8 - Religion and Belief – Not at All the Same

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.  - Christopher Morley

In this post: What is theology? How does it differ from religion? What does God (or god) have to do with it?

Many people confuse the word “religion” with the word “belief” (or “theology”) and this has a crippling effect on dialogue about what people believe and what they practice.

A theology is a package of beliefs. A belief is something a person accepts as true, either without or against evidence (for example, that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he is the Son of God).

The literal meaning of theology is the study of god(s), but the term has been expanded to include the study of a wide variety religious beliefs and ideas. These ideas are generally associated with God, such as an afterlife, heaven and hell, the soul, spirits and demons, Satan and others, as well as the truth of certain scriptural narratives.

A personal theology is made up of an individual’s beliefs. One such belief, of course, may be that there are no gods. A religious theology is the package of beliefs promoted by a specific religion, which its adherents are taught within that religion. The Catholic theology is, for example, taught to children and to converts through a catechism (a teaching system based on a question/answer methodology). Elements of the theology are constantly espoused and reinforced in liturgy and scriptures.

A religion, on the other hand, contains much more than its theology. It includes such things as traditional foods, rituals, music and dances, a system of ethics, history, languages, folklore, customs, literature, holidays and holiday practices, and even ways of swearing at someone. Although these may have been originally influenced by theology, they are by now quite separable from theology.

The book The Encyclopedia of World Faiths by Bishop and Darton (1989) lists twelve major religions, as well as a number of other religious movements and sects. It also lists six “dimensions” of what makes up a religion, as shown in the pie chart, above.

I don't completely agree with their list ^note, but it will do to communicate the concept of the components of a religion. The diagram illustrates how a component, such as the black one labeled “theology,” can be removed like a piece of a pie. Having removed that slab from the pie, one can make changes to the theology and then slide it back into place. Same religion, new theology.

Allow me to use myself as an example, since I am the only person I know whose personal theology I can describe with confidence.

My religion is Judaism, and I am very involved in that religion. Had I been born a Muslim, I probably would be a Muslim today; in fact had I been born into practically any of the major religions, I would probably profess that religion. But I was born Jewish and that’s what I am. I go to synagogue regularly and I wear a kippah (yarmulke) even when I’m not in the synagogue. I try to follow as many of the practices of my religion as are feasible in modern times.

My theology is something else. I love the Jewish God and often have a one-way interaction with Him, both formally through Jewish liturgy and informally when I perform the morning, evening and meal-associated practices of Judaism. Admittedly, I get very little tangible insights from these sessions, but they provide me with satisfaction and some of the benefits of meditation.

However, I don’t believe the Jewish God exists. Nor do I believe in the Biblical creation story, or in Noah and his ark, or in most of the narratives of the Jewish Bible. In fact, I believe in very little of the theology of the Jewish religion. Through the very natural process of observation, and keeping clear what I have learned through scientific literature, I have gradually developed my own set of beliefs, a personal theology quite different from, but very influenced by my Judaism.

In my personal theology, I don’t think the Jewish God is real, nor do I believe in the deity of any other religion, Abrahamic or Eastern. But I do believe there is a deity that created our Universe, about which I know nothing more than that it created the Universe, and that it had a purpose in doing so. I have chosen to call this god yotzer, which is Hebrew for “creator.” That makes me somewhat like a deist, although there are differences between their theology and mine that I will discuss in a later posting.

Then what about God? How can I love something that doesn’t exist? I think of God as a human-created avatar for yotzer. I believe that yotzer itself built into our evolutionary program a need for such an avatar, and that each religion, formal and informal, has created one, as a stand-in for yotzer, because yotzer is far too transcendent to meet my needs and those of all humans.

Who wrote the Bible? In my theology, not God, but rather, extraordinary humans with a sublime (though not divine) set of messages to convey. I treat the Jewish Bible and the miracles it describes, as well as much of its narrative, as myths, parables, remarkable pointers to an ethical life, and in many cases, poetry at its best. I feel that the Hebrew Scriptures are among the best literature ever produced and I study it for the multiple levels of meaning in it. I value it even more because it was written by humans in their search for the meaning of life, and not given us by a benign super-being.

