How do you explain faith to people who have no specific faith?
It’s anything but easy. The language of the faith traditions is utterly foreign to these folks. Many of them are cynical by nature. They find more reasonable explanations in the world of science, the everyday, or the closed loop of human society (often with good reason). It doesn’t help that aggressive evangelists have made faith talk synonymous with the ol’ hard sell—and alienated many people into an outright refusal to consider faith at all.
This question certainly daunted Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest, psychologist, and contemplative. In fact, he wrote a brilliant book (Life of the Beloved) to answer it; unfortunately, for his secular friends, it didn’t work.
And yet, God has given us this unutterably rich experience of life, and we want to share it so others can taste of its richness as well. But how can we do so in their language?
One answer came from a close friend who is deeply spiritual and just as deeply alienated from any specific faith tradition. As we discussed matters of faith one day, she explained her view of the Divine: “Just look around us. This all doesn’t just happen.”
In that spirit, maybe the following might help skeptics take one step closer to the Divine. Consider that, in a world without God:
· The universe makes sense. The earth does not.
· Function makes sense. Beauty does not.
· Cooperation makes sense. Love does not.
And yet the earth thrives. Beauty abounds. Love persists. Life, to quote
What else doesn’t make sense without God? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
5 comments:
The rationalist in me, and the 'cultural materialist' anthropologist in me, say that since cooperation makes sense, so does love.
Love is, in this context, a neat device for facilitating cooperation. It's most obvious when it's parental love. What else can keep an infant, with its inconvenient requirements, alive?
That's the template for future love and cooperation, however attenuated the expression of the original bonding might become in later social life.
Not that I'm trying to explain away the unexplainable. Ultimately, it's all unexplainable.
You make a very good point, Bill, especially in the parent-child realm. And I think you're right that love does often work to facilitate cooperation. I wonder, though, to what degree that idea holds up as you get deeper into self-sacrificial love. Surely, a parent's sacrifice of self for her child makes sense; but does that kind of love still add up when the social connection is more tenuous? Does Jesus' saying--"greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends"--make rational sense?
I don't know the answer, so I'd love to hear your thoughts. As you so eloquently put it, it's all unexplainable.
Rational sense? What does make rational sense? Pure rationality gets you to homo ecnomicus unless you include emotions in your calculation of desired outcomes.
Once you do that, there's no limits to what makes sense. And so, there have been many people who have died for others or for causes that are based on ideas of serving others in some way.
Posthumous Congressional Medal of Honors citations are good evidence that some people will lay down their lives for their friends. It may come out of direct caring for those who care for you (as in "having your back") or, indirectly, through it being unbearable to turn out to be a person who would turn his back and turn away from others' perils -- even strangers' perils.
I suppose that it depends, in part, on how wide the category of "we" is, as in "we're all in this together". However wide or narrow the category and despite the variations in the content of moral codes, we're social and moral animals by necessity. Otherwise, psychopathy would be the norm rather than some kind of failure.
I should know better than to quibble with an anthropologist about things that touch on anthropology--it means I'm most likely wrong! But here goes:
Yes, we are social and moral animals by necessity--but I think that only goes to a point. When one's own extinction is at stake, does it follow that one would submit to that extinction purely for the well-being of another?
The examples you cited involve people who are making the ultimate sacrifice altruistically. From the standpoint of an individual organism, that's a huge price to pay for a benefit that is not one's own. Given how unwilling we are in general to face our own extinction, why do it here?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. As you rightly pointed out, it happens quite a bit. I'm saying it's an anomaly. It goes against the entropy and self-preservation to which every species tends. And even if it's entwined in our genetic code to make these sacrifices, how did the code get there in the first place?
I'm sure there are holes in my thinking, and you should definitely feel free to point them out!
I don't know about holes in your thinking, but here's my thinking:
Last things first: I'm always suspicious about statements that attribute complex human behaviors to our DNA or "hard-wiring". While everything has some kind of genetic base, I see complex behaviors like altruistic self-sacrifice as being higher order side effects of other more basic elements. The capacity for empathy underlies altruistic behaviors, and it's that capacity that has the genetic, neurological, and brain structural base.
There's a trend of socio-biological thinking that sees self-sacrificial altruism, such as parents toward children or kinfolk toward other kinfolk, as promoting the spreading of one's own genes. I think that misrepresents the nature of any individual organism's motivations.
Socio-biology leads to interpreting altruism as making sense because it promotes survival and procreation of kindred, the larger breeding population, and the species itself. Again, I think those considerations, while real, don't function at the level of the individual human being.
The question you raise boils down to "who benefits from a person's self-sacrificing death?"
I think the the simplest, most "parsimonious" answer is that the person who makes the sacrifice is the first one who benefits.
When I was very young, perhaps still in elementary school, it came to me that, ultimately, there's no such thing as "unselfish" behavior. I was a very fair-minded boy and it wasn't unusual for me to be praised for my "unselfishness". I realized that I didn't feel that I was being unselfish -- I was doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to do it because, somehow, it felt right to me -- and that felt good to me.
Putting it in more abstract terms, one's values are a basic part of one's identity. Some values are truly "core values": to protect them, whatever they are and however they're inculcated, is to protect one's selfhood. To lose those values or to go against them is a form of psychological death. Orwell, in "1984", portrays that death at the end of the novel, when the hero is left in a state of apathy, having lost his independent selfhood.
Voluntarily dying for someone else is an act of love. It's an act of maintaining one's integrity -- as in "wholeness". Where the love is deepest, as for one's children, it can be a reflexive response. As such, I see it as an expression of one's deepest self. Paradoxically, it's an act of self-maintenance.
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