A Sense of Awe: science, faith and wonder
December 5, 2011 Off

Closing shop and seeking awe in Tasmania

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You may remember that Nancey Murphy tried to convince Denis Alexander that Gothic cathedrals are more awesome than the wonders of nature. But I’m on Denis’s side.

In fact, so much so that I’m heading off this week with four sons to brave the wilderness of Southwest Tasmania. For those in the know: we aim to climb Federation Peak and traverse the Western Arthur range; Australia’s most awe inspiring bushwalk according to some.

So it’s time to wind down the conversation here—although the site will remain for some time. Please continue to participate in similar conversations at the main Encounter site: abc.net.au/rn/encounter

Many thanks to those people who have contributed articles and comments to A Sense of Awe. I hope the conversation has encouraged you to ponder the things that matter.

November 25, 2011 Off

Einstein’s mysterious religion

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The writings of Albert Einstein, the 20th century’s best known and perhaps greatest scientist, are a treasure trove for quotable quotes. He has been used by the religious, by atheists and by philosophers of science of all stripes, as an ally in their various causes. But however one defines his religious views, there is little doubt, that for Einstein, awe and mystery lie at the heart of the scientific endeavour.

In 1932 Einstein wrote “My Credo” and read it for a recording to benefit the German League of Human Rights. It ends with the following words:

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

Einstein’s Credo can be found here where you can also listen to a recording (in German of course!)

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November 16, 2011 Off

Earth

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The heavens declare the glory of God, said the Psalmist.

We are alone in the meaningless immensity of the universe, said the Nobel winning biologist Jacques Monod.

And mathematician John Lennox says at the end of the recent Encounter program: I’ve got a telescope in my garden and one of the things I love to do is go out and just let the night sky, the galaxies, the Orion nebula, have an impact on my mind. I find that awe inspiring. Just to contemplate what the astronomers have revealed to us about the immense size of the universe. I find that very healthy. It’s a good thing to do.

This video from NASA on the ABC site is food for thought. It’s not the looking out at the universe described above, but a look at the earth from space and more likely to provoke a little cosmic introspection.

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November 10, 2011 2

Plumbing Heideggerian mysteries

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In my non-ABC life I am currently thinking about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He’s a thinker who wants to challenge the history of Western thinking in its naive belief that we can simply take hold of reality and describe it as it is. In doing so we eliminate the mystery of ‘Being’ and we live without thinking about the most fundamental levels of what it means to be a human being.

Martin Heidegger 1889-1976

The following piece of writing, which I wrote for another context, is not for everyone. But in some ways it complements Sarah Tomasetti’s piece on her experiences as an artist. It also challenges naive assumptions about the ‘objectivity’ of science which takes so much for granted. (Meanwhile, do join the discussion about the radio program; it’s all happening here.)

Now, for those who ponder the mystery of Being; an introduction to Martin Heidegger: his life, his Nazism and his obscure but profound philosophy.

**********

My philosophical quest in search of the nature of knowledge has recently led me down a slippery trail into my own Mines of Moria, the eerie world of raw truth. It is here, in this obscurity that lies beyond words, that the ghost of Martin Heidegger looms: certainly one of the 20th century’s brilliant minds, and a philosopher with a damning relation to the Nazi party.

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November 6, 2011 22

Let the conversation begin (anew)…

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This morning “A Sense of Awe” (the radio program) went to air at the (ungodly?) hour of 7am Sunday morning. We hope a vigorous conversation will ensue; this site is the place to contribute. Please get involved by leaving your comments here.

If you haven’t heard the program, you can find times of further broadcasts or an audio download at the Encounter page for the program. You can also read the transcript, but of course if you read it you’ll miss out on Pink Floyd, Vangelis, Pärt, the Bloody Beetroots and all the other subtle and not so subtle WAV file splices.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

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November 5, 2011 3

Awe in the Landscape – Painting Milford Sound

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Sarah Tomasetti is a Melbourne landscape artist and kindly agreed to write a piece for A Sense of Awe about her experiences. Sarah gained a professional qualification in fresco painting in Italy in 1995. Her work is held in a number of collections including Artbank, Macquarie Bank, National Australia Bank, BHP, Grafton Regional Gallery and in private collections in Australia and overseas. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Night Sequence

Like many artists before me, I am compulsively drawn to the great wild romantic landscapes of history. I am intrigued by how we need this sense of something extraordinary that lies beyond ourselves, how we have sought this through encounters with the natural world, and how, in turn, landscape painting has historically charted our cultural relationship to nature.

