Queens and Playmates

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Once upon a time, theology was queen. I’m no theologian, but then, I didn’t make up the phrase. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how some scientists say there is no longer a need for philosophy. In passing the piece mentions that theology had, long ago, been considered the queen of the sciences. According to medieval thinkers, philosophy was her handmaid. Antiquated archaisms apart, I sometimes think back on this whole venture of education. Few today acknowledge, and most probably don’t know, that education began as a religious exercise. Writing, and reading, were overseen by the gods. Even in the modern world the earliest universities were founded to teach theology and law. Many of the ivy league schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, began as training grounds for the clergy. How quickly our forebears are forgotten.

It’s not that I think religion deserves a privileged place in the academy, but I do believe it deserves a place. Science has a long track record of spectacular successes. Not only that, but the advances in science often capture the imagination—and here we are back in the realm of the humanities, that place where feeling and possibility are unlimited. Many of those of us in religious studies—apart from creationists and their kin—gladly award science its deserved paean to successfully unpacking the intricacies of the material universe(s). As the Chronicle article demonstrates, some on the science side of the circle want to claim all the marbles and go home. Some of us want to keep the game going well after dark.

Maybe that’s a very wide metaphorical shift—from queen to playmate—it may be presumptuous. After all, what has religion, or philosophy for that matter, got to claim? What shiny Nobel Prizes to display gracefully, or great advances of which to boast? The benefits religion can claim are somewhat less tangible, but important nevertheless. While some people declare that meaning is a chimera, deep down, as a species, we know that it is important. Even more than that, the fact that you’re reading this right now owes its ultimate origin to religious thinking. Writing was the brainchild of the gods, an activity we learned in imitation of the divine. I will always find science fascinating, but I will always do so with a book held in my hands. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” in the words of another famous queen.

Goats and Sheep

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Having missed the movie, when I found a cheap copy of Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, my curiosity was piqued. With such a title I had assumed it to be fiction, but, proverbially it turned into the truth stranger than. The book explores the weird world of the X-Files chestnut, the super-soldier. There is no doubt that despite science’s discomfort with the paranormal, government agencies have utilized psychics for some years now, hoping to gain some advantage over the other guy. Not everyone agrees on how effective such tactics are, but they exist nevertheless. The Men Who Stare at Goats (TMWSAG) provides a rare glimpse into that world where no one knows who is telling the truth (otherwise called “government”); we live in an era when truth has become negotiable.

One of the accidental recurring themes in my recent reading has been the horrendous abuse of power at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Far from placid eyes, the land of the free advocates torture to get prisoners to talk. After years of government bungling, it is no surprise that misguided efforts at torture on the part of a democracy would invariably be discovered. It would be easier to doubt that governments kept lethal secrets if they didn’t keep getting caught in flagrante delicto. Who can you trust when governments, ruled by gods of their own making—in their own image—preach the gospel of torture? TMWSAG weaves this sordid story in with 9-11, Uri Geller, Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate and Deuteronomy 18—what’s not to like?

I’ve been alive long enough to know that some supremely odd stuff goes down. TMWSAG provides a service in demonstrating that the government takes some of this mysterious reality seriously. It also shows the twin surfaces of resistance: religion and science. Science has a difficult time admitting what can’t be seen; with few exceptions psychic phenomena are considered not even worth the bother of a lab test. Religion, at least in its biblical, American incarnation, lumps all spooky stuff together with the devil, something Jon Ronson declares that even high-ranking generals in the military believe. So when I put this little book down I was left scratching my head. It may just be me, but where have all the sheep gone?

The Naked Vicar

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In a fit of nostalgia, for lack of a better excuse, I recently re-watched A Room With a View. I suspect I saw it with my wife near the time it first came out since I had trouble recalling having viewed any of it before. Until the skinny-dipping scene. Even then, it was unfamiliar until Mr. Beebe, the vicar, jumped into the pond. Now perhaps in the Victorian era same-sex cavorting was permitted for the young, far from repressed eyes, but it was the implications of seeing a priest in the nude that was particularly jarring. As Lucy Honeychurch comes primly along with her fiancé, she is scandalized to see the boy she truly loves unclothed, but the minister in similar state is a laughing matter, a novelty. In the light of the many church scandals that have become public knowledge since 1985, this particular scene has perhaps accrued additional, unintended freight.

