Читать книгу A John Haught Reader - John F. Haught - Страница 15

“There is communion with God, and communion with the earth, and communion with God through the earth.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin66

If nature is not all there is, then what else is there, and how do we know about it? Religions are convinced that there is more, indeed infinitely more, but they tell us we can know about it only if we are disposed to receive it. The infinitely “more” cannot be known in the same way that ordinary objects are known. In fact, religion is less a matter of knowing than of being known. It is a state of being grasped rather than of grasping. Not every person is ready for religion, and even self-avowed religious believers cannot truthfully claim to be ready for it most of the time. Indeed, much of what we usually call religious life consists of avoiding or running away from the demands of religion. Religious understanding—as most theologians see it—is impossible without surrender, worship, and prayerful waiting, along with struggle and frustration. Yet, to those who wait, the rewards can be peace and joy, as well as profound intellectual satisfaction.

Religion, at least in any conventional sense, cannot get along with scientific naturalism, but it can get along quite well with science. Science deals with what can be sensed or, at least, what can be inferred from sensation. Religion is based in experience too, but of a different kind from science. Religious people testify to having felt, beneath all sensible appearances, the very real presence of an elusive mystery that takes hold of them, invites them, sometimes unsettles them, and often reorients their lives. They profess to having been carried away, as it were, by something “more” than nature. Their sense of a mysterious presence beyond the world, beneath the surface of life, or in the depths of the universe, evokes responses of vague anxiety sometimes mixed with overwhelming excitement and the impulse to worship. Religion often also involves the encounter with unseen agents, powers, and personalities, but these are experienced as emerging out of the background of a more fundamental transcendent mystery. Religion, taken here in a very broad sense, is a conscious appreciation of and response to the mystery that grounds, embraces, and transcends both nature and ourselves. There are other ways of defining religion, of course, but the issues raised by scientific naturalism have to do especially with religion’s bold claims that there is more than nature. A good name for this more is “mystery.”

Religion, therefore, means that the universe available to science and ordinary experience is not all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. To most religious persons, there is something other than the physical universe. This mysterious presence is not separate from the universe, but it is not identical with it either. It simultaneously penetrates, encircles, grounds, and enlivens nature without being reducible to nature. Religions are convinced that reality does not end at the limits of nature, but instead includes an incomprehensible dimension that extends beyond the scientifically knowable world. The infinite scope of mystery provides religious devotees a permanent reason for hope and a sense of freedom. It allows for limitless breathing room in the face of nature’s obvious constraints and ultimate perishability.

It is especially those whose thoughts and passions reach toward infinite mystery who are most prone to feel imprisoned by naturalistic doctrine. Religious believers, unlike naturalists, do not look to nature for either ultimate fulfillment or ultimate explanation. Still, a wholesome communion with ultimate reality can take place through nature. Healthy religion is gratefully aware of the riches of life and the resourcefulness of the natural world. It is appreciative of science as well. But it also senses that nature imposes obvious limits on life, most notably suffering and death. Religion, then, is a kind of route-finding that looks for pathways beyond the boundaries that nature places on life.67

It is imperative that naturalists be fully sensitive to this point even if they vehemently disagree with it. Religious persons may turn out to be wrong, but clearly they are seeking ways to get beyond what they take to be the natural limits on life. This does not mean that they have to despise the world—although in some cases they do—but that they relativize it. They neither take nature to be ultimate nor do they see science as ultimate explanation. Characteristically, no matter how large science has shown the universe to be, religious people look upon the claim that “nature is enough” as itself an arbitrary confinement that they must get beyond.

To religious ears, including those attuned to the monumental scale of contemporary cosmology, the assertion that “nature is enough” sounds like a prison sentence. This is because religious awareness generally involves a sense that the human mind (or spirit) has already transcended the limits of nature, not finally or decisively, but at least by anticipation. In the next chapter, I will show that human intelligence, in spite of all attempts to understand it naturalistically, extends itself beyond the limits of nature in every act of questioning, understanding, and judging. Religion is inseparable from the intellect’s anticipation of an infinite fullness of being. In biblical circles, religious anticipation of this fullness of being takes the form of hope. And so, to those who hope for final transcendence of death and suffering, naturalism is the most dreary and suffocating of dogmas. Instead of limitless horizons, naturalism offers only an ultimate captivity, unbearable to those who sense that at the core of their being they are capax infiniti—open to the infinite.

