The Carolinian Trail

Wednesday, January 31, 2001

The loss of religious doctrine has left an empty place in my mind. This is not painful. In fact it is reassuring to know that I can live with uncertainty. Unanswered questions no longer threaten me they way I remember them doing when I was a teenager, or later during my years of intense Christian faith when doubt was tantamount to faithlessness.

Now it is only confusing and a little unsettling, as when visiting my friend Douglas earlier this week and we started talking about beliefs. He too is gay, but an organist happily employed in an inclusive United Church that is working through the process toward officially welcoming and affirming gay and lesbian members. I started to tell him that despite my alienation from organized religion, I'm not an atheist—then realized the question is still undecided.

Because maybe I am an atheist, whether I want to be or not.

Emerson did this to me, with his annoying essay, Nature! Reading it on Thursday raised more questions than it answered.

Today I waded through another essay, at Britannica.com, on existentialism, looking for common sense. But this perspective seems just as marked by diversity and contradiction as does Christianity. Just when part of it began to sound refreshingly different from what else I've been reading, the encyclopedia said this philosophy holds that existence is, "so to speak, transcendence." Which brought me right back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I started to feel a little bitter.

Once again I wish for a background in liberal arts with a course or two in philosophy. The problem is that as a naturalist I want to know what I'm writing about, and why. Is the universe created, an embodiment of the creator, or just this delightful thing that exists for no reason? The last possibility is starting to make the most sense to me.

Recently I've heard how quantum physics supports the idea that we can influence events at a distance, that our minds are somehow enmeshed in the æther that permeates all matter and energy. So consciousness is itself a substantial part of the universe. A reasonable conclusion would be that we are all part of a higher consciousness, God, or whatever you want to call it.

So after dancing with existentialism I searched Yahoo! and came up with a category devoted to "Quantum consciousness." But smack in the middle is an article entitled "The myth of quantum consciousness," by Victor J. Stenger, who explains how spiritual gurus have twisted the theories of thinkers like Einstein to suit their own assumptions, and bolster their own egos. Such faulty logic has occurred time and again in my own life, and the lives of religious pedagogues around me. I don't doubt Mr. Stenger for a moment.

It is human nature to want to believe we are much more significant than a randomly occurring species on an obscure planet in a mediocre galaxy. But the fact remains that if we ceased to exist, the universe could hardly care less, and planet Earth might be better off.

That's probably as close as I can come to stating what I really believe, and it's a rather dismal perspective to live with. It runs against all the things I value: beauty, integrity, compassion, my love for my children.

So why believe in anything? That takes me back to another text I located this winter, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), by William James. I haven't read it yet, but apparently it relates to the precept of modern psychology that religious experience is a neurosis—but a beneficial one. Individuals who can lay hold of some form of faith are generally more resilient, and capable of responding to stress or suffering. For example, there might not be a higher power, but believing in one still helps alcoholics change their behaviour constructively. In other words, believing in God may not be reasonable, but it's helpful.

Which leaves us in the position of choosing to believe in something not because it is true, but because it makes us better people. This sounds too pragmatic and not very spiritual. But at the moment that's where I'm working from.