The Varieties of Religious Experience
A small number of writers have adapted the style and conventions of science-fiction to tell stories that have little to do with science but much to do with theology. Writers of theofiction present a vision that is primarily religious rather than scientific, and raise important new questions that traditional theology has ignored.
By Freeman J. Dyson
About the Author: Freeman J. Dyson was born in 1923 in England. He received a BA degree in mathematics from Cambridge in 1945. Folowing a 1947 appointment as a Commonwealth Fellow to Cornell University, he pursued post-graduate work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was appointed professor of physics at Cornell in 1951, and returned to the Institute for Advanced Study as professor of physics in 1953. He has been Professor Emeritus since 1994. His two papers on the foundations of quantam electrodynamics have had a lasting influence on many branches of modern physics. His ability to write about complex scientific theories for the general public has won a wide audience for his books, which include Disturbing the Universe (1974), Weapons of Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986), and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1984 for Weapons of Hope, and the Lewis Thomas Prize from Rockefeller University. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in religion.
I. William James and Sir John Templeton
I begin with a quote from William James’s Gifford Lectures, given at Edinburgh a hundred years ago with the title: “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”
“Is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable? . . . . I answer No emphatically. . . . . No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. . . . . If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer . . . Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. . . . . We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life.”
My copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a little book bound in sky-blue cloth and bought in 1938 for seven shillings and sixpence, has been my constant companion ever since, [James, 1937]. My lecture tonight will be squarely based on James’s way of thinking. Even the title is borrowed from James. James looked at religion from the inside, and so do I. He was a professor of psychology, and he looked at religion as a psychologist looks at a patient, doing his best to see the world through the patient’s eyes. He was convinced that religions are an important part of our understanding of the world, that spiritual truths exist and can be apprehended by humans, and yet he insisted that the varieties of human experience lead us to a variety of truths. There was no place in his view of religion for exclusiveness or for claims of infallibility. There was no place for dogmatic certitude. James’s God was a presence that could be sometimes felt but never described. He was revealed more in people’s lives than in their thoughts. James was not interested in theology, and neither was James’s God.
I find it illuminating to compare William James with another great man who is embarked upon a similar quest, Sir John Templeton. John recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, and is still actively engaged in supporting and encouraging the study of religion. He has a personal philosophy which he calls Humility Theology, based on the notion that we shall understand much more about God if we begin by admitting our ignorance. William James would certainly have agreed with this notion. But William James and Sir John go about the study of religion in very different ways. James studied religion by studying the individual soul. His raw material was the lives of the saints and the writings of mystics. He made no attempt to be scientific. His insights came from personal narrative, not from scientific analysis. His aim was to explore the by-ways of religious experience, not to reduce them to a set of scientific conclusions.
Sir John follows a different road, because he believes that spiritual wisdom is to be found by combining the insights of religion with the tools and methods of science. The John Templeton Foundation spends a major part of its resources in the support of research and teaching in the field of “Science and Religion”.
“Science and religion” is a new academic discipline still in the process of defining itself. Its practitioners may be theologians, philosophers, psychologists, medical doctors, biologists or physicists. They engage in a great variety of studies with diverse methods and purposes. But the central purpose of Sir John in supporting such studies is clear. His purpose is to rejuvenate the ancient discipline of theology by bringing into it people and ideas from the new disciplines of science. His dream is to see experts in “science and religion” making new discoveries in religion, as revolutionary as the discoveries that have been made during the last century in science. He uses the phrase ``spiritual information’’ to define the goal that he is seeking.
One of the central new ideas in the physical sciences is complementarity, introduced by Niels Bohr in the nineteen-twenties as a way to describe the new world of quantum mechanics. Complementarity means the existence of two pictures of a physical process that are both valid but cannot be seen simultaneously. The best-known example of complementarity is the dual nature of light. Light sometimes behaves like a continuous wave and sometimes like a hail-storm of discrete particles. To see the wave nature of light, you do an experiment to observe its diffraction by a grating. To see the particle nature of light, you do an experiment to observe it kicking out electrons from a metal surface. The two experiments are complementary. Light is both waves and particles, but you cannot see a wave and a particle at the same time. The nature of light is richer than any of the pictures that we use to describe it.
