Natural Religion

Frederick Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351503433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

There is widespread belief that the world's religions con- tradict each other. It follows that if one religion is true, the others must be false--an assumption that implies, and may actually create, religious strife. In Natural Religion, acclaimed poet, critic and essayist Frederick Turner sets out to show that the natural world offers grounds for stating that all religions are, in some respect, true.

Through the ages, various ways have been proposed to resolve religious differences. Some argue for the destruction of all religions but one's own. Others substitute an abstract principle for the real ritual and moral practice of religion. Still others doubt all religious truth and, consequently, all truth. Others accept a kind of pluralistic relativism. This book explores syncretism, whereby all religions are seen as grasping the same strange and complex reality, but by very different means and handles. The idea that all religions are true raises a supervening question: if so, what must the real physical universe be like? Turner approaches these questions in terms of scientific inquiry. There is not enough room in space itself to fit in all theologies; but there may be enough room in time if new scientific descriptions of time's nature are to be believed. Turner argues that in the time-models of contemporary cosmological and evolutionary science all times may be connected and time may be infinitely branched and causally looped so that both forward-in-time and backward-in-time factors may be in operation in the same event. Thus, the fundamental substance of the universe may be information rather than matter or energy. The universe is more like a vast living organism than a vast machine.

Turner argues that all existing religions can be shown to fit into this model, which in turn points to deeper implications of religious doctrines, languages and practices. There would be plenty of "room" in such a view of time for a tree of different yet linked religious w

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Introduction

Why write a book on religion? More to the point, why read one?

In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the city of Washington the practical need for a reconsideration of religion, and especially of religious differences, is painfully clear. Religion did not go away when the Enlightenment showed us the path of human reason. It did not go away when twentieth-century science began to plumb the mysteries of the cosmos, when twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and sociology explained the reasons for religious belief, when twentieth-century technology made possible a secular middle-class lifestyle for hundreds of millions of people, when twentieth-century secular regimes attempted to stamp religion out altogether. The twenty-first century has begun with a huge atrocity committed in the name of religion and the possible prospect of a religious war conducted with nuclear weapons and enveloping at least the countries between North Africa and Bangladesh.

Religion cannot be eradicated, even if it were desirable to do so. It deals with the most important things human beings know, and has its own profound claims to truth. Is there any way of showing that religious differences are not necessarily absolute, that hostility between religions is not justified by the logical demands of noncontra-diction? This book explores this question, and brings in the new knowledge that modernity has given us as an ally, rather than an enemy, of religion.

The very sciences that once cast doubt on religion (or by describing the universe in terms of material determinism forced religion into a distorted and dualistic revision of its own theology) are, I shall argue, now providing us with a world picture that is strangely friendly to religious interpretations. Complexity theory seems to have given back to the world its autonomy, freedom, and mystery; cosmology its origin; computational physics its ancient role as the vast thought of a vast thinker..

The core question this book asks and attempts to answer is: What would the universe have to be like, if all the religions were true? And its core claim is that the understanding of the universe that is beginning to emerge from the sciences is perhaps bizarre enough to match and to accommodate the bizarreness of a world in which all the religions really are true.

This book takes a rather different direction than that of most contemporary academic thought. It argues against relativism and pluralism (though in favor of a much closer embrace of different religious ideas than mere tolerance). It refuses to take the line that many contemporary advocates of worldwide spirituality have taken, which is the rejection of “western” modes of thought and an attack on global capitalism, technology, and progress. And it questions the longstanding agreement between secular rationalists and religious intellectuals, enshrined by Immanuel Kant, that the realms of fact and value, means and ends, are radically separate. The reward for these abandonments of conventional wisdom is, I will argue, well worth the sacrifice.

But we cannot write or read about religion in any meaningful way from the outside only, ignoring the inner experience of it.

“Thy life’s a miracle.” So says Edgar to his blinded father, Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Gloucester has just attempted suicide, pathetically and unsuccessfully, by jumping off what he wrongly thinks are the cliffs of Dover. Edgar, disguised as a madman, has led his father to believe that the cliffs were real in order to heal him of his suicidal depression, and now, pretending to be a passerby, continues with the deception, commenting on the huge distance the old man has fallen and the crushing violence of the impact. Gloucester is persuaded to believe that he has been saved from suicide by divine intervention:

Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors

Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.

The ultimate purpose of any attempt at religious understanding is to bring home to oneself that simple fact: our life is a miracle. Suicide and martyrdom are important boundary-markers of the dark country of our deepest religious experience, whether we believe we serve the divine by our death, or the divine is the only beauty great enough to hold us back from the solace of self-destruction. Edgar’s lie about the cliffs is the shell or envelope of a staggering truth, a truth so daily and customary that we fail to see it for what it is. How can this meat of which we are made, this hair-tufted, naked, nimble, rather feeble primate, with its noisy digestive system, have the amazing property of consciousness; how can it contain the gigantic dark continent of our dreams, our inner life, our metaphysical inner reflexivity? And as we see this we should also see what a miracle the world itself is, with its orchids, its slime molds, its elaborate Lego system of chemistry, its sperm whales and black holes and neutrinos, and its unimaginably vast distances, masses, sounds, energies, and voids; and marvelously, with the eyes and ears and other senses to perceive all the rest.

Though the miracle of ourselves and the world is almost always obscured from us except at moments of crisis, extreme grief, or ecstasy, that miracle contains, for anyone who has experienced it, a promise, that in some sense all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, as Juliana of Norwich put it. Religion—in its often blundering and sometimes murderously obsessive way—is, as I shall argue, our only real means of getting to grips with this huge promise and the huge problems that lie in the way of its fulfillment.

