The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God

EXCELLENT BEAUTY T H E N AT U R A L N E S S OF RELIGION AND THE U N N AT U R A L N E S S OF THE WORLD

ERIC DIETRICH

T W E LV E

The Personal Mystery and the Impersonal God

S O W H A T ? T H E R E A R E T H I N G S that are genuinely and objectively mysterious and that are beautiful. . . . So what? Of what possible use could such mysteries be to Homo religiosus? The mysteries of chapter 10 are not beings. The mysteries cannot proscribe certain behaviors; they cannot be the author of and enforce morality; they cannot comfort the suffering, provide succor for the afflicted, protect the innocent; they cannot be worshiped, they cannot inspire worship; they cannot create ex nihilo; they cannot love or be loved. Perhaps chapter 10 was interesting; perhaps even enlightening, but what deep meaning could the realm of the mysterious have for us?

But the so what? sword is double-edged and cuts both ways.

As we saw in chapter 7, no god needs to proscribe any behaviors.

Morality arises naturally, and requires only that we be rational and have feelings of empathy for others. Furthermore, human morality is deeper and more right than much religious morality. The September 11 attacks were immoral, yet encouraged by a branch of Islam; the Crusades were immoral, yet instigated by the Catholic Church; and on and on. Hence, even if some deity proscribed certain behaviors, so what? It doesn’t matter what behaviors a god proscribes, we know right from wrong independently of any god. When, in the Bible, Yahweh says we should kill homosexuals, we know that he is wrong (even most members of the religious right in the United States refrain from killing or even advocating killing homosexuals). When Yahweh killed all the firstborn

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in Egypt, we know that was wrong: he shouldn’t have done that. And he shouldn’t have turned Job over to Satan on a bet—that was wrong of him.

We turn to our gods when we are suffering or afflicted, but so what?—to what avail? No god comforts us or provides succor for our afflictions: the innocent still die horribly (of course, for many the concept of a god is comforting). Just recall the events of September 11, 2001.

Many innocent people died that day, receiving no help at all. Right now, somewhere, an innocent child is being raped, and is receiving no help at all. At the end of the day, we either suffer on our own or receive help and solace from another human . . . It was the New York City firefighters, police, emergency personnel, and fellow New Yorkers who came to the rescue on September 11.

Suppose some god created the universe ex nihilo. Without a continuing moral presence, which is obviously lacking, so what?

True, gods inspire worship and are worshiped; they are also loved.

Suppose one of them loved us back. Without genuine loving consequences arising from that love, so what? Unless the relevant deity cures one’s terminally ill child, of what use is its love? Humans love, and in their loving, they sacrifice deeply and daily for real . . . and often permanently. According to most Christians, Jesus loves us and sacrificed for all of us. But he did this once, a long time ago, and for something of dubious merit: to save us from our “sins.” I know many people (adults, not just children), and so do you, who have never sinned in their lives.

It’s hard to believe that any deity worth worshiping would allow those peccadilloes from which we all suffer to keep us out of heaven. And those who really do sin, the evil among us, continue to flourish. Jesus’s sacrifice, it could be reasonably be said, was meaningless. Moreover, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice: he didn’t permanently die, and he knew he wouldn’t (he knew he was the son of the god Jehovah), so his sacrifice was temporary. Compare this to the profound sacrifice of a random mortally wounded infantryman in any war in the history of the human race. That person died permanently for some ideal which he probably loved, or at least respected (of course many believe that their honored dead go somewhere special, like Valhalla, or Summerland, or one of the heavens, but they are still permanently dead to us here on Earth; they don’t get to come back and talk to us as Jesus did). Or pick any single

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mother who is struggling to raise her children. Or a doctor working with the sick and impoverished. Or a community organizer who is living in poverty because community organizing doesn’t pay well. One can think of many many others who intentionally sacrifice for their loved ones every day.These are cases of real love, meaningful love—caring that matters. If the deity that loves can’t even do what the weakest among us can do with his or her love, of what use is that deity’s love and that deity?

The bottom line is this: all the gods in all the religions on planet Earth, even if they do some work from time to time, cannot be counted on when the chips are down. If you need real help right now, you need a human. Prayer, magic, ritual, invocation, spell casting, and divination all work with about the same reliability as flipping coins. That should force us to ask something. And what it should force us to ask is the big embarrassing question so what?

All of these cases of so what? are every bit as biting as those raised against the mysteries. Even if there exists just one of the millions of gods that populate human religions, so what?