Of course, to the naturalist, religion is fully part of nature and, like everything else, it must submit to being explained naturalistically. There must be a purely scientific answer to the question of why so many humans have longed for the infinite and thereby experienced nature as a limit. To many naturalists these days, it is evolutionary biology that seems best equipped to provide the deepest account of humanity’s persistent religious tendencies. If evolutionists can come up with a purely natural explanation of the habit religious believers have of looking toward limitless horizons, then this will supposedly expose infinite mystery itself as empty fiction rather than ultimate reality. Therefore, the most efficient way to disabuse religious people of the illusion that there is anything beyond the limits of nature is to explain, in purely scientific terms, how that illusion could have arisen in the first place. Nowadays, Darwin’s idea of natural selection, brought up to date by genetics, seems to provide the best, perhaps even the ultimate, explanation of the human conviction that reality overflows nature’s boundaries.

Naturalists today often attempt to explain not only religion but also morality in Darwinian terms. There was a time not long ago when the moral instincts of people seemed to be the best evidence for God’s existence. Indeed, moral aspiration was a clear indication of the direct imprint of a transcendent, divine goodness on each soul; conscience was the stamp of God’s will on the inner core of each personality. Hints of an infinite perfection could be found in the insatiable anticipation of the goodness, truth, and beauty that drives the questing human heart. Humans were said to be restless only because an infinite goodness, truth, and beauty had already made itself tacitly present to their moral, intellectual, and aesthetic sensibilities.

The scientific naturalist, however, will have none of this, at times even rebuking religious people for being so “greedy” as to look for fulfillment beyond the limits of nature. In a book whose every page chastises those of us with cloudier images of reality than his own, the philosopher Owen Flanagan asserts that there is nothing beyond what scientific naturalism is able to discern. How he knows this he does not say, but he is certain that people who look beyond nature for fulfillment “are still in the grip of illusions.” “Trust me,” he says, “you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough. Don’t be greedy. Enough is enough.”68

My own work brings me into contact with many good scientists and philosophers from all over the world. Some are religious, but many others are naturalists like Owen Flanagan. Naturalism is now so entrenched in science and philosophical faculties around the globe that it constitutes one of the most influential “creeds” operative in the world today. Scientific naturalists are still a small minority in the world’s overall population, but their influence is out of proportion to their numbers. Generally speaking, their beliefs quietly determine what is intellectually acceptable in many of our universities. Naturalism has now spread from science and philosophy departments into social studies and the humanities. Even departments of religion are no longer immune.

The academic world now harbors numerous scientific naturalists who prefer to keep a low profile in order to avoid controversy wherever religion is considered important. Flanagan wants them to come clean. Likewise, the Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Natalie Angier believes that most scientists are closet naturalists, but are reluctant to state openly what they really think about religion and theology. In a recent issue of The American Scholar, she cites studies showing that as many as 90 percent of the members of the elite National Academy of Sciences are nontheists, and less than half of other scientists believe in a personal God. She upbraids scientists for not being more vocal in criticizing the “irrationalities” of religion in all of its forms. Most scientists are no longer afraid to state publicly that Darwinism has made creationism obsolete, but Angier is annoyed that they pass over in silence the larger body of religious illusions. In her own opinion, the entire history of human religiousness is a preposterous mistake—since there is no scientific evidence for its empty musings. And so she is agitated that most scientists refuse to wear their de facto naturalism on their sleeves.69

It is annoying to scientific naturalists such as Flanagan and Angier that religious people can’t come up with “evidence” for what they take to be more than nature. But to religious experience, this “more” will always be something that grasps us rather than something we can grasp. We can know it only by surrender, not possession. It will never have the clarity of scientific evidence, nor should it be presented as an alternative to science. The most immediate “evidence” for it is the fact of our own anticipation of more truth, deeper goodness, and wider beauty, an insatiable reaching out toward a fullness of being that is by no means illusory, but instead the very core of our rationality. Biblical religions refer to this transcendent dimension as God. They think of God as possessing the most noble of attributes: infinite goodness and love, unsurpassable beauty and splendor, the fullness of being and truth. God is also the epitome of fidelity, creativity, freedom, healing, wisdom, and power. As one who allegedly makes and keeps promises, this God is understood to be “personal” as well, since only persons can love and make promises.