I’d like to believe there are a lot of people who, like me, have adjusted their theology as they have learned, experienced and considered today’s science, without abandoning their religion. Atheism is not a religion, it is a component of a theology, which itself is a small component of a religion. It is, in fact, perfectly consistent to belong to a particular religion and still be an atheist.

7 – The Kosmos: Beyond the Universe

There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.  - William Shakespeare

In this post: The Big Bang theory answers a lot of questions, but also causes a few. Some of these questions may be resolved if the Universe is not all there is, but rather, is part of the Kosmos.

Over the last century or so, we have become aware that the Universe is unimaginably vast. It boggles the mind to even think about how small our planet Earth is in a Universe with many billions of galaxies, each containing many billions of stars.

But is that vast Universe all there is? Based on the Big Bang theory, there had to be something before the existence of the Universe (at least the singularity), and some important scientists speculate that there are other Universes. Perhaps a four-dimensional (three dimensions of space, plus one of time) Universe is all that our limited brains can conceive of, while there are other hidden dimensions that we cannot experience because of our limitations.

Universe and Cosmos are two terms often used interchangeably, but for this discussion they are used quite distinctively. Let’s consider the word “Universe” to refer to the still-expanding entity that was created in the Big Bang. We know a lot about our Universe thanks to the brilliance of many scientists, their powerful observational tools and their logical deductions. It is usually defined as the totality of everything that is known or inferred to exist as a product of the Big Bang. That includes the largest objects that we know of (galaxies and clumps of galaxies) and the smallest objects (well below the level of the atom, extending to a panoply of strange particles) and the space between them. Although our estimates of its age fluctuate as astronomers, their instruments and their mathematics keep sharpening, most scientists today agree that it is somewhere between 10 and 18 billion years old. Today, it is most often estimated at somewhere between 12 and 14 billion years, but in the last 40 years the estimates have changed as often as a baby’s diapers.

There may actually exist much more than our Universe. Imagine the Universe in its initial state, 12 to 14 billion years ago, as a minute speck occupying no space or time (the singularity). That speck, it would seem, contained all the energy, matter, chemical and physical laws, and evolutionary processes needed to make our Universe.  Where was that speck located before it exploded into our Universe? Clearly it was not anywhere in the Universe — according to the laws of physics something cannot be inside itself. It was suddenly blown up by some force so powerful that the initial expansion plus the interaction of its own components have kept it expanding since then. What caused the singularity to exist, what ignited the explosion that caused it to expand? Where were these located? Was there anything else that existed before the Universe was formed?

Logically, the questions seem to have only one answer.  Our Universe must exist inside something that is much larger than our Universe and that existed before our Universe did. Is thIs reasoning a figment of my imagination? In fact, it is a broadly-held view that realms other than our universe are likely.

There was a time when “Universe” meant “all there is.” Everything. The whole Shebang. The notion of more than one Universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms. Yet a range of theoretical developments has gradually qualified the interpretation of “Universe.” The word’s meaning now depends on context.   Sometimes “Universe” still connotes absolutely everything. Sometimes it refers only to those parts of everything that someone such as you or I could, in principle, have access to. Sometimes it’s applied to separate realms, ones that are partly or fully, temporarily or permanently, inaccessible to us; in this sense, the word relegates our Universe to membership in a large, perhaps infinitely large, collection.

This quote comes from The Hidden Reality, written in 2011 by Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists, and his line of thought is not a singular deviation by one eccentric physicist. In fact, alternative Universes, multi-Universes, parallel Universes, the megaverse and other speculation about a cosmos of much greater size and content than our own Universe dominates the recent scientific literature, thanks in part to quantum mechanics and in part to the inadequacy of the (Big Bang) singularity as an explanation for how the creation of our Universe came to be.

Greene is referring to what are, within my definitions, the Universe and the Kosmos. Because some people use the word “Cosmos” to refer to what we call the Universe, while others, including myself, refer to the “Cosmos” as this much larger entity that contains the Universe, I prefer to spell this far larger realm with a “K,” thus: Kosmos.

