Is Religious Freedom Really the Issue?

In my last post I considered some legislative attempts to preserve, under the heading of religious freedom, the right of private parties to discriminate. (The most recent example is Mississippi's "Religious Freedom Restoration Act.")

But what, exactly, is religious freedom? Doesn't our understanding of religious freedom depend on our understanding of religion?

Attention and Imagination: Some Thoughts on Simone Weil's Religion of Attention

Attention is important. In fact, for the sake of actualizing the full potential of our lives, it may be more important than anything else.


The moments of purest joy in my life have come at those times when I forget about myself enough to pay attention, with absolute purity, to the world in all its beauty. I watch my children at play, and instead of seeing their play through the filter of my own desires and concerns, instead of thinking about how their play is affecting me, I focus so completely on every laugh, ever twirl, that there’s no longer any room for the other stuff.

For my stuff. My son likes to “make smoke” by throwing Oklahoma red dirt into the air. And more often than not I think about the bath he’ll need to take, even though he just had one. And he’ll probably leave his bath towel on the floor, and a dirt ring in the tub.

As simply as that joy eludes me. But sometimes I manage to stop and look, to silence my own stuff enough to let what is out there in. To really let it in, unfiltered by my own stuff. To let it be, for me, what it is.

To pay attention. And in that moment the beauty and goodness of my son, flinging dirt into the air to see it turn to smoke, hits me with heartbreaking power.

I think we tend to underestimate the significance of attention. One reason I love the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil is because she didn’t. For her, attention was a centerpiece of her philosophy. She took attention to be the essence of both love and prayer, and she saw it—not willpower—as the crucial element in self-transformation.

The other day, I was directed to the website/blog of my dissertation director, Newton Garver. Of the occasional thoughts/reflections appearing there, I was particularly caught by the ones that focused on attention. One entry was nothing more than a single sentence from Irish Murdoch: “If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.”

About half an hour after posting this—perhaps after meditating on it for a time, thinking about its significance—he posted the follow up comments:

Iris Murdoch holds that proper attention both reduces choices and increases freedom. Wow! When we get our minds around that inspired thought, we will have put some distance between ourselves and the stultifying dogmas of our outcome-oriented civilization.

Paying proper attention, which is especially important with respect to other people, means appreciating the inherent reality of what we are attending to. Simone Weil took mathematics or formal logic to be good training for paying proper attention, because it is so difficult in these fields to hide reality under hopes or desires. Seeing other people as they really are is much more difficult than seeing mathematical reality.

In reading this comment, I was struck by how often I am accused, by atheist critics, of failing to attend to reality, of seeing everything through a filter of hopes and desires. Atheists almost inevitably—perhaps irresistibly—perceive religious conviction as precisely this: an exercise in projection, as the outcome of imposing one’s own wishes and cultural prejudices onto the field of experience and staunchly refusing to see the stark reality underneath.

And there certainly is much religion that looks exactly like this—which is undoubtedly why Simone Weil, devoted as she was to a philosophy of pure attention, was inspired to describe atheism as a purification. “Of two men who have no experience of God,” she says, “he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. The false God who is like the true one in everything, except that we cannot touch him, prevents us from ever coming to the true one.”

And for Weil, the opposite of attention is imagination, which she calls the “filler of the void.” She claims that “if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void.” And the existence of such a void is crucial to attention. Paying attention means establishing within ourselves a space free from our own stuff, our own desires and anxieties and presuppositions and imaginings, a space of emptiness into which reality can flood.

Imagination is the enemy of such attention. “The imagination,” Weil says, “is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” The true God, for Weil, is not the superman fashioned by our imagination to satisfy our subjective needs, but is, rather, that which floods us at precisely that moment when we achieve this void and thus find ourselves open to reality—attentively present to it—in all its mystery.

In other words, God is what fills us when we love reality for itself, absolutely and perfectly, apart from our preconceptions and imaginings, and no matter how it affects us for good or ill. Weil’s fixation on affliction may be seen in this light: To love reality even in the face of affliction—even when it shatters us—is to relate affirmatively to reality apart from its propensity to serve our desires. In that moment of afflicted love, we have stopped filling up the fissures with imaginings that suit us.

We can understand Weil’s comments about atheism in the following way: When atheism is arrived at based on a rejection of imagination and a desire to attend to the truth, the atheist has thereby adopted the attitude that is essential for any authentic experience of God. And this remains the case even if theistic belief is in important ways closer to the truth about God than is atheism. Even in the face of similarities in appearance, there’s a huge difference between believing an invention and experiencing reality free from the filters of invention. The latter happens when we pay attention. And attention to something means openness to it that is unconditional, that does not wait on its worth, that is prepared to accept whatever comes.

Given much of the history of religion and much of what goes by the name of religion today, it shouldn’t be surprising, I think, that many atheists see themselves as more serious about paying attention to reality than are theists. But it seems to me that both atheists and theists can be bad at paying attention to reality—although, perhaps, bad in different ways. Both can and (probably inevitably) do see the world through the filter of their preconceptions, through the lenses of their desires, through the unconscious reification of speculative imaginings.

Those who imagine an empty room beyond a locked door are just as guilty of filling the room with the products of their imagination as are those who fill it with imagined furniture, or imagined crates. The only difference is that refusal to imagine is easier to confuse with imagining emptiness than with imagining a room full of stuffed clowns. Likewise, those who imagine that there is nothing beyond the boundaries of what science can discern are just as guilty of filling in the fissures with their imagination as are those who populate the transcendent with personality.

And those atheists who immediately dismiss religious experiences of a transcendent love at the root of reality, who immediately cast away such experiences as of course nothing but delusional projection of wishful hopes—well, isn’t it clear that, in confidently attributing imagination as the source of these experiences, they are assuming that ultimate reality can’t be anything like what this religious experience teaches? If so, they are not just begging the question in their dismissal of these religious experiences. They are, more significantly, basing their dismissive assessment of such experience—their conviction that the experience must be rooted in imagination rather than attention—in their own exercise of imagination.

It is not this sort of atheism that Weil takes to be a purification.

I think atheists sometimes adopt a self-congratulatory attitude towards their powers of attention because they—unlike too many religious believers—take very seriously the lessons of science. The fact is that science is built around the effort to pay attention in much the way that Weil describes. For this reason if for no other, those who are drawn to Weil’s brand of religiosity need to take science and its conclusions seriously. There may not be a single “scientific method” that correctly describes all the various things that scientists do—but it is clear, at least, that science pays attention to the empirical world, to its building blocks and to the laws that regulate it.

But it is one thing to praise the attention of a good scientist. It is something else again to conclude that Simone Weil’s religious experience cannot be the outcome of sincere attention, because to treat it as such would require that there be more to reality than what attentive scientists study. It is one thing to say that scientists pay attention to their subject matter. It is something else again to insist that the subject matter of science exhausts what there is to pay attention to.

And there clearly is more to pay attention to. But to make this point, I don’t want to focus on religion. I want to focus on what my former mentor and teacher, Newton Garver, focuses in on: paying attention to persons.

What does it mean to pay attention to a person? A person is a whole, the sum of many parts, and what is most definitive of persons is not our syntax but our semantics (if that metaphor makes sense). I do not pay attention to you if I am focused on the hairs protruding from your nose and the way that they flutter when you exhale. I might be paying very good attention to those hairs, but in so doing I am not paying attention to you.

But the same is true if I pay attention to your nervous system, or your skeletal system, or your brain. If I study you the way a scientist might, I am failing to pay attention to the person. I am focused on the grammatical structure of a sentence, or the word order, or the use of punctuation, or the shape of the letters—not on what the sentence means.

I don’t want this point to hinge on what we think about the relationship between mind and brain. But it certainly is true that I cannot pay attention to a person if I am not paying attention to them as conscious beings—beings who experience, believe, hope, fear, anticipate, plan, intend, do. Subjectivity and agency, whatever their ultimate explanation, are clear loci of personhood. Persons experience the world and act in it. And even if you think that both of these things have their roots in brain processes, it’s still clear that I would not be paying attention to you as a person if I were fixated on understanding the inner workings of your brain.

