truth of faith, more than the truth of history, or science. In other words, the accounts survive because what they mean is true for us. I need more information to comment on the details.

I think it entirely possible that miracles did, do, and will occur. As I said earlier, the methods of science work very well - when applied to measurable, repeatable phenomena. However, I need faith too much to let it depend on miracles, especially since most purported miracles are the product of hoax, wishfulness, or careless thinking.[8] In fact, the wish that miracles occur comes from the same desire as the wish that they don't - we want our Universe to be what we need in order to feel secure, rather than what it is.

But there is one miracle I am waiting for, the personal miracle hinted at in some people's "near death" experiences, and in the "visions" experienced by dying people I have known. The miracle promised by all our major religions, and in its most radical way by Christianity. There's little point in arguing about it now - if it happens, we can talk about it later.

Getting Even

With all this preamble, it's time for science and faith to settle a few old scores. Long ago we had Divine Providence - the idea that an "Invisible Hand" guides our destinies. This mutated into the "Free Market" of Capitalism, the "Dialectical Materialism" of Communism, and the Clockwork Universe of scientific determinism. About the first two I'll say more later. Determinism is in for it here.

Determinism is based on the notion that if we could know the positions and velocities of every particle in the Universe (and there seems to be a large, but finite number) we could, in principle, calculate the entire future evolution of the Universe. This idea was born from the structure of Newton's equations of motion and held sway for over 200 years, until the 1920's. Then we found out that very small particles begin to exhibit behavior that is masked by the sheer size of large ones. It turns out that the process of precisely measuring a particle's position destroys information about its velocity, and vice versa. That is to say, measuring exactly where a particle is gives it such a whack that we can no longer know where it's going, and measuring exactly where it's going can only be done via interactions that "smear out" where it is. That the position and velocity of a particle cannot simultaneously take on precise values is a statement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and seems to be a fundamental limitation on the measurability of reality.

If the Uncertainty Principle struck Determinism a mortal blow in the 1920s, nonlinear dynamics delivered the coup de grace in the 1980s. The nonlinear dynamicists finally had the desperation, the courage, and the methods to tackle some of the really hard problems of Classical Mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with the motion of ordinary sized things and is described by Newton's equations). They found that even for relatively simple systems, like three bodies moving under mutual gravitational attraction, the future motion can depend so sensitively on the given conditions at any moment (positions and velocities) that the detailed motion of the system is unpredictable (or chaotic) - not only because classical measurements are only finitely precise, but because of the limitations imposed by the Uncertainty Principle as well. In other words, the Universe is not nearly as well-behaved as a wind-up clock. The Universe is not a machine or a mechanism, as we understand machines and mechanisms. Determinism is dying.

What's replacing determinism is still emerging out of the mess of attempts to unify theoretical understandings of gravitation, the strong nuclear interaction, and the weak nuclear and electromagnetic interactions, and the infant discipline of artificial intelligence. The next century promises to be a real humdinger in that regard. We may even discover that much of our own sub-conscious thinking is non-deterministic, in that many of the problems we (and "lower animals") solve without thinking simply to perceive and act in our environment are "np-complete," that is impossible to solve (in a useful time) via strictly deterministic sequential algorithms (recipes). Indeed, Roger Penrose [9] argues rather convincingly that no Turing machine (an idealized "standard" computing device that follows algorithms) can replicate conscious subjective experience and insight.

I would like to argue a different and perhaps complementary point, based on the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics. One result of the Uncertainty Principle is that nothing can stand precisely still, for then its position would be precisely x, and its velocity precisely zero. Since the Uncertainty Principle states that both quantities cannot take on precise values at the same time, standing precisely still is impossible. Every particle exhibits a little back-and-forth random motion, even at zero average energy. These motions are called zero-point oscillations. Fields like electromagnetism have zero-point oscillations, too. These have been measured via their effect on the energy levels of electrons bound in atoms - the zero-point electromagnetic oscillations cause the "Lamb Shift" in the line spectra of atoms.

