It's interesting how many times you mention Enlightenment. You're working under an implicit post-Enlightenment frame which places the fundamental truth about Being -- or realness -- as that which can be claimed propositionally and supported with evidence, measured etc.
But so many *real* things cannot be proved empirically, measured. Do you love your wife, parents etc? Can that be measured or proved empirically? So is it real?
A thought experiment:
Imagine someone is watching The Godfather in a theater. They feel the highs and lows of the film. Emotionally connected to the characters. Then Jim barges in, hits pause, and goes: “Hold everything! None of this is real! Those people don’t exist, it’s just photons being beamed from a projector box and displayed on a flat screen, there’s no empirical evidence that Vito or Michael or Sonny ever existed, you’re wasting your time!”
In a sense, he’s technically right. But he’s mixing up what’s most fundamental (because he’s trapped in this implicit post-Enlightenment frame). The Enlightenment frame makes your iPhone work and gives us intercontinental flights. But it’s the wrong level of approach for meaning, love, and ultimate truth about Being.
Spot on critique, and very close to the one I want to raise—Jim’s is a highly rationalist perspective. Rationalism will not result in a coherent vision for the future, it will at best assemble a series of coping strategies (basically the assemblage of practices, individually selected based on preference, that Jim seems to be advocating for).
Jim’s right that a RETVRN to fundamentalist mythic belief systems will not fix the crisis that rationalism created, though. A key issue here is truth, which rationalism can at best ascribe to a prior, ultimately unknowable world. This is a good system for the development of science and technology, but utterly fails in the domain of cohering human activity for the betterment of human beings.
I’m not arguing there’s some “cosmic script” that needs to be decoded for ultimate, objective meaning. I’m not talking about meaning independent of human consciousness. You assume that, but I’m not.
I’m also not talking about something we invent or explain. It’s before all that. I’m pointing to the simple, undeniable fact that anything exists at all, and to the direct, felt awareness of being alive before we start analyzing / labeling / explaining it.
When I say physics can’t tell us “what reality means,” I don’t mean it should give us absolute objective purpose. I mean physics can’t explain the immediate felt sense of being alive. Heidegger’s capital-B Being. Meaning independent of thought or argument. Ontological, not epistemological. Participatory, not propositional. What it feels like to be here, now, perceiving the world. To love, to wonder, to feel joy, to feel a sense of longing. That’s far from being a pseudo-problem. It’s the condition of every problem we ever try to solve. Before we can ask any question or do science, we must already exist and experience. So this first-person Being is foundational, not optional. It gets under your materialist perspective. It’s upstream.
Your assumption that it has to be this objective “CCTV Camera” view of reality is a tell that you’re still in the post-Enlightenment materialist frame. I know this can be hard to see, but it is possible to step outside of that frame. To encounter reality directly, before explanation
You wrote: "Do you love your wife, parents etc? Can that be measured or proved empirically? So is it real?"
Love is proved by empirical acts of love. Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages, is basically a catalog of the empirical proofs of love.
John Gottman has devoted his entire career to the empirical study of married love; and his findings are incredibly useful in helping people stay happily married.
Your anecdote about The Godfather is just silly. Everybody learns, in childhood, about how things can be viewed from multiple perspectives. A gripping film is also just photons beamed on a screen, and is best treated as the latter when the projector malfunctions. A beautiful woman is also a sack of meat, and is best treated as the latter on the operating table. Dom Perignon is just grape juice that's been allowed to go bad and is best treated as the latter if it goes bad in an unexpected way. Seeing things from multiple perspectives is part and parcel of science, where it's tied to the notion of emergent phenomena.
There's only one question that cannot possibly be answered, and that is: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" If you propose that X is the answer, I can simply ask, echoing any toddler, "Why is there X, rather than nothing?"
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Theists make a bizarre and unwarranted leap from the irreducible mystery of why the world exists to bizarre fairy tales about how it exists, e.g., created by a deity who wants us to come to love him through suffering, who incarnated as a man, who will judge as after death, etc.
Einstein knew the mystical feeling very well and it usually prevented him from calling himself an atheist. But here's one time he did so:
"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. ... It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all."