Embodiment is a popular topic for theologies these days. I’m no theologian, but as a member of the human race I do participate in the embodiment question. Everyone from biologists to psychologists seems to be rethinking the implications of the soft machine. Some theorists are already preparing to leave behind their bodies to have their consciousness electronically preserved. Their new bodies may be robotic or simply virtual, but I suspect they will find the experience deeply disappointing. We are closer to the cockroach and the goldfish than we are to the disembodied divine. Our bodies are who we are, and embodiment analysis is the attempt to make sense of it all. At the same time, some neuroscientists are speculating that human brains work perhaps in closer concert than we generally suppose. We human beings are more like cells in a great organism that encompasses all of us. The Portuguese Man O’ War, which resembles a human brain in some respects, is a communal organism and not a single creature. The implications are worth considering.

Our rules for getting along with biological bodies include some pretty straightforward permissible behaviors. We don’t penetrate the body of another person without their express approval. They have to be competent enough to give valid approval. We don’t end the existence of another human being’s life unless they’ve been convicted of being exceptionally naughty and they live in the United States (the only “first world” country where the death penalty is still routinely carried out) or unless we are mentally unstable or emotionally overwrought and have easy access to firearms. Bodies are limited, and so are brains. Although, since I’ve upgraded my operating system I notice that my laptop has now claimed my name as its own identity—(if anything looks weird, please let me know!) In the Victorian era it was assumed that the brains of the clergy were attuned to higher things. The naked vicar accepts the good-natured laugh at his expense because he is no threat to either young ladies or young men. In the technological era we are more savvy and less carefree. And given the choice, the religious would prefer a room without a view, thank you.

Used Against You

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Many times I’ve confessed to being a reluctant Luddite. My reluctance arises from a deep ambivalence about technology—not that I don’t like it, but rather that I’m afraid of its all-encompassing nature. This week’s Time magazine ran a story on how smartphones are changing the world. My job, meeting the goals set for me, would be impossible without the instant communication offered by the Internet. Everything is so much faster. Except my processing speed. We all know the joke (which would be funny if it weren’t so true) that if you’re having trouble with technology, ask a child. In my travels I see kids barely old enough to walk toddling around with iPhones, clumsily bumping into things (i.e., human beings) as they stare at the electronic world in the palm of their tiny hands. And once the technocrats have taken over, “progress” is non-negotiable.

I made it through my Master’s degree without ever seriously using a computer. Even now I think of this very expensive lap-warmer before me as a glorified word processor. Over the weekend I succumbed to the constant lure of Mac’s new OS, Mountain Lion. Some features of this blog had stopped working, and, being a Luddite, I assumed that it was outdated software. Of course, to update software, you need an operating system that can handle it. So here I am riding on a mountain lion’s back, forgetting to duck as the beast leaps dramatically into its lair. In this dark cave, nursing my aching head, I realize that I have become a slave to technology. For a student of religion who grew up without computers, I’ve got at least half-a-dozen obsolete ones in my apartment, each with bits and fragments I’m afraid to lose, despite the fact that I’m not even sure where to take them to retrieve the data. When I sat down to write my post this morning I received a message that Microsoft Word is no longer supported by Mountain Lion. Fortunately my daughter had the foresight to purchase Pages, so life goes on.