It is one thing to attend to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, something else to sit down with one’s music theory background and the score, and study how Beethoven constructed each movement. Both can be worthy exercises of our attention—but in each case, we're attending to something different. Perhaps what we're attending to are aspects or dimensions of a reality that's bigger than we can encompass all at once, in one single act of attention. Perhaps once we engage in piecemeal attention—to this, then to that, then to the other—we can arrive at an integrated attention to the whole that is more complete. Nevertheless, to experience the emergent whole is not the same as to study the parts out of which it emerges.

Loving a person means paying attention to the person—the subject who acts in the world, who grasps meanings and expresses those meanings in both verbal and nonverbal ways. To pay attention to a person means paying attention to what they’re doing, what they’re communicating, how they’re feeling, what they think and believe.

You don’t pay attention to a person if you reductionistically explain them away. You don’t pay attention to a person if your focus, when hearing what they say, is on attempting to understand how they could come to be so stupid. Nor are you paying attention if you’re trying to understand how they got to be so smart. Nor are you paying attention if your main goal is to understand their psychology so you can later manipulate them. Attention is a matter of openness, of having who they are enter into the fissures that you leave room for. This kind of attention does not primarily lead to propositional knowledge. You may not be able to come up with a list of facts about them. Nevertheless, if you’ve paid close attention, you know them.

What such attention to a person allows for is grasping something of their more private experience, as opposed to an array of empirical facts about them. And part of what paying attention to a person involves, I think, is treating what one thereby grasps as important, as meriting respect, even if it isn’t reducible to any empirical fact.

You don’t pay this sort of respectful attention to atheists if you immediately assume that their atheism springs from a desire to be free from obligations to a creator to whom, were theism true, they’d owe their existence. You don’t pay this sort of respectful attention to theists if you immediately dismiss their religious experience as nothing more than wishful thinking.

None of us can communicate our whole selves to each other without considerable work, considerable efforts at self-expression on the one hand, and open, unprejudiced attention on the other. And even then, the communication will be incomplete. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between knowing someone as a subject, however incompletely, and knowing them as objects. It is the latter sort of knowledge that science is after, and insofar as we regard persons with nothing more than scientific attention, we are not attending to them as persons. We have reduced them to mere things in our sight—and however much we may be attending to their parts and processes (including psychological ones) we are not attending to them.

I think it is also possible to attend to the universe in something like the way that we attend to persons: holistically, focused on knowing it as opposed to knowing a litany of facts about it. Is it possible that this sort of attention—which is, I believe, what Weil has in mind when she speaks of prayer—opens us up to an aspect of the universe that is not available to the scientific eye? The universe as subject rather than mere object? Is it possible that this distinctive sort of loving attention is precisely what brings us into contact with the meaning beyond the universe's syntax, the person for whom the universe is an endless form of communication?

There are those who have sought to pay attention to the world in something like this way, and who report the same thing that Simone Weil reported on the basis of her efforts at absolute attention: a personal presence brimming with love.

Dismissal is, of course, easy. Not everyone has this experience. It could be mere delusion. But is dismissal required? By what? By the urgings of our own imagination, which fills up the spaces beyond science’s limits with emptiness?

As I said, sometimes I pay attention to my children while they play. I really pay attention, so fully that I lose myself and my agendas. And it is then that I’m most overwhelmed with the beauty and goodness of what I see. Put simply: In my experience beauty and goodness overwhelm me, they most seize hold of me, when I am least invested, when my desires and dreams and hopes have been pushed back to make a space for what I’m attending to, so that it may flood in. Does it then make sense to say that beauty and goodness are nothing more than subjective projections, that these things aren’t part of reality, that they must be imposed upon reality by me in that moment, even though it seems to be the very moment when my stuff has been most successfully put away?

Why? Is this judgment really rooted in the weight of evidence? Or is it, rather, rooted in an exercise of imagination, one which, again, fills up those dimensions of reality outside the domain of scientific inquiry with gobs of emptiness?

It may, indeed, be very hard for all of us to distinguish between the products of imagination and the outcomes of pure attention. Real attention may be so hard that few of us actually achieve it, even when we tell ourselves that we have. It is possible that my religious experiences (far less vivid than Weil's, but of the same general kind) are the outcomes of my imagination filling up the void, and I'm just telling myself that I'm paying attention? Of course that's a possibility.

But there are other possibilities. And in our efforts to attend to each other, we fall short to the extent that we treat some possibilities as certainties, and others as impossible.

Of Heaven and Triathlons

I was thinking about heaven over the weekend. More precisely, I was thinking about how Christians should envision heaven.


Let me try to explain what I mean. It is easy enough, I think, to offer a Christian portrait of heaven. In classical theological terms, “heaven” names the state of eternal loving union with God and the blessed. To be in heaven is to experience and be transformed by the “beatific vision,” that is, the immediate experience of God. And that experience is thought to have two primary effects: perfect bliss and moral sanctification. Since Christianity defines moral goodness in terms of love, the “sanctification” element means that heaven involves being perfected in love by virtue of an unfiltered experience of God’s love.

Those in heaven become, in effect, channels through which divine love radiates outward to everyone and everything else. And so, to be in heaven is not merely to experience perfect joy; it is to experience that joy on account of belonging to “the beloved community” (as Martin Luther King, Jr., called it). In part it is the joy of being loved in such a community, but more deeply it is the joy that comes from loving as purely as it is possible to love.

This, I think, is a pretty good theological description of the Christian notion of heaven. But what I was thinking about this weekend wasn’t about how to describe heaven in abstract theological terms. A description doesn’t always evoke a sense of what it would be like to experience that which is being described. Unlike recipe-book descriptions of dishes, which prompt us to almost taste the explosion of flavors and textures, theological descriptions of heaven don’t typically produce a similar experiential echo.

But, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute, I think the concept of heaven needs to be more than just a theological abstraction. Events over the weekend inspired me to think about how such abstractions should be fleshed out—and then, coincidentally, a posted link from a facebook friend yesterday morning directed me to a rather interesting short essay on Randal Rauser’s blog, one that dovetailed remarkably with my own thoughts.

Apparently, there is this phobia called “ouranophobia”: the fear of heaven.

Randal Rauser opines that this fear is rooted in a conception of heaven as one endless church service. We hear theological descriptions of heaven like the one offered above—a community of the faithful united with God—and Christians quite naturally think about church, where people come together in a deliberate attempt to form a community defined and shaped by God’s presence.

It happens, I think, almost out of a sense of duty. We’re supposed to associate our church experience with nearness to God. And so we’re supposed to think of heaven in terms of that model. But the result speaks for itself: heaven becomes an endless church service.

And this is clearly the wrong way to think about it. In Rauser’s words:

…we are better off thinking of all the greatest moments of beauty and goodness as more appropriate icons for our heavenly destiny. You don’t look at an icon so much as through it to the transcendent reality beyond. And so it is for the world. All that is most wonderful and glorious about earth now is but an icon, a pale image like a shadow flickering on the back of Plato’s famous cave, which draws us to look at the unimaginable glory that awaits.

I remember the first time that my thoughts took me in something like this direction. I was in my late teens, and I was in Norway for the Christmas holidays (for the first time in many years). I went with my relatives to a “Sølvguttene” concert in the National Cathedral (Sølvguttene are the Norwegian version of the Vienna Choir Boys). I remember sitting in this beautiful building, surrounded by loved ones, listening to Sølvguttene sing, in Norwegian, the lovely German Christmas carol, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.”

I was swept up in that moment, in the wash of sounds and the presence of family and the prospect of having a big Norwegian Christmas Eve with my extended family, complete with all the family traditions…and I found myself thinking, “I wish heaven were like this.”

Not “I hope heaven is like this.” Not “Perhaps heaven will be something like this.” My thought was a counterfactual one: I was sitting there thinking that this moment was so much better than heaven was going to be.

And then I stopped and asked myself, “Why am I thinking that? What, exactly, is my image of heaven anyway? Puffy white clouds and people with wings and harps?”

I wasn’t quite sure, but one thing became immediately apparent: I believed in life after death, in heaven (and, at the time, in eternal hell), but my image of heaven was linked to one feeling above all others: tedium.

Heaven was about being bored.