From chapter 5, we learned that religion arose naturally. It is a mechanism for our evolutionary flourishing. The real work of religion is knitting human groups together and possibly providing some individual psychological benefits, for example, when a loved one dies. So pretty obviously, we can all be completely unimpressed by the alleged work of religion: comforting the suffering, proscribing behavior, creating, and so forth. Try this: consider a major religion other than yours (assuming you have one; if you don’t, this exercise will be easy). Aren’t you in fact unimpressed by what the gods in that other religion do? If you are suffering, wouldn’t the so-called comfort of that other religion leave you cold? And you probably don’t feel constrained at all to avoid the behaviors proscribed by that religion.

But, as we now know from chapter 5, religion won’t go away for biological reasons. It has lost the war but it won’t fall down—because it is written into the human genome. So we have the battle of the so what?, the battle between the so what? raised against our mysteries from chapter 10 and the so what? raised against religion. . . . Yet another religious battle to go with the one between religion and science and the one between religion and universal human decency and respect. But,

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the so what? raised against the mysteries can be answered. This is what this chapter is about. To get to this answer, we must first address several matters.

To begin, we delve more deeply into the so what? raised against religion. The issue here is one rarely appreciated. The issue is not atheism versus theism. That’s a tired debate, as we noted in chapter 8. The issue is, rather, one of the uselessness of our gods. Even if some or all of them exist, it is impossible to deny that their concern for humans is thin. What we do with this fact is important.

For the second matter, we will make sure that our mysteries from chapter 10 could not be used to found a new religion. This is required because the goal here is begin to refocus our religious impulses toward (or even perhaps transform them into) something else, something that doesn’t exult in invidious distinctions, something less destructive. At least, we want to explore this possibility.

There’s one more matter to take care of before answering the so what? raised against the excellent beauties. We must contrast our chapter 10 mysteries with religious mysteries. We will examine mysteries from several religions and compare them to ours. This will exhibit the profound differences between the two kinds.

What is left will not be a religion at all, but it may perhaps speak to human spiritual longing in a way that is genuinely fulfilling. We cannot rid ourselves of religion; it is in our genes, our human blueprint. But perhaps we can direct some of our religious attitudes and sentiments toward something real, something that might produce a kind transcendence that is free and available to all: the mysteries. Doing this will answer the so what? raised against them.

directed at humankind’s religions point to something quite deep: Knowledge, explicitly graspable, that, in its explicitness, frees all of humanity from the bondage of our dangerous collective evolutionary illusion. Let’s consider this in detail.

The knowledge is this: the responsibility for human flourishing is ours and ours alone. We humans have to do the hard work on our own. All of it. Every bit of it. Nothing, no one, no supernatural being is going to save us. Beliefs to the contrary are extremely dangerous. A Mormon missionary once told me that we didn’t have to worry at all about the T H E M A N Y C A S E S O F S O W H AT ?

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environmental damage we are causing because Jesus was coming back soon and so we weren’t going to be around long enough to have to deal with problems such as global pollution and global warming.1 Many of the rest of us want to, and see that we have to, fix the environmental problems that we are all facing. But we’re the ones who have to do that work. We have find solutions to problems like global warming, we have to cope with the rising sea levels, with decreasing crop yields, with water shortages, we have to try to live without re-creating the problem, assuming we can solve it.

No religion told us that racism is bad. No religion told us that women should be full citizens in the world. Just the opposite, in fact: religions instigated, and continue to support, both racism and sexism.

For example, until 1978, the Mormon church excluded black men from their priesthood; they still exclude women to this day, as do many of the other major religions—will there ever be a female pope? (Pope Joan is a myth.) Whether there will ever be a black pope is anyone’s guess. On our own, as members of the smartest species in the known universe, we had to figure out that racism was wrong, we had to figure out that sexism was wrong. No deity told us. And then we had to figure out how to try to hold racism and sexism at bay, how to try to get rid of them, how to ameliorate their effects. We have been, at best, only mildly successful.

During the 2008 US election, a gentleman in a feed store told me (and here I quote): “I’m not voting for any damn nigger who wants to take my guns away.” Any future success on these hideous problems is on our shoulders and ours alone. Future failures to fix racism and sexism will be our fault and our fault alone.

We are the ones who will have to figure out how to cure cancer and AIDS, how to handle the various new and deadly flus, and how to deal with yet newer diseases that will come. We have to. The Oracle at Delphi is useless for curing cancer; so is the Catholic shrine at Lourdes.

We are the ones who have to figure out what to do about crime and drug and alcohol addictions, what to do if we are in the direct path of an asteroid or comet, and how to prevent rampant species extinction, including ours. All these problems are ours alone; we have to solve them.