I recently revisited Fiordland in New Zealand and walked the Milford Track. On the fifth day one emerges at Sandfly point to take a boat across Milford Sound, the site of Von Guerard’s famous late 19th Century painting of the same name. From roughly the same viewpoint I embarked on further studies of The Lion, an iconic rock that rises with stately certainty from the tannin tinged waters of the Sound.

Kayaking close to the base, one is struck by the vertiginous nature of the granite sides that continue uninterrupted below the waterline.  There is nothing resembling a shore or even so much as a foothold in a rock face carved out by a glacier.  In the presence of such scale I am reminded of Kate Rigby’s conclusion to her book Topographies of the Sacred, that ‘there is something we might carry forward from romanticism: the art of dwelling ecstatically amidst the elemental, the uninhabitable, and the incomprehensible.’ *

The Lion

Painting The Lion felt, in some symbolic sense, like coming home, in the sense of engaging with the deep human wish for eternal, unchanging presence; for many found in faith, in nature, or the celestial realm of the sky.  The Lion is in reality a dark form, covered in deep brown and green foliage.  That this painting emerged a silvery blue suggests the domain of the spirit, perhaps an interior but not visceral place.

I think this reverie I find myself in has deep roots in the human psyche but there is something else intruding now – what is it? Awe has always sat close to a tremor of fear, but this is different, something more like dread. To speak of unchanging presence in nature would seem to be an unparalleled luxury in the 21st Century when the dire predictions of climate change add up to no less than the potential apocalypse of our time. How much more contemplation can we afford?  What have we done?

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October 28, 2011 3

From interview to air: WAV files and unacceptable vocal habits

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Making a radio program is not as simple as doing an interview and sending it into the airwaves. Let me share some secrets…

You wouldn’t believe the torrent of unacceptable vocal habits that pollutes the audio landscape. Unless of course you’ve had the joy of editing a WAV file.

This past week I’ve spent lots of time at the ABC in Southbank, Melbourne with WAV files passing before my eyes on a computer monitor. It’s part of the cost of cleaning up interviews into a product fit for public consumption on a national broadcaster.

Everyone makes a program differently, but this time I made a full transcript of my interviews (which you may have read here) and then planned the program using the transcripts. But of course only a small part of hours of interviews will find its way into the final 48min program (48min 28sec to be precise!)

That’s where the WAV files come in.

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October 20, 2011 Off

Awe inspiring audio

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Four audio files associated with A Sense of Awe are now available to download and listen to. The first three (in highly edited form) will contribute to the radio program that goes to air on November 6. The files are:

1. The full interview with John Lennox is available here (9Mb 18min). Transcript available here.

2. The full interview with Nancey Murphy and Denis Alexander is available here (35Mb 58min). Transcript available here.

3. A further interview with Denis Alexander (available here 15Mb 30min).

4. Also, David Tacey’s speech for the launch of Matthew Del Nevo’s book The Work of Enchantment (see Matthew’s blog post below) is available here (15Mb 30min)

October 19, 2011 Off

Be heard and not seen: Record your audio comments

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Record your own voice message in our online conversation – and it may even be included the radio program!

One of the latest additions to the social networking bag of tricks is Audioboo. It’s a way to record short comments and post them for posterity online.

If you would like post an audio comment on the topics of conversation here, just follow these instructions:

  • First set up your free Audioboo account at http://audioboo.fm
  • Then, while you are still logged in to your Audioboo account, go to the Sense of Awe page (http://audioboo.fm/asenseofawe) and record your comment. (You will need a microphone connected to your computer.)
  • Simple!

We look forward to hearing from you.

October 13, 2011 3

Feynman and beauty

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Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman is the voice beyond an evocative and thought provoking 5 min video titled Beauty which can be found via this page at The Immanent Frame. The blog post there says:

While Feynman himself was a self-acclaimed atheist, and the project itself aims to “promot[e] scientific education and scientific literacy in the general population,” watching these videos, one cannot help but become enveloped by some sort of spiritual sense of the world and its majesty.