Now we have yet to develop a satisfactory quantum theory of gravity, but we can be fairly sure that the gravitational field also has zero-point oscillations. One property of these oscillations is that they take on larger values (greater intensity) on smaller length scales (or equivalently shorter time scales). As John A. Wheeler first pointed out in the 1960s [10] these oscillations should be enormously intense on a distance scale known as the Planck Length (about 10^-33 cm). Things like the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei (the densest form of matter known) are gigantic, but insubstantial cloud-like will-o'-the-wisps by comparison.[11] Because gravitation seems to be a kind of curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass-energy, these zero-point gravitational oscillations may collectively give rise to a kind of "spacetime foam" that could support all sorts of interesting structure in what we normally think of as "empty space." So I think it possible that we may find someday that there is more to the mind than the brain. Perhaps some aspects of our mentality (our "souls") happen in the empty space between and within the atoms of our biochemical selves. And perhaps whatever happens in this "spacetime foam," including aspects of mind, may need to be incorporated into our theories of evolution someday.[12] Indeed, the noted neuropsychologist J. C. Eccles has already begun to consider the question of how "non-material" mental intentions may influence neural activity [13] and evolution. [14] He has considered the interaction between the world of matter-energy and the world of subjective personal experience, the soul. Rather than consider these worlds as separate, I suggest that they are united in a level of complexity that we have yet to explore.

As long as we are on the subject of gravity, I mention that the standard cosmological model is based (with some good evidence) partly on the Robertson-Walker solution to Einstein's gravitational field equations. The basic idea of this model can be grasped by imagining all of three-dimensional space to be like the surface of a balloon that is being inflated. The galaxies can be represented by pennies glued to the balloon (another John Wheeler idea). Now as the balloon expands, the pennies separate, as do the galaxies of our Universe. Since each point on the surface of the round balloon is as good as any other, each penny (galaxy) sees itself as the center, with all the other galaxies moving away from it, the speed of the movement being proportional to the distance between it and any other galaxy in question.

The implication of this is that according to the most widely accepted cosmological model, the center of the Universe for you is wherever you center your consciousness. What's more, as Buckaroo Bonzai says, "Wherever you go, there you are." You are stuck in the center of the Universe for good. This is a far cry from the days when religionists feared that science would displace humanity from the center of creation by showing that the earth revolved around the sun.

Now one from biology: The science that gave us evolution is entertaining the idea (in some quarters) that the self-replicating DNA molecule that encodes the instructions of our heredity may have arisen in the interaction of certain organic precursor molecules with a type of sediment that forms in a kind of self-replicating layered structure. In other words, we may indeed have been made (albeit in a more complicated manner than we had expected) from clay.

Finally, even our best models of the origin of the Universe stop short of explaining how the so-called Big Bang got kicked off. We can go right back to the first few fractions of a second, and then... practically speaking, it's back to God saying, "Let there be light."

The point of all this is that if the religionists had been willing to open themselves to the wonder of the physical Universe, their experience of the spiritual would have been enriched rather than denied. If the hubris of earlier scientists had made it seem less so, their hubris was a reaction to the hubris of the religionists who thought they knew everything there was to know about the universe without looking at it and everything there was to know about God without consulting him.

Making Science Moral

"Science is the road to Hell!" a country preacher hollered over my hometown radio station. Meanwhile, we kids were swallowing Sabin's oral polio vaccine, and wondering what Strontium-90 was and how it got in milk. Science is knowledge, which gives us ever more power to act and to make choices in the physical world. It can empower the powerless and deter the destructive, both of which I claim are part of peacemaking, or it can provide our world with the means of self-destruction. Its goodness and evil only reflect the goodness and evil in ourselves. It all depends on what we do with it.

One thing we sometimes do is to moralize it. A society with a sure idea of the Good will sometimes manipulate science to serve and support that idea. Such was the case with the various scientists who backed the popular racial theories that became the foundation of Nazism. This development was echoed by American scientists using various Intelligence Quotient tests to reduce the quotas of eastern European Jews who wanted to enter America to escape the gathering Holocaust.[15]

Nowadays, certain Fundamentalists are advocating "Scientific Creationism," an attempt to manipulate the truth about the material Universe (including our material selves) so as to control what people think. If knowledge of the material Universe can serve to warn us of idolatrous faith, then Creationism is an attempt to silence the alarm.

