Longing Within

This essay on individual faith is the first in a five-part series about the value of religion

SALT LAKE CITY — 

“Faith empowers us to see the invisible, embrace the impossible, and hope for the incredible.” — Reverend Samuel Rodriguez[1]

Our modern world offers more choices and possibilities than ever before. Science and technology continually expand our knowledge, and the diversity of religious worldviews keeps growing. Our horizons seem to stretch thinner and faster than we are capable of handling. But in the end we remainthe same spiritual creatures. Throughout our journeys the longing within endures.

Religions share a common insight: there is something incomplete about us. And so we yearn for fullness. If every question had a ready answer, there would be no reaching in prayer. If every pain had an easy cure, there would be no thirst for salvation. If every loss was restored, there would be no desire for heaven. As long as these needs remain, so will religion. It is a natural part of life. To be human means to experience uncertainty, sorrow and death. Religion, however, is a school for making sense of chaos, a hospital for healing unseen wounds, a lifeline that gives us second chances.

To this point, Rabbi David Wolpe taught that religion “can go into a world in which there is a great deal of pain and suffering and loss and bring meaning and purpose and peace.”[2]

Though religion addresses these needs, it is not created by them. Religion is not merely a human response to hardship. It transcends the human; it comes from a higher source. History shows that men and women, in good times and bad, seek truth outside themselves as well as within. And they follow the answers they receive.

What is more, religion is the gathering of unique persons into a fellowship of believers. But if it cannot win the heart of the one, it cannot sustain its community. The spiritual experiences of each individual can be as different as the individuals themselves. Because we “see through a glass darkly,”[3] most things in life come down to faith. Ultimately, in those searching moments with the divine, it is the individual who filters the details, weighs the evidence, and makes decisions on matters of highest significance. This wrangling is the process of faith. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”[4]

Human life is about meaning. Our nature leads us to spiritual questioning and purpose. Religion provides a space where answers and meaning can be sought, found and passed on. That connection between religion and purpose continues today.

Whether it is healthy lifestyles, social trust or charitable giving, social science attests to a myriad of ways religion benefits individuals. According to one recent study, for example, “those who indicate that they are confident in God's existence report a higher sense of purpose.”[5]

This is particularly relevant now. Our encounter with modern life is often a flash of images that burn bright and fade away — so rich on the surface, so neglected at the roots. But religion and the spirituality it inspires digs beneath that surface and connects us to the moral foundations that undergird the best of our shared humanity.

Throughout his life Will Durant, a historian of ideas and cultures, marveled at the power of religious faith. He himself, however, came to no definitive belief about God. At the end of his life of learning and observation he turned his mind to the meaning of the church. In his reflections he showed that even an agnostic person can see the abiding appeal of religion in the face of the unknown:

"These church steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty city spires, or simple chapels in the hills — they rise at every step from the earth toward the sky; in every village of every nation they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know. But as long as man suffers, these steeples will remain."[6]

Institutions and ideas flourish when they fulfill real, lasting needs. Otherwise, they tend to die of natural causes. But religion has not died. Writing at a time, in the 1830s, when his home country of France was departing from religion, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the soul has needs that must be satisfied.”[7] He has proven correct. Over the centuries, attempts to squelch these needs have failed. Religion provides the structure for this longing, and churches are the household of faith.

Though built of wood, stone and steel, churches represent something deep in the human soul, something we long to uncover. More than anything man-made, religion gives direction and shape to the individual search for meaning.


[1] Samuel Rodriguez, “Religious Liberty and Complacent Christianity,” The Christian Post, Sep. 10, 2013.

[2] “Why Faith Matters: Rabbi David J. Wolpe,” lecture given at Emory University, Oct. 21, 2008.

[3] 1 Corinthians 13:12.

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, personal journal entry (8 July 1916), p. 74e.

[5] Stephen Cranney, “Do People Who Believe in God Report More Meaning in Their Lives? The Existential Effects of Belief," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sept. 4, 2013.

[6] Will and Ariel Durant, Dual Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977).

[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 510.

By ROGER SCRUTON How did the universe begin? Some think the question has no answer—that it lies beyond the limits of human reason. Others think the question has an answer, but that the answer depends not on reason but on faith.

What almost no one believes is that there is a single, rational scientific theory that tells us how the universe emerged from the primeval nothingness. How could there be such a thing?

When Isaac Newton proposed his laws of gravity, he did so in a spirit of awe and reverence before the simplicity and beauty of the physical world. He did not doubt that so perfect a design implied a yet more perfect designer.

Immanuel Kant, who believed that Newton's laws of gravity are not merely true but necessarily true, argued that we humans lack the ability to comprehend the universe as a whole, and thus that we can never construct a valid argument for a designer. Our thinking can take us from one point to another along the chain of events. But it cannot take us to a point outside the chain, from which we can pose the question of an original cause.