The good news here is that we’ve been doing a passable job—if you look at the big picture . . . and if you tilt your head and squint. . . .

For example, slavery is still a staggering evil. There are more people 159

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enslaved now than ever. Experts estimate that there are perhaps as many as twenty-five million enslaved humans today, mostly women and children. And slavery is still with us because it is a multibillion dollar industry. But today slavery is regarded as immoral by many people and by all people of good will. (This was not always the case: Thomas Jefferson had slaves, yet he arguably was a person of at least some good will.)

Furthermore, humans who enslave other humans are breaking the law in every country in the world. Though we have a very long way to go, just this much is at least somewhat impressive. It is impressive because the major religions condoned and even encouraged slavery. Before the Common Era, Judaism embraced it, and approving discussions of slavery are still found in the Christian Bible and Torah . . . in Leviticus, of course. So, though we are religious naturally, we have successfully fought against our own inclinations and the teachings of our religions.

That albeit mild victory can lift anyone’s spirits.

It is much better to have cancer now than even ten years ago.

And ten years hence, cancer treatments will be even better. . . . This is due to human medical researchers doing their best, not to some deity.

If you get cancer, by all means pray—but go see a cancer doctor, too.

And this list goes on and on.2 It is a list of humans doing their best to makes things better, to fix things, to improve things, to make good things. Some of these people are religious, some aren’t (virtually every religion is represented, so no one religion has a monopoly on actually being helpful from time to time)—but they are all human. This is the deep point here.

The facts I’m pointing to are obvious. All we have to do is to complete them, to take the leap they are pointing to, which is this: we should explicitly embrace what we all already know, that the life of humankind is the sole responsibility of humankind. To paraphrase Jacob Marley (from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol): “Mankind is our business!”

Religion is not about morality—we create a better morality with our rational, feeling minds. We humans comfort and aid those in need, in whatever form their need is. We humans protect the innocent as best we can. And we humans love, and our love matters. Except as a palliative, it is of no use to look to religion for help with the hard work of life. We humans will either do it or it won’t get done. So, by all means keep your gods, but also roll up your sleeves and get to work.

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We see, then, that the so what? raised against all religions is sharp indeed. Now we need to consider whether our mysteries could be the foundation of a new religion.

be the foundation of a new religion? No. Recall our definition of “religion.” A religion is a social group with social boundaries between it and the surrounding larger society and culture (even if that society and culture has to be the rest of the world, as is the case with the major religions, abstractly conceived). A religion endorses and requires supernatural events, states, and beings. And religions invoke some notion of the holy and sacred.

The mysteries could be the foundation of a special social group.

For example, the knowledge of the weirdnesses of infinity could be held by a select few that formed a “priesthood” of the “Infinity Mystery Club”—imagine a priesthood of mathematicians. They could then dole out the information about infinity a little at a time to those they deemed worthy. Something very similar to this actually happened in ancient Greece. A school formed by Pythagoras and his followers, called the Pythagoreans, was just such a secret mathematical priesthood. They apparently kept secret such knowledge as that the square root of 2 is an irrational number (and allegedly killed a member who leaked it to the press). And what about that cabal of dark cosmologists discussed in chapter 10? So, if it happened once, it could happen again, presumably. . . .

But a priesthood of the mysteries like infinity is very unlikely because many many people across diverse cultures already know a lot about all of them—the knowledge of the mysteries is not arcane. For example, you now know about infinity’s weirdnesses along with many other mysteries. Furthermore, what we can do with these mysteries—explore their ramifications and their boundaries—enhances the democracy of knowledge, thus preventing such knowledge from being (or at least making it very difficult for it to be) incorporated into a religious power hierarchy. The knowledge of the mysteries cannot easily be used to manipulate people, so it can’t be used to give one group power over another (the Pythagoreans just had secrets, not real power, like money; and anyway, they lived long before the knowledge we are discussing here became widespread and freely available). The mysteries COULD THE MYSTERIES

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of consciousness, for example, cannot be used to define sin and condemn sinners. Without the ability to be used to manipulate people, the knowledge of the mysteries cannot give rise to priests and priestesses.

There’ll be no shamans or gurus, no monks or nuns, no prophets or saints. And hence, there’ll be no martyrs. The knowledge of the mysteries, once freed, is unlikely to be reshackled.3 So the mysteries are going to be inadequate for forming a dominating in-group, which is required for religion.

