old ideas Archives

When Blurred Lines Help

I was lucky enough to spend a day at an interfaith event that took place as part of World Interfaith Harmony Week. It’s focus was sharing ideas about the different religions present. Jainism, Baha’i, Judaism, Natural Pantheism, Paganism, Christianity, Islam the list went on.

Two things struck me that day.

One was how those religions, and others present, complimented each other. How when points of similarity are emphasised, points of difference blur.

One God Many Voices

Rabbi David Mivasair ended his talk that day with a story from Hebrew oral tradition. In the Midrash Rabbah, the story goes, God spoke at Sinai in seven voices and each voice went forth in seventy languages.

It’s a simple and poetic picture for the diverse ways we hear, and so understand, God.

It reminds me of the story of the elephant behind the screen. The one where an elephant is hidden behind a curtain with slots large enough only for a hand to go through. Different people slide their hand though the hole and when asked to describe the thing behind the screen, they can’t agree. One says “It’s hard and pointed at the end,” another, “It’s very wide and thin, rough to the touch.” And another still, “It’s long and thin and hairy at the end.” A tusk, an ear and a tail. All parts of the same creature. Each on their own, difficult to see as being part of the same animal.

Like Rabbi David’s story, it sums up the need for things like World Interfaith Harmony Week.

Moving The Conversation On

Interfaith events like the one I attended aren’t rare and they don’t just happen on World Interfaith Harmony Week. If you’re in the States, Harvard’s Pluralism Project holds frequent events with the mission of “helping Americans engage with the realities of religious diversity through research, outreach, and the active dissemination of resources”. If you’re in Canada. The Interfaith Observer plays a similar role and if you’re in the UK have a look at The World Congress of Faiths.

It’s refreshing to see while that “mind-numbingly circular” debate for or against God I mentioned in my last post drones on (and on, and…), there’s still a real desire for some to share ideas about God.

Letting Go

I said there were two things that struck me at that event. The other was this. At the end, when everyone was tidying up or stacking chairs, a man handed me a booklet. It told me Jesus was my saviour.

That simple, no doubt well intentioned, gesture speaks volumes about how difficult it is for some to let go of their one fixed idea about God.

Hold On, Lose Out

It’s holding on to one fixed idea about God that could be the reason younger generations are giving up on God. Although a survey released earlier this month by the Public Religion Research Institute points the reason squarely at a perceived anti-gay bias in organized religion, Jon Terbush writing in The Week offers a broader view. The “outright hostility to science from some on the right,” Terbush writes, “— on global warming, evolution, and even something as seemingly benign as vaccines — only further impugns religion’s credibility with younger voters. It should be no surprise then that solid majorities of Millennials describe Christianity as “hypocritical” and “judgmental.”

Is it any surprise belief in God is losing ground? Put simply, if God really were as some right wing religious views depict it, then God too would be hypocritical and judgemental. Who wants any part of that?

Interfaith: The Beginning of A New View

World Interfaith Harmony Week isn’t about glossing over the problems of religion. It’s about respect for all religions.

And here’s something else it could be: the beginnings of a new way of looking at God. One that sees God not just present in all religions, but transcending religion as well.

Imagine that for a moment.

In a world that sees its religions as an attempt to understand God rather than having the definitive take on God everything changes. It means we can put religious differences aside, knowing one view is no more complete than another. It means we can start working together to solve some of the world’s problems. It might even mean we attempt to solve those problems with a sense of equality, justice and integrity.

And then who knows what kind of world we’d create for oursleves.

Picture: The Golden Rule (UN Photo/ Milton Grant)

Darwin may have worried about the impact of his ideas. Turns out he didn’t need to.

Back in 1838, Charles Darwin was reading Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population. He was already fifteen months into figuring out how new varieties of life formed, but what struck him in Malthus’ book was the idea of checks and balances in nature that maintained populations. Writing in his notebook on September 28, 1838 Darwin said those external factors were “a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones”. It was the beginning of his ideas on natural selection.

Twenty years later on November 24, 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published. Twenty years. According to the Natural History’s website, Darwin spent those years “agonising over every detail.”

Although Dr John van Wyhe in his essay “Mind The Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory For Many Years?” shuts down the idea Darwin was nervous about the impact of his ideas on a creationist worldview, I think it’s disingenuous to think Darwin wasn’t concerned about how his work would be received. But if Darwin did worry about offering a theory of natural selection, it turns out he didn’t need to.

Darwin’s Idea: Yet To Catch On

A PEW Research Center analysis published in the fading moments of last year shows that 33% of American adults don’t believe in evolution. With an idea that would have been at home in the Victorian age, the poll found those 33% believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Of those who do acknowledge evolution, “roughly a quarter of adults (24%) say that ‘a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.’”

What are we to make of that?

The More Things Change…

Well, for one thing, that’s not the first time a good idea’s been rejected to keep a belief system going.

Throughout history people have a done a good job of holding onto whatever cherished idea they hold regardless of the evidence against it.

Back in the 17^th century what people wanted to believe was that the Earth was the centre of the solar system. Actually of all creation. The stickler was explaining why Mars and the other known planets fall behind the Earth at some points as they pass through the sky. The phenomena’s called planetary retrograde and it’s one of the reasons Copernicus put the Sun at the centre of the solar system. You can watch an animation of the Mars retrograde as seen from Earth here.

But having rejected Copernicus and his ideas, astronomers at the time came up with ever more complex explanations for why this happened. And here’s what they did: they deemed that for no apparent reason planets moved in small circles or epicycles which in turn move along a larger circle in what we’d think of as a very complex orbit. If that sends your mind spinning, you can check out an animation of epicycles here. The advantage of this idea was that it explained why sometimes Mars went backwards.

As inventive as that explanation was it only worked for so long before more accurate data cast doubt on it. But once again that didn’t stop anyone from believing it. Instead, the astronomers of the day came up with epicycles within epicycles, or little circles within little circles. “Planets,” these astronomers were saying, “don’t just have one epicycle, but within the first epicycle, there’s another and another and another.”

All the additions necessary to keep the idea of circular orbits and an Earth centred solar system alive. Johannes Kepler, using Tycho Brahe’s data, offered a very simple reason for planetary retrograde. One that didn’t need epicycles. Adopting Copernicus’s sun-centred solar system, Kepler showed that planets don’t move in circles at all. They move in elliptical orbits. His three laws of planetary motion explained why planetary retrograde happened and predicted orbits for planets that hadn’t yet been discovered. No mental gymnastics, no philosophical mumbo-jumbo, just an observation based on what’s really happening.

Four Options for Handling New Ideas

One thing faulty logic has in common the world over is that it starts with a conclusion and finds, distorts or invents data to support it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s the thing: I think there’s four options we face when we come across an idea that challenges the way we think about the world. We can:

1. Ignore it and pretend the idea doesn’t exist.

2. Shoehorn it into our current ideas like our 17^th century astronomer friends.

3. Denounce it.

4. Let the new information refine our idea if possible, or lead us to a better one.

God: Time for a New Idea

Historically, in the God debate, number four hasn’t been a popular option. It’s why, as Oliver Burkeman’s writes in The Guardian, the modern God debate has become “mind-numbingly circular” with each side arguing for the existence of a God that may or may not exist. The problem with those debates is that both side fail to move the conversation forward.

And since no-one has (or maybe even can) prove there is no God. And since the idea of a creator and personal God seems silly to many. Well, maybe it’s time for a new way to understand God. One that isn’t contrary to evidence and reason. Maybe it’s time for the next stage in the God concept.

Tag: old ideas

World Interfaith Harmony Week: Two Observations