This blog has an index. It is an archaism. Indexes are not necessary with complete searchability. It is there mostly for me. In my feeble attempts at cleverness, I sometimes forget what a post is about, based on its title. The index helps me. In a truly Stephen King moment, I found this morning that my index had infinitely replicated a link to my post on the movie Carrie, so that any link after that will lead you directly to the protagonist of Stephen King’s first novel. It will take a few days to clean that up. There’s probably an app for it. For those of us brought up before household computers were a reality, however, there is a more religious explanation. Yes, my laptop is clearly haunted. And in the spirit of Stephen King I type these words while awaiting the top to snap down with the force of an alligator byte and break off my fingers. I should be worried about it, but instead, I’m sure there’s an app to take the place of missing digits. Even if there isn’t I’m sure my iPhone will happily survive without the constant interference of a Luddite just trying to call home.

Not a lap-pet.

Supernaturally Selected

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Things are seldom as simple as they seem. Religion, for example, is frequently cast as the villain or the hero of human society, when, in truth, like most human institutions, it is a little of each. I’ve read many theories on the origin of religion, and none has been completely convincing but most contain persuasive aspects while I’m reading them. After having read several books proclaiming the end of religion in the last several months, I just finished Matt J. Rossano’s Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved. Many books with a similar goal begin with the suggestion that religion may have had some biological utility for people at one time, but that we’ve outgrown our need for it and we should classify it with other obsolete, arcane concepts that have no further purpose. Rossano suggest that religion grew out of the need for social bonding and that we could not have become human without it.

Basing his ideas on genetics and anthropology, Rossano notes that even with our genetic similarity to chimpanzees there remain striking differences. Mostly they are social in nature. Many of the differences are reflected dimly in our primate cousins, but the human penchant for gathering in groups with ritual behavior to offset overwrought emotions applies only to us. That ritual behavior includes healing rites, something that Rossano suggests might be the earliest, shamanistic, religion. Back in my teaching days I’d been telling students that the earliest evidence for religious behavior dated to the paleolithic period. This is something I’d reasoned from the artifacts found in pre-historic communities. I was happy to find confirmation in a more competent scholar than myself.

While I’ll no doubt revisit some of the fascinating hypotheses of Supernatural Selection over the coming days, one point especially stood out on my initial reading. Religion is a communal phenomenon in what is a largely individualistic society. In other words, religion itself continues to evolve. Even the hermit in his or her cave is only considered religious in comparison with his or her less dedicated, secular compatriots living la vida de fe. Since religion is communal, Rossano suggests, it is impossible to argue someone out of their religion—based on perceived relationships as they are. Indeed, it seems that his hypothesis predicts a behavior we find only too evident when we prepare to line up at the polling booths, but which will immediately fall into the background again once the level is pulled.

Coexistence

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Sometimes I think I’m a punching bag. Not uncommon among scholars of religion, I suppose. I have read my fair share of overt attacks on religion: Hitchens, Dawkins, and even Jillette, and sometimes limp out of the ring wondering why I even bother. Still, science doesn’t completely explain the universe I inhabit either. Thus is was with some glimmer of hope that I read a story in Monday’s Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Does Religion Really Poison Everything?” There can be no doubt that religious behavior has a track record of some execrable atrocities—some very bad behavior has been engendered by fervent religious belief. At the same time, those who despise religion have a hard time explaining it. As the Chronicle piece points out, religion is likely an evolved trait. There is some survival value in it, otherwise it would, by natural selection, disappear. Religion is seldom a rational enterprise. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be rationally studied, but rather that religion is primarily experienced as an emotional phenomenon. We find ourselves motivated by feelings, although reason will often drive us to do things we don’t feel like (like going to work). And emotion is necessary to be truly human.

It is often difficult to respond to those who castigate religion as an evil or poison, not for lack of reason, but because of feelings. Having spent most of my life with religion, it is not surprising that attacks on it often leave me feeling ashamed. But ah, that is an emotional response! It seems rational on the surface, but really, shame and embarrassment are typical emotional responses. This is the realm of religion. Reason may indeed indicate with great accuracy the way the universe works—of this I have no doubts. At the same time, I’m not sure the entire universe is something that humans can adequately comprehend. I have a hard time remembering what’s on a short shopping list if I accidentally leave it at home. Our brains aren’t equipped to the task of comprehending universes. Feel overwhelmed when facing a physics test? That overwhelmed feeling is an emotional response. With considerable cheek, might I suggest it might even be a little bit religious?

