INSTANCES OF THE NUMBER 2

At our Sunday evening forum in Wychwood Library we recently dipped into Jonathan Sachs’ book The Great Partnership, a book about bringing together two very different approaches to understanding the world. The third section of the book is entitled Faith and Its Challenges. In the chapter ‘Where Religion Goes Wrong’, Sachs bravely tackles a number of instances of religion getting a bad name, sometimes with good reason.  He mentions five ‘hazards’ to which he admits the Judeo-Christian tradition has been prone, of which one is Dualism.   

Dualism

Dualistic thinking seems to be everywhere these days.  Chambers English Dictionary defines philosophical dualism as a view which seeks to explain the world by means of two separate elements, as in spirit and matter or good and evil.  It is to the second of these that Sachs refers.  The conclusion it is tempting to draw from the existence of ‘unjust suffering’ in the world, he says, is that there must be ‘forces of evil, as an independent, active force, apart from and opposed to God’.  With the Woolwich massacre fresh in our minds and the ensuing attacks on mosques, it is all too easy to recognise this sense of good and evil, of judgment, violence and vengeance.

And do we not recognise in our own instincts the sort of dualism of the sort Sachs decries?  From the playground  where it remains trivial (“It wasn’t me; it was him”) to war zones and fascist states where it  goes to the other extreme  (“it’s not us; it’s them”) mankind sets up a dualism which spares us (and our god?) and blames the others: the outsiders, those who are different or disabled or unemployed or have a different religion or ethnicity or nationality.  Look at Nazi Germany, or the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Woolwich and its aftermath.  As Sachs rather dramatically puts it: ‘There is a straight line from dualism to demonisation to dehumanisation  to genocide.’

Sachs’ answer is simple, even if it would need a sermon to unpack it: ‘The most powerful antidote to dualism is monotheism.’  Monotheism, he says, ‘refuses to split light and dark, good and evil, into separate forces or entities’.  Sachs’ God created them all and encompasses them all and ‘forces us to wrestle with the ambiguities of our own character, the necessity for moral choice and the inescapability of personal responsibility’.  Tell that to the reasonable-sounding Tommy Robinson of the EDL.

Two halves of life 

Another related instance of dualism is found in a recent book about what one might call “spirituality for the ageing”!  Dualistic thinking is here not spirit and matter, nor good and evil, but rather what the author calls ‘the well-practised pattern of knowing most things by comparison’.

We are all happier knowing where we are in terms of up or down, in or out, right or wrong, for me or against me, black or white, gay or straight. But Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest addressing a Christian audience albeit with an intriguing Jungian agenda, says this dualistic thinking is characteristic of a ‘first half of life’ attitude.  In his book subtitled A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he says we need to build on this phase but also move on from it into what Jung called the ‘second half of life’.  A new capacity for ‘non-dualistic thinking’ or ‘both-and thinking’ is, he says, ‘almost the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life’. 

As someone who definitely hit the stereotypical mid-life point some time back, I have asked lots of new questions and been dissatisfied with the traditional answers.  I have also looked back at what my own first half of life was like and I found a lot of resonance in Rohr’s book. Dualistic thinking is necessary in the first half of life in order to draw boundaries and set up clear goals.  We desperately need to find an identity – so much easier if we can do so by excluding what we are not or wouldn’t want to be.  But this approach exists only through comparing and labelling, judging and polarising.

The danger, as Rohr sees it, is that we get trapped into this way of thinking: Most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are. …  Buddhism has helped people see this in themselves probably better than most of the world religions. … In the first half of life, the negative, the mysterious, the scary, and the problematic are always exported elsewhere.  Doing so gives you a quick and firm ego structure that works for a while. [But]… Eventually this overcompensation in one direction must be resolved and balanced. This integration … is the very name of growth, maturity, and holiness.