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October 3, 2011 Off

A word from my mentor

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As you might have gathered, I’m a neophyte radio freelancer working on only my third program. I’m enjoying the challenge but I don’t have years of experience or training. And some of the ropes are tricky to learn.

Margaret Coffey is an ABC old hand and my mentor at Encounter. So I asked Margaret to jot down a few thoughts on the making of a radio program. Margaret writes:

So, you’ve been following Chris’ blog and reading transcripts of interviews with eminent thinkers – and ideally you have been posting your thoughts in response. I hope you want to take up Chris’ invitation to help him plan the making of a radio program in the Encounter series. His task is not simple; there are difficult and tantalising philosophical issues to consider here.

Now, add to the mix the challenge of making a radio program. Each Radio National program brief dictates what the program maker aims to do. Although Encounter sometimes delivers straight lectures, edited and interpolated to greater or lesser degree for broadcast, it generally aims to proffer a ‘feature’ program—a program that tries to make an affective as well as an intellectual experience of radio and that therefore uses the tools radio makes available.

Making such a program is quite a different task from writing a feature article or a lecture and I think it’s especially challenging if you want to enlarge the audience’s sense of whatever it is that is at issue. That means you have to find a means of getting away from simplicities, from conventional tags that align this with that and in so doing might save you the time and effort of dealing with complexity.

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September 30, 2011 Off

Of Gothic cathedrals and natural wonders

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Interviewing Nancey Murphy and Denis Alexander

Allow me to introduce two guests featuring on the coming Encounter program. One grew up on the land in North America and finds little awe in nature but wonders at Gothic cathedrals. The other, from Britain, has had his fill of cathedrals but finds the mountains awe inspiring.

Recently they shared their thoughts on such matters and others too, including how they deal with doubts about their faith; the metaphysical implications of their messy desks; and their confidence in both science and God.

Nancey Murphy is a philosopher of science and theologian from Fuller Seminary in California, and Denis Alexander, all his life a scientist, is now Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Christianity in Cambridge.

Below you will find a transcript of my lengthy interview with them at the recent Tasmanian conference. Please use the comment form, not only to comment on the content of the interview, but also to let us know what parts of the interview you think should be used for the radio program in November. Editing is imminent and we value your feedback.

Chris Mulherin: We’re at a conference at the beautiful Tamar Valley near Launceston, Tasmania. There are perhaps a hundred people here, mostly Christians professionally involved in science and technology. The conference is run by ISCAST, the Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology, and the conference theme is ‘Disenchantment—faith and science in a secular world’. I’m talking to two of the main speakers at the conference; Nancey Murphy from the United States, and Denis Alexander from the UK.

Nancey Murphy, you’re a philosopher and theologian at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, and famously, you don’t believe in the soul, although you’re a Christian. We’ll get back to the soul, but first: what led you into the philosophy of science?

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September 27, 2011 1

An interview with John Lennox

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Photo: Roland Ashby, Anglican Media

Chris Mulherin: John Lennox, you’re an Oxford mathematician but perhaps better known to the public as one of those who does public battle with Richard Dawkins and the new atheists. Recently you debated atheist philosopher Peter Singer in Melbourne. Why do you divide your time in such disparate pursuits?

John Lennox: I don’t think they’re entirely disparate pursuits, I’ve always been interested in the broader implications of science and the issue here is that people like Richard Dawkins are arguing that if you are a scientist, the only logical position you can take intellectually is atheism. And I dispute that and I quite honestly don’t like seeing science abused in that way. So I want to put across a counter-argument to the public and let the people judge.

Chris Mulherin: Let me ask you about attitudes to science in the public space. As we listen to science, as it’s portrayed in the public eye, I wonder if there’s a tension between two attitudes to science? What we might almost call absolute and relative views of science. One view perhaps represented by the so-called new atheists is very confident that science is the only grounding for truth and knowledge. Another view seen, for example, in scepticism about global warming, shows a lack of confidence and a disenchantment with science. What do you make of these two attitudes to science?

John Lennox: Well I’d call the first attitude scientism. Because it is an attitude to science that science is the only vehicle to truth. And I suppose the easy way to put it is the way Bertrand Russell formulated it: That ‘what science cannot tell us mankind cannot know.’ I’m interested in logic and Russell was a great logician but his logic failed him there. Because his statement ‘what science cannot tell us mankind cannot know’ is not a statement of science. So if it’s true, it’s false.

