AUGUST 26, FRIDAY

MARS HILL 3

STILL SEARCHING

SCIENCE

From an objective observable perspective, in an age we in which we have overwhelming factual evidence, we know that in the enormous universe looking all the way back to the Big Bang there is no physical evidence of a divine creator as posited by religion after religion.

In fact rigorous scientific evidence demands that we see the process of evolution, which in the observable universe began before the first signs of life, moving through chemical processes, that required the slow development of just the right combination of chemical elements and temperature and weather for the simplest forms of life to develop and then through the slow, slow almost random mutations of life, a branching out of plant life and animal life of all kinds slowly formed through enormous changes if weather and shifting chemical elements, almost having to start over and over again until life on earth as we know it developed with the likelihood that evolution will continue in this random way after life as we know it, including our own, is gone and that someday life will very likely be extinguished. Those are the facts.

RELIGION AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

And then countering this is religion (and conspiracy theories). The presence of God is not scientifically provable. And yet there is god after god, religion after religion, all similar but also so very different from each other, yet with each claiming to be the one true way with the others either made up or at least mistaken and warped.

So for an ordinary person like me it seems obvious that no religion can claim to be the one true way and the others be wrong.

But at the same time it also seems perfectly obvious that from the time that we were first human that we believed in and worshipped gods and felt that God or the gods were central to our being fully alive, central to our identity.

So this brings me around full circle. It seems to me that there must be something in our human makeup developed through the processes of evolution, that leads us to have faith in gods or conspiracy theories that we cannot prove but which are more important to us than anything else and that we are even willing to devote our lives to and lay down our lives for.

What can that be? Evolution makes it seem certain that whatever this power of the divine is or this belief in a savior who will save us from threats to our identity is, that it must be built into us, built into our DNA and be transmitted from the moment of conception. Not only that, but whatever it is must have been there in development in our closest related species including bats and apes and other animals. It must have something to do with the life force that impels us along through life, that must impel all life forms to make their way along blindly.

Deep faith must come out of some inner visceral blind drive that pushes us along through life. It is partly a force that protects us from being threatened, not only physically, but emotionally with a sense of who we are and what we should do in life. And for me this comes about through stories that share what makes us feel most alive and what protects us from being threatened, not by wild animals as was the case in our hunter gatherer days, but from our own fellow humans who have different ideas of what is most real and what impels us through life. Once we have blind faith in something that makes us feel very alive, a projection of what is most alive within us, then when this is threatened we do anything we can to defend ourselves, often including destroying those who threaten us.

But what I am really interested in is what this deep power is. I can only see if from the perspective of an ordinary person with little scientific training. And yet how I respond to this blind inner force seems to have great impact on how alive I feel. And at the same time this inner force seems to be almost as out of sight as the forces that control my breathing or which control the pumping of my blood or the antibodies that jump on Covid viruses when they attack me and begin to spread in my body or any of the other physical processes that keep me alive.

The force that gets me up in the morning and pushes me to do one thing or another, that makes some activities make me feel high and full of life such as writing right here but also makes other activities seem suffocating and immobilizing such as figuring out a budget or sorting the Augean stable of things that I have collected and live within in my house.

Why do some activities make me feel very alive and others flatten me. There is something within me, some out of sight visceral drive, that is behind this and I think it must be similar to the drive that impels all animals along through life and even seems to push plants of all sorts to grow and flower as they did. I am not sure they feel high and doubt if they get depressed, but something is driving them to grow and flower and propagate and and then go through the same process again. They don’t look around and say this is pointless and wither and drop. No, something drives them. And it feels like the same thing is happening within me.

This isn’t very profound science, it is just the way that it feels to me. But one of the things that I can do that makes me feel alive is to be aware of this process which is why I keep feeling along here. Another thing that makes me feel very alive is opening up to all of the physical senses that are necessary for me to make my way through life, but all of them enhanced and refined so that combinations of sounds, music, brings delight; combinations of sights, of colors and shapes in art or in an Indian bazaar, brings delight; touching and being touched physically brings intense pleasure that functions to drive us to procreation but has becomes much more than that so that just the presence of other people brings intense delight and finding out how they are most alive brings intense delight; taste and smell does the same thing so that there is almost nothing we can eat that doesn’t, if prepared the right way, bring delight. All animals have these five senses and probably delight in growing awareness as well which draws then to learn about the world around them.

So I can be aware of what touches me the most deeply: becoming aware, delight in the senses, accepting and caring for fellow humans and sharing with them, and breaking out of cliche or empty conventions through comic response and creating fresh new conventions which themselves wear out.

And it seems to me that listening to myself and being aware of what touches me and brings delight is a way to be most fully alive. Other people find fullness of life in other things and while I need to accept these things as being good for them, it is what touches me most deeply that I have to open myself to and have to focus on, letting other people delight in other activities.