  

The divided brain

There is more than just an echo of the ‘divided brain’ analysis here.  If you are looking for balance and integration, start with an understanding of how your own brain works! Which of course was the principal thesis of Jonathan Sacks’ book.  Using the still relatively new concept of the divided brain he works on the premise that the two hemispheres of our brains lead us into contrasting but compatible, or even ‘more than compatible’, views of the world.  As Sachs explains:

Since Pierre Paul Broca discovered the location of language-processing skills in the left side of the brain, neuroscientists have come to understand the marked difference between the brain’s two hemispheres and how they process information. The left hemisphere tends to be linear, analytical, atomistic and mechanical. It breaks things down into their component parts and deals with them in a linear, sequential way. The right brain tends to be integrative and holistic. 

A much bigger book, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, goes further and suggests that western civilisation has for several centuries been adversely affected by the predominance of the left hemisphere in our thinking.  What may be most challenging to us in our self-confidently scientific modern world is the possibility that we took a wrong turn a couple of hundred years ago and are not as clever as we think!  Mary Midgley’s summary of this huge book in a Guardian review of January 2010 is provocative and striking :  

McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience - an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought - has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought...

Dualism again 

But is this about dualism or dualistic thinking?  The Guardian review is worth quoting at length, not least because it asks whether the origin of this split way of thinking and the subsequent predominance of the literalist and empiricist view does in fact lie in dualism of the spirit/matter variety:

Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision - toward elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience - in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. ... And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more. 

This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached form us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. ... It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home - in the zone of the spirit. ... But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consists of billiard balls, when

we all supposedly believe that we are part of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms - when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist - seems rather surprising. 

It is a massive book but a fundamental one to our human journey – and I may say that it is quite possible to dip into it and miss out the more technical and mathematical chapters.  The final word on his theme should go to Iain McGilchrist himself:

We have been sold a sadly limiting version of who we as human beings are, and how we relate to the world.  Inside each one of us there is an intelligence, in fact a superior intelligence, that sees things differently from the way we have been told - if we would only listen to it. Let's hope that we can. 

Conclusion

A suggestion emerged at the end of a fascinating Cheltenham Science Festival event this month on the so-called ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ of science and religion.  Actually -  the immunologist and bishop of Swindon advanced - they do overlap and that overlap is precisely where we really get talking about ‘what it is to be human’.  Which is as good an anti-dualist point as any to round off this post. 

THE MYSTERY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

THE MIND OF GOD - Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning

THE MIND OF GOD is the title of a book published in 1993 (re-issued since) by Paul Davies, English physicist, astrobiologist and cosmologist, who has held academic posts at universities from Cambridge to Adelaide and now at Arizona State University.  Chapter headings range from ‘Reason and Belief’ through ‘Why is the World the Way It Is?’ to ‘The Mystery at the End of the Universe’ – three promising themes for future discussion at our open forum at Wychwood Library, if the group so chooses, following a recommendation by Clive Fieth.

Davies is not, as far as I know, a believer but he won the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1995 for his work on the deeper meaning of science.  His Address at Westminster Abbey on that occasion, entitled Physics and the Mind of God, is a more distilled example of his thoughts and argues against the ‘widespread belief that science and theology are forever at loggerheads’.  Where The Mind of God draws attention to the limits of rational explanations of the universe, in this address he is perhaps trying to persuade a more religiously inclined audience not to cling to a childish concept of a ‘cosmic magician’ but to ‘confront modern scientific thought’:

The position I have presented to you today is … one that regards the universe, not as the plaything of a capricious Deity, but as a coherent, rational, elegant, and harmonious expression of a deep and purposeful meaning.

Chapter 1 of The Mind of God sets out to answer the questions, ‘Can we really hope to answer the ultimate questions of existence through rational enquiry, or will we always encounter impenetrable mystery at some stage? And just what is human rationality anyway?’  He goes on to discuss the Big Bang, continuous creation, the Laws of Nature and The Cosmic Code, mathematics (far too much for me), Leibniz, Hawking and Hume, cosmology, astronomy, you name it…  This is not a book for the scientifically faint-hearted.  However it bears dipping into and drives on relentlessly towards his concluding chapters.