What about the supernatural? The really beautiful thing about the mysteries is that they are real: they are not supernatural in any way.They are freely available to everyone. No special magical talents are required to understand them; no special connection to any god is required to access them; no psychic abilities are required to communicate them. They are natural. Weird . . . unsettling, . . . but perfectly natural. It is stunning to contemplate that they really exist in our universe—that our universe really is a strange place.

What about holiness or sacredness? Here matters get considerably more complicated. Perhaps the mysteries can support some notion of the sacred. But this is insufficient for forming a religion. Any sacred thing that doesn’t at the same time allow for forming a clique, that doesn’t allow for forming a special priest class, that doesn’t depend on the supernatural is going to be useless for forming a religion. We conclude that the mysteries cannot function as the foundation of a religion.

Which is good.

But now, let us turn to the matter of comparing our mysteries with those of religion.

M O S T H U M A N S D O N ’ T L I K E genuine, intractable mysteries. Part of the reason for this is that humans need to feel in control, individually, in their personal lives, and collectively, in their social ones. Sometimes we are in control, but often we are not, and we certainly don’t want to increase our feeling of being not in control. But matters are more complex: whether we feel in control doesn’t usually align with whether we really are in control. Here, then, is one of the roles of faith. Faith is a surrogate for control: we are not in control, we acknowledge, but we have faith that someone or something else is in control. The mysteries from chapter 10 require no faith.

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Removing mystery is one of religion’s jobs. Who created the universe? Your favorite deity.Why did Smith’s child die? It was time for her to go to heaven. True, these don’t really remove the mystery (who created your favorite deity? why was it time for her to go to heaven?), but they comfortably mask these so-called mysteries at a superficial level, reminiscent of a child’s understanding of why Brussels sprouts have to be eaten: “Because Mom says so, that’s why.” Removing mystery is also one of science’s jobs—perhaps its main job. But paradoxically, as we’ve seen, science creates mysteries: it was science, after all, that revealed the weird world of quantum mechanics and the bizarre ratios of matter and energy to dark matter and dark energy. And of course it is science’s abject failure at explaining consciousness that reveals its mysteriousness.

Religions also create mysteries, of a sort. It is important now to contrast religious mysteries with the ones discussed in chapter 10. Let’s consider some examples of religious mysteries. For each of these mysteries, it is important for the reader to adopt the mindset or point of view of the relevant religion in order to understand them (note that this is not required for understanding chapter 10’s mysteries). From outside the religion, many of these mysteries aren’t mysterious at all. (The following have been graciously submitted by devout practitioners of the respective religions.)

Christian: Why did God reveal so much to us through revelation, including of course sending Jesus Christ, and yet leave so much hidden?

Moreover, all the revelations are very difficult to understand, so it is not clear what they are revealing. Another mystery is, why does prayer sometimes work and sometimes not?

Buddhist: All of reality that we perceive is an illusion that masks the true nature of things. But if so, then why do we all have the same illusion? Usually when we all experience the same illusion, like experiencing a mirage when looking out across the desert, there are physical and optical properties that explain this. But according to Buddhism, these very physical and optical properties are themselves part of the bigger illusion in which we are trapped. So, again, why do we have the same illusion? On the other hand, often those who experience illusions experience different ones: Jones sees the ghost or UFO but you do not; this is why it is so comforting when someone else tells us that they, too, saw the weird lights in the sky (for example). Yet the illusion of reality is nearly universal and very detailed. How can this be?

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Wiccan: Magic is a crucial aspect of Wicca (modern witchcraft). But why does magic work only sometimes and randomly? Another central and interesting mystery surrounding Wicca (sort of a metamystery, really) is why people would self-identify with being a witch. There have always been those who have a special ability to perform magic or sorcery (or so many believe). Of those, some performed magic beneficial to their group or tribe (say, for health or protection or justice), while others performed maleficent magic, at least some of the time. These latter humans, of whatever culture and time, have traditionally been called by terms that best translate into the English word “witch.” So, why would someone willingly want to be thought of as a witch, as a bad person?

Jewish: How could God ask Abraham to kill his beloved son and then offer him up as a burnt offering? And how could Abraham have obeyed? He would have killed his son had not God stopped him. (Genesis has lots of mysteries of this sort.) The Book of Job is also a source of a deep mystery, discussed in chapter 4: why would a good deity allow evil? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper?

The first thing to note about these mysteries is that they are all religion-dependent. That is, from outside of Wicca, say, it is not a mystery why spells don’t work on a regular basis. Indeed, from outside Wicca, the mystery is why anyone would think casting a spell should work.