And as I sat there listening to the beautiful music, I thought to myself: “Then I’ve got the wrong idea of heaven.” But the problem wasn’t with my theory of heaven. While I probably couldn’t have provided precisely the theological account sketched out above, I believed something in that ballpark.

I say “believed,” but it was mainly a matter of rote endorsement. I didn’t believe it in the way that I believe in the promptings of my senses, an automatic and irresistible affirmation hardwired into me and rich with content. I knew that my grandmother, sitting near me in the cathedral, believed in God and heaven in something like that way. She couldn’t help it. She believed as automatically as breathing, and it was a belief full of color and substance.

My belief wasn’t like that. But it wasn’t a matter of hope, either. If heaven was something to be dreaded (not for its horrors, as one might dread the idea of hell, but for its tiresome monotony), then how could my belief be a matter of hope? It didn’t spring from the yearnings of my soul, from my longing for the good. After all, what filled my image of heaven wasn’t the good at all.

Or maybe the problem lay further down. Maybe it’s better to say that what filled my image of the good wasn’t the good. I had the kind of deficient view of the good that leads people to insist that evil people are more interesting than good ones. Goodness, for me, was uninteresting—as if being interesting weren’t a good thing. And so, armed with my deficient view of the good, God and heaven became utterly banal.

“But that’s upside down,” I thought to myself. Perhaps, somewhere in the back of my head, I was recalling the phrase “the banality of evil.” And I knew that here, in this moment, there was rich vibrancy that was not the least bit boring. At the same time, of course, I was aware of others sitting around me who were, indeed, bored to tears.

You always see them at classical concerts. They have no sense of the music, of the transcendence of that moment when dissonance resolves. There are enough times in my life when I have been one of them, bored in the presence of exquisite music. What makes the difference is the extent to which I am in the music, living in it and through it, invested wholly and completely in the moment-to-moment depth and flow. It’s a matter of attention and love.

And as I sat there in that concert, something shifted in me. What changed was my vision of heaven. That word, “heaven,” started to be fleshed out with new content, new resonances. It ceased being about some alien future on the other side of death, something I couldn’t help but feel disconnected from. As is true of music, disconnection means disinterest, and so tedium. To put heaven wholly on the other side of death is to strip it of the very things that make it meaningful—or, perhaps better, of the kind of substance that fits with its meaning.

Our concept of heaven needs to be filled up with things that seize us and hold us, the moments that are deepest in their savor, the things that inspire, not ordinary desire, but yearning, that soul-hunger for the good.

Let me explain this distinction a bit. Desire is a kind of unpleasantness that we feel on the wrong side of getting what we want. We don’t notice the unpleasantness if the desire is readily satisfied. And the process of satisfying desire is pleasant enough, often intensely so. But desire smacks of pure subjectivity: the object of desire is good because we desire it, whatever it happens to be.

When I speak of yearning, I have in mind something different. Yearning fills us when we have intimations of something we didn’t know to desire. The yearning is a foretaste of something greater than we could hope for or imagine, a good whose worth is utterly independent of our desires. And yearning is not pain, but an exquisite and at times terrifying movement in the direction of something that has brushed against us, something whose touch we never expected and can barely comprehend.

When we desire, we feel a lack that needs to be filled, and we know exactly what will fill it (if only for a time). When we yearn in the way I have in mind, we feel as if some lack we never knew about is being filled, as if we are closer to complete than we have ever been. And as we lean urgently in the direction of what is filling us, we sense a great not yet. We aren’t ready yet, not for the totality of what is there. What promises to complete will only swamp us if it comes in all its fullness now.

But there is no disappointment, no frustration of the sort that accompanies thwarted desires. Instead, we feel more alive, more real, more whole. To yearn in this way is to stand on a threshold.

It is moments of such yearning that, in the years since I sat in that cathedral, have been filling in for me the conceptual space of “heaven.” But I never really thought about it that way, not explicitly, until this weekend.

On Saturday, my wife participated in Oklahoma City’s Redman triathlon, competing in the half-Iron (70.3 mile) distance. She and I went down to the city the night before so she could pick up her race materials and put her bike in the transition area, and we stayed in a hotel down there so that she could sleep a little later (until 4 AM instead of 3). Unfortunately, the folks in the hotel room next to us decided to host a party there. Requests for quiet and phone calls to the front desk finally succeeded, but not until closer to 1 AM. The remaining hours of sleep were, at best, fitful. When the alarms went off, I joked that she was really doing a quadrathlon: go a night without sleep, then swim 1.2 miles, bike 56, and run 13.1.

We drove to the race venue in the darkness. Once we were parked it was a brisk 15 minute hike to the starting area, much of it in a darkness so deep it was hard to see the sidewalk in front of us. When we reached the venue, it was alive with activity. Athletes were hurrying around in the artificial light, taking care of last minute preparations, transition-area setup, and, of course, potty stops. As the sun began to rise over Lake Hefner, I helped my wife into her wetsuit and shared her nervous anticipation. It was the longest endurance event she’d ever done, and she’d been training hard for months. Her body was ready. She was ready.

Finally it was time. I wished her luck as she pulled on her swim cap and headed into the starting chute. I snapped pictures as the full-Iron-distance athletes trotted down to the water for their mass start. Then came the half-Iron athletes in waves. After I watched my wife’s wave scramble into the water and begin swimming, I turned and headed back towards the car. I had a two hour drive ahead of me: one hour up to Stillwater to get the kids and my mother-in-law, then another hour back to the race venue.

I walked along the path that had been shrouded in darkness two hours before. Now the sky was a brilliant blue and I saw the white heron fishing by the lighthouse, and the sunflowers, while behind me I felt the weight of dreams, of human struggle and aspiration, and ahead of me my children, who would likely clamor about me as I came into the house, demanding hugs. And I paused and breathed deeply. I had to choke back tears.

There it is, I thought. Not some rote belief but a real presence pressing in on me, filling the moment with almost more than I could hold.

For awhile I just stood there, yearning, leaning against the threshold of joy.

Disputing the Authority of Religious Experience

At the conclusion of his discussion on mystical experiences in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James turns to the question of what kind of authority we should attach to these experiences. Of course, to give them authority is to lend credibility or evidentiary value to what they "say," that is, what lessons they appear to teach us. And that raises the question of what mystical experiences actually do say, if anything.

On this matter, James stresses that "the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies." Even so, it is clear that James thinks they do say something--just nothing that justifies invoking them "in favor of any special belief." They are "only relatively in favor" of a range of vaguely supernaturalistic and optimistic understandings of reality.

But do they lend any support to the truth of even this very vague message, a message, in effect, that there is more to reality than what we encounter in ordinary experience, and that this something more is a reason for hope or joy?

On this question, James sums up his position in the following way:

1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

3. The break down the authority of the nonmystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding of the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other order of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.

That mystical states are usually authoritative for those who experience them can hardly be challenged. With few exceptions, those who have had these kinds of experiences are transformed by them, both in terms of outlook and behavior. And the basis of that transformation is a sense of having encountered orders of reality that make a difference for how we should live and relate to our world. Mystics see the world in a new light, in terms of a sense of promise that what lies hidden from our ordinary conscious experience infuses all of reality with a value it would not otherwise have, and gives us reason for far more confident joy than the empirical surface of the world can provide.

But while we can all agree that for most mystics, their experiences have this kind of de facto authority, it is arguably more controversial whether they should have it. And it is likewise controversial to insist, as James does, that "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretensions of nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe." Here we see the link between James' fascination with mystical experiences and his arguments in his essay, "The Will to Believe," in which he endorses a kind of pragmatic faith, a right of the individual to decide to embrace what goes beyond the ordinary evidence, to pursue practices and make decisions that would make no sense if the material world exhausts what is real, out of the hope of connecting thereby with something of deep value. It is clear that, for James, part of the impetus for favoring such pragmatic faith is that "the pretensions of nonmystical states" have been shattered by the reality of mystical consciousness.