By chapter 9 he is suggesting that ‘it has to be admitted that our concept of rational explanation derives from our observation of the world and our evolutionary inheritance’.  After quoting  Stephen Hawking’s ‘turtle story’ as a symbol of the search for ultimate answers, he questions whether we should limit ourselves by identifying ‘understanding’ with ‘rational explanation’ and asks whether there are ‘other forms of understanding which will satisfy the inquiring mind’.  Alluding to a number of scientists, from Einstein onwards, he dares to broach the topic of mystical knowledge and revelatory experiences, both within and outside the scientific community.  The way we read of such experiences – which Davies says he himself has never had – varies depending on the culture of the person describing them, from Eastern mystics to Christian monastics to Roger Penrose the mathematician, and some such accounts are of course an immediate turn-off.

However, whether it is through turtles or Eastern mysticism, it is hard to resist being drawn – like much of twentieth-century mathematics, it seems – into pondering the infinite and hence what Davies, with only a hint of flippancy, calls ‘the mystery at the end of the universe’.  The final section of the final chapter is, appropriately, entitled What is Man? and includes this deliberately inconclusive conclusion: ‘We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation, by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek an explanation in the first place.’ 

Much scope for discussion here and some thoughts which would probably not sit uncomfortably with our current author and searcher for meaning, Jonathan Sacks, philosopher, theologian and, for a little longer, Chief Rabbi.

A SHARED SENSE OF WONDER

Science and faith: a new dialogue

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in The Great Partnership (the current theme of discussions at Wychwood Library on the first Sunday of the month) claims boldly that science and religion are not only compatible but ‘more than compatible’:

‘They are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. The creative tension between the two is what keeps us sane, grounded in physical reality without losing our spiritual sensibility.’

It’s a moot point whether the age-old science vs religion debate is fascinating or just incredibly dull!  Is the battle irresistible because it goes on and on, apparently unwinnable,  or is it for the same reason just a lot of stale arguments?  Sacks, amongst others, would say it is based on a false dichotomy.  Julian Baggini, in a review of A C Grayling’s book The God Argument, described the whole Dawkins-inspired debate thus:

‘For a while it was at least invigorating.  But the most vocal atheists and the believers who take their bait appear ever more like a long-married couple who prefer the familiarity of their dysfunctional relationship to the emptiness that lies beyond an amicable divorce. They trade the same old niggles and complaints with no hope or expectation of mutual understanding.’

I recently received an email from someone who had attended one of our Wychwood Circle meetings and wished to come off the mailing list again. ‘The problem with non-belief, is, it doesn’t take much exploring,’ he told me.  ‘Non-belief and rationalism are not very nuanced, spiritually at least.  I can only contribute to others’ exploration of their faith by saying (in effect), ‘where is the evidence?’ That is at best tedious and at worst hostile.’  I was provoked by that first sentence – I couldn’t disagree more – and we have since started a fascinating correspondence!

My own position on the science and religion question is the modest but realistic one of saying that I'm not a scientist and I'm not a theologian or philosopher.  It seems difficult therefore to settle down on either side of the agnostic-theist boundary, which in any case I suspect is very blurred.  I am perhaps more interested in watching the others slugging it out, while agreeing with Mark Vernon that, where academics recognise the limitations of their own insights, some 'epistemological modesty neutralises the fight over which discipline is the best arbiter of truth - and all in the interests of thorough and open-minded debate'. 

I take comfort in the scientists and philosophers who take that 'modest' line. Stephen Jay Gould famously talked about 'non-overlapping magisteria', which looks like a polite way of saying why don't we all mind our own disciplines.  Thomas Nagel has more recently written a book which was reviewed in a Prospect Magazine blog thus: 

'But what if science is fundamentally incapable of explaining our own existence as thinking things? What if it proves impossible to fit human beings neatly into the world of subatomic particles and laws of motion that science describes? In Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press), the prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel's latest book, he argues that science alone will never be able to explain a reality that includes human beings.  What is needed is a new way of looking at and explaining reality; one which makes mind and value as fundamental as atoms and evolution.'