When the idea of complementarity is applied to atomic processes governed by quantum mechanics, the idea is mathematically precise and is verified by a wealth of experiments. But Bohr liked to extend the idea to more general contexts where its use has remained controversial. Bohr introduced complementarity into biology, pointing out that a living creature can be studied either as an organic whole or as a collection of chemical molecules, but its behavior as a living organism and the behavior of its constituent molecules cannot be studied in the same experiment. In fact, the attempt to locate precisely all the molecules in a living creature would probably result in its death. He also spoke of the complementarity between justice and mercy in ethics, between thoughts and sentiments in psychology, between form and substance in literature, between frame and content in scientific theories. He spoke in an even more general way of “the mutually exclusive relationship which will always exist between the practical use of any word and attempts at its strict definition.’’
Following Bohr’s broad use of the word, I propose that religion and science are also complementary. The formal frame of traditional theology, and the formal frame of traditional science, are both too narrow to comprehend the totality of human experience. Both frames exclude essential aspects of our existence. Theology excludes differential equations and science excludes the idea of the sacred. But the fact that these frames are too narrow does not imply that either can be expanded to include the other.
Complementarity implies exclusion. The essence of complementarity is the impossibility of observing both the scientific and the religious aspects of human nature at the same time. When we are aware of the universe through a religious experience, nothing is quantitative, and when we are aware of the universe through scientific observation and analysis, nothing is sacred. To astronomers with a religious turn of mind the heavens may proclaim the glory of God, but the glory will never be captured in their computer models of star-clusters and galaxies. There is a danger that the academic discipline of “science and religion’’ may become a frame that excludes both genuine science and genuine religion. If frame A and frame B are mutually exclusive, then a frame C that tries to include both A and B is likely to end by excluding both. If science and religion are complementary, it is better that they should live apart, with mutual respect but with separate identities and separate bank accounts.
Contemporary discussions of science and religion often have a narrow focus, as if science and religion were the only sources of knowledge and wisdom. In fact science and religion belong to a wider array of human faculties, an array that also includes art, architecture, music, drama, law, medicine, history and literature. Several of these faculties have closer ties than science with religion. Every great religion has great art and great literature associated with it from ancient times. The connections between science and religion are by comparison recent and superficial. I find it strange that science should be singled out as the partner of religion in Sir John Templeton’s vision. If we look for insights into human nature to guide the future of religion, we shall find more such insights in the novels of Dostoyevsky than in the journals of cognitive science. Literature is the great store-house of human experience, linking together different cultures and different centuries, accessible to far more people than the technical language of science. William James was trained as a medical doctor and was familiar with the science of his time, but he paid far more attention to literature than to science in his study of religion. His book is full of marvelous quotes from writers ancient and modern, and has hardly a single reference to scientific journals.
For many years, ever since the personal computer became ubiquitous, we have heard prophets proclaiming that books will soon be obsolete, that the new generations raised on video images will no longer be interested in reading books. Nevertheless, books survive, and new books are still being written and read. Even if books become obsolete in the future, the content of books will be transferred to some other medium and literature will survive in another form. No matter how far we look into the future, humans will need a way to share their stories, and the sharing of stories is the essential basis of literature. Literature enables us to share the passions of Greek and Trojan warriors in the twelfth century before Christ, and of Hebrew prophets and kings a few hundred years later. Literature will remain as the way we embalm our thoughts and feelings for transmission to our descendants. Literature survives when the civilizations that gave birth to it collapse and die. All through our history, literature and religion have been closely tied together. It is literature that gives longevity to religion. Religions that have no literature may come and go, but the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospels and the Moslem Koran endure through the millennia. The more successful of the new religions of recent times also have their sacred books. Latter Day Saints have their Book of Mormon, Christian Scientists have their Life and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, and the Marxists have their holy scriptures too.
When I look around for a recent piece of research leading to an increase of spiritual information, I can think of no better example than the work of Elaine Pagels in studying and elucidating the ancient scrolls that were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Her book, The Gnostic Gospels, is a popular account of her work, explaining the origins of these early non-canonical Christian texts and the new light that they throw on the canonical texts which later became the Christian bible, [Pagels, 1979]. Pagels is not a scientist. Her skills and her tools have little to do with science. She is a linguist and a historian. Her skills are intimate knowledge of the Coptic and Greek languages, and her tools are literary and historical analysis. Her work has given us a new picture of the Christian religion as it existed in early times before orthodoxies were rigidly imposed and heresies stamped out. This glimpse of a different Christianity has had great influence in broadening the scope and style of Christian thinking. It helps to free Christianity from the dogmatism of past centuries, and resonates well with the new generation of students who call themselves Christian but feel more at home with heresy than with orthodoxy. The notion of complementarity can also be used to reconcile heresy with orthodoxy, to reconcile the view of Jesus seen in the Gnostic gospel of St.Thomas with the view seen in the orthodox gospels of the New Testament. The various gospels give us different views, but they are views of the same Jesus.