As far as the former issue goes--whether mystics really have a right to believe what their mystical experiences are telling them--James offers a sketch of an argument that has been developed in various ways by other philosophers interested in the epistemology of religious belief (among them William Alston). Here is how I laid out that argument to my philosophy of religion class earlier this week:

1. If a person has an experience (EX) that seems to be an experience of X (some object, event, etc.), then, in the absence of a defeater, it is reasonable to believe PX (the proposition “X exists/ happened/etc.”). (This is one way of formulating what is often called the Principle of Credulity)


2. An experience EX can admit of either of two kinds of defeaters which would block the legitimacy of inferring PX: (i) reason(s) to disbelieve PX more compelling than the reasons, given by EX, for believing PX; (ii) reason(s) for believing that the conditions under which EX occurs render EX a poor indicator of PX’s truth.

3. People have experiences that seem to be of a divine reality, that is, a transcendent and fundamental good (D experiences)

4. Sometimes, the people who have D experiences do not have defeaters of either type (i) or type (ii).

5. At least sometimes, it is reasonable for people who have D experiences to believe that a divine reality exists

Premise 2 may need som clarification. So, imagine I am looking out my window and see, in the courtyard below, what appears to be my wife passionately kissing my least favorite student. This experience would, based on the Principle of Credulity, justify the belief that my wife is kissing my least favorite student in the absence of defeaters. But suppose that my wife happens to be standing next to me in my office at the time of this experience. In that case, I have a defeater of type (i). Or suppose that (against my better judgment) I just ingested a strange mushroom given to me by my least favorite student, that I'm feeling a little funny, and that in addition to seeing my wife in a passionate embrace, I also see in the courtyard Sarah Palin waving at me from astride a huge elephant. In that case, I have a defeater of type (ii).

While some would argue that the problem of evil poses a defeater of type (i) for D experiences, this is hardly an unproblematic claim. The problem of evil clearly is a problem (whether or not it can be overcome) for belief in the "omni-God" who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. But the belief that flows from a typical D experience is far vaguer than that. At best, the problem of evil might dictate against interpreting the D experience in terms of the existence of a God conceived in this particular way.

In fact, James thinks mystical experiences are generally immune to defeaters of type (i). As he puts it, with respect to the facts given to us in ordinary experience, typical mystical experiences "do not contradict these facts, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized." Rather, they "merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness." And he thinks "there can never be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view."

But even if we accept what James has to say on this point, there is still the question of defeaters of type (ii). Michael Scriven has challenged the authority of religious experience in a manner that might be viewed as positing a defeater for religious experiences of type (ii). Here is a key excerpt from his argument:

It is easy for someone to imagine that he saw something he did not see; it is even easier for him to "sense that some presence is nigh," to use a common description of the religious experience, for the sense that gives him this report is not one with the built-in training of our usual senses and is all the easier for the emotions to use as a projection screen.

That the millions who are brought up in a nervous and stress-provoking world and taught the tradition of religious experience and symbolism should produce thousands who claim to have had religious experiences is not surprising but entirely to be expected.

Since I've been in the habit recently of ending my discussion with a theistic argument and asking what skeptical critics think of it, I will end this post with Scriven's skeptical argument, and ask how those prone to lend some wieght to religious experiences might respond to the idea that the existence of religious experiences has no evidentiary value, since the conditions under which they occur are such that we'd expect them to occur whether or not there is more to reality than meets the empirical eye.

My Spiritual Autobiography: The Beginning

I remember quite vividly the moment I came to believe in God. It was during the first semester of my freshman year in college, and it happened in the library. I was sitting at a wooden desk in “the stacks,” a quiet place by a high window, surrounded by books. Since I’d chosen to sit near the engineering texts, the only distraction was the graffiti scrawled on the desk.

But this was no ordinary graffiti. What dominated this particular wooden desk was a conversation about the meaning of life. Given how worn and faded the inaugural message was, it had obviously started long ago, perhaps decades. I wondered how many years separated each entry, how many generations of college students had carved their own thoughts into the wood with a ballpoint pen.

I can no longer recall their words, but I do remember that none of the additions were flippant or glib. This was graffiti-turned-serious, and those who chose to add their thoughts seemed to respect that. And I remember thinking I should add a message of my own.

The problem was that I didn’t have one. I had no idea what life was all about, or even if there was an “all about.” At some point during my high school years a species of atheism had crept over me—nothing militant or doctrinaire, just this vague sense that the material world was all there was and that religion was a comforting illusion created to help us cope with the inevitability of death.

I’d grown up the son of two preachers’ kids—and, like many preachers’ kids, my parents had rejected the religion of their upbringing. At some point in his young adulthood my father had realized that the Lutheran liturgies he recited on Sunday mornings were nothing more than rote words, habits without meaning. And so he left them behind without ceremony, becoming an agnostic scientist who spent his time thinking about what rock formations can tell us of the Earth’s history.

My mother’s break with her religious upbringing was more impassioned, a repudiation of the fundamentalist Baptist world she’d come to find increasingly claustrophobic. When her family immigrated to the United States in the 1950’s, they went from insular Baptist enclaves in small-town Scandinavia to the burgeoning cosmopolitanism of the Bay area. And so my mother found herself encountering a rich tapestry of ideas and perspectives, cultures and experiences that she wanted to explore. But to do so she had to cast off the worldview which insisted that all of these things were a threat, temptations put in her path to lead her away from God.

For my mother, the outcome of rejecting this worldview was a lingering, pluralistic spirituality too vague to have any practical bearing on the routines of daily life.

And so I grew up with parents for whom religion and religious life lay at the periphery of their concerns. We went to church inconsistently—a pleasant, milk-toast Methodist congregation—but only because my parents thought my sister and I should have some exposure to it “so that you’ll know what it is and can make your own decisions about it.”

And by the end of high school I’d pretty much reached the conclusion that it wasn’t for me. Over the course of my childhood I’d gone from an uncritical acceptance of theism as “just the way things are” (largely through the influence of my grandparents) to an indifferent agnosticism that tended towards atheism. I thought of church attendance as a nice way to make some friends, but I took the teachings of the church to be, most likely, nothing but old myths—harmless but probably false. Since there was no pressure from my family to be anything but such an indifferent agnostic, the stance was a comfortable one. Nothing defiant about it or daring. I was secular in the truest sense of the word: I lived in a world where God and religion just really didn’t matter.

And then I found myself in the stacks of the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, dividing my time between my history textbook and this odd, cross-generational conversation about life’s meaning written on an old wooden desk.

It so happened that what I was reading in the textbook had to do with the meaning of life as well, at least in a broad sense. It was a section on the history of ideas in early modern Europe. While I can’t say for sure which specific philosophers I was reading about at the time, I’d guess that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were among them. What I remember clearly is finding myself, quite to my own surprise, abruptly engaged in deep metaphysical reflection for the first time in my life. All alone in the stacks, the sunlight streaming onto a desk cluttered with old graffiti, I began to think in earnest about the meaning of life and the nature of reality.

I must have spent a good hour in silent contemplation, the textbook—with its oversimplified summaries of philosophical ideas—all but forgotten. What I thought about during that hour was wide-ranging, but two things stand out in my memory. The first was a vivid image of something terrifying; the second a line of argument that assured me, with a degree of certainty I now know philosophical arguments can never wholly justify, that the terrifying image was just an illusion.

The image that terrified me was, to put it bluntly, nothing. That is, it was nothingness, nonexistence. As I thought about the meaning of life, I inevitably thought about the end of life, about death, and about what death was from the standpoint of the vague materialism I’d stumbled into during high school.

I’d never really thought about that before, about what death was. And as I confronted it I saw before me an endless expanse of nonexistence, of not being. In the face of that infinite sea of nothing, my finite life seemed a flimsy reed. The nothingness swamped me by its sheer vastness. What did it matter whether I lived for a day or a year or a hundred years? Against an eternity of nonexistence, it all seemed pointless—especially since it wasn’t just me who faced this fate. Every living creature would die, all consciousness would be extinguished. The nothingness began to appear to me like an all-consuming maw, as if it were the ultimate reality, as if existence and life and light were just an ephemeral moment in what was otherwise an endless night of nonbeing.

What I was encountering, tucked away in a sunny corner of the library, was the thing that Karl Barth takes to be the root of evil, the wellspring of human depravity and despair: Das Nichtige. The nothingness. When, years later, I read Barth’s account of it, there was a strong resonance, a deep familiarity. This was something I knew, something I’d seen.