THE DIVIDED BRAIN

Where Gould says that religion is needed to discuss Purpose, Jonathan Sacks is interested in the search for Meaning.  Strangely I for one have never been too concerned about Purpose or Meaning, but I am much more taken with Sacks's claim that 'science and religion are to human life what the right and left hemisphere are to the brain'. 

In 2010, in a large volume intriguingly entitled The Master and His Emissary - the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist produced what the blurb describes as 'a fascinating exploration of the differences between the brain's right and left hemispheres and their effects on society, history and culture'. In it he argues, at great length and based on a vast body of recent brain research, that 'despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences.' 

Sacks exploits this divide - in far more readable form - and applies it to the history of civilisation and to attempts by religion to dominate science and vice versa.  He argues that it has always been a mistake not to recognise the distinction between right- and left-brain activity and instead 'to apply to one the logic of the other'.  There has been bad religion just as there has been bad science, but the answer to each is to be found in its own terms. The cure for bad religion is good religion, and as he adds, perhaps provocatively, in his chapter on Darwin: 'The way of testing a scientific hypothesis is to do science... The way of testing religion is to do religion...'

Describing the whole science vs religion debate as unwinnable, Baggini suggested that it has done 'as much to make the participants feel validated as it has to change their opinions'. So should we give it all up and form our own self-regarding clusters?  Sacks argues not for compartmentalisation but for conversation - which is very much what Wychwood Circle has been all about. It can certainly be trying, particularly when you feel you are out of your depth, but the dialogue is worth having.  Maybe more especially at the academic level. 

ENTHUSIASTIC OPTIMISM AND EXCHANGE OF IDEAS

Jeff Forshaw wrote an article a while back about a conference on the banks of Lake Geneva organised by Wilton Park - a forum for international dialogue - in partnership with Cern (see an earlier post on this site dated 21st October 2012). 'The event', he wrote, 'drew together particle physicists, cosmologists, theologians and philosophers in the name of dialogue and mutual understanding.'  He asks: 'In some people's minds, science and religion stand in stark contrast, but is this really the case?  Certainly, years of being a scientist have led me to doubt pretty much everything I thought I knew.'  He goes on to suggest that scientists act with 'what seems to me to be something like faith:  a faith in scientific truths perhaps or in the humbling significance of nature's beauty.  Perhaps "faith" is too strong - enthusiastic optimism might be better ...'

We have toyed with the possibility of reading Mark Vernon, ex-priest and modern agnostic, for our Wychwood Circle discussions.  Vernon recently wrote an article for the Church Times where (maybe with some enthusiastic optimism) he discerned a dialogue in the 'community of scholars' and dared to hope that a 'fruitful phase' is beginning.  He quotes Michael Welker, Professor of Systematic Theology at Heidelberg University: "The most exciting work in the future looks likely to be interdisciplinary".  One example he cites concerns the matter of personal identity.  John Polkinghorne, scientist and theologian, wrote in his Science and Religion in Quest of Truth that an understanding is emerging in modern biology that there is a "continuously developing, almost infinitely complex, 'information-bearing pattern' carried at any one time by the matter that then makes up my body" and he believes this is what, from Aristotle and Aquinas onwards, we have tended to call the human soul.  Vernon concludes:  'The ancient notion looks not unlike the modern one - hence the possibility of fruitful exchange.' 

We should give the final word to Einstein, quoted with approval by Sacks: 'Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.'

JOIN US as we discuss the third section of The Great Partnership entitled 'Faith and its Challenges' at our open forum at Wychwood Library OX7 6LD: 

• May 5th - chapter 11 (Darwin) and chapter 12 (The Problem of Evil) 

USE YOUR IMAGINATION!

Imagination and Experience  

“Use your imagination!” we may have been told as children, when asking a particularly dumb, awkward or just embarrassing question. 

Someone recently asked why a theological discussion group like Wychwood Circle’s open forum would want to base a discussion on a novel – even if the theme was the contemporary one of a priest and his family caught up in very real moral and emotional dilemmas.  “I don’t read novels,” she said.  How familiar that phrase is, though more often in the mouths of men: surely life’s too short to waste it on fiction?  Yet I once heard a sermon in a church in Barnes (where else?!) where the priest enjoined us all to read novels and see them as sacramental.  I think that means they speak to us of life and of God.   Well, the good ones, anyway, and they are the ones worth seeking out.  Give me Iris Murdoch or Tolstoy any day, rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica!