If I were asked to recommend a program for the increase of spiritual knowledge all over the world, I would suggest a program of support for scholars like Elaine Pagels who are learned in the languages and histories of other cultures and other religions, in the hope that they will discover and interpret other documents that were forgotten long ago or condemned as heretical. All religions have a tendency to become rigid and intolerant. Every religion has, buried in its past, heretical views that were suppressed. If we could recover some of the ancient heretical literature of other religions and make it accessible to students in the modern world, as Pagels has recovered and explained the suppressed literature of the Christian religion, we might succeed in broadening the outlook of all religions. With a broadened outlook, our diverse religions might be better able to live together in peace. Believers in each religion might come to see that all religions are complementary, giving us views of the same reality seen from different angles.
One of the finest Christian heretics was William Blake, whose poems and prophesies were not suppressed but ignored when he published them in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, [Blake, 1939]. His orthodox contemporaries considered him insane, and he narrowly escaped being put in prison for treasonable remarks against the British monarchy. Two hundred years later he is honored as an artist and as a poet and as a spokesman for the oppressed. His poem, ``The Everlasting Gospel’’, is another heretical gospel to put beside the Gospel of St. Thomas:
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Vision’s greatest enemy:
Thine has a great hook nose like thine,
Mine has a snub nose like to mine:
Thine is the friend of All Mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the blind:
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell’s gates.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.
In another place he wrote
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
William Blake, this crazy poet who invited us
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
gave us more spiritual information in a few lines than all the theologians and scientists of his time in their learned volumes. In the future too, if we are searching for spiritual information, we are more likely to find it among poets than among scientists.
2. Theology and Theofiction
In my thinking about religion, writers of science-fiction play a larger role than either poets or scientists. Science-fiction is generally despised both by scientists and by literary scholars as a bastard discipline combining bad science with bad writing. Much of it deserves their contempt, but some of it does not. I shall talk tonight about a small number of writers who have adapted the style and conventions of science-fiction to tell stories that have little to do with science but much to do with theology. Their stories are found on the shelves of bookstores among the classics of science-fiction, but they truly belong to a different genre to which I give the name theofiction. Writers of theofiction present a vision that is primarily religious rather than scientific. Their characters are exploring the meaning and purpose of the universe rather than the geography of particular places. They confront age-old problems of good and evil, not paying serious attention to the astronomical vistas and technological devices that serve as stage-scenery for their dramas. The writers that I shall discuss are Olaf Stapledon, Clive Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Octavia Butler. I chose these four only because I am familiar with them. There are many other writers of theofiction, many of them writing in languages other than English. Perhaps the greatest works of theofiction in the literature of Europe are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The limits of the genre are arbitrary, and I will not try to trace its history. I am asking whether the modern writers of theofiction may have raised important new questions that traditional theology ignored.
Olaf Stapledon is the most analytical of the four. When he was not writing fiction, he was a professional philosopher. At many places in his fiction, the philosopher is speaking through the mouths of his characters. The most explicitly theological of his stories is Star Maker, published in 1937, [Stapledon, 1968]. The hero is a non-descript character who sits down to rest on a hill overlooking his home and unexpectedly finds himself embarked on a tour of the universe. The first stop is a planet similar to Earth, where he finds a kindred soul to share his journey. From there he travels on to other worlds, enlarging his view of the cosmos and collecting a diverse group of fellow-travelers to explore further. He travels like Dante, through realms of horror and degradation, into realms of gradually ascending philosophic calm and understanding, until he stands finally in the immediate presence of the Star Maker. He then experiences the mystical union of the cosmos with the mind of the Star Maker. But that supreme moment is tragic rather than harmonious. Like God answering Job out of the whirlwind, the Star Maker strikes him down and rejects him. The Star Maker judges his creation with love but without mercy. In the end, our entire universe, in spite of all its majesty and beauty, is a flawed experiment. The Star Maker is already busy with designs for other universes in which our flaws may be repaired.
Seven years after Star Maker, Stapledon wrote Sirius, a less ambitious but more persuasive venture into theology, [Stapledon, 1972]. As a work of literature, Sirius is far superior. The story is more gripping and the characters more finely drawn. The most memorable of the characters is Sirius, a super-dog with a super-human brain. Stapledon was writing in the ninety-forties, before the chemical structure of DNA and the technology of genetically modified embryos had been discovered. A modern writer writing a story about a super-dog would naturally assume that the animal must be genetically modified. Stapledon did not need genetic engineering to imagine a super-dog. All he needed was old-fashioned growth-hormones infused into the dog’s brain by an old-fashioned dog-breeder. The setting of the story is sheep-dog country, the hills of North Wales during the Second World War, a time and a country where dogs and humans live and work together with mutual respect.
