The Double Refuge 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim
Doubt + Belief
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The reason I suggest embracing both 🔹 doubt and 🔸 belief is that neither can do everything we’d like them to.
🔹 The Need for Doubt. The most solid religious belief can’t explain the physical world, nor can it explain other religious beliefs. As a result, there’s good cause to doubt solid religious beliefs, and to make room for other explanations. We can still believe the basic and vague points — about love, forgiveness, redemption, meaning, etc. — and we can still believe in specific incarnations — Jesus, Krishna, etc. Yet if we’re after universal truth, we can’t assume that religion explains science or that all the other beliefs in the world are fantastic or wrong.
🔸 The Need for Belief. Likewise, the most impeccable reason can’t explain why we’re here or where we’re going after it all ends. Evolution may tell us how we got here (at least since the ‘creation’ of the biosphere), but why evolution did this remains a mystery. We really do seem to have come from stardust, but why would this dust cohere to make this life possible? As the saying goes, Heaven only knows! Science can’t explain it all, so it throws the question over to the arationality of religion. Heaven only knows.
And yet whether or not Heaven actually knows is debatable. Khayyam writes that there’s little use asking Heaven, because “the Powers that Be are themselves in a spin.” In Rg Veda — the first Hindu text, written c. 1450 BC — the poet says that only the God in the highest Heaven knows where this universe came from … “or perhaps He does not.”
Yet at least religion gives us a plethora of possibilities here, many of them responding to our deepest needs, fears, and hopes. If we’re going to dream beyond our our knowledge and beyond science itself, we may as well dream big. And who knows, according to the doubts that reason casts on itself, we may in fact have an eternal soul, and we may in fact soar from this world to some better place, or shift into some other dimension after we die. As the Spanish say, Ojala! — a phrase borrowed from Islam meaning If God wills it!.
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Put briefly, doubt allows us to explain the physical here and now, and belief gives us hope about things we can’t know for sure.
🔹 Doubt
Doubt can be liberating, but it can also create chaos, angst, and alienation. Above all, it can bring meaninglessness. I see this situation in terms of cause and effect: the cause is the combination of reason and science, which are like the sturdy ramparts of a castle; the effect is the alienation of existentialism, which is like a wobbly watchtower above.
Cause — Because reason and science work hand in hand, they can be a formidable pair. It’s useless to argue against the facts of space and time, geography and history, evolution, DNA, and biological structure. And there’s no debating the two simple, basic facts: we live and we die (even taxes are less certain). While it’s true that the facts of our neurology allow us 🔺to think for ourselves, 🔺to change the world around us, and 🔺to imagine metaphysical worlds, our thoughts can’t dissolve or supersede these facts. We may feel like we transcend this world in moments of meditation or prayer, yet we always come back down to earth. It’s also debatable if we ever left.
No matter what our philosophy, we remain circumscribed by physiology, from our earliest days in a crib to our final moments in a wooden box. The only exceptions to this are 🔺 when we were born someone put us onto a bed rather than into a crib, and 🔺 when we die someone cremates our body on a pile of burning sticks rather than buries it in the ground.
Effect — Because the logic of reason and the physics of science are so relentless, they force us into acceptance of the scientific method, which is wonderfully solid thing, yet also a never-ending search for truth. This search is conducted within the parameters of its own rational understanding of the physical universe. In terms of Sartre’s existentialism, we might say that this type of existence is only comprehensible on its own terms, and these terms don’t include essence or spirit.
It can be a great freedom — especially if we’ve been brought up to believe in a rigid and exclusive doctrine — to think freely, to no longer be tied by dogma. Yet it can also be uncomfortable, even terrifying, to live with the sense that there’s no meaning in the world or in our lives. Khayyam puts this powerfully when he depicts a waster on the ground, a man who doesn’t believe in anything, and asks, “Who in this world has the courage of this man?”
We may think we’re strong and can go it alone, yet it’s very likely that sooner or later we’ll need help. And humans aren’t always willing to help. In such a case, it’s a great relief to find refuge in belief, in the notion that however miserable or misguided we are, and however messed up the world is, there is still Something Better. Something Else. However far we fall, there’s always redemption. Indeed, as Rumi points out, desperation is a powerful conduit to belief:
This translation, as well as the one below, are by Andrew Harvey (from Love’s Fire, 1988).