On the other hand, it is equally dangerous to scientize morality. The first attempt in this direction was Utilitarianism, the idea of "the greatest good for the greatest number," of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. It is still used today by public policy makers in the form of "risk assessment," even though its deficiencies are apparent (as illustrated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki[16]). Later on Karl Marx tried to get scientific in his critique of Capitalism, and his followers invented a solution that far exceeded Capitalism in its cruelty. Capitalism itself is based on the idea of homeostasis (a tendency of dynamical systems to oscillate about equilibrium points) that has no more moral value than a weight jiggling on a spring. Unless we Capitalists rig the game for moral reasons some people will always die from the effects of poverty.

Rather than moralize science, or scientize morality, it is perhaps wiser to make moral choices that are informed by science. Science cannot generate or guarantee morality, but it can spare the would be moralist from some obvious mistakes. For example, a little research (scientific or historical - now that we have the case of Rumania) can show that criminalizing abortion can have terrible consequences. Precipitating these consequences may be as evil as the anti-abortionists think abortion to be.

Science gives us power, and with power come choices that we are forced to make. The choices are the price of that power. The collective and individual agony over abortion is one example. Another is the simultaneous relief and revulsion we feel concerning military uses of science. Yet another is the Human Genome Project. Soon we will have sequenced all of the DNA in the nucleus of a human cell. Eventually this will make it possible to treat and even cure an enormous number of genetically mediated diseases. First, however, it will merely enable us to diagnose and predict them, temporarily creating an enormous moral problem for insurance companies and society as a whole. Science can give us a few hints about the choices we make regarding the powers science gives us. But ultimately a moral choice is a moral choice, which demands that science be transcended rather than contradicted or abandoned. Science provides factual knowledge - for wisdom to use the facts well we must seek elsewhere.

But there is one moral teaching than we can get from science - humility. Every scientist who has ever "reached for the stars" has experienced being wrong. Not just a little bit mistaken, but absolutely publicly dead wrong. It's not such a bad feeling really, and certainly not worth killing anybody or destroying anybody's career to avoid. Everyone should try it sometime.

Notes

1. The failures of both science and religion are often attempts to deny doubt rather than embrace it, and press through it toward truth.
2. For example, marine biologists measure whale sounds with single hydrophones instead of arrays, because they don't consider that single hydrophones may merely extend human hearing rather than mimic whale hearing. See "Cosmic Babble," Omni, April 1992.
3. This delay has been interpreted by psychologists as evidence for unconscious filtering of information. I think they're a little behind the times with their electrical engineering metaphors. Anyone who knows about signal processing will tell you that it probably just takes time for the brains hardware to construct an image to present to consciousness. The reality we see is probably not filtered so much as made by our brains.
4. See "Reviving a Dead Language," at this web site.
5. Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen, Anchor Press, New York, 1980.
6. Recounted by Paul Reps in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Anchor Press, New York.
7. See also Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott, Dover Publications, New York, 1952, for a fanciful example of a two-dimensional being trying to describe his experience of being lifted out of the planar world (Flatland) in which he lived and into our three-dimensional world (Spaceland).
8. See James Randi,The Faith Healers, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1989, for numerous examples.
9. In The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989. Penrose also argues that a correct quantum gravity theory may need to include a theory of consciousness.
10. J. A. Wheeler, "Geometrodynamics and the Issue of the Final State," in Relativity Groups and Topology, edited by Cecile and Bryce DeWitt, Gordon and Breach, New York, 1964. It's inaccessible to the layman, but that's where I came across the idea.
11. A perhaps non-coincidental parallel with the expressions of mystics of all traditions to the effect that the ordinary material world becomes insubstantial and transparent to them during their mystical experiences - that it becomes less real to them than the spiritual world.
12. While it is true that evolutionists in the early part of the century fought against the involvement of mind or purpose in the evolutionary process, their effort was a reaction against even more naive theories put forward by religionists. I think we are all in for some surprises concerning the connection between matter and spirit as we discover more of the details of how evolution occurs. Simply put, I believe that any honest inquiry into the truth will point to Truth, if pursued far enough.
13. J. C. Eccles, "Do mental events cause neural events analogously to the probability fields of quantum mechanics?" Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B 227, pp411-428, 1986.
14. J. C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self, Routledge, New York, 1989. See especially Chapters 8 and 10.6-10.7.
15. See The Mismeasure of Man and Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, W. W. Norton & Co., New York.
16. See "Obscenity and Peace" in at this website. Note also Caiaphas' statement that it was more expedient for one man to die than for the nation to perish made in reference to Jesus.