Believers, p.19
Believers, page 19
Obviously, such effects transcend borders and religions, persisting in places where religion has declined or was long suppressed. Skeptics argue that it has nothing to do with faith really; it’s just about affiliation, and regular attendance at a church or a mosque could be substituted with, say, a bowling league. “You don’t look well,” one of the regulars says, “you should see a doctor,” and pretty soon you are getting better care than you would if you didn’t bowl. Or, any sort of fellowship is psychologically good for you. Some of these studies suggest that this looking out for one another works and that (as many evolutionary models propose) much of the adaptive value of religion is in community. Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt, for example, find that religious people are happier, more charitable, and make up the majority of the world, and their explanation is that religion binds people together in moral communities. But others suggest this isn’t all, that spirituality and faith work in more mysterious ways too—nothing supernatural, just psychological fostering of health habits and perhaps the immune system.
A 2017 study by Becky Read-Wahidi and Jason DeCaro explored immigration stress in rural Scott County, Mississippi. They interviewed 60 Mexican immigrants sharing devotions to the Virgin of Guadalupe. They used a standard immigration stressor scale, asked subjects to rate their well-being physically and psychosocially, and developed a scale for “cultural consonance” with Guadalupan devotion. Those with high cultural consonance—many beliefs and practices, such as keeping a statue of the virgin in their homes or cars, bringing her flowers, or saying that her festival is important to them—showed no decrease in physical or psychosocial adaptation with increasing immigration stress. But those low in cultural consonance declined in well-being as stress increased. Those who scored high did so for different reasons. Praying to the virgin even when you are not in trouble is different from attending a communal event in her honor. So there were varied paths to high consonance. Anthropologists would call the Virgin of Guadalupe a “master symbol”—one with many meanings and functions.
Her following is strong in Mexico; there, it is said, a poor peasant named Juan Diego was climbing a mountain five centuries ago when she appeared to him. He reported this appearance to his bishop, who was dismissive. But on another climb, she appeared to Juan in winter and filled his cloak with flowers. The bishop, seeing the flowers, as well as the virgin’s image on Juan’s cloak, became a believer, and customs honoring the virgin grew in the church. As has often happened with Catholicism’s spread, the virgin’s shrine was at the site of a pagan goddess’s demolished temple.
Scott County immigrants identify with Juan Diego, reframing poverty as humility. He was native, yet, under colonialism, a stranger in a strange land. Scott County immigrants are also disempowered. Many do hard, dangerous work in the poultry industry, and families include documented and undocumented people. Most lack health insurance. Many are afraid. But those who are high in devotion are buffered against stress.
Critics of religion might argue that religion simply helps these immigrants to accept what they should resist, but for them, fighting back is highly impractical. Just going forward day to day is resistance. Spiritually or psychologically, the Virgin of Guadalupe is helping her Scott County followers come through. And theirs is the story of generation after generation of immigrants, legal and otherwise, willing and enslaved. They come through for themselves, their families, their unborn American grandchildren. If faith helps them, it is not just opium for the people; it is also sustenance for the people’s future.
11
If Not Religion, What?
As we have seen, one eminent figure of scientific atheism is the Nobel-laureate theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg. Like Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, he is an implacable enemy of religion; he says unequivocally that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” and that helping the world to do that might in the end be science’s greatest contribution. But while he is in the inner circle—“one of the staunchest atheists on the planet,” according to Dawkins—he parts company with them when he takes very seriously the question “If not religion, what?”
There is a difference between an atheist wise enough to see a worldwide end of faith as a potentially serious loss, and one who says, in effect, no problem. I’ve called Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens the Quartet, but they are a brass quartet, while Weinberg, the tragic humanist, is to the side, playing a slightly mournful solo violin, and the music and its meaning are different. Tragic humanism is different from “no problem” atheism, because it admits the dark side of life. It does not claim that the scientific world-view can take the place of religion, even if it succeeds in eliminating religion. It shares with religion a sense of loss during our brief, often painful lives, our inevitable separation from the people we love, our aching search for beauty and meaning in lives that are often anguishing and sometimes seem pointless.
Of course, there is the surpassing beauty of improved human lives: the impact of vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, the treatment of HIV/AIDS, the prevention of heart disease, advances in agriculture, the industrial technology that has liberated billions, the information technology that may yet unify the world, lifesaving mathematical models of hurricane movements, the preservation of diversity and beauty in the plant and animal world, and the science of global climate change that can help avert catastrophe.
