Free Congregation of Sauk County

Sauk City Talk, Part Two by Andrew Kerr on June 17, 2001 at Park Hall

First, let me say thank you again for the opportunity to come here and speak to all of you. I give my thanks again to Michael Whaley for inviting me. This congregation’s interest in, and commitment to, philosophy is inspiring. There is the detached consideration of philosophy found in departments of philosophy; certainly a detached approach is important. But to explore philosophy as a way of life, as I sense happening in this congregation, is to experience the transformation of scholarship into adventure.

Last time I offered the thesis that atheism can be a religious affirmation. Upon the assumption – very important – of a philosophical approach to knowledge, logical consistency, fact-checking, and appeal to principle identify a standard of truth to which all the arts and sciences must appeal. Religion, I argue, is then best understood as a question, the question that asks, “What gives my life meaning?” or “To what do I cast my ultimate loyalties?” Here, atheism identifies a set of positive, non-theistic answers to this question.

Today I wish to suggest, in general terms, one kind of answer to the question of religion. It is: to serve, deliberately, cosmic joy – the joy that comes just from being anything at all. I say ‘deliberately’ because we humans are intelligent, and have the distinct mission to serve cosmic joy more fully aware of the scale and nature of existence. The human gift, I offer, is intimacy.

This suggested religious answer discloses three required movements of argument. First, we must establish that a religious answer, whatever the content, is expressed in any possible experience we might have. Second, we must establish that this religious answer is in truth cosmic in scope. Third, we must establish that ‘joy’ has legitimate cosmic meanings.

The religious answer must express itself in any possible experience because the religious question asks about our ultimate commitments or loyalties, and we exercise these ultimate commitments and loyalties in every experience we have. To speak of an ‘ultimate’ commitment or ‘ultimate’ loyalty is to speak of the logically final principle to which we appeal to explain ourselves, our actions, our choices, and, finally, our experiences. There is the story of the boy who asked the wise man, “What holds up the world?” and the wise man answered, “An elephant.” But the boy, who if not wise was at least precocious, asked, “What holds up the elephant?” The wise man answered, “A turtle.” But the boy sought the answer to a deeper question, and asked “And what holds up the turtle?” The wise man gave an honest answer, “It’s turtles all the way down.” But this answer is not a rational answer; an infinite regress of reasons marks a failed philosophical explanation, for an infinite regress of reasons contradicts the rational commitment to principled explanation. But then there must be a final principle of explanation. In the case of the question of religion, to say that the religious answer expresses our ultimate commitments or loyalties – what we mean by ‘value’ – is to say that it expresses our choice of final principle of explanation. The religious answer is our final turtle.

Does this final principle of explanation, this religious answer, exist in any possible human experience? I suggest that we consider the religious insights provided by John Dewey in his wonderful book A Common Faith. Dewey distinguishes between ‘religion’ and ‘the religious.’ The ‘religious,’ Dewey claims, identifies the transformative element in experience. When we grasp a possibility which improves both our individual self and our environment, this experience is religious. Dewey writes,

There are…changes in ourselves in relation to the world ..that are much more inclusive and deep seated. They relate…to our being in its entirety…There is a composing and harmonizing of the various elements of our being such that…these conditions are also arranged, settled, in relation to us. This attitude includes a note of submission. But it is voluntary, not externally imposed (ACF, 16)

The recognition of a ‘note of submission’ is vital to Dewey’s position. A philosophical approach to a religious atheism requires that we take responsibility for finding the meaning in our lives, but this meaning for which we search is something outside ourselves, something upon which we depend for our sense of worth. Dewey himself recommends nature, broadly put, as the element in experience to which we submit. He writes,

The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the universe (ACF, 19)

How we idealize ourselves, how we imagine ourselves at our most worthy, depends upon what possibilities our environment provides. While we choose among those possibilities, the general character of our freedom depends upon the environment providing the possibilities.

So any experience is religious when we grasp the best possibilities in our environment, and so choose to improve both ourselves and our environment. This choosing of the best possibilities within the environment – and the concomitant improving of the environment itself – Dewey labels ‘intelligence.’ The answer to the religious question, Dewey suggests, is intelligence. He writes

One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action (ACF 79)

By intelligence, Dewey means both a quality within humanity - our ability to choose good ends – and a quality defining the environment, namely, the good possibilities themselves, including those which follow from our own good action. Intelligence is finally an order of nature.

