Faithful Skeptics

Is science spiritually destructive? Does it throw cold water on every flickering spark of mystery? In chasing the fairies from their hills does it leave in its wake a landscape devoid of spirit? Is science the enemy of the soul? …. I propose the following metaphor:

Let this, then, be the ground of my faith: All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or ever will have, is as an island in the sea of mystery. We live in our partial knowledge as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea. We dike and fill. We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring. And occasionally, at certain disquieting moments in history (Galileo, Einstein, et al) a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts, reclaims knowledge that has been built up by years of patient work, and forces us to retreat to the surest, most secure core of what we know, where we huddle in fear and trembling until the storm subsides, and then we start building again, throwing up dikes, pumping, filling, extending the perimeter of our knowledge and our security.

Knowledge is an island in the sea of mystery. The metaphor takes its power from a firmly held fact: We live in a universe that is infinite, or effectively so. Our brains are finite…our mental maps of the world are therefore necessarily finite. As time passes, the scale and detail of our maps increase, but they no more exhaust the worldscape they describe than a map of the Grand Canyon depletes [its] power….

If we accept the knowledge is a finite island in a sea of inexhaustible mystery then two corollaries follow: 

1) the growth of the island does not diminish the sea’s infinitude and 

2) the growth of the island increases the length of shore along which we encounter mystery…. 

We are at our human best as creatures of the shore, with one foot on the hard ground of fact and one foot in the sea of mystery. Bureaucrats, technocrats and scientific drudges keep to the high ground, their noses fixed in ledgers and laboratory notebooks. New Age dreamers flounder in water over their heads, with near horizons. It is at the shore that the creative work of the mind is done – the work of the artist, poet, philosopher, and scientist….

At its best, scientific skepticism is a manifestation of curiosity, intelligence, and imagination – in a word, the best of the human spirit. It slowly, patiently builds the domain of knowledge, pushes back the encroaching darkness, the demons of the deep, but it never exhausts the infinitude of mystery. Asked if he was religious, Einstein replied: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernable concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion.”

 

—Chet Raymo in "Skeptics and True Believers"

Multiculturalism 101

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

― Charles James Napier 

(To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.)

Irony, Humor, and 'The Self'

"Irony is the birth pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship; discovered by the I, between existence and the idea of existence). 

Humour is the birth pangs of the absolute mind [based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I (self), between the I and the idea of the I]."

– Søren Kierkegaard Journals and Papers

Wrestling for the Blessing

"As a young child I used to beat-up my parents till they told me the truth; such was my passion for the absolute. By the grace of God that zeal is still with me! These days I beat-up God till he gives me what I want."

– Kevin Solway in Poison for the Heart

David Foster Wallace on Leadership

It is just about impossible to talk about the really important stuff in politics without using terms that have become such awful clichés they make your eyes glaze over and are hard to even hear. One such term is “leader,” which all the big candidates use all the time — as in e.g. “providing leadership,” “a proven leader,” “a new leader for a new century,” etc. — and have reduced to such a platitude that it’s hard to try to think about what “leader” really means and whether indeed what today’s Young Voters want is a leader. The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché or boring at all; in fact he’s sort of the opposite of cliché and boring.

Obviously, a real leader isn’t just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to believe is a good guy. Think about it. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with “inspire” being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. It’s a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you “looked up to” (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend’s parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are “authority figures,” but it’s a special kind of authority. If you’ve ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren’t, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.

In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

– David Foster Wallace “Up, Simba: Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate,” 

A God of Your Own

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

– Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird 

Kahlil Gibran on Love and Marriage

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

– Kahlil Gibran The Prophet