But science does not just make life safer and more comfortable; it creates great beauty—neuronal connections under a microscope, the vast worlds-upon-worlds view of the Eagle Nebula photographed on the Saturn flyby, the first views of Earth from space—but also in the elegance of the explanations themselves: Euclid’s geometry, the system of planetary ellipses reduced to the law of gravity, the periodic table of elements, Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, evolution by natural selection, the germ theory, Einstein’s relativity, the majesty of continental plates inching colossally under our feet, and the structure of DNA, a lockstep spiral molecular galaxy that explains life. But to suppose that all these products of science, together with many more, can take the place of faith reveals an impoverished view of religion.
It also risks ignoring or disdaining the role of art and its relationship, for much of the human past at least, with religion. In the context of responding to Steven Weinberg, who called religion a “crazy old aunt” who might be missed when she’s gone, Richard Dawkins declared he wouldn’t miss her a bit. But he then qualified the dismissal: “We would miss the music. The B Minor Mass, the Matthew Passion, these happen to be on a religious theme, but they might as well not be. They’re beautiful music on a great poetic theme, but we could still go on enjoying them without believing in any of that supernatural rubbish.” When asked once what music he would take to a desert island, he recalled that he “chose ‘Mache dich mein Herz herein’ from the St. Matthew Passion as the most gorgeous piece of music.”
“These happen to be on a religious theme, but they might as well not be.” But how would we know that the composer’s religiosity didn’t matter? In fact, in Bach’s case the opposite is much more likely. Scholars find that he was a man of faith and that his long career of writing church music drew on that faith. Among other similar notations, Bach wrote in the margins of his study Bible, “Where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present.” This is not to say that atheists don’t write great music; they do and probably always have. It is just to say that some great art is intertwined with faith, and in those cases it is a fool’s errand to try to disentangle them or to say that “they might as well not be.”
Dawkins has also addressed the question of art and science in his book Unweaving the Rainbow. The title, he says, “is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. Keats could hardly have been more wrong.” Here are the offending lines of the great young English poet (who was, incidentally, a surgeon):
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her texture; she is given
In the dull catalog of common things,
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow . . .
Dawkins proceeds to unweave the rainbow very deftly, satisfying my curiosity at least, but in no sense addressing Keats’s fears:
Light from the sun enters a raindrop through the upper quadrant of the surface facing the sun, and leaves through the lower quadrant. But of course there is nothing to stop sunlight entering the lower quadrant. Under the right conditions, it can then be reflected twice round the inside of the sphere, leaving the lower quadrant of the drop in such a way as to enter the observer’s eye, also refracted, to produce a second rainbow, 8 degrees higher than the first and half as bright.
Citing a great contemporary of Keats, he concludes, “I think that if Wordsworth had realized all this, he might have improved upon ‘My heart leaps up when I behold / a rainbow in the sky . . . ’” Dawkins also quotes an eighteenth-century English poet, Mark Akenside, whose lines extolling Newton’s prismatics have the misfortune to appear only a page away from Keats. Why is Keats so widely read and loved, while Akenside is not? A nineteenth-century critic, even in praising his verse, said, “At his very best Akenside is sometimes like a sort of frozen Keats.”
To demand that poems have Newtonian precision is a bit like reading the Psalms and pointing out that hills don’t skip like rams, or seeing in Mercutio’s magnificent riff on Queen Mab a throwback to a benighted age of imps and demons. In fact, Keats cannot have been wrong, because it was not his aim to be right in any way that Dawkins means. He was right in the only way that mattered to him: having expressed the fear he felt toward Newton’s prismatics in what I might call (metaphorically, despite my knowledge of the brain) his heart and soul.
Walt Whitman wrote, a century and a half after Newton, “There shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.” Yet an astronomy lecture inspired him to write,
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause . . .
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Now I, for one, don’t get sick and tired in lectures like that, unless they’re bad. I get energized and see the beauty in the measurements and models. I see the beauty, too, in Newton’s prismatics. But at a certain point I want to see the rainbow and have my heart leap up—an anatomical impossibility but an expression of delight. After the stimulating lecture, in the mystical moist night air, I want to put the analysis out of my mind for a while and, like Whitman, gaze in silence at the stars.
