This post was written by Mark Hansard on August 30, 2007
In a recent op-ed piece for Discover magazine called Peace Through God, computer scientist Jaron Lanier reflects on religion, pluralism, mysteries beyond scientific adjudication, and the meaning of it all. While he does not appear particularly religious himself, he proffers a number of recommendations about how people ought to be religious in our violence-strewn world. Since his thinking has much in common with the secular academy at large, I would like to comment on two points in his essay.
His first point is that we should celebrate and encourage a diversity of complex religious beliefs because this would constitute a “violence-avoiding arrangement,” healthy in a pluralistic democracy in which we would prefer to avoid violence. He thinks that often, traditional religions are “clannish” in the sense that there is concern about who is “in” and who is “outside” the group, and this can cause violence (although to his credit, he does not claim that all religions are this way, and he chastises Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for claiming that all religious belief is harmful). As expected, Lanier mentions the Hebrew God as an example of a “clannish” one.
He then goes on to say that we should encourage religious belief, even when it appears silly, if it breaks up the “clannishness” of traditional religion(s), because this would be the best way to avoid violence. His example is an apparently new religion in which the worshippers pray by chanting in binary language (zeroes and ones, the language of computers). Why should we be against such belief, he says, as long as it makes God complex enough not to interfere in the real world, and not to interfere with scientific discovery? (Only a small-minded person would believe that God actually interferes in the space-time universe, or that believing in him might have scientific implications).
Note again that we run up against the question of what knowledge is, whether it is possible to have religious knowledge. By recommending that we create our own religious beliefs in order to avoid violence, Lanier assumes there is no such thing as religious knowledge; we only have beliefs which we can create and follow for ourselves. But why should we assume that? Like many scientists, he believes science can step in and tell a religious person where she has erred, but he does not give such a person equal opportunity to critique scientific beliefs. Lanier’s view is an insult to the informed Christian who knows that Christian theology makes claims about knowledge—that it at least claims to describe reality in some way.
Curiously, Lanier goes on to recommend religious beliefs that “are concerned only with things too big to be framed by science.” He explains that mystery in the universe provokes “wonder,” and that certain questions may never be answered by science(!) His examples: consciousness, the source of mathematical truth, and what happened before the Big Bang. His admission here is significant in that it limits science to answering only the questions that science is designed to answer.
But Lanier goes on to define spirituality as “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions.” How can one have an emotional relationship with a question? His attitude reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos musings about the “wonder” and “awe” which the universe inspires because it is vast and mysterious. The problem with this view is that once we revel and glory in “unanswerable questions,” we are delving into a relationship, not with the questions themselves, but with the fact that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s not the questions, it’s the implications of the questions which are intriguing. After all, what did happen before the Big Bang? Why is the universe so huge and we are so small? We don’t have emotional relationships with such questions, but with their implications which lead us—dare I say?—to worship (if not God, then the universe itself). The problem with Lanier is he embraces such questions while studiously avoiding their implications.
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