I have to have faith in what makes me feel most alive even when the stories I tell myself or others tell don’t seem to have a provable basis in fact. Faith keeps me going and when people mock the things that I most have faith in I feel threatened and am tempted to eliminate these people from threatening me by avoiding them or refusing to do things in their way or believe in what they have faith in. And in the process I also threaten them.

But some things seem to enliven one person also seem to enliven many people or even most people and when there are things that a whole group finds to make them feel most alive gather story after story around them regardless of how factual they are with even the most wild stories showing the power of the the way of life, often embodied in a person, a person like Jesus or maybe a person like Donald Trump. I am guessing that religions grow by gathering stories that enhance the power of God or the gods. The question for me is not whether Jesus or Donald Trump are right or their way provable, it is whether it makes me feel fully alive or not. Jesus can make me feel more alive and Donald Trump makes me feel awful. Facts have nothing to do with it.

And this brings me back to religion, which I just earlier dismissed as not being provable. I am guessing that the reason that religion after religion gains great power in place after place is that religions connect with that hidden inner visceral part of us that makes us feel most alive and that pushes us through life. Religion makes people feel more alive and makes sense of the world they live in and gives people a guide to how they can be most alive, what to avoid and what to have faith in. The stories of each religion are closer to fairytale than to science, to what could be than what is, to what makes us feel most alive rather than what is provable to be true. The truth is in the feeling.

That is why the quote by Frederich Buechner touched me so strongly. He says the story of Jesus is a great fairytale that happens to be true. Whether it is true or not doesn’t depend on how provable it is scientifically, for example the virgin birth, but how alive it makes you feel that God is the father of Jesus, not Joseph, and because of this Jesus has the full power of God within him.

And for me, since from a scientific perspective there is no proof or evidence of God or heaven out there somewhere, in addition to no evidence for any of the other thousands of religions, this power must be somewhere else than objectively visible. And again Büchner offers a way out. Listen to yourself, he says. Let go of everything else and listen to yourself because deep within you is what can make you feel the most alive and this energy and power is, for Buechner, the same as the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to prove the divine, you feel it within you, a life force that, if you listen to it, can make you feel fully alive.

There is a fine line here. Buechner is also a skeptic. He sees that we can be fooled and misled and do things that make us and others miserable. His fundamentalism is not in a God out there but the power of the divine, if we listen to it, within us, a power which each religion discovers and amplifies in a different way. This divine power is a power which you can open yourself up to even if you don’t have faith in any god at all or believe there are any gods. If you open yourself up and listen you will discover what makes you feel most alive which may be what Mother Teresa found in comforting the dying in Calcutta, but it might also be what Dr. Ariyaratne in Sri Lanka found in seeing how faith in Buddhist renunciation could lead villagers to live a cooperative simple village life in which a whole village community would help each other be more alive. Religion might amplify what you find within you or you might simply find it on your own. But however you find it it will be more like a fairy tale in which the purpose of stories is to enhance what is most alive with their magical properties almost increasing faith rather than decreasing it. If we are look for God in the James Webb telescope we will discover a wild and miraculous universe but if we want to find the divine we will have to look within ourselves.

And that brings me back to the difference for me between MAGA stories about pedophile elites and Christian stories of rising from the dead. Both stories seem to me to come from the bewildering intense inner visceral drives that impel us through life. But the MAGA faith in white, male, straight, fundamentalist, patriotic nationalism seems to be based on fear and resentment and rage, all powerful emotions that give people a kind of high, but leave out so much of the world that they end up narrowing and withering life rather than expanding it. The antidote to defensive fear according to most religions is openness and acceptance and an expansion of what is possible. This makes you very vulnerable but it is vulnerability that you listen best to what is within you by listen to what makes you most alive and what makes others feel most alive. You may find that the discoveries that religions have made and codified help you in this inner search, or you may do it entirely on your own or through some combination of listening to yourself or others.

But for this old man this is what seems to make sense to me who chooses the path of Don Quixote, believing in what makes him most alive in a fairytale way, over the path of Sancho Panza, who sticks with an objective view of the world. You have to be kind of a nut to believe in fairytales. But I have a feeling that that nuttiness is built into being human, which is why religions and wild conspiracy theories both continue to be so powerful.

So this is how I deal with faith in things unseen and unprovable which make people feel fully alive whether Q Anon or faith in stories of Jesus. It is my way, the wondering of a nutty old man, and I‘m not trying to sell it to anyone else. It is just what makes sense to me.

But there is a fly in the ointment, a worm in the apple, of listening to yourself and finding the divine. Maybe Buechner is right, just listen to yourself. But so many people listen to themselves and seem to be turned on to all kinds of things including things that hurt other people very badly. Faith in conspiracy theories seems to built into some of us. Listening to yourself may not be enough. But listening to yourself feels to me like a good place to start. I‘ll take my chance with Buechner and hope for the best.