In a religious or non-religious context there is no doubt that fiction is useful to hone our morality or direct our moral compass.  Stories allow us to enter into the experiences of others, from which, however involved we become, we can remain more detached and therefore more rationally observant than we ever can from our own.  Arguably you need to develop your imagination before you can experience empathy – and unless you are a strict calculating utilitarian you probably base a lot of your personal actions and reactions (of compassion, of service, of respect for the other person) on thinking you know how they feel and how you could help them.  So anything which contributes to exercising that imaginative muscle in a positive fashion is good for humanity.  If the novel helps you to relax and step out of the rat race of your life, that can’t be bad for growth and balance either.

Ignatius of Loyola 

In the Hilary term at Oxford, the Thursday lunchtime series at St Giles was on the theme of Ignatian Spirituality, with 8 different contributors including the well-known author, walker, peace campaigner and Jesuit priest Gerard W Hughes (God of Surprises, God In All Things).  St Barnabas in Jericho also hosted a day with Father Gerry Hughes when he talked about “Earthing our Prayer”.  The last half-hour of the day was particularly special as two dozen of us sat at the feet of this grand old man and listened to words of distilled wisdom, gently and serenely spoken from a lifetime of study, practice and reflection.

Ignatians are big on self-examination and reflecting on our inner journey and Fr Gerry is keen for people to use their ‘felt experience’ in discerning what God might be telling them.  People ‘feel drawn to God in the depths of themselves’.  Where else would we find God, who, as St Augustine might remind us, is closer to us than we are to ourselves?  If we are to find God, Gerard Hughes says elsewhere, ‘we must learn to listen to these depths, to the emotions and feelings we experience in prayer and out of it, and use our minds and intelligence to help us understand what these emotions and feelings are saying to us.’ (In Search of a Way, 1986)

Prayer may be about meeting with God: it is also about meeting ourselves, because (as he is fond of quoting) ‘in God we live, move and have our being’.  Prayer, he claims, ‘is the most revolutionary and liberating activity in which we can engage’. He told us to use our imagination in prayer, particularly in the very Ignatian practice of reviewing the day. ‘Memory is an arsenal, not an archive’, was one memorable phrase.  He also told us to read the gospel stories imaginatively:  imagine you are there – eg in the upper room in Jerusalem, scene of several big events in the gospels including the Last Supper commemorated this week on Maundy Thursday – and ask yourself:  Who else is there? What is the room like? Why are they afraid? Listen to them.  What do they say to you? Talk to them…

We owe it to Gerard Hughes that he introduced us on both these occasions in Oxford to the work of a French poet, politician and philosopher, Charles Peguy (1873 -1914). His poem, entitled God’s Dream, expresses a dream of God and begins, I myself will dream a dream within you…;   it includes these lines which show God as ‘most intimately within’:

                                You will meet me often as you work –

                                in your companions, who share the risk,

                                in your friends, who believe in you enough

                                to lend their own dreams,

                                their own hands,

                                their own hearts,

                                to your building,

                                in the people who will stand in your doorway,

                                stay awhile,

                                and walk away knowing 

                                that they, too, can find a dream   

                                [The full text can be found online, for instance here]

It's a nice thought. 

AGAINST RELIGION

Belonging without believing 

Wychwood Library was full to bursting on March 3^rd when Canon Brian Mountford visited us to talk about his recent book, Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing.  It was heartening on this Wychwood Circle's first anniversary, or very nearly, to see that this subject sparked such interest.  Clearly many were tempted along who perhaps are not happy with the label ‘Christian’, but don’t feel comfortable with settling for ‘Atheist’ either and couldn’t help wondering if even a Church of England vicar might help them explore some common ground.