But at the time, being an eighteen-year old kid, I recoiled from it almost as soon as it occurred to me. I quickly reconstructed for myself the pleasant little reality in which I existed: young and healthy with my whole life ahead of me, going to a prestigious private university with a National Merit Scholarship to help cover the costs, lots of chances to have fun, to party, to learn, to pursue romance with one or another of the pretty girls I saw wandering around the campus.

But even as I rebuilt this comfortable little self-understanding, a part of me sensed that it was little more than a tissue curtain hiding the nothingness from view. I retained the lingering sense that if this material existence was all there was, then all of it, everything I cared about, all my ambitions and dreams—all of it was vanity and illusion, and the best I could do was immerse myself in the business of life and try not to think about the deeper truths. Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow you die.

And that’s what might have happened, except for the fact that my philosophical reverie wasn’t over. Although I couldn’t face the precipice I’d stumbled upon as I thought about materialism from my existential standpoint, my mind continued to gnaw at this same materialist worldview in another way.

Specifically, I began to think about how science explains the world around us. The things we see are made up of smaller things, and the patterns we observe are the macro-level consequences of more basic rules. Everything is explained mechanistically. If we want to know why things have the properties and powers that they have, we do so by understanding how the parts fit together and by learning the rules which govern their interaction.

Human beings have the powers and properties that they possess as an outcome of more basic building blocks organized in a certain way and interacting in accord with certain laws. But the building blocks themselves have powers and properties. So how do we explain them? We explain them by looking at more basic components organized in a certain way and interacting according to more general laws.

In my mind I was zooming in on myself, as if looking at what I was through the most powerful microscope imaginable. I zoomed in from organs to cells, from cells to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from atoms to subatomic particles. At each level, I was chopping up what I found and zooming in on the parts that made it up.

This is how you explain it, I thought—by taking it apart and looking at the pieces. But does it ever stop? It seemed to me in that moment, and I still believe it today, that an infinite regress of that sort of explanation explains nothing—it just keeps pushing the need for an explanation back one more level.

At this point my eighteen-year-old mind was swimming furiously to keep afloat in the conceptual depths I’d suddenly found myself in. I was excited, full of a sense of anticipation, as if I were on the verge of discovering some incredible secret. I thought: Material reality has to be infinitely divisible. Any component of a physical object occupies space, and space is mathematically divisible. Even if we get to a basic particle out of which all physical reality is constructed, doesn’t it have to either have extension or not? And if it has extension, then it’s divisible and so has parts. And if it has parts then how can it be the basic particle? But if it doesn’t have extension, than how can it be a physical thing at all?

Maybe it’s energy, I thought—but what the hell is energy? What is it other than some mysterious capacity to affect other things? Is the most basic thing just an unextended point of “capacity to affect other things”? If so, then it can’t be explained the way that science explains everything else. It will have to have the properties and powers that it has in its own right, rather than as a by-product of how more basic building blocks are organized and the rules which they follow.

And suddenly I found myself confronting this basic idea, that the most fundamental building block of reality would have to be nothing like the physical world studied by science, in which things can be understood mechanistically as the effects of constituent parts operating in accord with natural laws. Instead, there’d be this extensionless constituent that just is what it is, able to do things, to affect other things, for no reason other than its own nature—a nature defined in terms of something other than these reductionistic terms.

But then I had another thought: Since the basic building block of matter couldn’t have extension or structure (or it wouldn’t be the basic building block), the only thing making it different from nothing at all would have to be its power to affect and be affected by other things. And the other things affecting and being affected by it would have to be precisely in the same boat: they’d be nothing but the power to affect and be affected by other things.

But then what was it that was affecting and being affected? We’ve gotten rid of everything but the power to affect and be affected, without there being anything that is doing the affecting or experiencing the effects. Bits of nothing affecting and being affected by other bits of nothing.

It made no sense. I had the sudden, jarring certainty that materialism was conceptually incoherent, at least if it wasn’t grounded in something else more fundamental. And then, like a bright window opening up in my mind, I thought, “The something else is mind. The most fundamental reality is mind.” What else could it be? There was mind and matter, and when my mind plumbed far enough into the depths of matter, there was nothing material that could explain the material world.

And I suddenly had a vision of the universe, a vision in which everything that science studies is a vast outflow of a root consciousness, a unifying mind that acts in and through the physical universe, manifesting itself and expressing itself in all the things we see, in the physical laws that we discover, in the objects we touch and discern with our senses.

And I thought, there in the library: God.

And the nothingness that had been so terrifying to me, that had seemed to strip away all meaning from my life, was suddenly full of mind—the mind of God.

Let me be clear about a few things here. First, what I experienced at that desk in the library was not what I would classify as a mystical experience. While I came to have a sense of the unity of all things bound together by an ultimate mind, it was the outcome of speculative metaphysical thinking rather than of immediate numinous experience. It was the frantic philosophical speculations of a young intellect prodded by its first encounter with academic philosophy, along with a sense of solidarity with generations of college students pursuing a quest for meaning—in ballpoint pen, on a wooden library desk.

The second thing I want to be clear about is that the reasoning I went through at that library desk was hardly incontestable. Especially at the end, I made an intuitive leap that many will question—from the apparent untenability of materialism to the idea of mind at the root of all reality. The thinking I did that day (which, I am discovering, bears some striking resemblance to the much more careful and powerful thinking of the great 19th Century German philosopher, Hermann Lotze) was not the end of my spiritual and intellectual journey. It was the beginning.

What is significant for me is the kind of beginning it was. My religious life did not begin in my home, based on the teachings of my parents. It did not begin in church. It didn’t start with some profound mystical experience of the transcendent, as it does with some. The starting point was a line of philosophical speculation.

But the conclusion of that hour of philosophy was a sense that religious belief needed to be taken seriously, that religious practitioners might be on to something after all. I went, in the space of an hour, from a vague atheism to a strong intuitive sense that some species of theism was most likely true.

On the basis of that conviction, I went in search of religion—seriously in search of it—for the first time in my life. And by a set of coincidences the first thing I stumbled into on my search was a small community of charismatic evangelical Christians, a rather cult-like group that met every Friday night at the top floor of Wilson Commons (the University of Rochester’s amazing student union).

The group was called BASIC (Brothers and Sisters in Christ); but my closest friends in college liked to call them BASIS (Brothers and Sisters in Space). They were, quite literally, Jesus freaks. But my conflicted relationship with that group—my fascination and flirtation with their fundamentalism and their faith—is a story for another day.

Considering the Effects of Spiritual Practices on the Brain

Since I’m starting up a new semester (but the kids haven’t started school yet), I’ve been dividing my time equally between course preparation and parenting (my son is in my office with me as I write this). Thus, I don’t have much time to work on the blog these days. And so, in lieu of something more time-consuming, such as the next (and likely final) chapter in my biblical inerrancy series, I invite readers to read and share their thoughts about a Reuters article that appeared yesterday: “Faith Rites Boost Brains, Even for Atheists.”

The article discusses a recent book by Andrew Newberg (How God Changes Your Brain) that addresses some current research into the impact that religious practices—meditation and meditative prayer in particular—have on the brain. The research discussed in this article isn’t totally new (I’ve read about similar findings off an on for a few years). But it is interesting and worth reflecting on. What follows are a few of the questions and ideas that reading the article generates for me (to the extent that I can express them clearly while a six-year old builds an elaborate tunnel system in my office using the packing boxes I haven’t yet filled with books for the impending office move).

The obvious lesson in this article is that science is able to discern, through its empirical methods, effects that certain religious practices have on the brain—effects that, at least in terms of their correlation with states of consciousness, most would judge to be positive. Beyond this obvious lesson, there is much that deserves reflection and debate.

One such issue relates to the positive value that is generally attributed to the psychological products of the spiritual practices in question: greater compassion, a deeper sense of connectedness with the world and other beings in that world, greater “peace of mind,” etc. Of course, these things are widely desired and valued. But is that all there is to it? Or are they things that ought to be valued? Is there a reason why they should be valued, even by those who, as a matter of contingent psychology, fail to value them? And if so, what are those reasons? More basic contingent desires? Then we can ask the same questions at a deeper level. If we think that some things ought to be valued apart from contingent desire (as I do), we need to look for an answer to the question, “What makes these psychological states categorically valuable?” The answer will not rest in empirical facts about the brain. As such, and insofar as the positive value of the states produced by spiritual practice is integral to what makes them significant, we cannot fully appreciate the fruits of spiritual practice through brain science alone.