My point isn’t that love doesn’t produce measurable effects. Of course it does. My point is that the experience of love transcends measurement. You can measure the length of all the brush strokes in a Van Gogh painting and still completely miss its essence.
To state it another way: the reality of love isn’t reducible to data. It’s an experienced phenomenon.
This same gap between external data and lived experience applies to the deepest question of Being. Physics can measure what reality does, but not what it means. Trying to answer questions about existence with materialism is like measuring the brush strokes to explain beauty. You’re swimming inside an invisible post-Enlightenment frame without realizing, like a fish in water. There’s a wider frame available.
You wrote: “This same gap between external data and lived experience applies to the deepest question of Being.”
I disagree. The hard problem of consciousness is merely a puzzle; the irreducible mystery of existence is not. It is a pseudo-problem.
“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You wrote: “Physics can measure what reality does, but not what it means.”
Reality has no meaning. Meanings are purely the creation and concern of sentient creatures. For human beings to ask about the meaning of the Universe is as silly as a bunch of flowers trying to describe the Universal Fragrance.
Meanings are manufactured by us, not handed out to us tied with a ribbon by God or Reality. Expecting to discover the meaning of the universe is as silly as deciding to publish a novel and then searching one’s attic and basement for a completed manuscript.
“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”
Thank you for highlighting this much needed cultural shift. I, too, have been concerned that truth itself feels uncertain and the world seems to be losing its shared sense of reality.
So about two years ago, I gathered a small group of friends together online simply to stay connected through sincere conversations. There was no plan — only a desire to remain grounded in what was human and real. Week after week, we gathered to share hopes, fears, and insights. And over time, something remarkable began to happen: what emerged between us was wiser, more nuanced, and more alive than any one of us could have found alone.
From this beginning, our community was born. Not as an organization, per se, but as a relational field of trust and coherence. We discovered that nourishing connection doesn’t require ideology; it requires relational intimacy. True coherence happens in small groups — five to seven people — where there is room for us to bring our tenderness forward safely.
Today, Wisdom Exchange has grown into a constellation of small circles, each one sovereign yet connected by shared values like the courage to stay in the conversation when it matters most. Together, we've found that these circles form a social network of relational wisdom.
WE is not a movement to be scaled up, but a practice to be deepened. It exists as a training ground for the qualities we most need in our time: discernment, trust, repair, and compassion. While our journey began in friendship, it now continues through coherence. And in a fragmented world, WE remains a invitation to remember what it means to be fully human, together.
Very interesting. But it's a long story. I agree that meaning comes from private/civic life, not something political society agrees on to enforce unity of belief. But the fact that people tend to couple their rituals/practices (as in Durkheim) with doctrines/beliefs about reality seems inevitable. Guess I should read Vervaeke.
As a psychologist, I resonated strongly to this post because I think it accurately depicts some of the psychology of religious practice and belief. It was also timely. Just an hour earlier, I read about Charles Murray's reasons for converting from being a life-long agnostic to a believer that there is a greater-than-50% chance that Christianity is a viable belief system. I am no fan of Murray's politics or possible racism, but I always thought that at least he was serious about scientific inquiry. And now he has joined so many other intellectuals, not just in the belief in God and an afterlife, but specifically in Christian belief. So strange!
Yep. I am a long-time follower of Tom Clark, and, as people like Sagan and Dawkins have written so eloquently, there is plenty of awe in being a naturalist. I have a colleague, Alice Andrews, who started a movement she calls Sacred Naturalism to emphasize that awe that can be found in a naturalistic worldview.
Rationally you know, but at a deeper level your brain/body identifies this as a medicine that a doctor gave you. Maybe it is the same with religious practice - the scaffold of belief give practice their full impact - the body takes it more seriously - and reinforce commitment. Hard to see organized practice in a community persisting over time without it, in particular when competing against infinite entertainment options. For that, it has to become part of your identity, which is not a rational thing.
It's difficult to peel away from ready-made structures. Plenty of people have fallen back into this throughout the last century. Seraphim Rose and Jordan Peterson come to mind. They saw the Nihilistic Crisis and retreated directly to the most familiar established source of transcendent meaning.
