The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Is belief in a supreme being harmless?

Some of my friends cannot accept the fact that there is no higher force governing us in some way. They believe in God.

I think that this belief and faith in whatever created the universe which many young people have is a beautiful and wonderful thing. I wouldn't think much of them if they were cynically "realistic" and callous at their age. But I know they haven't had much time to think about just what it is that they believe in, or what exactly they have faith in. And I believe that over time they will get more and more sophisticated in their understanding of themselves and of the world, most of them, and will have much more to tell me over time about how this deep belief evolves.

I have hope and faith, too, but I resurrected it with great difficulty from a world that believed in nothing. I grew up amongst very ignorant people who pretended to believe in God but who could hardly spell the word. Since I hated their hypocrisy, for many years I described myself as an atheist. But now I prefer the term agnostic.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog", said that atheism was too strong a position for him to take since it claimed that he definitely knew that there was no God. Huxley said it was more accurate to say that he had no knowledge of, or reason to believe that there existed, such a God. Gnostic is a Greek word for knowledge, and a-Gnostic simply means without knowledge. Like Huxley, I have no reason to believe in anything as ill-defined and vague as "God", but can't claim such detailed knowledge of the entire cosmos that I can entirely rule out the possibility either. Reading science fiction in my youth revealed the possibility of much stranger things out there in space and time than what most people call "God". And a candid look at our own evolutionary origins would argue that anything as tiny as the human brain isn't capable of comprehending much more than how something as tiny as a body controlled by such a brain could survive in its particular ecological niche of its particular galaxy. As Einstein said, "The most amazing thing about the universe is its comprehensibility."

Young people who are just starting to wonder about life look at the incredible order of the universe, how the earth is at just the right distance to the sun for there to be life. They see the wonderful complexity of the human body, of the ecosystem, of everything, and they just cannot believe that it was all an accident. They believe there had to be planning behind it — it couldn't have all been coincidence. It's all to beautiful and mysterious and complex for that.

I agree with their observations and share the awe and wonder that they feel. But I don't feel the need to inject a supernatural being into the picture. In fact, I don't feel it's my place to do that. It seems vain and pompous to think that any of us could in a sudden flash of insight figure out why everything exists. Although the grandeur and historical weight of the very word God makes it sound philosophically unassailable, to ascribe the entire visible universe to a God isn't much different than ascribing electricity to the Electricity Elf — which would sound rather silly these days. I believe simply that the universe certainly is mysterious and puzzling, and that slowly mankind will learn more and more about it. In the meantime I'm glad it's here, I'm glad I'm here, and I'm glad you're here.

And not dragging God into the picture does not mean that you need to believe the universe came about by chance or accident. The universe certainly is well ordered and in many ways amazingly predictable, but the laws of physics and chemistry seem to provide the beginnings of a much more credible explanation of how everything works than just to recite a mantra that says, "God keeps it running this way."

Being thankful to whatever power it is that provides us with the beauty that surrounds us is a natural human feeling. But it could be equally directed to Mother Earth, our venerable ancestors, the Rock of Gibraltar — or any other icon capable of symbolizing grandeur, like the Sun. Personally, I'm grateful for whatever interior logic and scientific laws there may be that rule our universe, prevent it from deteriorating into chaos, and have provided me with a good and bountiful world and the love I have been fortunate to give to and receive from other people.

As long as a person who wants to believe in God realizes that this is a feeling and not a scientific certainty, and that feelings can be trusted only until they are demonstrated not to reflect reality — in other words, for just so long as it doesn't matter whether they are true or false — then no harm can come from indulging in such an ancient belief as the age-old God cult. Everything depends on whether the person is open to learning. If they are, then it really doesn't matter what they believe today, does it? I never ask such people to give up their belief in God. I only ask them to continue to be open to the greater truths that they will discover in coming years, to realize that anything we can see today is only a special case of larger insights that are "out there" waiting to be discovered. In this light, the irony of an omnipotent being becoming harmless is exquisite.

This same constructive self-criticism that I advocate has been gaining momentum at all levels of civilized living for thousands of years. In science, for example, every theory is sooner or later overturned. But it isn't completely refuted. Rather it is seen as a special case in a larger framework of truth. Newtonian physics, for example, is a special case of Einsteinian physics. It's perfectly adequate as an explanation for most things as long as you don't talk about objects traveling near the speed of light. Then you need a more complex mathematics to really do justice to what's going on.

Similarly, Freud's psychology, which focused on feminine personalities, and Adler's psychology, which focused on masculine personalities, achieved a higher synthesis in Jung's psychology, which accurately described both introverted and extroverted types.

Actually, our thinking tends to follow three phases: magic, religion, and then science. In the first human minds capable of fantasy, mysterious events were credited to fairies and sprites from the spirit world. You can see that the purpose of this kind of explanation is not to lead the way to a deeper investigation of the event in question, but simply to lay the mystery to rest. If a mysterious event — a strange sound in the middle of the night, say — could be written off as a fairy hiccupping, then you didn't have to wonder much about it. That was good for our ancestors, because their enlarged brain made them want to understand everything all at once. When they couldn't, their perplexity was painful. So, in the absence of much real information about their world, our ancestors invented fairies and sprites so that, like your Aunt Betty, they had an answer for everything.