In other words I think we’re having an over-reach here. And really great scientists like Sir Peter Medawar were very clear — as are most scientists — on the limits of science. That’s the reason science is successful. Medawar puts it this way: that it’s very easy to check that science doesn’t tell us everything. It can’t even answer the simple questions of a child: Why am I here? What’s the meaning of life? And so on.

And Einstein once said you can speak of the ethical foundations of science but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics. In other words you cannot get ethical values from science. So science is there, it’s wonderful, but we do it a disservice, as Medawar also pointed out, if we make it the sole criteria of the truth. And that’s absurd of course because science is not coextensive with rationality. If science were the only way to truth, you’d have to shut half your university departments in Sydney.

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September 23, 2011 Off

A time for everything?

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There’s an old anecdote that haunts me as I rush about my life in the global fast-lane. It’s about a Western traveler in another culture, in a hurry to get to the end of the journey. One version goes like this:

In the deep jungles of Africa, a traveler was making a long trek. Local tribesmen had been engaged to carry the loads. The first day they marched rapidly and went far. The traveler had high hopes of a speedy journey. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. For some strange reason they just sat and rested. On inquiry as to the reason for this strange behavior, the traveler was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.

In his 1999 book God for a Secular Society Jürgen Moltmann writes of the impoverishing effects of our Western battle with time:

Modern men and women are ‘always on the go’, so wherever they are, they are always pressed for time. Is it the Christian understanding of time as irreversible, and as an unstoppable ‘ever-rolling stream’, flowing out of the future into the past, that has plunged us into this shortage of time? How can we be rescued from it?

Never before did human beings have as much free time as they have today, and never did they have so little time. Time has become ‘precious’ too, because ‘time is money’. The world offers us endless possibilities, but our life-span is brief. Consequently many people fall into a panic in case they should miss out on something, and they try to step up their pace of living. The utopia of overcoming space and time by way of high-speed trains, faxes and E-mail, Internet and videos, is a modern utopia. Everywhere we want to ‘keep up’ with things – the phrase is significant in itself. We want to be omnipresent in space and simultaneous in time. That is our new God-complex.

The difference between our life-span and the possibilities offered by the world tempts us into ‘a race against time’. We want to save time, so as to get more out of life, and miss out on life in the very attempt. … We have more and more ‘contacts’ and ‘know’ a great many people.

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September 21, 2011 Off

Matthew Del Nevo’s “The Work of Enchantment”

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This week another book related to our theme is being launched in Sydney. It’s by Matthew Del Nevo and called The Work of Enchantment.

Matthew lectures in Philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney and his interesting thesis is that it is a lack of “enchantment” in rich, developed countries that causes soul-starved Westerners to experience mental (and sometimes physical) illness.

David Tacey will launch The Work of Enchantment on Friday night, so I asked Matthew about the book and his response to my introductory posts. (See “Initial thoughts on awe in a secular age” on this site or the longer article at ABC Religion and Ethics at “Is awe still possible in a secular age?”) Matthew writes:

I would support the claim of David Tacey from his book Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality, that there is a deep-seated tension in Australian life between artists and intellectuals:

The artists are advocating (re)enchantment from the depths of a prophetic imagination, while the intellectuals are promoting disenchantment and an ironic vision of the world.

This goes not just for Australian life, but for the rich “First World” and is linked into the disenchanting power of Big Capitalism – by which I mean commodity capitalism, in which, as Adorno first said, culture itself is commodified and sold. Education is a commodity too on this market. Nothing is sacred, everything has its price and money is the bottom line. The fiscalisation of the world.

This spells the death of art – it already has, whereby art is defined by market, and an artist is as great as his or her publicity.

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September 19, 2011 Off

Enchantment of the gaps?

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In a comment on “Is awe still possible in a secular age?” (on the ABC Religion & Ethics portal) Harry Kerr offers some thoughts on teasing out the issues involved in “the enchantment debate.” He says:

I think there is room for some serious defining of terms like re/de/enchantment, awe, wonder, secular, transcendent etc., otherwise we end up talking past each other.

Most religious people would now recognise the futility of the “God of the Gaps” approach: when we can’t explain something it must be God. As science advances the gap gets smaller and smaller until we realise that even when there are things we can’t comprehend, we probably will sometime in the future.