The Chronicle is a high-profile source for academic rectitude. I am pleased to see Tom Bartlett pointing out that the line-drawing in the sand between religious Fundamentalists and pro-science New Atheists will not solve anything. Religion is often guilty as charged. It is not, however, pure evil. There is enough evidence out there to suggest that religion is a tremendous coping mechanism for billions of people. And coping is not a bad thing, all things considered. Wisdom that is often attributed to the Greeks suggests that “all things in moderation”—the golden mean as it’s known—is the way to human happiness and success. The idea is older than the Greeks, and indeed, can even be found in the Bible for those who are willing to look. One need not be religious to see that, like most human inventions, religion has both good and evil uses. Evolution gave us religion, and it gave us science. It also gave us brains divided down the middle and strong reasoning that must dance with creative emotion in a tango that frequently makes abrupt shifts of direction. Our job, as humans, is to learn the steps to the dance.

Different, but equal.

NDEs

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I love science. Like many young boys, I was probably enticed to science through science fiction. While I didn’t follow science to a career, I used it to study religious texts. Those who’ve never undertaken the challenge of trying to figure out what something written thousands of years ago—on clay!—really says may be surprised to learn just how much science is involved. Nevertheless, as comforting as reductionism may be, something just doesn’t feel right about it. Science is how we explain and understand our world, and it does a spectacular job of it. The problem arises when science becomes what Stephen Jay Gould called a “magisterium.” Magisteria have all the answers. Yes, science explains how matter and energy work and interact, but it has yet to explain satisfactorily what it feels like. Most days I feel like the person I’ve become accustomed to show to the world. That person is very much like every other—being born, eating, breathing, dying. Medical science can explain most of it, but what about the parts it can’t?

I just finished reading Ornella Corazza’s Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection. I remember when the craze about this hit in 1981 with the release of the movie Life After Life. I was fascinated and terrified by it. Since a materialistic view of science dismisses anything that has the residue of spirits or souls, the phenomenon of the resuscitated dead reporting seeing their bodies from above, shooting through tunnels into the light, and sometimes meeting the dead (or God), were explained as last nano-second hallucinations as the brain prepared to shut down or reboot (upon resuscitation). That’s that. The answer, however, didn’t satisfy everyone. What about those cases where the dead person reported, in detail, what happened in other rooms, or things they couldn’t have seen in their own room, had they been conscious? Corazza takes these considerations seriously and tries to understand what may be going on. Obviously, her explorations will not convince a reductionist, but they may give pause to some of us.

What makes her approach so interesting is that Corazza takes into account an alternative way of looking at consciousness. While the facts of science are, by definition, universal, the contexts within which those facts are viewed are not. Having spent considerable time with Japanese scientists exploring consciousness, eastern ideas of the body inform her research. In the western world we have an easy familiarity with the Cartesian dualism of body and soul that does not fit into other worldviews. Corazza takes the interesting step of asking what if we apply an eastern paradigm of the body (one that understands soul as body, and not just in a materialistic sense) and apply it to the question of Near Death Experiences. The results are mind-stretching. I feel as if my consciousness got up from months of laziness and ran a marathon (or at least a 5-K). It’s a bit winded and parts of it are starting to ache a little. No reductionists need worry, however, because in that worldview none of this exists.

Isaiah Thwarted

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Back in January, out of a sense of curiosity on a number of points, I began tweeting the Bible. I wondered how long it would take, at 140 characters a day, to type the King James Bible into Twitter. Since that time, I have not missed a day. Until this week. International travel and business travel with uncertain Internet access have been overcome as I flew with Bible in hand to keep it going. On Monday I was just wrapping up the flood story. Clearly this was going to take a long-term commitment. Then early this week a message popped up on my Twitter account stating, “You cannot send messages to users who are not following you. Learn more,” so naturally, I learned more. Unfortunately I am not now, nor have I ever been, a techie. Just a sentence in and words I don’t understand begin to flummox me, building confusion on confusion. What it appears to be telling me, in layman’s language, is that I can no longer post to Twitter.