The story of Sirius is a tragedy. Sirius understands both the world of dogs and the world of humans, but he can find no place for himself in either world. Searching for a place and a purpose for his life, he becomes increasingly frustrated and angry. Then, in a moment of desperation, he is overwhelmed by a religious experience. A mystical peace descends on his soul, and an awareness of God that he is unable to describe in words. Afterwards he talks to his human owner and attempts to formulate a theology. The theology of a super-dog is necessarily different from human theology. Sirius’s God is a supreme hunter rather than a supreme judge or redeemer. Stapledon does not develop Sirius’s theology in detail. Sirius’s intellectual explorations are cut short, and the story ends in tragedy, because humans who do not know Sirius regard him as a dangerous monster. At the end of the story, we are left with the theological moral. God may have more qualities than we humans are capable of imagining. If we could enlarge our senses and our emotions beyond the human range, we would experience a very different God.
The second writer on my list is Clive Lewis, more commonly known as C.S.Lewis. Lewis was a professor of medieval literature and a more-or-less orthodox Christian believer. He believed in the traditional Anglican theology rather than the attenuated theology of the modern Anglican church. For him, Satan was a real and important presence, clearly visible in the evils of twentieth-century society. Lewis became famous as the author of The Screwtape Letters, a collection of letters written by the senior devil Screwtape to his young nephew, instructing the beginner how to tempt humans most effectively into paths of evil. The vividly drawn character of Screwtape gives a clear impression that Lewis was more interested in Satan than in God. The character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost gives the same impression, as William Blake observed: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Lewis too was a true poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it.
Lewis wrote three books that are usually classified as science-fiction, although they have almost nothing to do with science. These are a trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, [Lewis, 1952, 1965, 1972]. The three stories are staged on three planets, Mars, Venus and Earth. In the first two stories, the alien creatures inhabiting Mars and Venus are depicted as living like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden before the fall from grace, uncorrupted by technology and uncorrupted by evil. In Lewis’s mind, technology and evil are synonymous. The main character is a philologist who is able to learn the aliens’ languages and understand their culture. His companions who travel with him from Earth are technologists who only wish to destroy and dominate. The aliens, with the help of the philologist, succeed in defending themselves and preserving the innocence of their societies against the invasion of earthly technology.
The third story, taking place on Earth, shows Satan at work on the planet that he has made his own. The battle between good and evil occurs at a university town with a strong resemblance to Oxford. The force of evil is an organization called NICE, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, which Lewis describes as “the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world’’. The thoughtful people, for whom Lewis expresses so delicately his contempt and loathing, no doubt included many of his academic colleagues and particularly the scientists among them. The story begins with NICE successfully corrupting the leaders of the university, buying the town and the land around it, and establishing a totalitarian police-force to maintain law and order. After a prolonged struggle the forces of good, led by the philologist and other recalcitrant spirits, prevail, with substantial help from a number of mythical characters borrowed from Arthurian legend. The corrupted town and university are destroyed in an earthquake, and the story ends with virtue rewarded and lovers reunited.
When the three parts of the trilogy were published, the fairy-story That Hideous Strength turned out to be far more successful than the theological allegories, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Lewis then understood that his real talent was to be a writer of fairy-stories, and he went on to write a succession of books, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that became classics of literature for children. Meanwhile, the three books of the trilogy remain as classics in the literature of theofiction. The theology of Lewis is as conservative as the theology of Stapledon is radical. Lewis looks inward and backward to medieval England for his inspiration, Stapledon looks forward and outward to the remote future and the universe as a whole. In the preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis makes a generous acknowledgment to Stapledon: “Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow’’. Both Lewis and Stapledon were rich in invention, and their joint legacy is made richer by the fact that their philosophies were diametrically opposed to each other. Theofiction does not impose constraints on theology. Rather, it widens the theological imagination.
Madeleine L’Engle, the third writer on my list, has written more than thirty books of theofiction, generally classified as children’s literature but widely read and admired by adults. I will not attempt to summarize them. Instead, I will concentrate on her book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, which gives us a direct statement of her theology, [L’Engle, 1980]. Walking on Water is full of memorable quotations. Here is one borrowed from Archbishop William Temple: “It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion’’. Here is one from Saint Augustine: “If you think you understand, it isn’t God’’. Here is one from the Koran: “He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh’’. Here is one from Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, “If we begin with certainties, we will end in doubt, but if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty.” And here is one from L’Engle herself: “I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.”