A second issue relates to a point that some readers of this blog are likely to make: namely, this research demonstrates that the positive benefits of religious practices can be divorced from the metaphysical beliefs about reality which so often operate as both motivation and interpretative framework for these practices. I essentially agree with this. I don’t think you have to, say, believe in God or in a universal spirit or in the illusory nature of the world of ordinary experience in order to benefit from meditative practices. The same is true about a lot of things. Food nourishes you regardless of your specific beliefs about eating and what it does to your body. Drinking plenty of water is beneficial regardless of what beliefs you have about what happens to you when you drink water and why drinking it is good for you. The real question is not whether these practices impact the brain in discernible ways, ways that correlate with beneficial changes in consciousness, but what implications this fact has, if any, for the reasonableness of various metaphysical beliefs.

There is also the question of describing what is going on in the agent, at the level of consciousness. That is, what are we, as conscious agents, doing when we meditate? Simone Weil, whose provocative and challenging reflections on her own mystical experiences have been deeply influential on my own thinking, describes meditative prayer as an exercise in absolute attention—an attention that isn’t directed towards anything in the field of empirical experience nor to any construct of the imagination. In her view, it is a matter of opening up a place in consciousness that is free from all the things that usually vie for our attention—sense experiences as well as our inner thoughts and ideas and imaginings. Meditation is about paying absolute attention to that which is not these things, and as such is really a matter of opening up an empty space in consciousness, a space of quiet waiting.

Of course, Weil interprets what happens next in the following way: the “God” that transcends human concepts and categories, that transcends empirical experience, floods into the empty space that we have made. As such, she’d interpret the current brain science as offering a picture of how the brain responds to the inflow of the divine. By contrast, many naturalists will argue that current brain research belies this interpretation, because there is no reason to suppose that any such grand encounter with a mysterious and otherwise inaccessible order of reality is happening when we can just explain religious experience as nothing more than the by-product of a distinctive sort of brain activity.

My own view is that there is a reason to interpret religious experience in something falling within the broad family of interpretations to which Weil’s belongs (even if, all things considered, that reason may not prove decisive). The reason is provided by what the experience “feels like” from the inside, so to speak. It feels like a veridical encounter with something other than what we are connected to in ordinary experience.

The naturalist account of spiritual experience is, I think, inspired by a suspicion of taking such subjective “feelings” as having any evidentiary value worth attending to. On a more basic level, it seems to be rooted in the insistence that the same kinds of evidentiary standards that drive science should be followed in all domains of human inquiry—even when the questions we ask are ones to which such standards simply cannot be applied (and hence become questions that it is either pointless to ask, meaningless to ask, or about which the only answer we should ever give is silence). But this leads to yet another question: What is lost, and what is gained, by such an insistence?

In some ways, different answers to this question may lie at the root of the disagreement between metaphysical naturalists and those progressive supernaturalists who treat science as authoritative but not exhaustive in its account of the reality we inhabit.

Reflections on the Argument from Design

A number of readers of my book have asked me why I’m as dismissive of the argument from design as I seem to be. My best friend is among them. He finds considerable power in several formulations of the argument, including Indian versions which, based on his descriptions of them, I think I probably need to study.

I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.

Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”

But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.

To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.

Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.

For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”

The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.

This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.

But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).

My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.

This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.

I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?

I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.

I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.

In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.

Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.

And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.

An Open Letter to a Dear Sicilian Friend

First of all—Carmelo! Good to hear from you. How the hell are you? I recall still, with great fondness, climbing Etna with you while on my honeymoon, and scrambling up rocks and ash to that volcanic cave you took us to, still hot from Etna’s last eruption but cool enough to enter. I remember, in the darkness, running my fingers along the rough surface and hearing the resonance of it like a thousand tiny bells.

For me, at least, that moment was religious. In the language of one of my favorite theologians, I sensed in that moment intimations of the Infinite in the finite.

And so I want to reflect for a bit on your unexpected comment on my last post. I was originally going to just add my own comment, but then I thought, why not a kind of “open letter” to my Sicilian friend so far away? Somehow, it seems more fitting.

Your portrait of religion is clearly true for much that goes by the name of “religion” in history and today. The Marxist critique of religion wouldn’t have attracted the following it did were there not a pervasive reality that is precisely as Marx describes it: an ideological tool shaped by the privileged classes to preserve their privilege, invoking gods of the imagination for the purpose of brainwashing the masses, redirecting their attention away from the injustices they endure.

I am hardly unaware of this reality. In fact, much of my career has been devoted to fighting it for all I’m worth. To that extent, I have something in common with Richard Dawkins and the other “new atheists.” The difference lies in the fact that my horror at the evils of religion is motivated in large measure by a deep affinity for this precious thing I find buried underneath all the garbage.

You call religion something “extremely dangerous” that “must be rejected,” with no room for “middle ground.” In an important sense, I agree. The thing you describe is extremely dangerous. It must be rejected. There can be no middle ground. This thing you describe must be unequivocally opposed, because this thing you describe is crushing the soul of religion. I love religion too much to give this evil thing any quarter at all.

My point, of course, is that there are fundamentally different phenomena that go by the name “religion.” In the real world, they are often bound up together. You have identified what you see as dangerous. It is like poisonous trash that must be thrown away. But let us not also throw in the trash the child who has been poisoned by it.

This is the point I want to really convey: it isn’t all poisonous trash. Much that goes by the name of religion fits the Marxist description. But not all of it. The portrait of religion that I’ve been trying to paint—which you call beautiful but anomalous—is not something I’m inventing. It’s an attempt to capture something that I’ve experienced—in private moments of spiritual reflection, in diverse religious communities I’ve participated in, and vicariously in religious movements I’ve studied.

It is something I see at work in Martin Luther King’s religiously-inspired civil rights movement, in which an oppressed people were moved to stand up against injustice, to say no to oppression, and to do so in a way that had a real prospect of building bridges and healing wounds. It’s something I find in the writings of liberation theologians, who invoke religious ideas not to perpetuate the institutional structures that oppress the masses, but to critique them and work for their dismantling.

It is something I have encountered in Quaker meetings, in which worship is the silent meditation of equals without a priest or religious leader. It is something I encountered during the Wednesday chapel services at Pacific Lutheran University when I was on the faculty there—services rich in beauty, shaped by the intellectually informed homilies of faculty members, and guided by a deep commitment to social justice. It is something I have experienced at a small, rural Mennonite Church in upstate New York during the foot-washing ritual in which everyone expressed their commitment to humble service towards humanity by washing each others’ feet.

It is something I saw in the eyes of PLU’s former chaplain, Dan Erlander, when he spoke of his gentle work guiding and inspiring students towards a deeper commitment to justice and peace. It is something I felt when I was descending Stromboli at dawn, skating down the ash in the way that you taught me to do, and seeing the sun break over the Mediterranean.

In many ways, the religion I am talking about is the antithesis of the religion you (rightly) abhor. And the religion you abhor is all the more horrific because of what it so often twists and corrupts and crushes underfoot, what I call the “germ of true religion.” At heart this germ is a feeling, the feeling that Schleiermacher called “the intuition of the Infinite in the finite,” a feeling swelling with hope, with transformative promise, and with the energy to make us better than we thought we could be. And it feels to me, as it did to Martin Luther King, Jr., as if it’s a connection with the deepest reality of all. That’s part of what gives the feeling its power.

I could treat that feeling as mere delusion. It might be nothing but a biochemical reaction in my brain, brought on by various environmental stimuli. It might be the effect of altitude or the power of suggestion. Maybe my attunement to aesthetic impressions is just a side-effect of evolutionary forces. Maybe this mere side-effect is triggering neurological excitement in certain parts of my brain when I’m standing in a hot dark cave and hearing the resonance of nature’s bells. And that’s all it is. No deeper meaning. No fleeting connection with something transcendent.