Apart from the personal rejection such impersonal messages inevitably engender, this development brought to mind the famous verse from Isaiah 40.8, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” Hath the Lord been stopped by Twitter? Technology changes rapidly, and those of us who’ve never had any formal training in it sometimes feel like we’re driving a car on a dark country road at night with no headlights. I’m not really sure how this all works, but I try to send daily thoughts out into cyberspace and, yes, what you say can and will be used against you. And I wonder about old Deutero-Isaiah sitting there in Babylon peering into an indefinite future.

Our abject dependence on the Internet has changed us as a species. I’ve recently read about how technological innovations have become the evolution of the human species. This collective brain we refer to as the Internet has revolutionized the way we do business, but it has also introduced a component of fragility into the equation. Electronic information is untested in the long term. Some of my earliest writing projects now exist only on three-and-a-half inch floppies, most of which are tucked away in some musty corner of the attic. And what if the earth passes through a comet’s tail or a nasty solar flare jets out our way? Doomsday scenarios have been based on such things (just remember Y2K and smile). So maybe Second Isaiah was onto something after all. Printed books have been known to survive for at least half a millennium, and in rare instances, a couple thousand years. And the pagan sources on which parts of the Bible are based, written in clay, last even longer. And one of the earliest stories recorded was that of a worldwide flood.

Danger de Nuit

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I am on a boat—maybe it’s the Titanic. Far from land. For some reason, vaguely unclear, the ship is sinking. There’s panic—people are running and flailing, trying to save themselves. I’m frozen with terror as the icy water encroaches. I can’t swim. I prepare to die. So goes a nightmare I had several times in association with a former place of employment. Nashotah House felt traumatic to me with forced liturgies and daily reminders of my inferior status. The terror of the nightmares was very real, and the day I was fired did nothing to improve them. As a child I was plagued with phobias and frequently experienced horrific nightmares. They still come once in a while, but since I’ve left the employment of the church, they have become, gradually, less frequent. Nightmares are just dreams gone bad, and I’ve always been a dreamer.

Last month Time ran a story on nightmares. The subject of nightmares has now caught the attention of the military because of cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When the military decides to show its humane side, it doesn’t fear backing it with big bucks. Soldiers confess to frequent nightmares after witnessing the atrocities of war. (One psychologist said that many at Nashotah House seemed to be suffering from a similar phenomenon.) Theorists now suggest that nightmares might lead to mental illness, and sleep deprivation, as we all know, can lead to bad judgment. Not a good thing on the battlefield. Or behind the wheel of a car. Or, in a recent real-life nightmare, while flying a jet.

In many ways nightmares seem like minor annoyances—they don’t physically hurt anyone, and they end when you wake. Time probably wouldn’t have reported on them if it hadn’t been for the military angle. This seems a paradigmatic situation. A common problem goes ignored until it affects the military, then it is deemed worth research funded by tax-payers. I am well acquainted with nightmares. As a child they became part of my identity. I am heartened that serious research is considered worthy of federal money. It seems, however, that perhaps a better way to end battle-induced nightmares would be to stop the horrors of warfare. When war ends, some nightmares will cease. Of course, I’ve always been a dreamer.

Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
-Poe

Seedtime and Harvest

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With the drought deepening over about half the United States, it is with not inconsiderable irony that I am reading the story of Noah’s flood. I have been tweeting the Bible for some months now and am just reaching the end of the fascinating account of the deluge. The difference in the case of the drought is obvious, but similar. Having spent some time in the Midwest, I came to know how intimately and intensely many of the citizens trust God’s providential care (this is true elsewhere, of course, but I noticed it more in that region). When disasters come, however, just like an animist would suggest, answers will be sought in the divine world. “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Genesis 8.22 rounds out God’s plan for the perpetuity of nature’s cycles, stating in just the previous verse that he knows people to be wicked and will never punish them for it again, as he did in the flood. Such biblical assurances, however, do little to allay fears when crops are dying in the field.