Two points follow, I believe, from Dewey’s proposal. First, if the answer to the question of religion is intelligence, then the answer expresses an evolving, self-surpassing order of nature. The relation between human choice and nature is symbiotic; each good human choice improves nature itself, and this improved order of nature displays better possibilities for better human choices. This answer to the religious question asks that we re-consider the meaning of perfection. Perfection need not mean a changeless entity containing within itself the realization of all possibilities. This notion of perfection, borrowed from Greek metaphysics, haunts the Abrahamic religions. Instead, a religious atheism may propose that perfection refers to manner of changing. This is so important. A religion that embraces change and articulates a good kind of change may also embrace experimentalism in all human endeavors, rather than condemn it as sacrilegious. A religion that embraces change may look to the future with hope, rather than mark time waiting for God.

Second, because the religious, as Dewey calls it, is present in every experience we have, the goal of a religious community is not so much to add into experience the answer to the religious question, as to make explicit what is always within us. It is a natural human possibility to experience in every moment the full measure of our worth, including our dependence upon the order of nature for this worth. There is a meaning of salvation here. Salvation needn’t mean the creation of our worth by supernatural fiat, but can mean instead our choice to live in full consciousness of worth we always have. Salvation, for the religious atheism I propose, means to live deliberately.

I hope I have now offered sufficient reasons to make at least interesting the proposal that a religious atheism must identify something common to all human experiences, that this something refers to an order of nature, and that one thing we already know about this order is that we humans help to make it and that it grows, evolves, is self-surpassing. But is this order of nature truly cosmic in scope? Humans may contribute to it, but human intelligence anyway is certainly not cosmic in scope.

I want to suggest to you that a cosmic answer to the question of religion is the only possible kind of answer by reasons of logic. The cosmic answer is required by the success of a philosophical insight called the naturalistic fallacy. According to the naturalistic fallacy, no facts or ideals arising from facts can justify claims about worth and value. Define ‘worth’ or ‘value’ any way you please, but if this definition is to possess any claim to truth, you cannot appeal to any factual state of affairs: human nature, civilization, ecosystems, to give some examples. The fallacy follows from the recognition that any factual state of affairs offered as a definition of worth is restricted in scope, or local, and so excludes some aspect of reality. Any effort to include the previously excluded portion of reality requires a new, more inclusive state of affairs now defined as the meaning of worth but, since all states of affairs are local, you have the same problem all over again, and so on. The naturalistic fallacy is really a version of the turtle problem; philosophical claims require a final reason, so it can’t be turtles all the way down and it can’t be factual states of affairs all the way down, either.

But if the naturalistic fallacy tells us that any religious answer appealing to something local or factual is ultimately irrational, then it also tells us that any religious answer must appeal to something which is universal and necessary. Any principled argument must point to something existing, something existential, as the ground of justification, and if that ground of justification can’t be something which is factually existential, then it must be something existential for which there is no alternative, something universal and necessary, something expressed in the nature of things regardless of the facts. So the religious answer must be cosmic in scope.

If we combine this conclusion with the earlier conclusion that the religious answer is nature in some sense and is found in any possible human experience, then I suggest that the religious answer is not merely something cosmic, but is the cosmos itself, all things past, present, future, and all things expressing an order of nature in which all things participate, to which all things contribute. The term ‘nature’ means the set of all facts. The term ‘cosmos’ means ‘nature’ as including an order. The cosmos is not an abstraction, but reality in all its concreteness, including the concrete and universal expression of an abstract cosmic order.

If the cosmos is the answer to the religious question when pursued rationally, then a rational exploration of this answer must include the findings of modern science. The cosmos includes all facts, and science is the rational exploration of the facts. Carl Sagan suggests the cosmos, as described by astronomy and physics in particular, as an atheistic answer to the question of religion. I warrant that Sagan’s writings articulate a prolegomena to a new sort of religion. This religion, Sagan says, will find inspiration in the findings of science, but most important, it will find religious wisdom in the habits of mind and heart that the pursuit of science inculcates. It is worth quoting one entire paragraph from the book Pale Blue Dot:

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say “No, no, no! My god is a little god and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge” (PBD, 52).

