When God is gone, everything is holy

Originally published 23 April 2006

In a blog post­ing a week or so ago, I stat­ed that the cen­tral con­tri­bu­tion of 20th-cen­tu­ry sci­ence was the shat­ter­ing of absolutes. There is a corol­lary: The impor­tance of everything.

Once we reject the absolute truth of one thing, what­ev­er it might be — God, a holy book, a law of nature — then every­thing, even the small­est ele­ment of real­i­ty — an insect, a leaf, a grain of sand — becomes infi­nite­ly inter­est­ing. The physi­cist Heinz Pagels put it this way: “The capac­i­ty to tol­er­ate com­plex­i­ty and wel­come con­tra­dic­tion, not the need for sim­plic­i­ty and cer­tain­ty, is the attribute of an explor­er. Cen­turies ago, when some peo­ple sus­pend­ed their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, mod­ern sci­ence was born. Curi­ous­ly, it was by aban­don­ing the search for absolute truth that sci­ence began to make progress, open­ing the mate­r­i­al uni­verse to human exploration.”

If one want­ed to describe this in reli­gious terms, it would go some­thing like this: The absence of God makes every­thing holy.

But why use reli­gious lan­guage when Pagels’ quite sat­is­fac­to­ry sum­ma­tion says it all?

Because for some of us, Pagels’ sum­ma­tion is incom­plete. We are — for bet­ter or worse — reli­gious by nature. Whether by genes or from thou­sands of years of encounter with the world in wake­ful­ness and dream we have a felt attrac­tion to the suprasen­su­al. We need not apol­o­gize for this. The suprasen­su­al does not imply super­nat­ur­al. The bound­ary between the mind and the world is infi­nite­ly fuzzy, and we are far from under­stand­ing the nature of con­scious­ness. Nev­er­the­less, we feel, with New­ton, like chil­dren play­ing with pret­ty stones on the shore of a lim­it­less sea. Any lan­guage that gives expres­sion to our transsen­su­al intu­itions is religious.

But let me say clear­ly: All gods are idol­a­trous, espe­cial­ly any god we per­son­i­fy with a cap­i­tal G. The great ser­vice to human­i­ty of sci­ence has been to sweep the anthro­po­mor­phic gods away, or, at the very least, to show them for what they are, phan­toms of the human brain. What we are giv­en in their place is not Truth, but reli­able empir­i­cal knowl­edge of the world, ten­ta­tive and evolving.

When the slate of super­sti­tion has been wiped clean, what are we left with? Silence? Yes, there is some­thing to be said for silence, for retreat­ing into what Thomas Mer­ton called “the prayer of the heart.” The Greek writer Nikos Kazantza­kis in his Spir­i­tu­al Exer­cis­es writes of the thing that he — hes­i­tant­ly — calls Spir­it: “We strug­gle to make this Spir­it vis­i­ble, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in alle­gories and thoughts and incan­ta­tions, that it may not escape us. But it can­not be con­tained in the twen­ty-six let­ters of an alpha­bet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these alle­gories, these thoughts, and these incan­ta­tions are, once more, but a new mask with which to con­ceal the Abyss.”

He writes: “We have seen the high­est cir­cle of spi­ral­ing pow­ers. We have named this cir­cle God. We might have giv­en it any oth­er name we wished: Abyss, Mys­tery, Absolute Dark­ness, Absolute Light, Mat­ter, Spir­it, Ulti­mate Hope, Ulti­mate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for pri­mor­dial rea­sons, can stir our hearts pro­found­ly. And this deeply felt emo­tion is indis­pens­able if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic.”

One might rea­son­ably take issue with Kazantza­kis. The word God is so bur­dened with idol­a­trous bag­gage that its use­ful­ness is com­pro­mised for the sci­en­tif­ic skep­tic. Bet­ter, say, to adopt Rudolf Otto’s “mys­teri­um tremen­dum et fasci­nans,” or Kazantza­kis’ own “dread essence beyond log­ic.” But then, in the end, is any for­mu­la­tion of the transsen­su­al less idol­a­trous than another?

Let it only be said that the world is shot through with a mys­tery that man­i­fests itself no less in what is revealed by sci­ence — the uni­verse of the galax­ies and the eons, the eter­nal­ly weav­ing DNA, the elec­tro­chem­i­cal flick­er­ing which is con­scious­ness — than in the cre­ations of poets, visu­al artists and musicians.

So we stum­ble for­ward, try­ing to avoid the dog­mas of blind faith or sci­en­tism, We try to make our­selves wor­thy of the uni­verse of which we are an infin­i­tes­i­mal part. We will not all agree on what wor­thi­ness con­sists of. For me, it is a mix of skep­ti­cism and celebration.

Kazantza­kis, in the Spir­i­tu­al Exer­cis­es, lodges his Ulti­mate Con­cern in the human heart.

A com­mand rings out with­in me: “Dig! What do you see?”
“Men and birds, water and stones.”
“Dig deep­er! What do you see?”
“Ideas and dreams, fan­tasies and light­ning flash­es!”
“Dig deep­er! What do you see?”
“I see noth­ing! A mute Night, as thick as death. It must be death.”
“Dig deep­er!”
“Ah! I can­not pen­e­trate the dark par­ti­tion! I hear voic­es and weep­ing.
I hear the flut­ter­ing of wings on the oth­er shore.”
“Don’t weep! Don’t weep! They are not on the oth­er shore. The voic­es,
the weep­ing, and the wings are your own heart.”

So this would be my creed: Strive for reli­able knowl­edge of the world, which I take to be the ten­ta­tive con­sen­sus knowl­edge of the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. Dis­trust those who offer absolutes. Lis­ten to poets. And pay atten­tion, even to the least of things — for every­thing is interesting.