The problem in looking for answers in nature is their ambiguity. Just consider the record number of church picnics that haven’t been rained out this year—the number of prayers I’ve heard for the staying of rain for human convenience is surely a reflection of how intimate divine interaction with the workings of nature is supposed to be. One of the benefits of science has been its ability to straighten out all the cards in the deck, tapping them on the table-top and squeezing them into line. How would God weigh prayers for no rain so that an outdoor wedding of a devout couple could take place versus the prayers of a backslidden farmer for much needed precipitation (without hail)? Are decisions made by majority request? Wouldn’t that be excessively dangerous, given humanity’s track record of deciding what is good for itself?

The drought is a serious concern, and I do not mean to suggest otherwise or make light of the situation. What concerns me is the human tendency to look for a divine bailout. Many politicians of certain persuasion (usually the greenback kind) tell us that the climate is just fine. Our greenhouse gasses are not unduly affecting it. Now that a drought is upon us—and even a child can understand that all weather is related—the focus shifts to God. This dancing around the elephant in the room is tiring and dizzying. We can spend billions of dollars making bombers that are almost invisible to radar and so oddly shaped that they get reported as UFOs and yet we can’t get politicians to consider our impact on the very skies they fly in on their bombing missions. The atmosphere is larger than us all and it is warming up. And when we bake ourselves out of existence isn’t it a comforting thought that seedtime and harvest will continue, at least until our sun burns out?

Thinking Zombies

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Religion seldom makes as big an impression as when it concerns itself with the undead. Popular culture has gone after zombies to such a degree that they have engaged academic discourse well beyond the field of African-Caribbean religions. In fact, religious specialists tend to shy away from the topic in a kind of first-date embarrassment. Perhaps it’s because zombies in popular culture are so much cooler than their Vodou forebears. Within the past several months, however, zombies have shown up in Time, on the Center for Disease Control website, and now in the Chronicle of Higher Education. An article this week explores the academic implications of a paper by neuroscientists Bradley Voytek and Timothy Verstynen on the zombie brain. The two took on the project as a lark at the behest of the Zombie Research Society. Science fiction writer and head of ZRS, Matt Mogk gave an interesting take on zombies. He’s quoted in the Chronicle as saying, “Zombies are rooted in science, not superstition and myth.”

At the risk of sounding extremely uncool (one that I take rather frequently, I fear), I would point out that exactly the opposite is the case. Zombies are rooted in superstition and myth, i.e., religion. The entire idea that a person can be made to rise from the dead—originally to be made a slave—comes from that heady blend of Christianity and African religion that developed as part of slave culture. Slavers were notorious in not wanting slaves to accept Christianity because that might make slaves think that they were equal with their owners. By suppressing Christianity among slaves, the African religions in which many were raised came to blend with the Christianity that they’d garnered. One of the bi-products was the zombie. The zombie partakes of the Christian concept of resurrection, but in a twisted way. Once the new vision of the zombie presented by George Romero took off, yes, they did move into the realm of science fiction, often the forerunner of science.

A very serious issue underlies the zombie myth—the very religious concern about death. While not all religions comfort with an afterlife, they all in some way deal with ultimate issues. The end of life is about as ultimate, from our limited experience, as they come. Science loudly and repeatedly insists that death is the final frontier. We don’t cross back this way again, according to the available evidence. Scientists do not study ghosts or souls, and are very cagey about near-death experiences. The zombie, who is now threatening the careers of young scientists, is a most religious monster. Everything about the zombie points to its origin as a religious trope. Voytek and Verstynen wanted to interest people in science by taking a comic look at zombie brains. The problem is that zombie brains are brains on religion, not science.