Naturalists, on the other hand, consider such a belief untenable, especially after Darwin. To them, the universe is, at heart, utterly impersonal. Their persistent question is: where is the evidence for God in this imperfect world? Religious people, however, do not usually claim to be able to see the mystery of God directly—“nobody can see God and live.” God is the light that lights up everything else, but one cannot look directly into that primordial illumination without being blinded. Yet, even though the human person cannot grasp God, many people testify to being grasped by God. For them, the powerful sense of being carried away by something of ultimate importance is evidence enough. To take them at their word, they have surrendered their lives and hearts to an irresistible presence and power that receives them into its compassionate embrace. It is not that they have comprehended the overwhelming divine mystery of beauty, goodness, and truth. Rather, they have been comprehended by it. They express their response to this experience in acts of worship, prayer, praise, and gratitude, as well as in distinctive ways of living and relating to the world. That this is not wishful thinking can be demonstrated if it turns out that our longing for the infinite is supportive of what I shall call “the desire to know,” the very heart of human rationality.

As Flanagan and Angier illustrate, however, the naturalist ideal is to bring the totality of being out into the clear light of daytime consciousness, so that there is nothing left for religions to talk about. If theology wants to be respected intellectually, so says the naturalist, it must also adduce the right kind of evidence, namely scientific. This does not necessarily mean that all naturalists demand that God show up among the objects available to empirical inquiry. But there must be visible and unambiguous tracks of divine reality in the natural world if scientifically educated people are to pay any attention to theology. If science comes across anything in nature that cannot be fully explained naturalistically, then there might be good reason to invoke the causal powers of a deity. Today, however, naturalists are eager to demonstrate that everything that formerly gave the appearance of being a trace of the divine can now be explained in natural terms. Not only the “apparent” design in living organisms but also the ethical and mystical inclinations of human beings can be “naturalized.” And if science can account sufficiently for even the holiest of phenomena, there is no need any more for theology.

The Outlines of a Response

The goal of scientific naturalism is to explain everything, insofar as it can be explained at all, in terms of natural processes. This would include the mind itself, which is part of nature. Human intelligence arose by way of a natural process that can be accurately laid out in Darwinian terms. But, as we shall see, the actual performance of human intellection (and later I shall include moral aspiration) is such that it will forever overflow the limits of naturalistic understanding, no matter how detailed scientific understanding becomes in the future. I shall propose that the concrete functioning of intelligence cannot, in principle, let alone in fact, be fully captured by the objectifying categories of any science. In other words, the natural sciences cannot account completely for what I shall be calling critical intelligence. If this claim turns out to be true, it will be necessary to go beyond naturalism in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the universe.

In order to present my argument as clearly as I can, I shall be inviting you, the reader, to place yourself in the mindset of the naturalist, even if ordinarily you are not quite at home there. Then I shall ask you, if only as a thought experiment, to try to provide adequate justification on naturalist premises for your own mental functioning. I don’t believe you can do so in all honesty. As a naturalist, you already claim that your mind is fully part of nature. But your naturalistic worldview, as I hope I can lead you to acknowledge, is too restrictive to account fully for your own cognitional activity. And if your mind and your view of nature do not fit each other, then something has to give. My suggestion is not to abandon scientific explanations of mind but rather to accept them as intermediate rather than ultimate. By itself, science cannot justify the spontaneous trust you have placed in your own mind, even as you seek to arrive at scientific truth. To justify your implicit trust in the possibility of arriving at truth, you will need to look for a wider and deeper understanding of the universe, a more expansive worldview than naturalism has to offer. My proposal is that your own mind’s spontaneous and persistent trust in the possibility of reaching truth is itself a hint that the physical universe, at least as naturalism conceives it, is only a small fragment of all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

65. Previously published in Haught, Is Nature Enough?, 21–31. Reprinted with permission.

66. Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, 14.

67. See Bowker, Is Anybody Out There?, 9-18 and 112-43.

68. Flanagan, Problem of the Soul, 319.

69. See Angier, “My God Problem,” 131–34.