L’Engle is a Christian, but she pays more attention to scientists than to theologians. She writes:
“I had been reading too many theologians, particularly German theologians. . . .I asked questions, cosmic questions, and the German theologians answered them all . . . . I read their rigid answers, and I thought sadly, if I have to believe all this limiting of God, then I cannot be a Christian . . . . It was the scientists, with their questions, with their awed rapture at the glory of the created universe, who helped to convert me . . . . A Wrinkle in Time was my rebuttal to the German theologians . . . . When I try to find contemporary twentieth-century mystics, to help me in my own search for meditation and contemplation, I turn to the cellular biologists and astrophysicists, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself, and their questions are theological ones: What is the nature of time? of creation? of life? What is human creativity? What is our share in God’s work?’’
L’Engle’s theology is Christian but not conservative. She believes in miracles, and she believes in the divinity of Jesus, but always leaves room for doubt and human fallibility. She believes also in the World-soul described by William James: “There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”
For L’Engle, there is a close connection between her religion and her work as a writer. She writes:
“The depth and strength of the belief is reflected in the work. If the artist does not believe, then no one else will. No amount of technique will make the responder see truth in something the artist knows to be phony. My faith in a loving Creator of the galaxies . . . is stronger in my work than in my life, and often it is the work that pulls me back from the precipice of faithlessness.”
Although L’Engle listens to what scientists have to say and has a deep understanding of many areas of science, her theology expresses itself in literature. For her, theology is an art and not a science.
Octavia Butler, the last of my four theofiction writers, is the only one that I know personally. I once spent a day with her, talking with an enthusiastic group of children from the inner-city schools of Chicago. We were performing together as a writer-scientist team, so that I could answer questions about science and she could answer questions about everything else. She could communicate with the kids much better than I could, since she grew up poor and black in California and the kids were mostly growing up poor and black in Chicago. She knows their world from the inside.
She has written two books of theofiction, with the titles Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, (Butler, 1995, 1998). She writes about the world she grew up in, as it might be in the future if things go badly. In the books, things go very badly. The climate has changed so that Southern California gets no rain at all. The minority of rich people live in armed fortresses. The majority outside are homeless and hopeless, scavenging in the ruins of civilization. Butler’s hero is Lauren Olamina, a young black woman, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. At the age of eighteen, she escapes when her home is destroyed and her family is murdered. She leads a handful of survivors on a long trek to the north. As she travels, she works out a personal religion which she calls Earthseed. She preaches Earthseed to people she meets on the way, to anybody who will listen, but the seed mostly falls on stony ground. Only a few believe and follow her. She says,
“God is power, infinite, irresistible, inexorable, indifferent. And yet, God is pliable, trickster, teacher, chaos, clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change’’.
This is not the Baptist religion of her father. This is something new.
Parable of the Sower ends with Lauren arriving at a remote place in Northern California where she establishes a community of nine adults and four children, battle-hardened survivors of the long trek. They settle down to raise their own food and practice their own religion. By dint of hard work and self-reliance, they survive and prosper for five years. One of the community members is a medical doctor. Lauren is married to him and they have a baby daughter. Parable of the Talents continues the story, with the daughter replacing her mother as narrator. After the years of chaos and banditry, a totalitarian regime is established, with a right-wing religious organization, the Church of Christian America, in charge, and shock-troops of young crusaders stamping out heresy. The crusaders stamp out the Earthseed community, imprison Lauren and take away her daughter. The daughter is adopted into a right-thinking Christian America family and has no contact with her mother for thirty years. Meanwhile, Lauren escapes from prison. She puts aside her dream of building self-sufficient Earthseed communities, so long as the crusaders are raging, and instead becomes an itinerant preacher. She preaches at first secretly, and then openly as the wave of persecution subsides and her converts increase in numbers and influence.
Unknown to Lauren, her younger brother Marc also survived the destruction of their home. He too has inherited their father’s talent as a preacher and is a rising star in the Church of Christian America. So brother and sister become leaders of rival religions, Marc clinging to the old orthodoxies and Lauren preaching the new wine of Earthseed. Marc keeps his talent safe in the ground while Lauren invests hers in daring ventures. An essential article of the Earthseed faith is to spread the seed of life into the universe:
“We are Earthseed, and the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars . . . to live and thrive on new earths . . . to explore the vastness of heaven . . . to explore the vastness of ourselves.”
The story ends with Lauren dying, old and rich and famous, while the first Earthseed starship is being prepared for take-off. When it takes off, her ashes will be on board, ready to fertilize Earthseed crops on another world. Her daughter stays behind with Uncle Marc, wondering why God spurned their years of faithful service and gave that crazy old heretic his blessing.
