by John Teske
The Thirst for Transcendence"
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination."
--John Keats
In order to consider religion in an age of science, we must ask how and why religion needs to take the insights and discoveries of science seriously in addressing ultimate questions of meaning. But if we are to find an alternative to the horribly incomplete ideology of scientific rationalism, we also must ask about both the epistemological limits of our knowledge of nature and the ontological limits of nature herself. In addressing issues of both nature and transcendence, this year's Star Island conference made a healthy pass at this aspect of the religion/science dialogue. As in any conversation, there were multiple voices, each having something to offer in revision, criticism and the dialectical process that is so much part of human truth-seeking. Indeed, that process was itself discussed explicitly in this year's IRAS book seminar, which considered Helmut Reich's Developing the Horizons of Mind: Relational and Contextual Reasoning and the Resolution of Cognitive Conflicts.
Co-chair Michael Cavanaugh's introductory talk provided an overview of part of the multivocality present at the conference. Examining a variety of definitions of nature and transcendence, Michael asked us whether we see nature as standing opposed to supernature or as all-inclusive, as inimical to human characteristics like free will, consciousness and culture or as including them, as indifferent to that which is unhealthy, perverted or pathological or as inclusive of these and other moral categories? Do we see transcendence in the interaction with divinity or ultimacy - in the supervenience of a whole over its parts - and/or do we see it "horizontally," in states of mind like wonder and awe, in the longing for ideals, in the feeling of the miraculous when our expectations are exceeded? In considering a transcendent that is beyond our comprehension, Michael also highlighted an important tension in the dialogue: Is the transcendent an "outside or higher" reality or is it to be found within, immanent? Is there a God outside nature, creating it as "other" and supporting and renewing it by indwelling love, or is the recognition of God something we reach into, as nature carries us deeper into the Ground of Being?
I agree with Michael's warning that, in the wake of 9/11, we need to be especially attentive to the dangers of justifications that appeal to irreconcilable ideas of objective, external and absolute truths. As James Carroll argues in Constantine's Sword, not only do science, culture, politics and learning jointly attack such an absolutist and exclusivist notion of truth, but the very existence of alternate religious views provides an additional, pluralistic challenge. What he might want to add, however - and I think was embodied in the conversations this year on Star - is that we also need the counterbalance of the analogical imagination, and of a rationality that travels from binary opposition to authentic mutuality, to the equivocations of modern skepticism. (Such notions were hinted at both by Jerry Stone's talk and the discussion of Helmut's book.) Ultimately I agree that, given the imperfections of our knowledge and the hubris of our assertions, it is not truth but our capacity for loving that represents the highest value and that can best undergird genuine respect for others' points of view. While we may still need a language of justice to protect us from our failure to love, it is not our beliefs but our care for our neighbor that matters.
The upshot of my own limited perspective on the conference is this: Our epistemological limitations, understood both metaphysically and as a matter of scientific rationality, suggest that any sort of transcendent ontology lies beyond what we can know. Jack Haught suggested that a religious belief system is nevertheless necessary to address issues of meaning, praising a Christian story as one metanarrative commitment. Jerry Stone's minimalist position pushed beyond the borders of scientific rationality to the "transcognitive," suggesting that we take religious experiences of transcendence seriously as reflecting a normative and creative power - even drawing on religious traditions for inclusion within a religious naturalism.
If religion is rooted in a longing for the transcendent, then it is ultimately religion that is likely to provide the Midrashically imaginative metanarratives, the stories in which we need to find coherence and meaning, in the otherwise loose collection to which Stone drew our attention. This may be true despite the problems inherent in our capacity to imagine that our invented narratives capture an ontological realty. As Joyce Carol Oates put it: "Homo Sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions." Physicist V.V. Raman's account of Hindu versions of transcendence suggested a further plurality of views, accompanied by the possibility that 20th century physics introduces a third element between modernist scientific views of nature and traditional views of transcendence.