Although science asserts that the Universe is finite, (with at least its origin and its age estimable), it is possible, if not probable, that the Kosmos is infinite. It is also possible or likely that the Kosmos is not bound by the same rules of physics as is our Universe. If that is truly so, it could provide a basis for explaining how a Universe (or even a singularity) can be created out of nothing, and how a singularity can exist in the Kosmos, though not as part of the universe it will become.

Another thing we might want (or not want) to think about is that we are, as a species, sensually attuned to a  three-dimensional world, and most of us have great difficulty thinking in terms of a fourth dimension (generally considered to be time). How many dimensions are there beyond that in the universe?  And outside of the universe,  in the Kosmos?  Thus, when we speak of the Kosmos  being “outside” the Universe, does that necessarily mean that it is “outside”  within the three dimensions we can think in, or within some other dimension that might exist?

6 - Harris, and Hitchens, and Dawkins! Oh My!

Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!  - The Wizard of Oz

In this post: Who are the New Atheists? What do they say? What do they get right, and what do they get wrong?

In those countries in which fundamentalism lost state sponsorship and had to stand unarmed and naked in the snow, that belief system became simply a religious option, open to rivalry and criticism from science, literary analysis and common sense. One result was diminished focus on theism and atheism in the last half of the 20th century. Then, in the early 2000s, three scientists/writers/speakers, Sam Harris (born 1967) a neuroscientist, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), a literary critic, and Richard Dawkins (born 1941) an evolutionary biologist, became the voices of what was dubbed the New Atheism. A number of other gifted atheist scientists, including Daniel Dennett, joined the group. Their stated purpose was to inform the people of the world that only the ignorant believe in God, that only science can produce true knowledge, and that scientific knowledge is incompatible with belief in any form of extranatural agency. As an example of the purpose and attitude of the group, I quote Sam Harris’ brag: If anyone has written a book more critical of religious faith than I have, I’m not aware of it. 

In spite of their great popularity and stated purpose, the goals of the New Atheists are not altogether clear. To help bring about a world that is free of religion? To sell books? To satisfy a religious-like need to be missionaries? If the need is simply to ensure that everybody knows their “truth,” then how different are they from Christian missionaries whose motive is to ensure that everybody knows their “truth?”

The New Atheists have been very successful at bringing the atheist-theist debate to the public and at stating the atheist case forcefully and compellingly. In doing so, they have taught their lay audience much about science and have provided insights into the dangers of religious fundamentalism. However, along the way, they’ve also managed to convey some false implications, including, notably:

1. Any trained scientist knows there is no god;
2. The very few who don’t know that, well, they are off their rockers. 

What does the data indicate on this topic? A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, found that 51% of scientists believe that God or some higher power exists. 

The 51% of scientists who are not atheist can be further broken down: 33% say they believe in God and 18% say they believe in a universal spirit or higher power.

When that 33% declare they believe in God, they are probably referring to the Biblical God. Despite the huffing and puffing of the new atheists, they seem to believe that there is, in fact, a God. Those who say they believe in “some higher power” are most probably referring to some sort of deity other than God that created the universe, the god of the rational theist. We can look further into that deity later in this blog.

The point I am making is that approximately half the population of scientists do not believe that the only force involved in the creation of our Universe was a random explosion of a singularity. Rather, they believe that there was some sort of agency that created the Universe and at some level of resolution manages it through its natural laws that are in some ways defined as a probabilistic direction, with some purpose.

It may be that the number of scientists who are not atheists would increase if more of them were aware that other options than the Biblical God existed on the theist palette.

While reducing the options for a god to only the fundamentalists’ God, the New Atheists have also managed to totally confuse the issue of a god with religion.

Does religion really represent an outmoded, useless, even harmful way of thinking, with no place in the 21st century? Is theism, in any form whatsoever, indicative only of ignorance or wishful thinking? Does science provide all the tools required to lead a satisfying life, leaving no room for religion?

I believe that religion, once it totally sheds fundamentalism, has much to offer, and that without it our species would never have gotten as far as it has. It provides insights into life, much understanding of why we exist, what we have evolved for, and what we can contribute to our universe and our species.

