Without a doubt, we are children of our age. There have been indications that the young folk with higher IQs tend to drift away from Christian and Jewish belief and practice. The interesting exception in some of those studies is the Church of the Latter-day Saints. I’ve read lightly, but substantially by current standards, in the historical and biographical studies of modern science. This literature tends to support the general trends which have resulted in practitioners and admirers of science tending to pull away from traditional ways of believing and worshiping.
Let me run roughshod over the history of human thought to point out a matter of sheer contingency which can be seen in that history.
There have been major periods in history when the smart guys were mostly metaphysicians who didn’t engage in the traditional religious practices of their age nor did they have a proper respect for empirical knowledge — ancient Greece comes to mind. There have been periods when the smart guys were mostly theologians, or at least engaged in empirical research or metaphysical analysis from a theological perspective — the High Middle Ages in Europe comes to mind. There has even been at least one period when empirical researchers were also serious theological students, such as Galileo, or even creative thinkers, such as Newton. As the Modern Age progressed, there was a tendency for empirical researchers to become skeptics about both metaphysics and traditional religious beliefs and practices, though many scientists practiced their own form of metaphysical analysis and also claimed to have a strong if unorthodox faith.
Some sort of skepticism has become dominant even amongst scientists who are personal believers and practitioners of some traditional form of religion. This is largely because of two trends in modern thought which I’ve discussed often and from — I hope — multiple perspectives:
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We have learned to separate mind from the created being which is us and also is the stuff around us so that we become allegedly disinterested judges of what’s out there and also of human nature rather than being students shaping ourselves to the thoughts manifested by God in His freely chosen role of Creator. We continue to — necessarily — shape our minds by our responses to created being, but we do so in a manner both surreptitious and half-hearted. The relationships which result from that shaping process are what we call ‘mind’, but we would rather have some sort of immaterial and transcendental mind. We would be as gods even if we are partially embodied gods.
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We have learned, largely as a consequence of that first wrongful thought, to separate created being into largely non-overlapping realms, such as science and natural theology and literature and so forth. Stuff, including human nature, aren’t part of a unified nature and don’t even exist in themselves, instead having one nature when studied by a physicist, another when studied by a historian, and still another when studied by a philosopher. We’ll make sure nature conforms to the practical strategies we adopt because of our limited and defective skills of exploration and analysis. If nature refuses to so conform we’ll… Well, perhaps those Gods of the Copybook Headings described by Kipling are once more catching up to us.
It’s hardly a surprise to learn that research has indicated, with some serious qualifications, that Intuitive Thinking May Influence Belief in God.
In a series of studies, researchers at Harvard University found that people with a more intuitive thinking style tend to have stronger beliefs in God than those with a more reflective style. Intuitive thinking means going with one’s first instinct and reaching decisions quickly based on automatic cognitive processes. Reflective thinking involves the questioning of first instinct and consideration of other possibilities, thus allowing for counterintuitive decisions.
With the Divine Presence in Creation thinned out to a Ghostly Presence, we have to engage in strange seances to make any sort of contact with God. Was this necessary? No, we should have known from the start, or at least learned by experience, that even the most transcendental of God’s self-revelations are necessarily received by way of vibrations in the air or by light-waves impinging on the eye. We should have known that even those revelations pointing to the transcendental attributes of God are necessarily understood by way of bodily processes in a physical creature and by way of communal knowledge, traditional or new, as embodied in both the knowledge and practices of communities of physical human animals.
In the modern worldview, permeating our ways of perceiving and our ways of thinking and our ways of acting even when we claim to be traditionalists, God is not to be truly understood as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but rather as Ethereal Entity #1, Ethereal Entity #2, and Ethereal Entity #3. In Jewish terms, the King of Creation is to be seen as Ethereal Entity. Some would claim we can use the language of received revelation, such as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, while claiming that the received revelations are ‘personal’ and unanchored in our communal understanding of empirical reality, of created being, of Creation. They could have stopped at the valid point that our communal understandings must be endorsed by a personal experience if our faith is to be alive, but they insisted on passing on to an absurdity. Moreover, they ignore the evidence that some of God’s most faithful servants, such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta — hardly an excessive rationalist, have been bereft of that personal grounding for their faith.
And so it is that we’ve become confused puppies, trying to hold on to the insights and the practical advantages of the knowledge gained by modern empirical exploration and analysis of physical reality and allied mathematical abstractions but also wishing to believe in what we — wrongly, for the most part — see as the spiritual ways of traditional forms of Christianity, Judaism, and other communities expressing a faith in a personal God.
Please join me, at least as an amused spectator, in an effort to do better, to provide better foundations for the human understanding of Creation and the Creator as we live through the decay of one phase of Western Civilization and — we can hope — the founding of another phase. My way of understanding Creation and the Creator will encourage you to use both intuitive and reflective ways of thought whether you are thinking about God or about some level or realm or aspect of created being.