But even given our epistemological limitations, there is much that a fuller naturalism can provide for understanding a movement toward unknowable transcendent mystery from within the [expanding?] cocoon of our phenomenal knowledge. All speakers agreed that our natural scientific knowledge must at least be a part of the stories we tell about what we cannot know - because those stories must remain true to what we can. Co-Chair Terry Deacon took us a step further, suggesting that nature itself has self-transcending capacities, that the very functions of evolution, consciousness, meaning-making and our moral discourses represent increasingly higher order emergents of natural dynamics, in a process-oriented view suggesting the open-endedness and unfinished character of nature itself. I would argue that while Terry may be right, this causal emergence may itself presuppose a transcendent a priori, a ground of being or a horizon of deeper mystery, without requiring the kind of temporal or causal predestination against which he rightfully argues.
Nevertheless, Terry's argument suggested that the study of nature itself may inspire a deeper metaphysics of evolution, creativity and emergence. This might in turn provide the underpinnings for a process metaphysics of self-transcendence, immanent meaning emergent from nature rather than external to it - meaning that is unfinished, incomplete and pointing toward future manifestations. Similarly, theological notions of continuous creation suggest a process that is not at an end, revelation that is not complete, a faith that must be self-critical.
The other plenary talks focused on what a naturalistic viewpoint can provide for understanding the physical limits of the universe, in the case of the physics introduced by Pranab Das and Larry Fagg; what those limits might suggest about transcendence, for understanding the biological roots of culture from our primate cousins (Volker Sommer); the group-level adaptations that religious systems make possible and by which they might be understood (David Sloan Wilson); the importance of considering human constructions, even cities, as a part of the natural ecology to which they relate (Ann Spirin); and even the value of a naturalistic framework for understanding much (if not all) of our ethics and morality (Michael Cavanaugh).
The upshot of these talks, among other things, was to further and deepen our understanding of just how rooted in and part of the natural world we are, ranging all the way from the precursors of culture to the higher realms of our ethics and even our religious beliefs. Jerry Stone threw down the gauntlet the first night of the conference by declaring that while nature might not be enough, it's all we've got. Jack Haught's response was that, from his philosophical and theological point of view, naturalism was not enough, being insufficient for our spirituality or for our thirst for understanding and explanation. Jack argued that naturalism fails even on the ground of its own inability to justify truth claims - i.e., despite its value in understanding the causal emergence of mind, the evolutionary story of that emergence actually undermines our ability to rely on our minds as instruments well adapted to discern the "truth."
In focusing on metaphysical questions, I am agreeing with Jack's response to Michael's ethical framework, which included a "ground of being" analysis in addition to naturalistic components. I say this not because I think we can definitively answer metaphysical questions but because they are important. Scientific naturalism may tell us a critical part of the story of what we are, but it is not the whole story. This is so because what we are, our evolution, our history, is not finished, and I believe that in understanding and appropriating our origins we can better direct ourselves to our future and its transformations of those origins than to studying them as if they could determine what that future will be. Put differently, I think that the metaphysical concerns that have predominated so much in the history of philosophy and theology are not really about some alternative, dual, parallel realm to which we have no phenomenal, experiential or cognitive access, but rather about the horizon of our knowledge, our cognition, our subjectivity and the deeper mysteries of life toward which our hearts and our imaginations ever direct us.
Jack's critique off Jerry's view of naturalism was that it is inadequate as a spiritual resource, inadequate for full explanation and rationally inconsistent. While Jack did allow for a difference between a "sunny" naturalism (which would include depth, meaning and morality without reference to a God) and a "shady" naturalism (which would suggest that life is absurd, pointless and tragic), he argued that naturalism is "bad news." It is bad news because if it were true, it would mean that pain, suffering, mortality and not reaching one's potential are irrevocable when consciousness ceases to exist at death.