The theology of Earthseed might be called Action Theology. It has much in common with the Liberation Theology that arose out of a similar background of poverty and oppression in Latin America. Lauren stated the essence of it in her verses:
“Chaos is God’s most dangerous face—amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape chaos. Shape God. Act . . . Only actions guided and shaped by belief and knowledge will save you. Belief initiates and guides action, or it does nothing.”
God exists in the shape of action, and only through action can we bring him into our lives.
I have sketched very imperfectly the four theologies that are expressed in the writings of my four authors: in Stapledon, a theology of transcendence, with a God who plays with universes as a composer plays with melodies; in Lewis, a theology of traditional Christianity, with devils and angels fighting over human souls; in L’Engle, a theology of artistic creation, with a Christian God whose nature is glimpsed in parables and stories; in Butler, a theology of action, with a God who exists to shape human action and to be shaped by human action as he evolves. What general conclusion or moral can we draw from these diverse visions of God?
We certainly cannot reach any agreed wisdom by reducing these four writers to their lowest common denominator. What they have in common is trivial. It is their profound differences that are important. Their differences teach us that theology may have wider scope and greater freedom than it has had in the past. Just as science-fiction shows us that there may be more things in heaven and earth than we are capable of imagining, so theofiction tells us that there may be more different kinds of God. These four writers, and many others that I do not happen to know so well, give us glimpses of what theology may become, if theology grows to comprehend the abundant flowering of cultures and sciences and religions in the modern world. In the last thousand years, the masterpieces of Dante and Milton brought theology to millions of readers who never grappled with the writings of Aquinas or Abelard. Likewise, in the next thousand years, we may expect that the next great masterpieces of theofiction will do more than the writings of professional theologians, “to justify the ways of God to men.”
3. The Varieties of Neurological Impairment
In the final section of this lecture I shall talk about theological insights that we may derive, not from stories of imagined people, but from stories of real people who live in mental worlds different from ours. They live in different worlds because they suffer from different varieties of neurological impairment. They are truly alien intelligences living together with us on planet Earth.
We have known for hundreds of years that the universe has room in it for other intelligent inhabitants living on other planets. If our ongoing attempts to detect their existence should be successful, this will be a big triumph for science but will not be in any sense a setback for theology. Since the time of Giordano Bruno, the multiplicity of worlds has frequently been a subject for theological speculation. Isaac Newton himself remarked in one of his theological manuscripts:
“And as Christ after some stay in or neare the regions of this earth ascended into heaven, so after the resurrection of the dead it may be in their power to leave this earth at pleasure and accompany him into any part of the heavens, that no region in the whole Univers may want its inhabitants,’’ (Manuel, 1974).
God may be portrayed in a million different shapes in a million inhabited worlds, without any diminution of his greatness.
Likewise, the transition from a Newtonian cosmology of infinite space and absolute time to an Einsteinian cosmology of relativistic space-time has not changed the age-old mystery of God’s relation to the physical universe. I see no reason why God should be inconvenienced if it should turn out that our universe started with an unpredictable quantum fluctuation giving rise to an inflationary expansion, or if it should turn out that we live in one of a multitude of universes. My conception of God is not weakened by my not knowing whether the physical universe is open or closed, finite or infinite, simple or multiple. God for me is a mystery, and will remain a mystery after we know the answers to these questions. All that we know about him is that he works on a scale far beyond the limits of our understanding. I cannot imagine that he is greatly impressed by our juvenile efforts to read his mind. As the Hebrew psalmist said long ago, [Ps. 147], “He hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse, neither delighteth He in any man’s legs.” Translating the psalmist’s verse into modern polysyllabic idiom, we might say, “He hath no pleasure in the teraflops of a supercomputer, neither delighteth He in any cosmologist’s calculations.”
We do not need to postulate alien intelligences in the sky or cosmologies with multiple universes in order to raise new questions concerning religion. Religious questions are best raised by looking at real people with real problems and real insights. Neurology comes closer than cosmology to the questions that are at the heart of theology. Neurology gives us evidence of the way human perceptions and human beliefs come into being. By studying the perceptions and beliefs of people who live in worlds different from ours, we may better understand our own. I am a physicist with no pretensions to be an expert in neurology. When I write about neurology, I write as a layman. My knowledge of neurology is largely derived, not from the technical literature, nor even from the non-technical literature, but from television programs addressed to the general public. I have in mind four one-hour television programs that I recently watched, with the neurologist Oliver Sacks as guide. These depict in vivid fashion the four different worlds inhabited by four groups of people with different kinds of neurological impairment. They have certain features in common. Each of the four neurological impairments is congenital, each of them deprives the affected people of an important human faculty, and each of them is ameliorated by the amazing ability of the human brain to work around obstacles.