That is awe—perhaps an evolved form of the chimp’s response at the waterfall; perhaps not so different. Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” He continued,
He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
The key phrase here is “which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms.” Science and art take this experience of awe in different directions. Religion is like art, and for many of us art is a partial substitute for faith.
Science is analytic and largely practical. Awe must be set aside for a time while we slog through the experiments, make the measurements, derive the equations. Then we go back and reexperience awe with greater understanding. I daresay I experience as great an awe at the starlit sky, with my knowledge of what the Milky Way is, the fact that there are billions more like it, and that they are racing away from each other at unimaginable speed and have done so since Lumina (the Big Bang), as the ancient Greeks did when they saw their gods in constellations or the Bushmen do when they see their ancestors’ eyes. But the moment of my awe at the stars cannot include pages of discourse about science. If it is awe, it floods the mind. I can feel awe in contemplating E = mc2, but I have to leave that state in order to derive, test, or improve on the equation.
Art, like religion, evokes awe not by analyzing but by inspiring. It attempts to re-create in the reader, hearer, or viewer the emotion of a moment as it was experienced by the artist. Of course, science evokes feelings too. But to do that is art’s fundamental aim, to re-present life to us, including internal life, to enable us to share in the internal state of the artist, not just an idea—however important—or an argument. Science can distract us from this involvement, because it requires us to control our thought processes, which art sooner or later asks us to temporarily yield, long enough to have an experience that explanation and argument alone do not bring about.
Recently, I looked on while soprano Renée Fleming’s brain was being scanned. Anyone can do it; it showed up as a link in my Twitter feed. She’s part of a study of how the brain makes music. In one mood I’m fascinated and want to see the scan and all such results, like the scans relating to faith in earlier chapters. But when I’m listening to Fleming sing, I don’t want to think about a brain process, much as I love thinking about the brain at other times. I want transcendence, beauty, pleasure, and if possible, awe. I want to be transported by the music co-created with her gifts. At that moment, the last thing I want in my brain is an image of hers.
Of course, a person can be a scientist and an artist both. Leonardo, Goethe, and Chekhov are examples. Many artists know a lot about science and try to depict it, to evoke a moment of discovery in a painting, or a long struggle with a scientific problem in a novel or play. Those can be instances of awe inspired by science, but they are not science itself. Scientists can have the eloquence of literary artists; we see that in the last passages of The Origin of Species (“There is grandeur in this view of life”), and in Einstein’s essays (“Pure mathematics is . . . the poetry of logical ideas.”).
But those passages are not the essence of these great scientists’ contributions. Art, I think, has more in common with religion, as William James suggests when he writes about the similarity between poetry and mystical experience:
Single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.
Just as some people are tone-deaf to music, or insusceptible to poetry’s magic, some atheists are insensitive to religion and spirituality. But no one who is musically tone-deaf goes around telling music lovers that they are imagining things and need to snap out of it.
Like all analogies, this one is inexact; the musically tone-deaf are a small minority. But suppose we consider people who shrug their shoulders at opera or Shakespeare’s plays. They, too, don’t try to talk the enthusiasts out of their passions. They just go about ignoring them and chalking it up to human variety, inexplicable tastes. They might think that a lot of money, including taxpayers’ money, is wasted through direct and indirect subsidies of such minority egghead arts. But most don’t make a career out of trying to get rid of those pursuits or even to eliminate the subsidies.
Personally, I think too much money is spent on sports, and in various ways I see harm done. I enjoy watching the World Series and the Super Bowl, so I do understand the general idea. But I’m baffled by the huge emotional and financial investment that billions of people around the world and around the year put into what seem to me mildly interesting, unproductive games. I’m not completely tone-deaf to sports; I just have much less of a feel for them than most others do. Those passions seem somewhat pointless and illogical to me.
But do I go around preaching against them? I teach students about the damage done to the brain by boxing and football, and I’m all for trying to limit the harms. But try to abolish football? Talk people out of it? Don’t be ridiculous. People have passions that are different from mine—so much so that I have trouble understanding why they go to so much trouble. I might privately wish that they studied science or went to plays or at least ate healthier food at the ballpark. I worry about the distraction from studies, the violent behavior of some players and fans, the fruitless dreams of millions of young minds who prepare for sports careers that only a tiny fraction of them will have. But am I going to write books or make speeches proposing that people wise up and do things that are more logical or useful? I mean, really.