The great Hungarian poet Deszö Kosztolányi provides what is for me one of the most moving of all accounts of the way that religious experience can supervene upon the most rational and down-to-earth of lives. Kosztolányi was not in any sense a religious person, but a secular modernist literary man. I quote from it in the translation by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and myself:

But up there, my friend, up there is the lightening sky,

a clarity, a glittering majesty,

trembling, crystallizing into constancy.

A heavenly dome

the blue of my mother’s eiderdown back home

so long ago; the waterblot of monochrome

that smudged my paper-pad with an azure foam,

and the stars’ souls

breathe and glitter quietly in their shoals

into a Fall night’s

lukewarm mildness—which precedes the colds and whites—;

they watched the files of Hannibal, today

look down at one who, having fallen from the rest,

am standing at a window in Budapest.

And then I don’t quite know what happened to me,

but a great wing seemed to swoop over me; the past,

all I had buried, bent down to me its breast:

childhood, infancy.

There so long stood I

to watch the vaulted miracles of the sky

that in the east it reddened, and the wind

set all the stars to quivering; sparks thinned

by the distance, they’d appear and disappear;

a vast thoroughfare

of light flared up; a heavenly castle door

opened in that fire;

something fluttered then,

and a crowd of guests took places to begin

deep in twilight shades of dawn

the measures of the last pavane.

Outside the foyer swam in streams of light, and there

the lord of the dance bade farewell on the stair,

a great nobleman, the titan of the sky,

the glory of the dancing-floor; by and by

there is a movement, startled, jingling,

a soft womanly whispering

miraculous; the ball is over; pages

ready at the entrance call for carriages.

Under a lace veil

streamed a mantle, fairy-tale,

from the frail

deeps of twilight, diamond-pale,

blued with such a blue

as the morning dew,

which a lovely lady dons for her surtout,

and a gem, whose hue

dusts with its light the pure peace of the air,

the otherworldly raiment she would wear;

or an angel pins, with virgin grace,

a brilliant diadem into her hair,

and a fine light chaise

rocks to a soft halt and she glides in,

quieter than a dream, and,

its wheels agleam,

on it rolls again,

a flirting smile glimpsed on the face of the queen,

and then the stallions of the Milky Way,

with glittering horseshoes gallop through the spray

of carnival confetti, each flake a star

of bright gold, where hundreds of glass coaches are.

Standing in a trance,

with joy I cried and cried out, there’s a dance

in heaven, every night there is a dance;

for now a great old secret dawned on me,

that all the heavenly hosts of faerie

go home each morning on the glittery

and spacious boulevards of infinity…

…So, though today my body is distressed,

I feel that in the dust and mire, my friend,

stumbling among lost souls in a fruitless quest,

of some unknown and puissant Lord, yet kind,

I was the guest.

Tolstoy’s Levin in Anna Karenina has got to this point when he runs across a major stumbling block: the variety of religions in the world. They cannot all be right, he thinks, or at least he does not believe himself to have the wit to see how they might be. So he chooses the Russian Orthodox Church, and in it he finds the ecstasy he seeks. But the theoretical problem remains, and with it the practical and historical problems of religious exclusivism, oppression, and even savage ideological carnage. Would it be just to seek one’s own psychological and spiritual salvation at the cost of perpetuating a kind of polemical certainty that has historically been demonstrated to produce atrocity?

The problem is that the apparent contradictions among the various religions reward the hotheads, the bureaucrats, the fanatics, and the politicians among the religions, and punish the wise ones, the holy ones, the gentle philosophical systematizers, and the poets. This book is an attempt to solve that problem, to show in an entirely experimental, playful spirit—and in fear and trembling lest this very conception might be blasphemous—how maybe all the religions could be right, especially in the bizarre light of the new scientific understandings of cosmology, evolution, time, and chaotic self-organization.

There is a real tension in any good person’s life between the imperative to perfect one’s soul in mystical contemplative observance, and the call to work actively in the world for its betterment, feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant, healing the sick, and clothing the naked. Without the former where will we find the virtuous discipline to practice the latter?—yet without the latter what moral substance can be claimed by the former? Meanwhile the time and concentration needed for either seem to preclude any other goal. In the Jewish tradition of Talmudic studies that duality is sometimes termed the apocalyptic (perfecting the soul) and the prophetic (works of charity). Today that tension is especially acute, since—as I have argued elsewhere—it looks very much as if the best thing we could do in practical charity for our neighbor is intelligently seek our own material interests within a free market capitalist economy. Within particular religions this paradox is solved by a specific moment of personal revelation, such as Moses’ in the burning bush episode of Exodus, Arjuna’s in the Bhagavad Gita, Monkey’s in The Journey to the West, the apostles’ at Pentecost in the New Testament, and the ball-playing brothers’ in the Popol Vuh. The acuteness of the problem—how to do our duty in the world, how to perfect our souls—is intensified into outright contradiction if we conclude that different religions are radically incommensurate and thus that either none of them is right, or only one is and we can’t know for sure which one. Revelation is the place where the active and contemplative lives intersect, yet revelation is the specific part of religion that is undermined by the scandal of religious contradiction.

The enterprise this book sets itself is to remove that contradiction. But I am aware that it will be doomed if it sets itself outside the religious experience, aloof, ironical, detached, scholarly. One’s own search for salvation and one’s own partial and obscured experience of it cannot be the subject of a book addressed to an audience that includes many kinds of believers and unbelievers and trying to prove its point by public evidence. But it cannot be true to its subject if i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Problem
• 3 Desiderata for a Religion of the Future
• 4 Religious and Scientific Truth
• 5 Freedom, Values, and Strange Attractors
• 6 Time
• 7 The Information/Spirit Universe
• 8 A Brief History of God
• 9 What Each Religion Brings to the Search
• 10 The Style of God
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Index