The simplest of the four syndromes is achromatopsia, the severe form of color-blindness in which the color-sensing cones in the retina are missing and only the rods remain, [Sacks, 1998]. People with achromatopsia have excellent night-vision but are almost blind in direct sunlight. Many of them adapt to their disability by learning to live like nocturnal animals. Oliver Sacks showed us a community with a high incidence of achromatopsia, living on a South Pacific island. There the achromatopes specialize in night-fishing, a productive occupation for which their disability turns into an advantage.
Far greater obstacles are faced by people with Usher’s syndrome, who are born totally deaf and then in middle age become gradually blind. They too can adapt to their disability if they live in a supportive community. As children they become fluent in sign language. They are able to communicate with one another and to absorb an education as readily as other deaf children. Then as adults, when their sight begins to fade, they can continue to communicate by sign language, the listener touching the hands of the speaker to feel the signs. They can continue to read and write by transferring their skills from print to Braille. Within the community of the deaf-blind, they are not isolated by their double disability and can maintain the social contacts that give meaning to their lives.
The third of the four disabilities is Williams’s syndrome, a genetic defect with consequences less easily described but more profound than Usher’s syndrome. People with Williams’s syndrome have all their five senses but lack the ability to integrate their sensory universe into a quantitative framework. They do not live in the solid three-dimensional world that normal people take for granted. They have great difficulty in forming concepts of shape and size and number. They cannot draw pictures of things, and their world contains no mathematics. They have a characteristic facial appearance which marks them as different from other people. To compensate for these disabilities, many of them are verbally and musically gifted. They are also socially gifted. They have a child-like spontaneity and a cheerful temperament which enables them to make friends easily.
The fourth and most mysterious disability is autism. Autistic people have their senses unimpaired and have no difficulty with abstract concepts of shape and number. Their disability lies at a deeper level. They are born without the normal human ability to attach meaning to things that they see and hear and feel. They have great difficulty learning to talk, and many of them remain speechless all their lives. It happens that the leading character in the autism section of Oliver Sacks’s program is Jessica Park, a lady whose family I have known since before she was born forty years ago. Her mother Clara Park has described her agonizingly slow development in a book with the title The Siege, a classic in the history of autism, (Park, 1982). Jessica was, as her mother wrote, “faced with a world in which an unreadable welter of impressions obscures even the distinction between objects and human beings.” Like other autistic children who learn to speak, for many years Jessica used the pronouns “I’’ and “you’’ interchangeably. She had no concept of her own identity or of the identities of other people. Her mother recorded the fact that she used the word “heptagon’’ correctly before she used the word “yes’’. Through the patient and devoted efforts of her parents and teachers, she has continued for forty years to learn new social skills and to increase her command of spoken language. Her intellectual growth has never stopped. Every year she becomes more independent and more capable of managing her own affairs. Through her paintings she is able to communicate glimpses of her inner world that cannot be communicated in words. Her paintings are exhibited and sold and bring her a modest income. In the television program we see her as she is today, after forty years of adapting to a world that is still largely beyond her comprehension. She speaks to a public audience and responds to questions. She is proud and happy because her gifts as an artist have been recognized. She talks about her paintings. Her speech sounds unnatural but is loud and clear.
What have these four disabilities to do with theology? Each of the four groups of people that I have described lives in a different world, and we normal people live in a fifth world different from theirs. Since we are the majority and have organized our world to suit our needs, they have been forced to adapt their ways of living so as to fit into our society as best they can. On the whole, they have adapted well to our world, but they still do not belong to it. They are aliens living here as guests. I find it illuminating to imagine the situations that would arise if the people with any one of the four disabilities were the majority and we were the minority. Wells already explored such a situation in his story, “The Country of the Blind’’, a hundred years ago. If the majority were suffering either from achromatopsia or from Usher’s syndrome, we would be in a situation similar to Wells’s story. The gifts of color-vision and hearing which seem to us so precious would have little value in the world of the achromatopes or the world of Usher’s syndrome. In the Usher’s world, our spoken language would be for our private use only. We would be forced to think in sign language in order to fit into the prevailing culture. But these first two disabilities are superficial compared with the third and fourth. The worlds of Williams’s syndrome and autism differ from ours profoundly enough to require a different theology.