I would posit that there are a few things that religions offer:
Owen, what do you mean by 'evolutionary mismatch"? Are you referring to how some of our inherent qualities (craving for sweets and fats in our diet, for example) no longer fit the world in which we live? How does religion provide a counterbalance to that?
Great question, Ralph, thanks. Yes, that's the mismatch I'm referring to. But it goes a lot deeper than just what we eat. The ancestral environment included not only our physical environment, from which we source our food, but, in broad strokes, also our social environment, which was mostly extended family and individuals we knew personally, as well as our psychological environment, which was, at the time, unexposed to the sea of information and distractions we are currently awash in.
The one thing all major religions appear to do is offer guidelines for behavior modification practices that curb instinctual impulses that evolved to promote reproductive success in hunter/gatherer societies, but which are no longer adaptive in civilization. The "Thou shalt nots": Don't kill, don't steal, don't get frisky with your neighbor's wife, etc. Religions tell us how to survive in the physical, social, and psychological environments we were not biologically adapted to live in, but have nonetheless created for ourselves, as symbolized by the Garden of Eden story, and our Fall from it and our opportunity for Redemption.
But aren't those things (don't kill, don't steal, etc.) part of our basic evolved morality, which were co-opted as moral codes by religion but which actually predate religion? Human morals come from our shared evolutionary heritage, not from religion; they may be reinforced by religion, if a person follows one, but we don't need religion to be moral. It's part of our basic human equipment.
Even though our species (and some others) have a rudimentary sense of altruism which is apparently genetically or epigenetically transferred to offspring, the greater part of what we call morality is culturally evolved, but evolved nonetheless. So, yes, it was evolving, at least culturally, in early Homo sapiens, long before "organized religion" evolved. But organized religion became "organized" to meet the needs of civilized societies.
Religion is similar to language in that we are born with a capacity for it, but not with its specific content. Example: All humans are born with the capacity for complex language, but no human is born speaking French. The surrounding culture supplies the specific content. Humans are born with the capacity for complex culture (including religion) but nobody is born Christian. The specific religious doctrines, like "thou shalt not kill" are sourced from the local culture.
The precursor to organized religion, mostly animism, was adequate to counter the low level of evolutionary mismatch experienced by pre-civilized societies, but that same cultural impulse grew up into what we call religion today to meet the much greater mismatch created by civilization.
Human morals come mostly from human culture, of which, religion has been a large part in the past, some of which has become secularized in recent centuries. And perhaps all of it could be in the future, but whether under the banner of religion or science, or just common sense... humans need a regularized program of behavior modification in order to remain civilized. We don't have to call it religion, or believe in reified mythology, but we will need to replace that with something that works as well or better - not just abandon it thinking our natural instincts will carry us just fine in a world they were not evolved to fit.
David, but didn't Jim explicitly say all that (that religions offer, structure, calendar, etc.) in his essay? And posit what we could and should do to replicate those things without fouling our thinking with the unfalsifiable metaphysical beliefs that religion wants you to think are inherently inseparable from the ritual practices, even though the project is difficult?
Clearest assessment I've read in a long time, and on a subject that's been gnawing at me for ages. Thank you. What befuddles me is the bliss radiated by those who have gone all in on focusing their attention far out. I prefer what Amy Scharff describes as the "god between us" when in relationship with one another.
This is excellent! I rather think this is what, at least in part, unitarians have been trying to do. That’s doesn’t really work for me because there are still metaphysical assumptions that would prevent me from embracing it. But yes, if somebody were to set up a community for practices which required no supernatural beliefs or magical thinking, I’d probably find a lot of satisfaction in that.
I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and we are devoted to practice, not to belief. I'm not even sure what my fellow congregants believe about God because it's not that important to us.
Sunday Assembly here in Seattle didn't take off, perhaps because there was not provision for taking care of kids. The intergenerational aspect of church is pretty important!
Also, the general decline in church attendance across the West is a tough current to swim against for any modern upstart isn’t it? Didn’t Alain de Botton try to start a humanist service years back? I like his idea of secular temples (basically what the writer is calling for here) but how to get them started? Perhaps initially simply as beautiful, calm and quiet places for people to sit for a while. Not sure who will fund them…
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Those "propositional claims" you're concerned about align perfectly with "what we do know about how reality works" when understood symbolically, as originally generated.