The title, Brian told us, originated with a conversation with Philip Pullman, the Oxford author.  The Canon, maybe trying to emphasize his credentials as a man of the world, said he would describe himself as ‘secular’; to which Pullman (an atheist) said he would say his own outlook on life was ‘religious’. So roles seemed to be reversed and Brian has had a number of similar discussions and interviews with members of his Oxford city congregation before and since.  Many choose to belong because of the music, or the Anglican liturgy, or because a partner sings in the choir.  Brian welcomes them all and the question of belief, in the sense of signing up to a certain body of doctrine, becomes secondary. The more important question is: “how shall I be?”

Some twenty years ago someone wrote a book about ‘Believing without Belonging’ – at a time when people were confident in their own spiritual or religious beliefs but didn’t necessarily want to ‘belong’ – and the issue of belief is worth exploring.  Karen Armstrong, the first author we studied in our Wychwood Library group last year, insists that Jesus himself did not insist on people ‘believing’ before he would heal them, in the way many of us have been taught. The word ‘faith’ is our Bible translation of a Greek word meaning ‘trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment’. This was the sense in which faith, Jesus said, would move mountains.  Even in Middle English, beliven meant ‘to prize, to value, to hold dear’ (and the word Belieber didn’t come till much later, in an age of teenage idols!).  Mark Vernon (How to be an Agnostic) makes a similar point when he draws the distinction which held over much of human history between ‘spirituality’ as ‘the more existential side of religion’ and ‘religion’ as ‘the more practical side of spirituality’: ‘Believing in such and such was more like saying you trust it, or are committed to it.  Now, though, to be religious means, most commonly I think, an individual affirmation of metaphysical beliefs, rather than a way of life which is practised.’

One of the first questions that arose in the discussions at Wychwood Library with Brian Mountford was the relevance of, or need for, religion: some said they can be ‘taken out of themselves’ just as well by nature or beauty – or even a Pink Floyd concert - as by a beautiful liturgy or a wonderful building.  On the same day the Radio 4 programme Something Understood began by questioning whether ‘religion’ was a useful word, given its origins in the verb ‘to bind’.  Even the Jesuit author Gerard W Hughes (God of Surprises, God in All Things) has pointed out that Jesus, for one, does not once mention religion, or religious observance, or orthodox religious belief or any other kind of belief: ‘Neither does he provide a list of moral precepts on which we shall be judged. It is not that these matters are unimportant: it is simply that they are not what matters most.’

One of the more controversial points made by Brian Mountford was to point out that Jesus didn’t say he was God.  (The title ‘son of God’, by the way, was given to both Roman emperors from Augustus onwards, and, in other contexts, first-century miracle workers) Neither did Jesus pull the wool over his companions’ eyes by pretending that the earth was flat when he knew full well it wasn’t.  There are dangers in anthropomorphising God (“he looked down on us, he wondered what to do next”) and also in divinising Christ (“he knew everything”).  If Incarnation means anything it means Jesus was fully human, whatever other qualities may have been ascribed to him then or later.

 

Clearly that debate is not over and we are still left to wonder, as Rowan Williams pointed out in a review of another controversial author, Geza Vermes, 'why this particular charismatic wonder-worker rather than others attracted the extraordinary claim that he was the vehicle of unconditional creative power and the enabler of a new kind of worship.'  As the Wychwood Circle forum gathers again on April 7th at Wychwood Library, we will be beginning discussions based on chapters from the 2011 book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (someone who certainly does not believe that Jesus was God):  The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning.  

Join us then. 

HOW TO BE AN AGNOSTIC

MORE THAN BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY CAN DESCRIBE

HOW TO BE AN AGNOSTIC by Mark Vernon  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 

One of the choices for April onwards for the group that meets in Wychwood Library on the first Sunday of the month is this recent book. The blurb describes it thus: 

The authentic spiritual quest is marked not by certainties but by questions and doubt. How To Be An Agnostic explores the wonder of science, the ups and downs of being 'spiritual but not religious', the insights of ancient philosophy, and God the biggest question. 