But what religious wisdom might we gain from the scientific habit of mind? Sagan suggests that at least two important religious lessons follow from the cultural practice of science. First, the recognition of the vastness of the cosmos serves as irrefutable evidence that humanity is not the center of the universe, or even very important at all. Sagan refers to the period of the last 300 years as the time of ‘The Great Demotions.’ By contrast, the vastness of the universe is the inspiration to learn, to explore, to appreciate, to wonder. We must discover our value and our worth in the life of the cosmos, and we discover that worth not by merely enjoying how reality serves us, but by consciously experiencing the cosmic scale of all things serving one another.

Second, a religious atheism that includes the findings of science also re-works the meaning of worship. In fact, Sagan defines science as “informed worship” (GL, preface). What he means, I think, is that if religion is an exploratory enterprise, then the effort at understanding becomes the act of worship. Sagan quotes Carlyle as saying that “all religion begins with wonder.” We might define wonder as the emotional response to anything that expands our appreciation and so points to new values, vaguely sensed. We feel value haunting us with enjoyments yet unfelt, and the pull of these unattained enjoyments we feel as wonder. In the Abrahamic tradition, wonder is the appropriate response to supernatural mystery, forever beyond the scope of human reason. But for a rational religion of the cosmos, wonder compels us to grasp fully what is only vaguely felt and understood. Worship no longer expresses respect for everlasting mystery and is instead the work of attaining intimacy with the nature of things. As Sagan tells us, “we are the Cosmos come to know itself.”

Granted that the cosmos includes all the facts, and thus granted that science must inform our religious explorations, I claim that nevertheless a philosophical approach to religion is not synonymous with accepting a purely scientific description of the cosmos. Science may express worship, but science does not, I warrant, exhaust any rational meaning for worship. Philosophy remains the more inclusive enterprise, and for two reasons.

First, as the naturalistic fallacy indicates, not all of reality is factual. The cosmos possesses a metaphysical, or logically necessary, existential character, as well as a factual existential character. Existence is a modal term, possessing two aspects of meaning, and science is the study of the kind of existence which is factual, or contingent. The existence of the cosmos itself abides eternally even as the actual state of the cosmos changes from moment to moment with the activities of all particular things. Science, the study of these changing facts, cannot explore the eternal nature of the cosmos. Only philosophy, under the banner of conceptual clarity and logical consistency, can do this religious work.

Second, science is typically not so much the study of facts conceived fully, but rather is the study of facts insofar as facts are determined by previous facts. To the extent to which any fact causally influences other facts, the circumstances of the past can determine the future. Patterns arise in the emergence of present facts from the past, and prediction is possible. Laws of nature describe the cosmos insofar as the past determines the present, and prediction is possible.

But the cosmos includes an element not just of necessity, of causal determinism, but also of chance. Science labels types of chance, for example ‘random mutation’ in biological evolutionary law, but it cannot give reasons for chance to the extent to which it adopts the presumption of causal determinism. This metaphysical assumption at the basis of the natural sciences especially has provided great success in understanding the cosmos, but in the end a proper theory of nature must give reasons for the random creativity in fact, however slight in many cases. Philosophical examination of casual determinism discloses an inability to give reasons for the randomness found throughout nature and for the enormous creativity found especially in human activity. A proper understanding of the cosmos requires a metaphysics of partial determinism, the notion that any fact is influenced by previous facts, often tremendously so, but that finally each present fact identifies a creative response to past facts. All fact includes an element, however small, of creativity or subjectivity, or psyche.