The central point here is a very important one that I fully support and have argued myself: that we don't have to subscribe to metaphysics for the practical benefits of religion. I am glad to see that central point stated so clearly.
However, the Vervaeke style approach to the alternatives does not to my mind offer a clear enough view of the drawbacks of naturalistic metaphysics - and how it can be used in exactly the same (but opposed) way as supernaturalistic metaphysics. Any absolute view can be used equally well for shortcut group bonding, appeals to authority, infinite rationalization, repression, projection etc., whether 'religious' or 'enlightenment'. We instead need a clearer view of how we can avoid metaphysics altogether and embrace provisionality. Vervaeke's approach to 'meaning' also conflates basic embodied/associative meaning with beliefs. It is our awareness of new embodied meaning as possibility, that is not the basis of current belief, that makes provisionality possible, so it is hard to give a coherent account of provisionality without a sufficiently clear account of meaning, and hard to escape traditionalist metaphysics if you don't have provisionality as a genuine alternative to metaphysics with all its absolutizing assumptions. All these people who are drifting back to metaphysical religion may well be doing so because they assume that metaphysics is everywhere and inevitable anyway - although they are wrong.
In my view the Middle Way, avoiding metaphysics on *both* sides, incorporating the provisionality of scientific practice at its best, and also taking archetypal inspiration from religion seriously (as solely meaning, not belief), can offer the basis of a much more coherent and effective approach to your central point here. I have written extensively on this, in books published by an academic press.
This analysis is just in time, the "tech-right" needs to hear it. From Peterson to Thiel, the intellectual dark web and elite tech bros recognize the importance of the practices but then do mental gymnastics to justify the religion. The rest of us athiest scientists and engineers are left lost and confused when those thought leaders suddenly start talking about Jesus. For people who are otherwise so smart, it's surprising they don't consider the possibility of separating the grounding traditions from the theistic beliefs.
Just at Halloween - it has very little religious significance anymore, it's simply...fun!
Halloween still has religious significance in many religious communities. Any public school teacher who has worked in diverse school communities can tell you about kids who were not allowed to participate in the Halloween fun because their religion forbids it, or because they have different metaphysical beliefs about ghosts and spirits and such. It's now a formerly-religious-but-now-secular event for us, a category which might also include Christmas for many, but there are probably more people who imbue it with the metaphysical than you might think.
I've been to secular events, that are attempts to have religeon with God, and it's awkward because everyone there is trying hard to 'have community' which feels weak, rather than worship. The supernatural beliefs do have a function. I don't know if we can do away with that entirely and still have something actually compelling.
Could religions' super natural beliefs be load-bearing shibboleths?
The problem of metaphysical baggage is real. But I can't shake a feeling that most religious people have, at least implicitly, addressed it with a different solution. Basically, believing a few core supernatural beliefs but holding them at arm's length.
I don't think its the sort of approach you'll find appealing (and I don't either). But I've got to acknowledge, it seems to work. And it preserves just enough of the scaffolding that makes the practices powerful.
Think you're off the mark here!
It's interesting how many times you mention Enlightenment. You're working under an implicit post-Enlightenment frame which places the fundamental truth about Being -- or realness -- as that which can be claimed propositionally and supported with evidence, measured etc.
But so many *real* things cannot be proved empirically, measured. Do you love your wife, parents etc? Can that be measured or proved empirically? So is it real?
A thought experiment:
Imagine someone is watching The Godfather in a theater. They feel the highs and lows of the film. Emotionally connected to the characters. Then Jim barges in, hits pause, and goes: “Hold everything! None of this is real! Those people don’t exist, it’s just photons being beamed from a projector box and displayed on a flat screen, there’s no empirical evidence that Vito or Michael or Sonny ever existed, you’re wasting your time!”
In a sense, he’s technically right. But he’s mixing up what’s most fundamental (because he’s trapped in this implicit post-Enlightenment frame). The Enlightenment frame makes your iPhone work and gives us intercontinental flights. But it’s the wrong level of approach for meaning, love, and ultimate truth about Being.