Mark Vernon was an Anglican priest, left a conviction atheist, and now finds himself to be a committed, searching agnostic. Part personal story, part spiritual search, this journey through physics and philosophy concludes that the contemporary lust for certainty is demeaning of our humanity. We live in a time of spiritual crisis, but the key to wisdom – as Socrates, the great theologians and the best scientists know – is embracing the limits of our knowledge. 

This much expanded edition was previously published as After Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life (2008) and includes new chapters looking at mindfulness meditation, pic'n'mix religion, quantum spirituality, the probability of God and why Stephen Hawking is wrong about nothing.

It's not a book that requires reading from beginning to end and there are a number of discrete chapters, including one called 'Socrates or Buddha'. In it Vernon suggests that some of us 'have a desire for more than biology and psychology can describe.  But we also find it difficult to put our trust in the religious discourses which might address our restlessness.'

  

He argues that Socrates, the lover of wisdom, offers us the way forward in the shape of just that: ‘philo-sophy’ (Greek: ‘love of wisdom’).  Socrates was a ‘lover of limits, of being thrown onto the unknown’, ‘a man with a religious imagination’. ‘Plato’s Socrates,’ he says, ‘embraced ordinary human searching and doubt and fashioned it into a flourishing way of life. It was a disciplined desire to reach out for more…  It was a developed sense that what lies beyond us powers our humanity – the longing to understand, to discover, to become enlightened.’

In Mark Vernon's brand of agnosticism, 'we are individuals who think that God is not a silly question, as the conviction atheist must have concluded, but rather one that our experience demands we keep asking.' 

 ------------------------------------------

Meanwhile on Sunday, March 3rd, we meet at Wychwood Library to hear Brian Mountford discussing his recent book, Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing. 

MAY THE DOORS OF THIS CHURCH BE WIDE ENOUGH

A SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION THAT SAVES US FROM OURSELVES

Canon Mark Oakley in a feature edition of BBC Radio 4's "Sunday Worship" which came from St Paul's yesterday: 

"May the doors of this church be wide enough to welcome all in need of love and encouragement and narrow enough to shut out all human pride and envy."

And as I stand here, under the dome now, those words resonate, because this is a space in the cathedral  that we often use for debate and the sharing of ideas on the many issues that we face today. 

It has been said that in his life Jesus did not answer people’s questions so much as question their answers. For a long time people have come to the Church expecting lots of answers and the Church has felt obliged to give them, often seduced by too quick a clarity or control. But the question as to how we are all to be loyal to the future is a shared one, for Church and everyone alike. Many answers we have come to take for granted need to be questioned for let’s not be too abstract. When we say the future, we are talking about you maybe, but certainly your children, grandchildren, young friends. And we are talking about the sort of the world they will be caught up in: the air (spiritual, political, chemical) that they will breathe. And not only them but those who find themselves born across the planet as victims of others decisions, of a changing climate and sea level, of war, poverty and all those victims of that almost respectable evil called indifference. If it is true that in the West we are spending money we don’t have on things we don’t want in order to impress people we don’t like, then we need to pull out of this deathly circle that preaches survival of the fittest but never tells us fit for what. The Church’s contribution as to how we do this will only be energised by the spiritual perception and truth telling of Jesus Christ that disorientates prejudice, saving us from ourselves.

...

The Australian poet Les Murray wrote that God is in this world as poetry is in the poem. Like most poetry it has to be read well, over time, puzzlement is part of the deeper journey and patience is demanded of us. This cathedral, and every church, is here for that puzzlement and patience as much as it is for celebration and thanks. It is here to ask difficult questions of ourselves and of the world. It is here to speak out for those who can’t, something very important the Occupy movement reminded us of. It is here to remind us of the deeper resonances of life that make it so often appear gift-like, trustworthy, as beautiful as it is fragile. It is here to celebrate love wherever it is found, goodness wherever it transforms, and faith where it gives hope. It is here to ask the urgent question of how, as human beings, we can now together be loyal to our shared future. As Churchill said, we make a living by what we earn but we make a life by what we give.

And so:

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really CAN make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.

Link to Sunday Worship from St Paul's - Feb 3rd 2013