Since they are religion-dependent, the religious mysteries are not democratic—they are not available openly to everyone. One cannot merely do some reading or some research and come to understand the mystery in the way members of the religion do. One has to be a member of “the club” to get them. But the mysteries of science, logic, and mathematics are democratic—they are open to anyone. It doesn’t matter what religion, if any, you belong to, infinity still seems to come in sizes.

Knowledge alone is required to get the scientific mysteries. There’s no club to belong to.

No? What about the science club? The math club? Some scientific and mathematical mysteries are so complicated that one has to be an accomplished practitioner to get them. To truly understand the distribution of matter and energy in the universe requires years of being immersed in very complicated physics.

That’s true, but not on point. The issue isn’t that to understand the scientific mysteries, one has to know some science, which is, of course, true (although, as we’ve seen here, one doesn’t have to know 164

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that much). The issue is that, outside of science, the scientific mysteries do not go away, they do not lose their mysterious edge; they remain mysterious even to nonscientists. The apparent fact that matter and energy make up only 4 percent of the total stuff of the universe can be grappled with and at least well enough understood to cause a raising of the eyebrows by anyone—accountant, welder, farmer, musician, or priest. One can know next to nothing about science and still get this fact and get some of its strange ramifications.

Furthermore, outside of their respective religions, the religious mysteries not only lose their mysteriousness, they usually also morph into something else entirely that is all too easy to understand. Outside of Abrahamic religions, Abraham’s unhappy behavior toward his son is not mysterious at all, it’s crazy . . . and it’s child abuse, plain and simple.

So the religious mysteries are dependent on their respective religions for their very existence as mysteries. Not so with the scientific and mathematical mysteries.

Secondly, even inside the appropriate religion, the religious mysteries are not beautiful—they are troubling. The Buddhist mystery about all of us experiencing the same illusion is an impediment to being a Buddhist. It has to be answered before one can proceed with one’s Buddhist training. That prayers don’t always work has to be addressed; otherwise belief and even faith are jeopardized. Many of the religious mysteries are in fact large impediments to faith and belief.

But the scientific mysteries are not impediments to science; they are no threat to science at all. This is one of the great things about science: a mystery is a spur to action and further research (research into dark matter and dark energy is one example; this is also the lesson of the mothballing of the Tevatron Collider, as we saw). Another great thing is that a mystery, even in the core of a science, doesn’t derail that science.

It is true that some scientific mysteries appear to be intractable—consciousness is one such example. But though consciousness’s mysteriousness is widely, if begrudgingly, acknowledged (but, tellingly, only as a temporary mystery), this has no effect on the relevant neuroscience: neuroscientists working on consciousness can and do make some progress on understanding consciousness.4 Lastly, a mystery in one corner of science, for example, the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, doesn’t threaten the other areas of quantum mechanics, and it certainly doesn’t threaten biology.

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But why don’t the mysteries of quantum mechanics threaten biology? And, in general, why don’t the mysteries in one area of science (understood very broadly to include mathematics and philosophy) threaten all other areas of knowledge?

This question is quite deep, and it is fundamental. It cuts to the heart of what science is and how human knowledge is structured.

There is no agreed-upon answer to this question. Proof of this claim is that philosophers work on these topics . . . the two fields are Philosophy of Science, where philosophers try to figure out what science is, and Epistemology, where philosophers try to figure out if we know anything and if so, how, as well as how our human knowledge is structured. As discussed in the appendix to chapter 10, if philosophy makes little to no progress, the fact that philosophers are contemplating something is not good news for those hoping to understand that thing. We see then that it is itself a mystery why mysteries in one area of science don’t threaten other areas of science.We can take a stab at an answer, though.We know that science works. We can cure someone’s strep throat by using antibiotics such as penicillin. And furthermore, we know why antibiotics don’t work as well on such diseases as they used to: the pathogens are evolving to handle our antibiotics. Since science works, the knowledge it discovers must therefore be real (at least this is a plausible conclusion).

But also the mysteries it unearths must therefore be real. This suggests that perhaps scientific knowledge is like Swiss cheese: the cheese represents what we know, and the holes represent what we don’t. Some of these holes are special. They aren’t simply things we don’t know, but are mysteries we will probably never know.The key fact, though, is that the mysteries and knowledge are real.

We can sum all this up by saying: • Religious mysteries reveal problems with religions; • The scientific mysteries reveal how strange the universe really is.

So the differences between the religious mysteries and the scientific ones are profound . . . as profound as one can get.

We conclude that the mysteries are real, and hence independent of any doctrine or dogma; they are freely available to everyone, and they are beautiful, engendering reverence. That’s so what.

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