Gospel & Universe 🍏 Starting Points

Layout

Overview - Two Main Sections - Tangents

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Overview

In Gospel & Universe I explore agnosticism, which is a philosophy centred on doubt. Agnostics are free 1. to confirm their doubt, which makes it easy to be skeptical, and 2. to doubt their doubt, which opens a path to belief. But they always come back to doubt, not as a form of inviolable truth, but as a way of going with life’s flow, and as a way of searching for what’s true.

Gospel & Universe begins with two wide-ranging introductory chapters, 🍏 Starting Points and 🧩 Complexities. These are followed by two main sections, Pathways to Doubt and Currents of Religion. In these sections I often use historical timelines, yet my arguments are more about the nature of doubt than about the historical development of doubt. In general, I go from early aspects of agnosticism, such as Greek critical thinking and the challenges of 16th and 17th century astronomy, to latter periods, such as the empiricism of the Enlightenment and the challenge of science and existentialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. I also highlight literature that’s relevant to agnosticism — for instance, the proto-agnosticism of Dickens in Bleak House and the Modern agnosticism of Forster in A Passage to India (🦖 At the Wild & Fog), the mix of existentialism & mysticism in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid), belief over doubt in Whitman & Zhuangzi (💫 Mystery), and doubt over belief in the early novels of Salman Rushdie (🇮🇳 Fiction).

The bulk of Gospel & Universe is written in essay form, although I often shift into fiction and autobiography: in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma a Parisian priest struggles with evolution and philology, and in 🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon the business troubles of Moses lead him to a novel form of monotheism; in ☠️ Ars Moriendi I deal with the death of my father and brother, and in 🇲🇽 Señor Locke I take a very personal look at Locke’s empiricism. This veering away from exposition and argument is in keeping with my notion that while agnosticism is a philosophical system, it remains, like literature, fundamentally experiential, phenomenological, and existential. At its heart it isn’t as much a logical system as it is a mode of operating. It urges us to think and feel critically, openly, eclectically, and ecumenically.

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Two Main Sections

The first large section, Pathways to Doubt, follows a rough chronological order. I start by looking at the revolutionary impact of astronomy (🔭 The Sum of All Space) and at the parallel rise of science and skepticism from the 16th to 20th centuries (🔬 Science & Mystery & ♒️ A River Journey). I then look at the skeptical and empirical strains in agnosticism, from the Greeks to the 19th century (❤️ Three Little Words), after which I look at 17th and 18th century empiricism in light of my personal experience while visiting Guanajuato in the year 2000 (🇲🇽 Señor Locke). I then look at the shift from pre- to post- Darwinian thinking in Dickens’ England (🦖 At the Wild & Fog), at the relation between existentialism and agnosticism (🎲 Almost Existential), and at a mystical version of the existential heroine (🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid).

Currents of Religion also follows a rough chronological order, starting with an overview of religious history (🌎 Many Tribes). I then look at the influence of Mesopotamian civilization on Judaism & Christianity (♒️ Currents of Sumer), at changing religious paradigms (⏯ Systems & ✝️ St. Francis), at a fictional Biblical & Mesopotamian scenario (🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon), at religion vs. science in contemporary France (🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma), at mysticism in Classical China & Whitman’s 19th Century Transcendentalism (💫 Mystery), at the battle against dogma in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century (🇮🇳 Fiction), and at the age-old puzzle of death (☠️ Ars Moriendi).

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Tangents

While chapters have themes and threads, I have a laissez-faire attitude in the pages themselves, taking tangents wherever I think they might yield some insight. A certain amount of latitude seems appropriate in an exploration of agnosticism, which seems to me a sliding, floating endeavour. It may be that if you’re willing to explore anything, you’re likely to shift your bearings quite often, and at times quite abruptly.

I follow timelines and threads, but beyond these are other grids and other fabrics. The lines we type onto the page or Internet stretch so far from us that eventually they become other, our scheme intersecting with other schemes, until we suspect that the universe is full of patterns and schemes, yet no clear and ultimate Scheme. To impose a pattern or gospel on the universe says more about us than it does about the cosmos. This is the meaning behind my title, Gospel & Universe.

“In this image taken on Oct. 30, 2021, an aurora dimly intersected with Earth's airglow as the International Space Station flew into an orbital sunrise 264 miles above the Pacific Ocean before crossing over Canada. Image Credit: NASA” (link here).