The desire for belief isn’t just a reaction to alienation or despair. It can also be caused by 🔺 an understanding of the limits of human knowledge, combined with 🔺 an appreciation of the beauty and awe that surrounds us.
No matter how expansive knowledge may seem, and not matter how wonderful existence may be, sooner or later we realize that our conceptions are just too tiny to make sense of our existence. No amount of romanticization can make Blind Chance sound reassuring. Sartre expressed the paradox of our liberated plight succinctly: “We’re condemned to freedom”; « Nous sommes condamnés à la liberté. »
🔸 Belief
Belief is likewise insufficient on its own. While belief can appear to be liberating — it can supply a meaning that’s impossible to find in this world — it can also take too solid a form. I see it doing this in at least two ways:
1. Belief can elevate our goals so high that all we see is the distance between the heavenly Ideal and the woe-begotten Earth. This creates a gap or chasm between our rational and practical lives here on planet Earth, and our emotional lives on a higher plane, a metaphysical dimension, or the astrophysical paradox of Heaven on Earth. Too often we say we want this Higher Realm, but what we really want is fresh air, water and food, a house on a lake, a car that doesn’t break down, a sexy mate, and commercial-free streaming. Dante writes elegantly about “the bread of angels,” but most of us want a beer and slice of pizza.
2. Belief can also reduce our diverse and ambiguous experience to doctrines and catechisms. It can dilute free thought, and can fix within us ideas like predestination, original sin, caste, the Chosen People, the Elect, the End of Days, the Whore of Babylon — or, in the worst of cases, War in the Name of God. In brief, belief can put us in a different type of box.
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Belief can give us a sense of meaning, a sense that we’re worthwhile in the greater scheme of things. We have a soul despite our shortcomings, and this soul fits into a greater spiritual superstructure, which lends us a place in the cosmos. Belief also connects us to others who believe, which creates a sense of community and belonging.
Yet none of this requires exclusivity. Just because we believe in one religious system doesn’t mean that there’s only one type of type of religious system, only one type of spiritual journey, or only one type of greater meaning. Doubting the superiority of our own particular belief system opens us to all the others. By giving ourselves the freedom to doubt, we can more confidently explore both science and religion. And if we give ourselves the freedom to explore spirituality, we’re more likely to go beyond tolerance and ecumenicalism to an understanding, through experience, of other religions. This is a type of lived Comparative Religion. It’s not just understood from afar — from either the academic’s chair or the throne of one who already knows the One and Only Truth. If we’re going to believe in a God that has no limits and can’t be circumscribed by reason, why ascribe to Him specific limits?
Belief also helps us cope with difficult aspects of life that doubt can’t help us with. For instance, if we have a belief in a Greater Benevolent Power, we can cope better with suffering and danger. I suspect that many avowed atheists quickly swapped their disbelief for belief when they hurtled toward death in the crashing plane, or when they faced the torturer’s knife. Psalm 23 may well have come to mind: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me … In this case, atheists instinctively (and miraculously) transformed into theists, despite themselves.
Belief is equally helpful in confronting the unknown realms of dream and the afterlife. Psychologically, belief can help us come to terms with what Jung calls the shadow, that is, the darker, perhaps animal part of us that lingers in our primal selves. With a belief in a universal Good, be it in the form of Krishna or Saint Mary, we may go to sleep more easily, knowing that we may soon be thrown into the chaos of our dreams, knowing that we may be confronted by a tiger’s teeth, or a killer’s blade deep in the jungle of dreams we can’t control. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me / Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies… If we can’t think outside our own box of doubt, we have no backup, no refuge from the relentless and powerful currents that operate inside our own minds.
Belief is perhaps most needed when we contemplate death. As Hamlet notes, dreams are a foretaste of the afterlife, which may or may not exist. Hamlet says “perchance to dream”; that is, we sometimes dream and sometimes don’t. The only certainty here is that we don’t know if we’ll exist in an afterlife.
Yet even in thinking about the afterlife, it helps to entertain a positive sense about the universe. Who knows what sort of Purgatory or Hell awaits?
The mind reels. This is where it helps to entertain the notion of a benevolent God, or any form of Grace so powerful that whatever our misdeeds, we might still find peace and meaning.
Why stubbornly resist the idea of God and Grace, when we can’t be sure they don’t exist, and when they might be so helpful in moments of danger and death? Why not keep our reasonable doubt, yet keep our minds open to belief?
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Next: 🍷 The Battered Caravanserai