^and if anyone reflexively rejects the final sentence, I recommend the opening paragraph of "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Spot on critique, and very close to the one I want to raise—Jim’s is a highly rationalist perspective. Rationalism will not result in a coherent vision for the future, it will at best assemble a series of coping strategies (basically the assemblage of practices, individually selected based on preference, that Jim seems to be advocating for).
Jim’s right that a RETVRN to fundamentalist mythic belief systems will not fix the crisis that rationalism created, though. A key issue here is truth, which rationalism can at best ascribe to a prior, ultimately unknowable world. This is a good system for the development of science and technology, but utterly fails in the domain of cohering human activity for the betterment of human beings.
We’re talking about meaning in different ways.
I’m not arguing there’s some “cosmic script” that needs to be decoded for ultimate, objective meaning. I’m not talking about meaning independent of human consciousness. You assume that, but I’m not.
I’m also not talking about something we invent or explain. It’s before all that. I’m pointing to the simple, undeniable fact that anything exists at all, and to the direct, felt awareness of being alive before we start analyzing / labeling / explaining it.
When I say physics can’t tell us “what reality means,” I don’t mean it should give us absolute objective purpose. I mean physics can’t explain the immediate felt sense of being alive. Heidegger’s capital-B Being. Meaning independent of thought or argument. Ontological, not epistemological. Participatory, not propositional. What it feels like to be here, now, perceiving the world. To love, to wonder, to feel joy, to feel a sense of longing. That’s far from being a pseudo-problem. It’s the condition of every problem we ever try to solve. Before we can ask any question or do science, we must already exist and experience. So this first-person Being is foundational, not optional. It gets under your materialist perspective. It’s upstream.
Your assumption that it has to be this objective “CCTV Camera” view of reality is a tell that you’re still in the post-Enlightenment materialist frame. I know this can be hard to see, but it is possible to step outside of that frame. To encounter reality directly, before explanation
You wrote: "Do you love your wife, parents etc? Can that be measured or proved empirically? So is it real?"
Love is proved by empirical acts of love. Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages, is basically a catalog of the empirical proofs of love.
John Gottman has devoted his entire career to the empirical study of married love; and his findings are incredibly useful in helping people stay happily married.
Your anecdote about The Godfather is just silly. Everybody learns, in childhood, about how things can be viewed from multiple perspectives. A gripping film is also just photons beamed on a screen, and is best treated as the latter when the projector malfunctions. A beautiful woman is also a sack of meat, and is best treated as the latter on the operating table. Dom Perignon is just grape juice that's been allowed to go bad and is best treated as the latter if it goes bad in an unexpected way. Seeing things from multiple perspectives is part and parcel of science, where it's tied to the notion of emergent phenomena.
There's only one question that cannot possibly be answered, and that is: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" If you propose that X is the answer, I can simply ask, echoing any toddler, "Why is there X, rather than nothing?"
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Theists make a bizarre and unwarranted leap from the irreducible mystery of why the world exists to bizarre fairy tales about how it exists, e.g., created by a deity who wants us to come to love him through suffering, who incarnated as a man, who will judge as after death, etc.
Einstein knew the mystical feeling very well and it usually prevented him from calling himself an atheist. But here's one time he did so:
"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. ... It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all."
My point isn’t that love doesn’t produce measurable effects. Of course it does. My point is that the experience of love transcends measurement. You can measure the length of all the brush strokes in a Van Gogh painting and still completely miss its essence.
To state it another way: the reality of love isn’t reducible to data. It’s an experienced phenomenon.
This same gap between external data and lived experience applies to the deepest question of Being. Physics can measure what reality does, but not what it means. Trying to answer questions about existence with materialism is like measuring the brush strokes to explain beauty. You’re swimming inside an invisible post-Enlightenment frame without realizing, like a fish in water. There’s a wider frame available.
You wrote: “This same gap between external data and lived experience applies to the deepest question of Being.”
I disagree. The hard problem of consciousness is merely a puzzle; the irreducible mystery of existence is not. It is a pseudo-problem.
“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You wrote: “Physics can measure what reality does, but not what it means.”