Indeed the question of how the universe began does not make sense. The concept of cause applies to the objects of experience, linking past to future through universal laws. When we ask about the universe as a whole we are attempting to go beyond possible experience into a realm where the concept of cause has no purchase, and where the writ of reason does not run.

All physicists since Kant have been influenced by this argument. Some admit the point, like Albert Einstein, Others, like Stephen Hawking, express the point in a language of their own.

But Mr. Hawking now wishes to break with this consensus and to argue that science actually does have an answer to the question of origins. We can know how the universe was created, he suggests, since the laws of physics imply that there are limiting conditions, in which universes come into being by the operation of those very laws. There is no room for the creator, since there is no need for Him. The laws of physics do it all by themselves.

Mr. Hawking, of course, dazzles us with his scientific discoveries. Einstein broke with the common-sense view of the world when he decided to treat time as a fourth dimension, on a par with the three dimensions of space. Mr. Hawking gives us dimension upon dimension, assuming that because every continuum can be squeezed into the axioms of a geometry there is no limit to the number of dimensions in which we humans find ourselves suspended. Nor is there a limit to the number of universes, even though we happen to inhabit only one of them and the others may be forever inaccessible to us.

The laws of physics are fast ceasing to be laws of the universe and are becoming laws of a "multiverse" instead. By the time people absorb all of these shifts, they have little strength left to dissent from the view that "the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing" or to question Mr. Hawking's conclusion that therefore there is no need for God.

But what exactly has changed? Have we really moved on from the position that Kant presented? Have we really lifted ourselves outside of everything and everywhere, and achieved the view from nowhere that tells us how things began?

If Mr. Hawking is right, the answer to the question "What created the universe?" is "The laws of physics." But what created the laws of physics? How is it that these strange and powerful laws, and these laws alone, apply to the world?

There are those who will say that the question has no answer —that it lies at or beyond the limits of human thought. And there are those who will say that the question has an answer, but that it is answered not by reason but by faith.

I say that perhaps, in the end, they are the same position. That is what Kant believed. You find out the limits of scientific understanding, he said. And beyond those limits lies the realm of morality, commitment and trust.

Kant, who destroyed all the systems of metaphysics and dug a grave for theology, was also a believer, who, as he put it, "attacked the claims of reason in order to make room for those of faith." It seems to me that he was right.

Mr. Scruton, a philosopher, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

God vs. Science Isn't the Issue Seldom do we act as if life has no moral component.

• By WILLIAM MCGURN
• When the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar," the thought was that scientific inquiry had forever undermined claims to certitude. In hindsight we see Arnold was only half right. In place of Genesis we now have scientism—the idea that science alone can speak truth about man and his world.
  

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today's advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view "outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia."
The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris's aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning—whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins—went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. "Humanity's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover." They concluded "it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning."

Here's the problem: Almost no one really believes this. Not, at least, when it comes to how we behave. And the dichotomy between scientific theory and human action may itself have something to tell us about truth.

That's not to deny electrochemical brain processes and the like. It is to say that much as we may assent to the idea that we are but matter in motion, seldom do we act that way. We love. We fight. We distinguish between the good and noble and the bad and base. More than just religion, our literature and our politics and our music resonate precisely because they speak to these things.

Remember Peter Singer? Mr. Singer is the Princeton utilitarian who accepts scientism's view that human beings are not fundamentally different from animals, just more complex. In his thinking, those who cannot reason for themselves or have lost their self-awareness have no real claim to life. Yet when Alzheimer's struck his mother, he paid for care to prolong and sustain her life. The irony is that an act that does him credit as a son must discredit him among those whose principles about life he claims to share.

To put it another way, while we talk about the clash between God and science, in practice it often comes down to disagreements about man and morals. The boundaries are not always neat. Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had. The result may not be a return to religion but a healthy agnosticism about agnosticism itself.

I once had the opportunity to interview one of my heroes, Sidney Hook. This was a man whose commitment to his atheism and secular humanism was beyond question. One example: A doctor saved Mr. Hook's life by going ahead with an operation against Mr. Hook's wishes. Mr. Hook recovered—and promptly published an op-ed taking his doc to task.

It is possible, of course, to imagine a good society in the absence of a belief that man's dignity comes from his being fashioned in God's image. Something of the sort would have been Mr. Hook's ideal. Yet in his writings, the Almighty in whom Mr. Hook did not believe makes an extraordinary, one might say miraculous, number of appearances. When I asked him why he was not more dismissive, Mr. Hook replied that he was never comfortable with the dogmatism of the village atheist.

Perhaps he thought it "a mild form of dementia."