While Jack was right that traditional religion responds to our deeper aspirations, and surely seems to deny the "bad news," one might argue first that naturalism's bad news doesn't make it untrue, but second, and I think more importantly, that the bad news may not really be that bad. Pain and suffering may have real value, real meaning in a life of consciousness, which is not likely to exist without them. Even mortality can be meaningful since the finitude of the individual organism is not only critical for evolution but central to our potential to generate value, priorities and ultimately ethics and morality. That "potential" entails ideals that shape our lives in important and meaningful ways. Even if our consciousness is entirely brain-based, why the worry about individual life if consciousness continues to exist in other, and larger, communities and for larger projects than our ego-consciousness? Perhaps a faith for which the best model lies in sacrifice, the kenosis of pouring oneself into a larger vessel, need not vouchsafe individual consciousness or individual desires (insatiable though they almost always are). Do we require as a spiritual resource a belief in an individual life after death, or can the acknowledgment of the continuation of life beyond our individual death provide an even better resource to allow us to escape the sting of our inevitable physical cessation? Such questions pose theological issues concerning the role and form of individualism.
Arguing that religious naturalism need not be the equivalent of a fully metaphysical naturalism, Jerry sought, by propounding a "minimalist" view of transcendence, to reinsert some of the elements that Jack would exclude from metaphysical naturalism. Translating him into Catholic theologian Karl Rahner's philosophical theology, Jerry suggested that experiences that direct our attention to the mysteries of life and the horizons of subjectivity may point beyond the boundaries of science, albeit without claiming that such forms of insight or appreciation imply transcendent knowledge. In this way Jerry's minimalist view may avoid some of the problems of reification and absolute claims for imaginative constructions that we may be led into by a theistic (or even nontheistic) religious view (regardless, one might suppose, of the need to generate such constructions). His proposal took us toward a revised notion of rationality that takes the transactional nature of experience seriously, valuing dissensus as well as consensus across epistemological communities and ultimately working to better nurture and educate "appreciation" - almost as a kind of technical competence.
We can see the importance of a kind of pluralism in the set of experiences that Jerry collected even while the unity of that collection is left open-ended. Still, one wonders to what extent an absence of commitment to a deeper unity subjects such a minimalism to the risk of incoherence and, ultimately, meaninglessness. Without some kind of overall story, or metanarrative, however tentative, revisable and recognized as an imaginative construction, can we make sense of such a pluralistic collection? Does any unity emerge on its own without our imaginative and interactive participation? And without such an overall context, can we really effectively nurture and pass on our sense of the sacred, and shape our communities, our lives, our experiences, our practices or our bodies to encourage such experiences? Jerry believes that a religious naturalism of the sort he proposes (of the sort he confesses?) can conceptualize and nurture transcendent experiences as he defines them even though it is not clear from what perspective they are ultimately to the viewed as meaningful, rather than just a collection of brain-based events that we experience subjectively as having an overriding importance. Doesn't he need, in order to compete with traditional religious understandings of such experiences, the same sort of context or story by which they are nurtured, produced and subsequently understood? If they are to be seen as on the side of the construction of good, doesn't he need some fuller understanding of in what qualities that good might consist?
Still, Jerry's cautious minimalism is not unreasonable. As he argued, there is no consensus concerning a transcendent ontology, no apparent method to justify or arbitrate (save conquest) between alternative claims. Moreover, our desire for wish fulfillment (to say nothing of our amazing capacities to deceive others and ourselves) does argue for metaphysical restraint on the trust we reside in our remarkable mythological and ontological imaginations. Jerry granted some cognitive privilege for science although he would agree that scientific naturalism may be insufficient in some cases. He suggested that, while scientific notions of truth, progress, critical realism and empirical probing are important (cf. Van Huyssteen), we also need "transcognitive" (though not unnatural) abilities such as insight, appreciation, evaluation and wisdom. Moreover, he suggested that those abilities may be better nurtured by the care, attention and discrimination in which we are educated by religion and art, drawing on the wonderful paradigm of wine tasting. I think these are also reflections for which alternative approaches to reasoning like those detailed in Helmut Reich's relational and contextual approach are quite germane.