In fact, the Pew Survey results suggest that no matter how powerful science is, there may be limits to the types of knowledge it can advance. Science deals primarily with issues of “what” and “how”, and seldom deal with the worldview questions such as “why.” Humans have the need to ask — and find answers to — “why.”

5: The Advent and Impact of Fundamentalist State Religion

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war…  - Sabine Baring-Gould

In this post: How the balance between atheism and religion has shifted. Why state fundamentalism is not a good thing. Enter secularism — the separation of religious belief and civil governance.

In Europe, freedom of religion was a very rare thing from Roman times until the 1800s or so. When nations did begin to embrace that freedom, a lot of things changed, including the balance of power in the atheist-theist debate.

There are three natural enemies of religious fundamentalism. The first is atheism, which goes against the primary assertion of all Abrahamic religions, and many other religions as well, that there is a God. The second is science, which often proclaims findings that are heresy to the beliefs promulgated by the scriptures. Third are beliefs of other religions or variant groups within the dominant religion that are considered heresies because they don’t agree with the scriptures.

History shows us that when there is a  fundamentalist state religion,  most progress towards scientific truth, freedom of speech and thought, improvement of the quality of life, and democratic principles come to a halt. Minority religious rights  and freedom of religion, of course, disappear and atheism goes underground.

For most of the last millennium Christianity and Islam, in one form or another, were the “bully-boys” in such debates. In their eyes, heresy referred to anything that suggested that the scriptures were not totally true in all their teachings. Being state religions, they usually had the power to force heretics to recant or submit to torture, or ultimately, to die. In other words, the fundamentalists were in charge, scientists were cautious and atheists and religious dissenters were very silent. Those who believed in a variant of the dominant religion often faced torture or death, and other religions, if tolerated at all, trod with great caution. In spite of all this, science progressed, albeit slowly, despite being stifled by the authority of the state-empowered fundamentalist church, particularly when it did not conflict with doctrine.

Enter secularism: the separation of religion and civil governance. With the gradual rise of secularism, and the reduction of the role of fundamentalist religion in the state, these fundamentalist state religions could no longer tell people what to believe. Although overt atheism might cause someone to be isolated from neighbours and family, it was no longer physically dangerous to espouse except when the occasional crazed fundamentalist reacted.

In the early 20th century, the authority of religions in the West was mostly eliminated, and science took off. By that time, many religions had become trapped in beliefs and practices that couldn’t stand the test of rational analysis. Having lost the power of coercion and having to rely only on persuasion, most religious groups mostly left science alone, even expressing support for theories such as the Big Bang that are deemed not incompatible with scripture.

Ignoring the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) and other minor battles, a degree of peace was achieved between church and science in the 20th century, given that the church had lost its advantage of power, and scientists were not that interested in re-entering such debates. Atheism could overtly thrive, and many bookstores introduced an “Atheism” subsection in their “Religion” collection. Atheists could say what they wanted to, theists could read atheists’ books for new ideas, and fundamentalists, for the most part ignored them or heaped scorn on them.

There are, of course, several Muslim states today in which this freedom does not exist because the power struggle between fundamentalist religion and secularism has not been settled. I might add that there are also Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, who work to impose their religious views on the rest of the Jewish population.

Interestingly, state atheism, a new type of state fundamentalism, formed during the 20th century. It was a phenomenon of some communist countries such as the USSR, Cuba, China, Albania and North Korea. In those states, conventional religions were outlawed or strongly discouraged, and veneration of leaders, the State, and communist dogma took their place. (Consider the resemblance of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, where the mummified body of Lenin is on display for the “faithful,” to religious edifices and the reverence accorded religious relics.) With the fall of communism, this state atheism has been considerably relaxed, much exemplified, for example, by papal visits in the 21st century. State fundamentalism, state- atheism or any state-sponsored belief system imposes enormous damage to thinking, research and progress, just as theistic state fundamentalism does.

Fundamentalism is bad. State fundamentalism or theocracy in any form is extremely bad.