Then as time went on some of the more curious people realized that such explanations only raised more questions than they satisfied. Where did the fairies come from, after all? Perhaps a strange noise in the night could have other, more natural, explanations? So right there arose a conflict between people who didn't have time to think hard and people who didn't mind thinking.

I'm actually quite interested in the history of religion because much of man's deepest thoughts and feelings have been ascribed to religious influences of one sort or another. And it is easy to trace a clear progression from the mundane to the sublime to the scientific in man's spiritual life. The Greeks believed in gods and goddesses, for example, but had no idea of the One Almighty God that the Jews would believe in. Actually, monotheism was invented by Aknahton, a great Egyptian ruler and, I would say, philosopher. Like my young friends, he too couldn't imagine such a wonderful universe just popping into existence. And he didn't think much of fairies and sprites. So he came up with a much grander theory — that of a supreme being: a unique being about whom every quality was infinite.

This great leap forward for mankind — and it was for it's day — carried a lot of philosophical implications that we've been wrestling with ever since. Not the least of which was this: how can a lowly creature such as ourselves have any knowledge or comprehension whatsoever of something that is infinite and eternal? Many philosophers have come to the conclusion that, in fact, we can't know that much about the infinite and eternal while we are locked into our tiny finite and mortal bodies, that the extent of our comprehension as a species is limited to what our senses and what our human-centered science tells us.

However, it was always very clear to these philosophers — and the theologians who agreed with them — that people are always going to have strong beliefs that impel them to do great deeds. How shall we classify the belief in human magnificence that fuels the fight for social justice, the belief that forming labor unions, for example, can liberate millions of workers? Is this merely an unsubstantiated superstition? Surely the human heart has a right to deep hope and abiding faith in the cause of human progress itself.

In the 1800's a Frenchman named Comte said, yes, faith and belief are inalienable, and in fact quite useful, components of human psychology, but they needn't be grounded in a fantasy of a supreme being that never comes out of the clouds. They should be grounded where they belong — in humanity itself, in the great causes of social progress and international peace — liberty, equality, and fraternity, as his compatriots had just declared. Comte was the first philosopher to divide the history of thought into three periods: the period of magic, the period of religion, and the period of science. He said that the religions of his day would wither away as people realized that their belief and faith should be invested in the future of mankind. He said that when they felt such inner faith, it was really faith in man's ability to build a world fit for people to live in.

Most of the socialist and communist thinkers that came after him borrowed this idea. They saw that the roots of religion — belief in the future, and faith in mankind — were good, but had to be distinguished from religion's chronic involvement with superstition, cowardice and comforting delusions. This kind of religion Marx accurately branded "the opiate of the masses". Comte called his system the "Religion of Humanity." Nobody talks much about Comte anymore, but many, many creative people believe in the religion of humanity without even knowing that it has a name. It has almost become the credo of every industrial democracy in the free world.

Some people say that instead of replacing religion with something better, science has become just another religion, that scientists can be just as dogmatic and rigid as any old parish priest. I agree that scientists are fallible, but, unlike religion, science has a number of built-in self-corrective mechanisms that religion lacks. First, discoveries are peer-reviewed rather than just delivered by somebody with a vision. Second, scientists love nothing more than disproving their own hypotheses and don't make claims until they're satisfied they have a leg to stand on. (The best ones, anyway). And third, scientists don't get paid unless their work is productive, which means they have to keep discovering new things that pass the above tests.

This continual pressure towards increasing the storehouse of human knowledge has radical implications, for merely increasing the amount of facts available is never enough. In the Middle Ages all astronomers kept reams of parchments with readings of planetary movements on them. Once a viable theory of gravity was promulgated, astronomers no longer needed these records because the path of the planets was now predictable using a simple formula that any child could understand. Science in general tells the story of the triumph of simple insight over reams of fact.

And it is precisely because this process boils down vast quantities of observations to basic principles and laws that we become capable of asking more, and deeper, questions about the world. Some naive people really think that when a grand unified theory of physics emerges sometime in the next 50 years all our questions will suddenly have answers. Nonsense. Was all of mathematics uncovered when people learned to count? Each triumph is merely a plateau upon which the next tier of knowledge can be erected. As Newton told Robert Hooke in 1676, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

We have already seen in mankind a clear progression in grand unified theories from fairies and sprites, to gods and goddesses, to the Supreme Being, and today the Laws of Nature. This last framework gives a far clearer and more detailed explanation of how the universe works and why it is here than any of the earlier ones, yet you can easily see how hollow and insubstantial it too is. The very concept of "law" is yet another human-centered metaphor. To say that gravity attracts because "it's not just a good idea, it's the law" is ultimately a reductio ad absurdum.

To explain the grandeur and mystery of the universe through appeal to a Supreme Being did little more than give that grandeur and that mystery another name. To declare a Law of Gravity, similarly, does little more than to reiterate the initial observation that "things tend to attract in a predictable way." If the Law of Gravity simply restates the observation in the form of a succinct metaphor then, what exactly does it explain? Why is there such a law? And precisely what causes this particular atom, in this particular molecule, in this particular pixel, on this particular computer screen to want to obey this law?

Like many other great advances, the current theory of natural law contains within it the seeds of its own eventual destruction. Lying behind it, at an almost inconceivable distance from our present conception of the universe, lies a grander, deeper and more accurate way of thinking about things.