In the Williams world there is no mathematics and no science. Music and language flourish, but there is no concept of size or distance. The glories of the natural world are enjoyed but not analyzed. Nature is described in the language of art and poetry, not in the language of science. What kind of a theology can arise in the Williams world? We can imagine many possibilities for a Williams theology, all of them different from our own. Our Judeo-Christian theology begins with the first chapter of Genesis, with days that are numbered and counted. “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” and the second day, and so on up to the sixth day. Our conceptions of God, like our conceptions of the universe, are rooted in an exact awareness of the passage of time. These conceptions are alien to the Williams world. A Williams theology would be more likely to resemble the theogony of the ancient Greeks, with gods riding in chariots across the sky and demi-gods hiding in bushes and caves on the earth.
In the autistic world there is no sin. Jessica Park’s mother remarks on the fact that her word is absolutely trustworthy. Jessica cannot tell a deliberate lie because she has no concept of deceit. She cannot conceive of other people’s thoughts and feelings, and so the idea of deceit cannot arise. There is no way for her to imagine doing deliberate harm to other people. When she hurts people, by losing her temper or throwing a tantrum, the hurt results from impatience and incomprehension, not from malice. If sin means deliberate malice, then Jessica is incapable of sin. When Jessica’s father was asked whether she loves her family, he answered, “She loves us as much as she can.” That is a precise statement of Jessica’s condition. In the autistic world, humans love each other without understanding each other, and are incapable of hate. The theology of the autistic world must be radically different from Judeo-Christian theology. Since there is no sin, there can be no fall from grace and no redemption. Since other people’s sufferings are unimaginable, the suffering of an incarnate God is also unimaginable. The autistic theology will probably be like Jessica’s character, simple and transparent, concerned only with innocent joys and sorrows. The strongest link between Jessica’s world and ours is that we share a common sense of humor and can laugh at each other’s jokes.
The most important lesson for us to learn from imagining these alternative worlds is humility. In each of the four worlds, humans are well adapted to their situation and are totally unaware of what we consider to be their disabilities. They believe that they are well informed and aware of everything that is going on in the world around them. In the Williams and autistic worlds, I imagine them building a religion and a theology to explain their world and their place in it. We know, of course, that they are unaware of huge and essential parts of their environment and are incapable of understanding what they cannot imagine. We know that their religion and theology are deeply flawed because they are based on a partial view of reality. If we are honest, we must ask ourselves some hard questions. Why should we believe that we are different? Why should we believe that our view of reality is not also partial, that our religion and theology are not equally flawed? How do we know that there are not huge and essential features of our universe and of our own nature of which we are equally unaware? Why should we believe that the processes of natural selection, which shaped us to survive the hazards of living in a world of fierce predators and harsh climates, should have given us a brain with a complete grasp of the universe we live in? These are the questions that neurology raises. Oliver Sacks has shown us glimpses of alien worlds. His glimpses are powerful arguments for the thesis that there may be more things in heaven and earth than we are capable of understanding. With this conclusion, William James and Sir John Templeton can both agree.
Notes
Blake, William, 1939. Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch Press, London. Quotes from pp. 118, 133, 182, 183.
Butler, Octavia E., 1995. Parable of the Sower, Warner Books, New York. Quote from p. 22.
Butler, Octavia E., 1998. Parable of the Talents, Seven Stories Press, New York. Quotes from pp. 27, 249, 313.
James, William, 1979. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, being the Gifford lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902, Longmans Green and Co., London and New York. Quote from page 477.
L’Engle, Madeleine, 1980. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois. Quotes from pp. 65, 88-90, 106, 117-118, 129, 132, 148-149.
Lewis, C. S., 1952. Out of the Silent Planet, (first published 1938), Pan Books, London.
Lewis, C. S., 1965. Perelandra, (first published 1944), MacMillan Co., New York.
Lewis, C. S., 1972. That Hideous Strength, (first published 1946), MacMillan Co., New York. Quotes from pp. 7 and 23.
Manuel, Frank E., 1973. The Religion of Isaac Newton, London, Oxford University Press. Quote from pp. 135-136.
Pagels, Elaine, 1979. The Gnostic Gospels, New York, Random House.
Park, Clara, 1982. The Siege, Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, Little, Brown and Co.
Sacks, Oliver, 1998. The Island of the Color-blind, (first published 1996), Vintage Books, Random House, New York.
Stapledon, Olaf, 1968. Star Maker, (first published 1937), Dover Publications edition, New York, in one volume with Last and First Men.
Stapledon, Olaf, 1972. Sirius, (first published 1944), Dover Publications edition, New York, in one volume with Odd John.