But if I believed that, then the feeling would lose its resonance. It would lose the sense that it’s about something fundamental in the universe. And so it would gradually fade away within me.

I could make that choice, but I would be emptier for it. For me, religion is about living in the hope that, despite the possibility of error, this religious feeling (what Schleiermacher named “piety”) is not just a by-product of neural misfirings in the brain, but an encounter with something beautiful and true.

In the complex mess of phenomena that go by the name of “religion” in this world, this religious feeling I’m talking about remains an element, even if it is an element so often twisted by inflexible dogmas, so often suppressed by religious authorities who see it as a threat to their privilege—in brief, so often buried under heaps of garbage.

But what I want to shout from the rooftops (or from the pages of a book, or from a blog site) is this: The fact that “true religion” is only a germ, and that it is so often buried under heaps of garbage, shouldn’t lead us to condemn it along with the garbage. We do more good for ourselves and the world when we strive to dig the germ out from under the garbage, when we identify those conditions that interfere with the germ’s sprouting and those conditions which nurture it, when we celebrate it where it is found by clearing away the things that stifle its growth.

This message probably has more resonance with those who have experienced the germ that I’m talking about than it does among those who haven’t. For me, one of the greatest tragedies of the proliferation of religion as you’ve described it is exactly this: it so obscures the germ of true religion that many people never experience it at all. And this is true even among those who faithfully attend religious services all the days of their life.

Atheism on the Bus

About a decade ago, while I was living in the Puget Sound area, I entered the “Poetry on the Buses” competition—an annual event in which poets and would-be poets compete to have their poems posted in and on Seattle buses. My poem, “Lilac Festival,” was among the winners, and so for a time it could be read by commuters on their way home from work. The poem, which I’m still rather pleased with, was an attempt to capture my memories of the Rochester lilac festival, which I attended every spring as an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester. It runs as follows:

In spring, at a carnival of lilacs and balloons,
of purple-peppered hills and pollens
that glisten on the tail of the bumblebee,
a sun-blond boy with ice cream lips watches
lovers who walk with steps that make the widows nod,
and girls in college jerseys
who flash their smiles in passing, over their shoulders
like petals tossed by children playing love-me-not.

The Poetry on the Buses project has always struck me as a great alternative to using bus walls—a kind of public space—for paid advertising. As a commuter, I’d much rather read a contest-wining poem than a soda slogan. Or worse, a religious ad.

Living where I now live, I don’t get much of a chance to see bus advertising (the bus system in Stillwater is run by the university and is advertisement-free), but I do see billboard ads often enough—and with some frequency the billboard space has been leased by one religious organization or another. One popular campaign (which apparently also does run on the sides of buses) features an all-black billboard with white lettering, the message signed by “God.”

The presumptuousness of this is only matched by the banality of the messages themselves—things such as “Have you read my #1 bestseller? There will be a test,” and “Think it’s hot here?” and “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” I can only imagine what God thinks of a bunch of religious slogan writers more influenced by Madison Avenue than by any deep sense of the divine, attributing their pithy messages to the infinite and transcendent mystery that lies at the heart of reality.

Now atheists are in on the game. And rather than taking their cue from the Poetry on the Buses project, they are firmly aligned with the Madison Avenue approach: Come up with a pithy message that simply can’t do justice to the deep philosophical issues to which it gestures, and then slap it on a billboard or a bus. But at least they aren’t attributing the products of their merely human sloganeering to the divine. I suppose that’s an improvement.

Thanks to a good family friend, I have a New York Times clipping about the atheist bus campaign in front of me, featuring a picture of a London double-decker bus with the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, posed in front of it—trying (it seems) to look dapper. The atheist message on the bus reads as follows: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The picture and the message were the first things I saw as I unfolded the clipping. And this fact gave me an opportunity to really experience first-hand the importance of context. Before reading the article itself, before coming to see the slogan in terms of the context out of which its creators were writing, I responded to it in terms of my own context.

My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world.

What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”

Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.

But, of course, for me “God” refers to that reality which, if it existed, would fulfill what I call in my book “the ethico-religious hope”—that is, the hope that the universe in some fundamental way is on the side of the good, so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all.

Perhaps the most important exponent of this hope in American history was Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it in terms of his conviction that “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”

In fact, King believed that embracing this hope was essential for practitioners of nonviolence. “I am quite aware,” he said in a 1957 speech, “that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God….And this was one of the things that kept people together (during the Montgomery bus boycott), the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.”

And so, when I read the atheist slogan on the side of the bus, here is what I read: “The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”

This absurd juxtaposition of messages might usefully be contrasted with one offered by philosopher Walter Stace, who before becoming interested in mystical experience was very much an atheist in Dawkins’ mold, but with an important difference. In his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness,” Stace discusses what he thinks is the demise of religion in the face of science, but he doesn’t present his atheist picture of the world as a reason to “stop worrying and enjoy life.” Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species.

In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things.

But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very good marketing campaign on the sides of buses. Too grim. If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it.

But here is where differences in context become relevant. According to the New York times article, “the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign” were sewn by a comedy writer named Ariane Sherine. Sherine saw a religious ad on a bus and, when she went to the associated web site, was informed in the materials there that she and her friends were doomed to an afterlife of eternal torment because they didn’t have the right beliefs about God.

When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. It becomes a liberation of sorts. In fact, this point was made beautifully long ago by the Greek scholar Plutarch.

Plutarch argued, in an essay called “On Superstition,” that there’s a fundamental difference between belief in tyrannical gods that place harsh demands on human beings on pain of retribution, and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. He calls the former superstition, and reserves the term “religion” for the latter. And he thinks that atheism is far preferable to superstition. Better to think there are no gods at all than to live your life in terror that the gods will smite you unless you scurry to obey their every whim. The superstitious person sees every misfortune as an act of the gods, and is always looking for someone to blame: Who is it that failed to obey with sufficient alacrity? Is it the gays, the feminists, the ACLU—all those whom Jerry Falwell blamed for the 9/11 attacks?

Far better to be an atheist than to live in cowering submission, convinced that we’re all the slaves of some irresistible supernatural tyrant. This is probably at least part of what the mystic philosopher Simone Weil had in mind when she referred to atheism as “a purification.”

But Weil was not an atheist. For her, atheism served the import role of wiping away the gods of the imagination, the deities we invent out of fear and ignorance. She believed that in order to really experience God—the divine presence that appeared to her while she was in the grip of debilitating migraine headaches, and seemed to her “a presence, like the smile on a beloved face”—in order to experience this we needed to clear our minds, to make a space within our consciousness, a place of quiet waiting into which grace might then flood in. But our imagination is always filling up these spaces with deities of our own invention, leaving no room at all for God.

And for Plutarch, the deadliest and most sinister god of the imagination is the supernatural tyrant, the growling monarch who commands us to obey or pay the price. This is a god we must flee, for the sake of our very sanity. But fleeing this god of superstition does not require us to reject all transcendent hopes, to dismiss every mystical report, to scoff at Martin Luther King’s hope that the universe bends towards justice or at Simone Weil’s encounter with a tender presence on the far side of anguish.

And so Plutarch concludes his essay by noting how atheists, in fleeing superstition, end up “leaping right over piety, which lies between.” This message (which, by the way, gives this blog its name) still has resonance so many centuries later. The god that Ariane Sherine is rejecting ought to be rejected. It is the god of superstition. But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King.

Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God. While nothing in our experience proves that the God of religion exists, there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. And, as I argue in my book, there are philosophical reasons to believe in deeper orders of reality than we encounter in ordinary sense experience—reasons that mean we don’t need to dismiss profound religious experiences as mere delusion.

We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.

If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives.