Alfred North Whitehead, whose own metaphysics was panpsychic, describes the final real things as living, individual moments of self-enjoyment. He writes,

“…life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment. This must mean a certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature. Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation.” (MT 150)

Religion asks the question, what makes my life worthwhile, to what do I cast my ultimate loyalties? To say that the cosmos is the answer, the cosmos understood as an eternally evolving community of life or psyche to which we contribute for good or ill, is also to say that the act of appropriating others, of making our experiences out of what others have given, is how we have our very being. To acknowledge the cosmos as the source of meaning and value is to acknowledge both our dependence upon the work of others and that our own worth will depend upon what we give to others. To be anything at all, is to give and to receive. The subjective feeling of this ontological process is joy, the joy of getting to be anything at all because to be anything at all means to do the work of loving all of the world around you. To be anything at all, whether an atom or a human personality, is to possess what the Hindu tradition calls ‘ananda,’ that joy in existence without which the universe would collapse and fall apart. This ‘ananda’ is always with us; it is a part of our being, it exists throughout the cosmos. An atheistic religion of the cosmos brings the message that joy is always possible for us, the joy which constitutes our being.

If joy is always possible for us, how do we acquire it? Certainly we do not feel joyful all of the time. What does a atheistic religion of the cosmos tell us about how to be a human?

There is a wonderful story about Siddhartha Guatama, who became the Buddha. After he achieved enlightenment, people would come to him and ask, not ‘who are you?’ for he was too unusual for such a personal reference, but would ask instead ‘what are you’? Siddhartha would answer, “I am awake.” An atheistic religion of the cosmos asks that humans become awake, awake not to the joy of the fulfillment of desire, but the ontological joy of being anything at all.

Buddhist metaphysics speaks of dukkha, or suffering, which arises because we have desires. These desires, or skandas, cause tanha, the experience of ourselves as solitary, as an isolated ego inhabiting a body. According to Buddhism, the meaning of human fulfillment is to recognize the illusion of the solitary self and to recognize the solidarity of all existence. Sometimes this Buddhist doctrine is called the ‘no-self’ doctrine; Nibbana, the goal of human life, means to ‘blow out’ or to ‘extinguish’ the ego.

A religion of cosmic contribution agrees that we lose touch with the answer of religion when our experiences include only the hopes and values of the more immediate, personal aspects of our lives. Instead, we must wake up, become fully aware of the reality which surrounds us. Indeed, the capacity for considerable awareness is perhaps the greatest gift of the human species. The gift we have to offer to the cosmos, to all the emerging living things, whether atom or fellow creature, is our intelligence, our capacity to know that the cosmos exists, and to know that all things contribute to it. We might say that the distinctive work of humanity is to learn the full, cosmic value of every item in our experience, and to act fully appreciative of such value. This is the doctrine that the meaning of human existence is intelligence directed toward tenderness or gentleness or intimacy, to give to the world experiences which articulate the full cosmic importance of any thing intelligence encounters.

We must not extinguish ourselves do so, even in the sense of personal desires. Worship is the act of becoming conscious of the cosmos, the act of paying attention to the ontological, cosmic aspect of who we are, in every experience we have. Such worshipful action will not, I warrant, so much extinguish our ego, it will not stop our suffering, but it will bring the joy of knowing that have been given something even in our pain, it will bring the joy of knowing that we can still give even in our pain, and it will bring the joy of knowing that we can appreciate the cosmic importance of each thing we encounter. We can always take joy in the otherness of things, and of ourselves as giving and receiving, and we act out our conscious joy. There is the image of the ocean which receives the drop; I like better the image of the drop which receives the ocean.

Granted the general admonition to kindness, to intimacy, what are we humans to do now, on this planet, in these times? Thoreau begins Walden with the statement, “I went to the woods to live deliberately.”

What we must do, I offer to you all, is to go the woods. For the most part, the community of life we know is the ecological community on our home planet, Earth. To act with tenderness towards the items in the cosmos for us means largely to pursue intimacy with the things of the Earth, with our ecosystems. The human ecological niche is the transmission within Earth’s ecosystems of actions displaying the full cosmic worth of every item in that ecosystem. Such an ecosystem possesses intelligence as one of its species, rather than the primate homo sapiens. Such an ecosystem enjoys the weaving of tenderness into the otherwise pervasive character of reproductive fitness. Civilization becomes an element within such an ecosystem.

Most religions have a church or temple; for an atheistic religion of the cosmos, the temple is the prairie meadow, the seashore, the rainforest, the woods, the stars at night. It is not the place we must go to live, but it is the place we must go to remember and to feel why we live, to remain religious, that is to say, to remain awake.

Thank you very much.