Terry Deacon's talk, a tour de force of optimistic naturalism, suggested a metaphysics of emergence that may provide an important response both to Jack's question about how mind can be understood and to a suggestion by V.V. Raman concerning the transcendence of thought. Terry provided an alternative metaphysics of nature, open-ended, emergent and unfinished, that we can actually begin to unpack and understand and that might provide some clues about immanent processes of transcendence. V.V. drew our attention to the transcendence of thought while Terry sought to show us whence in nature - from what subtle processes - such transcendence might come. One wonders, with Terry, why it should be necessary to speculate about a supernature when the study of nature itself is unfinished - as indeed nature itself may be. Terry explicitly rejected a dualism in which the world is seen as an artifact into which souls are injected, but he equally rejected a vision of nature as a clockwork metaphysics of atoms and the void, in which everything else is merely epiphenomenal. His view, instead, was of a nature that includes the unfolding of new structures and functions, such as mental processes, through physical, chemical and biological evolution.
In Terry's account symbolic representations and linguistic capacities give rise to interactions with our primate emotional dispositions and capacities, making our aesthetic, ethical and spiritual sensibilities possible. He acknowledged that this account might require changes in our notions concerning spirituality and the sources of value, but suggested that the fears that lead people to cling to old metaphysics can produce only increasingly insular beliefs and an alienated view of nature as dead clockwork rather than the stuff of which souls are made. Although Terry's talk was interrupted for the weekly fire drill, afterwards his audience chose to expose itself further to the direct stream of his fire-hose-like intellect rather that engaging in the usual question and comment session.
I have less to say about the remaining talks, not because they were less interesting or compelling but because their bearing on what I thought to be the central tensions of the conference was less direct, and I believe their insights can be more easily be folded into some of the themes already explored. Physicists Pranab Das and Larry Fagg, for example, both employed ideas from the epistemological boundaries of physics to speculate about possible connections with transcendence. Keeping to a naturalist focus, by contrast, biologists Volker Sommer and David Sloan Wilson, as well as landscape architect, artist, and educator Anne Spirin, emphasized the intimate tie between human beings, including the human spirit, and the nature in which we are embedded.
I find myself turning, in the end, to what I believe lies beneath our particular beliefs and ideas, the faith that drives us. Our shady side rightfully worries about our capacities for self-deception and fantasy, our unrealistic hopes, the hubris that fosters our tragedies, the Sancho Panza who tries to bring our quixotic efforts back to reality. But there remains the faith in an imagined better world, even if we know it is imagined, and the hope that our efforts are not destined to fail even if they are not likely to succeed. And if the world that those hopes portend is possible, it may be worthwhile to spend one's life in its pursuit. It is the trying that yields meaning, happiness and the good.
And then there is the way the IRAS experience at Star Island embodies our thirst for joyful, natural and human transcendence. It does so in passionate intellectual engagement, in dialogue pursued with respect for each other and views different from our own, in the risk and vulnerability that always entails, in the inspiration, the intake of palpable physical breath that is the spirit of the place, in camaraderie and friendship and care and compassion, in the ritual of morning chapel (with this year sermons offered with humor and grace by Barbara Whittaker-Johns) and evening candlelights, in art and music and poetry, and in the natural and human beauty of the Island and its temporary, finite and mortal inhabitants. At what other conferences of this caliber could poetry be introduced as an appropriate response to a plenary lecture, or could participants spend free time watching a nest of barn swallows fledge? Where else would music and laughter and celebration so imbue the proceedings? No wonder I feel so refreshed and renewed, so full of things to think about and experiences to cherish, even months later! The Island itself is a metaphor, its 360 degree horizon the limit of what we see, part of us and still alive for us as our future unfolds.