Naturalist vs. Supernaturalist: Identifying the Chief Points of Contention

Last week I posted John Shook’s reply to my “Evaluating the Unfalsifiable” post, along with a few general comments about it. But it seems to me that for the sake of a more careful discussion, it might help to lay out the core of Shook’s argument more formally. What I present in this post is, first, my attempt to lay out his main line of argument as fairly and accurately as I can; second, an identification and brief discussion of the premises with which I (and, I suspect, other religiously inclined philosophers) disagree; and third, a reflection on what I ultimately suspect will be the most likely outcome of serious philosophical reflection on the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism. I begin, then, with a kind of formalization of Shook’s argument:

1. Supernaturalism will either be a vague assertion that there is “something more,” or it will involve specific beliefs about the supernatural, that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
2. Supernaturalism that is a vague assertion that there is “something more” is what Shook calls “Theology in the Dark,” and such supernaturalism is vacuous and hence unacceptable.
3. So, a substantive supernaturalism will have to involve specific beliefs about the supernatural—that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
4. Endorsement of a particular religious creed will require the supernaturalist to “explain away” the religious experiences of all those people (inevitably millions) who ascribe to a different religious creed.
5. If the supernaturalist is forced to explain away the religious experiences of all those who ascribe to a different religious creed, then the supernaturalist’s worldview has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
6. So, supernaturalism has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
7. While some species of naturalism have difficulty explaining the apparent objectivity of value experiences, Dewey’s pragmatic version of naturalism explains (rather than explains away) this apparent objectivity of values as well as any version of supernaturalism does (without smuggling in any assumptions about transcendent values).
8. If (7), then supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
9. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
10. If supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining either religious experience or value experiences, then it has no advantage in its capacity to explain human experience (hereafter, its explanatory power).
11. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power.
12. If the supernaturalist’s worldview has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power, then the simpler worldview (the worldview that posits fewer theoretic entities) should be preferred.
13. Naturalism is simpler than supernaturalism.
14. Therefore, naturalism is preferable to supernaturalism

As a way of helping to isolate key points of contention between myself (and supernaturalists like me) and Shook (and naturalists like him), let me briefly identify the premises with which I disagree in this argument, along with what amounts to a very cursory sketch of the strategy I would pursue in challenging these premises.

First, I disagree with premise 2. While my own theology is more substantive that the vague supernaturalism of, say, many Unitarians, I do not think that this vague supernaturalism is wholly vacuous. Here, I would gesture to R.M. Hare’s idea of a “blik,” a kind of way of seeing or experiencing one’s life. I think that a vague supernaturalism constitutes a different blik than does naturalism, one that has an impact on the overall character of one’s lived experience. It grounds a way of life characterized by spiritual practices that seek to open the individual to a relational connection with this vague “something more.” These practices frequently culminate in “mystical” experiences (of varying degrees of intensity) that feel like the attainment of such a relational connection—and these experiences in turn have impact on the life of the individual, especially in terms of mood (they tend to elevate mood), outlook (they tend to promote optimism), and character (they tend to lead to less self-centeredness).

Second, I disagree with premise 4, for reasons along the same general lines as those mentioned by John Kronen in his posted comments to Shook’s argument. Basically, there is a difference between experience and its interpretation. Much of the disagreement among the great world religions occurs at the level of interpretation (and to a great extent, also, at the level of doctrinal teachings that have little connection with experience). Admittedly, the distinction here is muddier than it sounds, and some careful philosophical work needs to be done to fully develop this line of thought. There are many good thinkers who have done some of that work. Schleiermacher is one. William James is another. And there’s Walter Stace and R.C. Zaehner. More recently, we have John Hick. While these great thinkers have important differences and disagreements, they are all provocative, and their ideas and arguments are worth meditating on.

Third, there is premise 7. Now Shook has devoted a large portion of his career to interpreting and defending Dewey’s thought. And so if Shook says there’s something here worth examining carefully, we should take him seriously. And so, the other day, I tracked down my copy of Shook’s book, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, and started looking through it. A few things became quickly clear to me. First, it will take a great deal of effort to figure out exactly what Dewey means, even with Shook’s guidance. Second, Dewey’s thought is both provocative and controversial. I am grateful that Dewey has devotees such as John Shook willing to devote their careers to advancing Dewey’s thought, just as I am grateful that Aquinas and Kant and Hegel have such devotees. I’m a bit saddened that some other truly great philosophers (such as Hermann Lotze) do not. But it also seems to me, in the case of all of these great thinkers, that there is both much to admire and much to criticize. What these philosophers are tackling is just too difficult to expect any one of them to have the final word. While I am grateful for John Shook’s devotion to Dewey, I don’t share it.

Finally, there is premise 12, which says that the simpler worldview should be preferred over the more complex one if the more complex one lacks any advantage in terms of explanatory power. Formulated in this way, the premise leaves out something that I’m sure Shook would not want to leave out—namely, pragmatic value. What should really be said here is that the simpler theory should be preferred all other things being equal, where “all other things” is taken to include both explanatory power and pragmatic value. But I also think that both explanatory power and pragmatic value should take precedence over simplicity. We turn to the question of simplicity only once explanatory power and pragmatic value have both been assessed and found to be comparable.

And this leads me to my final thoughts. My own view is that, in terms of explanatory power, we’re likely to find something of a standoff between the strongest species of supernaturalism and the best formulations of naturalism. In other words, the advantages of one will be offset by the advantages of the other in such a way that we are left with a kind of existential choice. This will be true not only when all is said and done (which will never happen), but also at whatever stage of personal or collective inquiry we find ourselves at.

What I mean is this: we are faced with a choice that ultimately cannot be made on the grounds that one worldview is clearly preferable to the other in terms of its rational fit with experience. All surviving contenders will require us to make sacrifices (in terms of “explaining away” elements of experience) to roughly the same degree. And so we will have to decide which sacrifices we can live with, and which we can’t.

Some will likely view this existential choice in the manner expressed by Hermann Lotze in a passage which follows his efforts to show that there cannot be “any real speculative proof for the correctness of the religious feeling upon which rests our faith in a good and holy God, and in the destination of the world to the attainment of a blessed end.” Lotze, in considering what to do on the basis of this conclusion, says the following:

“He who does not share this religious conviction may…very easily from a speculative point of view reach that Pessimism, which is just now the order of the day, and for which there will be on speculative grounds no refutation. But this Pessimism, which reverts to the thought of an original energy without will, that produces the Good and the Bad alike without design, is not a profound view but is just that cheap and superficial kind of view, by which all enigmas are conveniently disposed of—by simply sacrificing all that is most essential and supreme to the unprejudiced mind.”

Others will likely view the same existential choice in terms of the distinctive ethical perspective nicely summarized by Charles Taylor in his masterful (and masterfully brief) discussion of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book called Varieties of Religion Today. Taylor describes the ethical perspective as follows:

“…it is wrong, uncourageous, unmanly, a kind of self-indulgent cheating, to have recourse to this kind of interpretation (a supernatural or religious interpretation of one’s experience), which we know appeals to something in us, offers comfort, or meaning, and which we therefore should fend off, unless absolutely driven to them by the evidence, which is manifestly not the case.”

This is the kind of ethical standpoint so powerfully voiced by Walter Stace in “Man Against Darkness,” and by Bertrand Russell when he said, in reply to someone who asked how to face mortality given his philosophy, that we should face it “with confident despair.”

In short, we are faced with an essentially pragmatic choice. Do we choose to be the kind of people who avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion, and who forge ahead in life like those mountain men of old to test their mettle against an indifferent world? Or do we choose to be the kind of people who live in the hope that there is truth in the religious inkling, the feeling that something greater and more wonderful lies beyond the horizons of experience, making itself felt most clearly in the deepest longings of our souls?

On a fundamental level, I think this is the perspective sketched out by William James in his works on religion. And so I consider myself, at least in this respect, a Jamesian. The process for evaluating worldviews which I’ve sketched out is a necessary first step towards settling on a worldview, but its function is this: to identify the viable contenders.

I think it unlikely that this process will ever winnow down the contenders to just one. And I also think it unlikely that it will winnow down the contenders to just one kind (natural or supernatural). But when faced with this general choice between natural and supernatural worldviews, I don’t think the choice will ever be judged to be a pragmatically neutral one. And so deciding between naturalism and supernaturalism on the basis of simplicity doesn’t strike me as the appropriate move—unless simplicity has first been invested with pragmatic significance, and in a Jamesian way allegiance to the ideal of simplicity has been adopted over against alternative ideals.

In the end, the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism will be a Jamesian one. If Shook and others want to call this step “faith,” I have no objection. But I would resist having it called blind or irrational.