There is also an older “enchantment of the gaps.” When people couldn’t comprehend natural phenomena such as thunder, storms, earthquakes etc, they would attribute them to some spiritual power, usually malign. For some these powers dominated the entire natural world. Humanity might be able to placate / get on the right side of them or it might not.

Most people would reject this view of “enchantment.”

The question is : Is enchantment/awe/ the experience of being “moved” an emotional reaction to natural beauty, art, music, love etc which will one day be explained by science? Or does it relate to a power beyond humanity and the known world, a power which relates to the known world and is knowable in it?  (“The beyond in our midst.”)

The word “secular” implies a closed system in which everything can or soon will be explained and understood through science and reason. In human relations the so called “free market” is proposed as a scientific reality against which there is no argument.

Most people then can acknowledge enchantment/awe etc as a dimension of human experience.

Religious people believe that the circle is not closed, that there is a reality, the nature of which is beyond our full comprehension, which is beyond yet present and active in our world. The world is a “holy place” which points beyond itself and bears witness to a deeper reality. This gives rise to awe/enchantment of a different order to the common human experience.

This awe takes hold of us and invites us into a deeper reality beyond what we see.

Thanks Harry for those thoughts.

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September 16, 2011 2

Is awe still possible? – George Levine responds

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George Levine has kindly responded to my original article which posed the question, “Is awe still possible in a secular age?” In that article I mentioned Professor Levine’s book The Joy of Secularism which contains chapters by 11 authors, including Charles Taylor. Levine’s introduction to the book explains its purpose this way:

This book was conceived from a totally secular perspective. It will explore the idea that secularism is a positive condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of “fullness” that religion has always promised.

In response to my recent article, Professor Levine writes:

I undertook my recent books, Darwin Loves You and The Joy of Secularism, because I knew without hesitation that “Awe is still possible in this secular age”; because the current strident debates (or screaming matches) between atheists and believers were making things worse – if better for book sales; and because the religious revival was threatening that separation of powers on which modern democracies are built.

With no illusions about how one might actually persuade believers, I nevertheless felt it to be critically important to affirm a secular position with something other than contempt for those who seemed to need fairy stories to make themselves feel better. Rather, it must build around a recognition of the kinds of normal human needs and longings that religion had been thought to satisfy.

Secularism is not a negation of religion, but an assertion of value, although I would hope without dogma and with energy to make things better. A sense of awe and wonder comes willy-nilly to us all, scientist, reductionist, atheist, agnostic. The question is what we do with the experience when it comes.

The sense of “fullness” that Charles Taylor describes, need not pull us relentlessly upward. It can give us a very earthly sense of connectedness to the here and now and to the rest of us, who have turned our corporeal life into human culture, and who are the only sanction we will ever need.

“Fullness” infuses all these molecules with a sense of value and breaks us from the dualisms that suggest that if we can explain what we used to think of as spiritual by the movement of neurons, those movements, of love, and generosity, and care, are somehow made worthless. Just the reverse: the miracle survives its explanation. It hasn’t been explained away but rather made more energizing and astonishing.

The Joy of Secularism was published this year by Princeton University Press and the introduction is available online as a pdf download here. James Wood reviews the book at The New Yorker here.

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September 9, 2011 Off

Apostates for Evensong

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Evensong in York Minster. Photo: Allan Engelhardt Source: bit.ly/rs01Pq

One of the more colourful characters I know is Dickie Gross. Colourful in dress and metaphorically too.

The other day Dickie was waxing lyrical about Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne. A lovely thing I’m sure… except that Dickie is an atheist with a popular blog called Godless Gross. I asked him to write a post for A Sense of Awe and here’s his reply:

Awe and wonder are things this godless atheist thinks about but has no answers.  In my godless world I look with jealousy and respect at some of the attributes of faith.  One of the benefits of being able to believe is the ability to take a sacred road the numinous.

For me though, such transcendent moments are usually based on nature, music, remembrance of the dead or a combination of the three.  I am having a small one now as the rain is belting down and the power of it has momentarily transported me away from the screen to stare vacantly out the window.  It is literally awesome.

A recent blog of mine is an attempt to describe the awe that even this Jewish apostate can find in Anglican liturgy and asks the question about how this sense of awe compares with other more secular highs. Thanks for dragging us away from the mundane and the day to day.

Dick Gross’s full article can be found here.