Reality has no meaning. Meanings are purely the creation and concern of sentient creatures. For human beings to ask about the meaning of the Universe is as silly as a bunch of flowers trying to describe the Universal Fragrance.
Meanings are manufactured by us, not handed out to us tied with a ribbon by God or Reality. Expecting to discover the meaning of the universe is as silly as deciding to publish a novel and then searching one’s attic and basement for a completed manuscript.
“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
Hi Jim,
Thank you for highlighting this much needed cultural shift. I, too, have been concerned that truth itself feels uncertain and the world seems to be losing its shared sense of reality.
So about two years ago, I gathered a small group of friends together online simply to stay connected through sincere conversations. There was no plan — only a desire to remain grounded in what was human and real. Week after week, we gathered to share hopes, fears, and insights. And over time, something remarkable began to happen: what emerged between us was wiser, more nuanced, and more alive than any one of us could have found alone.
From this beginning, our community was born. Not as an organization, per se, but as a relational field of trust and coherence. We discovered that nourishing connection doesn’t require ideology; it requires relational intimacy. True coherence happens in small groups — five to seven people — where there is room for us to bring our tenderness forward safely.
Today, Wisdom Exchange has grown into a constellation of small circles, each one sovereign yet connected by shared values like the courage to stay in the conversation when it matters most. Together, we've found that these circles form a social network of relational wisdom.
WE is not a movement to be scaled up, but a practice to be deepened. It exists as a training ground for the qualities we most need in our time: discernment, trust, repair, and compassion. While our journey began in friendship, it now continues through coherence. And in a fragmented world, WE remains a invitation to remember what it means to be fully human, together.
Very interesting. But it's a long story. I agree that meaning comes from private/civic life, not something political society agrees on to enforce unity of belief. But the fact that people tend to couple their rituals/practices (as in Durkheim) with doctrines/beliefs about reality seems inevitable. Guess I should read Vervaeke.
As a psychologist, I resonated strongly to this post because I think it accurately depicts some of the psychology of religious practice and belief. It was also timely. Just an hour earlier, I read about Charles Murray's reasons for converting from being a life-long agnostic to a believer that there is a greater-than-50% chance that Christianity is a viable belief system. I am no fan of Murray's politics or possible racism, but I always thought that at least he was serious about scientific inquiry. And now he has joined so many other intellectuals, not just in the belief in God and an afterlife, but specifically in Christian belief. So strange!
Good points about eschewing the supernatural, but having an explicit worldview in common can help the cause of community, in this case worldview naturalism: https://www.naturalism.org/spirituality/spirituality-without-faith
Yep. I am a long-time follower of Tom Clark, and, as people like Sagan and Dawkins have written so eloquently, there is plenty of awe in being a naturalist. I have a colleague, Alice Andrews, who started a movement she calls Sacred Naturalism to emphasize that awe that can be found in a naturalistic worldview.
And biologist Ursula Goodenough is a leading proponent of religious naturalism, see her book The Sacred Depths of Nature and other writings, https://religiousnaturalism.org/ursula-goodenough/
Placebo effect works even if you know you’re taking a placebo
Rationally you know, but at a deeper level your brain/body identifies this as a medicine that a doctor gave you. Maybe it is the same with religious practice - the scaffold of belief give practice their full impact - the body takes it more seriously - and reinforce commitment. Hard to see organized practice in a community persisting over time without it, in particular when competing against infinite entertainment options. For that, it has to become part of your identity, which is not a rational thing.
Yes!
It's difficult to peel away from ready-made structures. Plenty of people have fallen back into this throughout the last century. Seraphim Rose and Jordan Peterson come to mind. They saw the Nihilistic Crisis and retreated directly to the most familiar established source of transcendent meaning.
I would posit that there are a few things that religions offer:
- structure
- culture
- calendar
- transcendence
- ontology
It's a complete package, and hard to replace.
Also (and maybe primarily)...
- counterbalance to evolutionary mismatch
Owen, what do you mean by 'evolutionary mismatch"? Are you referring to how some of our inherent qualities (craving for sweets and fats in our diet, for example) no longer fit the world in which we live? How does religion provide a counterbalance to that?