Liberating Science

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The fact that prominent scientists occasionally take time from their busy schedules to fire off a broadside against religion and religious believers freely bare their fangs at science shows that we need some efforts at reconciliation. I am reminded of schoolyard bullies when specialists in either realm make claims of exclusivity. Religion and science are both here to stay, and they’d better learn to get along. I just finished reading the remarkable little book The Sacred Depths of Nature by biologist Ursula Goodenough. While declaring herself a non-theist, Goodenough, the child of a Methodist minister, preserves a profound respect for the sacred in a concept she calls “religious naturalism.” Her brief book, which a colleague compared to a daily devotional, contains more good sense than all the enraged professionals bellowing at each other from either side of an unbreechable gulf. Uncompromising in her science, Goodenough is not suspicious of the human religious impulse, but embraces it in the expressions of nature. It is an approach I found liberating and amazingly conciliatory. It lacks the territoriality of Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) and preserves the integrity of the human person in all its complexity.

The day I finished the book the headlines of the paper announced the premature death of Sally Ride, another woman who moved science in the right direction. Ride’s sister is a Presbyterian minister, while Ride herself was a physicist as well as the first American woman in space. Aboard the space shuttle Challenger, she made history also as the youngest American in space. Typical of the imperialist national attitude that unfortunately still reigns supreme, space had been tacitly declared a man’s world. Sally Ride shattered that glass ceiling at 17,500 miles per hour. Even so, change seems to have decelerated once again to far below sub-orbital speed. Religion is partly to blame. A deep component in our culture, religions in the western world have traditionally asserted male superiority. Even those who claim God to be sexless can’t really conceive of a big person without some gender. The day after her death and the headlines had shifted from mourning to astonishment that she was gay.

The loss of Sally Ride is a loss to science, for she was in the heaven formerly occupied by God, showing women the way. I am, however, comforted by the efforts of Ursula Goodenough to keep the dialogue open. Too often, it seems, that conflict is the cost of disagreement. One of the observations of astronauts is that long periods confined with the same small coterie of people lead to inevitable disagreements. The question facing us all—for our planet is not so large after all—is how we will choose to deal with differing worldviews. It was declared that science would eventually bury religion, once reason had taken hold and superstition had run its course. Although the grave was dug, it has never been filled. Maybe we should all read the sensible approach of Goodenough and just be glad that we’ve all had a chance to be here at all. And remember Sally Ride as a fearless explorer, a hero rather than a spectacle.

Explanatory Value

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The dividing line between superstition and religion is thin and growing more effaced all the time. Nowhere does this become clearer than in studies of the history of religion. One of the critiques early made between “true religion” and superstition is that the latter involved magic, but today anthropologists find that line difficult to discern as well. Many religions are defined by their insistence on supernatural occurrences. The world as is, is by definition, secular. That’s one of the reasons Euan Cameron’s Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250—1750 is so interesting. Cameron, an historian with a precise grasp on theological nuance, traces Christian responses to the world of the supernatural through the Middle Ages. Various theological responses are then explored as the author searches for that elusive distinction that makes one belief religious and another superstitious. It is really a matter of perspective.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the late Middle Ages. As Cameron notes, physics, to the mind attuned to God’s direct intervention in the cosmos, looks like the occult. How could a person seriously believe that two physical bodies, such as the sun and earth, or earth and moon, could attract each other? If you put God back into the equation just to take him out for an instant, this sounds extremely occult. Does not attraction imply volition? How can physical objects attract one another? Thus scientists such as Galileo and Newton often found opposition for their ideas based on the fact that science and superstition can also bear a passing resemblance.

As science’s superior empirical evidence became clearer, the God who’d stepped out of the room temporarily was eventually locked out. This vast universe could be explained without the supernatural at all. What was needed was better glasses. Microscopes and telescopes, and now cyclotrons and space telescopes, provide a consistent and ever sharper image of a universe that gets along just fine without the divine. But what of superstition? Has it gone away? We still routinely construct buildings without thirteenth floors. The sigh of relief from the worker or guest on floor fourteen seems never to be obviated by the fact that they are really on a renamed, empirically thirteenth floor. Your daily newspaper (although quickly growing extinct) will still offer you your horoscope before you hurry off to the lab. Call it what you will—superstition, religion, occult, magic—as long as we’re human no scientist or theologian will ever convince us that there’s not at least some whisper of a ghost in the machine.