Thanks Dickie!

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September 8, 2011 2

Brief notes: All things shining… a book review

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This morning I received a review of an interesting new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. The book is All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Free Press, 2011.) Here’s an edited excerpt from the review:

Dreyfus and Kelly open All Things Shining with a promise of no less than deliverance from the boredom, nihilism and despair that they think characteristic of our “secular age”. To accomplish this deliverance they take readers on a whirlwind tour through the history of Western thought.

The problem is the need for a middle path between two tempting, though in the authors’ view bankrupt, positions. The first is the “temptation to monotheism,” which they trace to the rise of Christianity. Monotheism promised “ultimate or final” meaning, “an ultimate truth behind everything that is”. The authors never make entirely clear what they mean by a “final” or “ultimate” account. But, as their extended discussion of Melville’s Moby Dick makes clear, they think that the possibility of such a thing disappears with monotheistic faith.

Still saddled with unsatisfiable longing for ultimate meaning, post-monotheist secularists fall prey to the second temptation, trying to create this meaning for themselves. This turns out to be merely a detour to the same ennui and despair it aimed to avoid.

The authors dismiss the possibility of an objective source of meaning — at least of “ultimate” meaning — and critique attempts to meet our yearning for one by subjective creation. But, unsurprisingly, they have difficulty locating a third possibility.

The lengthy review finishes:

The authors’ most significant mistake then is their early promise that they can address this state of mind. Baseball games are great fun and coffee is nice, but offered as antidotes to despair these things are hard to take seriously. Instead the book accomplishes the more modest goal of demonstrating that a breakdown of experienced meaning in the wake of secularism is not wholly inevitable.

The result is that the authors’ engaging reading of selections from the Western canon leaves everyone right where they were. It neither addresses the monotheist nor delivers the despairing secularist. But those fortunate enough to have the resources to invest in baseball games and coffee rituals, and the disposition not to worry too much about the “ultimate” significance of such things, will find affirmation here.

You can find the full review here.

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September 7, 2011 Off

That’s awesome! But is it true?

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This post is based on the second part of an article originally published on the ABC Religion site.

In a previous piece, Initial thoughts on awe, I asked whether enchantment is still possible in a secular age.

Traditionally the sense of awe or wonder has been linked to religious or transcendental views of the universe and the human condition. But some ‘non-transcendentalists’ such as Richard Dawkins disagree – to name the most prominent protagonist of atheist awe. For them, secularisation and atheism are no bar to living in an enchanted world, a world where it is appropriate, even obligatory, to wonder, to give thanks and to look with awe upon the works of nature.

Others, such as philosopher Charles Taylor, make it clear that transcendence for them is not solely about subjective feelings but is a fact of experience that can break in upon us: “the sense that fullness is to be found in something beyond us.”

At this point the road to transcendence divides into two trails. One, exemplified by Taylor, takes the high path into the dark of the forest where all is not seen and the hidden is as real as the visible. This way involves a belief that beyond human beings lies a reality that has a significant bearing on the human condition.

This ‘high’ view of enchantment includes a recognition of mystery, of truths too deep for words, and a rejection of reductive explanations. It claims that to talk of transcendence is to make reference to the real world, but a world beyond the limits of science; to re-enchant the world is to affirm truths that science will never come to grips with. Re-enchantment then, involves an implicit claim that science does not, and will never have, the last word.

Of course, this is a belief which is unprovable in a scientific sense. It is a faith claim, whether religious or not, that there is more to human existence than can ever be revealed by the methods and ways of science as we know it today. In the words of the apostle, “we see through a glass darkly.”

The other trail takes the ‘low’ road, crossing cleared ground where all is revealed to the eye and mystery is a mumbo jumbo word for complexity; a complexity that will be revealed in due course by science and human ingenuity.

From this perspective, the sense of transcendence is reducible to subjective experience, shared by many and rooted in evolutionary history and brain function. It has no external anchor in a world beyond human physiology that would make such claims objectively true or false.

On this view the wonder of a sunset is explainable by brain states, and a preference for Mozart over Madonna is no more than a cultural and chemical construction. While the reasons for such preferences may not yet be clear, cognitive neuroscience will reveal all.

Oh, the freedom of enjoying Gilbert and Sullivan without a guilty cringe and admitting that we never did like Puccini anyway! But I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

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