Your Brain on Plastic

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“Cogito ergo sum,” Descartes famously, and apparently erroneously, wrote. As technology races wildly ahead, those of us of biological origin are left feeling somewhat insignificant. An article in Monday’s Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality” touches on many of the issues that are the very pulse of religion. Revolving around the theory of Dr. Ken Hayworth that a preserved brain, sealed in plastic instants before death, may in the future be thoroughly mapped and resurrected, Evan R. Goldstein explores the idea of immortality. Hayworth’s belief is that a thoroughly mapped brain, reconstructed artificially, would be the ego of cogito. The self. Despite all our advances in science, we don’t know what it is.

As Goldstein makes clear in his article, this transfer of consciousness and possibility of immortality is not mainstream science. In fact, most scientists rapidly distance themselves from it. Many cite the unscientific nature of the very enterprise, but I wonder if it might not have a more religious basis. Immortality is the ultimate of religious ideals. Christians generally recognize it as resurrection, and other monotheistic traditions offer a heaven after death (sometimes, to some people). Is that not all at stake here? If we manage to assure some kind of human immortality, have we not just robbed ourselves of heaven? Quite apart from the technological hurdles and uncertainties about what the self/mind/soul is, is not immortality what separates gods from humans?

The problem with gods is that they don’t get to go home at the end of the day. Would Heaven be so great if you just left another tough day in the universe full of sadness, violence, and pain? Hayworth suggests that a reconstructed brain placed in a mechanical body (robotic, probably) would have the potential of lasting forever. It will, however, be expensive. That means that only the very wealthy will be able to afford the procedure, if it ever works. Imagine that world: a planet full of immortal, wealthy entrepreneurs who can spend eons without sleep, trying to acquire yet more for themselves while knocking the competition on its metal rump. It really doesn’t sound like Heaven to me. But then, what would I know? To me cogito sounds like a snack food.

Just You Wait, Professor Higgs

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They finally found him. Peering deep into the invisible world of the sub-atomic universe, his hiding place has practically been discovered. I knew that when it happened my alma mater, Edinburgh University, would be part of the equation. That’s just the kind of thing you know deep down in your sub-atomic parts. Scientists are now coming very close to announcing definitive proof of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson. Named for theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who predicted the particle, this elusive piece of physics has been nicknamed the “God particle” by journalists who want to express just how great its explanatory value is. The average citizen knows very little about the inner workings of science—thus we have Creationists and Tea Partiers—so we require striking neologisms to help us comprehend that this is not only important, but really, really important. For explaining the way the universe works, the Higgs boson has been likened to Newton’s discovery of gravity, although apples had always fallen from trees even before he learned why.

I have always found it curious that when we need a superlative we dash back to the biblical worldview. As John Heilprin and Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press make clear, “God particle” is not utilized by physicists (although coined by one), but is used “more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started.” To get us to read about science they have to use mythology. The more we understand about science and the way our minds work, the more perplexing it becomes. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and we often find story more meaningful than fact. Facts, however, determine what actually happens or what actually is. The Higgs boson is getting close to facticity. We whimsically call it the “God particle.”

Could the great gulf between science and religion, I sometimes wonder, be bridged by good, liberal arts education? The liberal arts, particularly the humanities, are all about understanding what it is that makes us, well, human. They aren’t precise like science, or profitable, like business. At the end of the day, however, in those few quiet moments, don’t we dwell among the realm of humanity? When we stop posturing for our co-workers, the media, or our neighbors, when we are who we truly are—then we are engaging in the humanities. Education can be in the service of becoming human as well as becoming rich. In one of its latest triumphs, it has produced physicists who have discovered the footprints of the Higgs boson, potentially revolutionizing the universe as we know it. And many of us would have never even heard if they hadn’t called it the “God particle.”

Like atoms over our heads