Great question, Ralph, thanks. Yes, that's the mismatch I'm referring to. But it goes a lot deeper than just what we eat. The ancestral environment included not only our physical environment, from which we source our food, but, in broad strokes, also our social environment, which was mostly extended family and individuals we knew personally, as well as our psychological environment, which was, at the time, unexposed to the sea of information and distractions we are currently awash in.
The one thing all major religions appear to do is offer guidelines for behavior modification practices that curb instinctual impulses that evolved to promote reproductive success in hunter/gatherer societies, but which are no longer adaptive in civilization. The "Thou shalt nots": Don't kill, don't steal, don't get frisky with your neighbor's wife, etc. Religions tell us how to survive in the physical, social, and psychological environments we were not biologically adapted to live in, but have nonetheless created for ourselves, as symbolized by the Garden of Eden story, and our Fall from it and our opportunity for Redemption.
But aren't those things (don't kill, don't steal, etc.) part of our basic evolved morality, which were co-opted as moral codes by religion but which actually predate religion? Human morals come from our shared evolutionary heritage, not from religion; they may be reinforced by religion, if a person follows one, but we don't need religion to be moral. It's part of our basic human equipment.
Even though our species (and some others) have a rudimentary sense of altruism which is apparently genetically or epigenetically transferred to offspring, the greater part of what we call morality is culturally evolved, but evolved nonetheless. So, yes, it was evolving, at least culturally, in early Homo sapiens, long before "organized religion" evolved. But organized religion became "organized" to meet the needs of civilized societies.
Religion is similar to language in that we are born with a capacity for it, but not with its specific content. Example: All humans are born with the capacity for complex language, but no human is born speaking French. The surrounding culture supplies the specific content. Humans are born with the capacity for complex culture (including religion) but nobody is born Christian. The specific religious doctrines, like "thou shalt not kill" are sourced from the local culture.
The precursor to organized religion, mostly animism, was adequate to counter the low level of evolutionary mismatch experienced by pre-civilized societies, but that same cultural impulse grew up into what we call religion today to meet the much greater mismatch created by civilization.
Human morals come mostly from human culture, of which, religion has been a large part in the past, some of which has become secularized in recent centuries. And perhaps all of it could be in the future, but whether under the banner of religion or science, or just common sense... humans need a regularized program of behavior modification in order to remain civilized. We don't have to call it religion, or believe in reified mythology, but we will need to replace that with something that works as well or better - not just abandon it thinking our natural instincts will carry us just fine in a world they were not evolved to fit.
David, but didn't Jim explicitly say all that (that religions offer, structure, calendar, etc.) in his essay? And posit what we could and should do to replicate those things without fouling our thinking with the unfalsifiable metaphysical beliefs that religion wants you to think are inherently inseparable from the ritual practices, even though the project is difficult?
Clearest assessment I've read in a long time, and on a subject that's been gnawing at me for ages. Thank you. What befuddles me is the bliss radiated by those who have gone all in on focusing their attention far out. I prefer what Amy Scharff describes as the "god between us" when in relationship with one another.
This is excellent! I rather think this is what, at least in part, unitarians have been trying to do. That’s doesn’t really work for me because there are still metaphysical assumptions that would prevent me from embracing it. But yes, if somebody were to set up a community for practices which required no supernatural beliefs or magical thinking, I’d probably find a lot of satisfaction in that.
Amen! (said as an atheist)
I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and we are devoted to practice, not to belief. I'm not even sure what my fellow congregants believe about God because it's not that important to us.
Sunday Assembly here in Seattle didn't take off, perhaps because there was not provision for taking care of kids. The intergenerational aspect of church is pretty important!
Also, the general decline in church attendance across the West is a tough current to swim against for any modern upstart isn’t it? Didn’t Alain de Botton try to start a humanist service years back? I like his idea of secular temples (basically what the writer is calling for here) but how to get them started? Perhaps initially simply as beautiful, calm and quiet places for people to sit for a while. Not sure who will fund them…
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Those "propositional claims" you're concerned about align perfectly with "what we do know about how reality works" when understood symbolically, as originally generated.
The central point here is a very important one that I fully support and have argued myself: that we don't have to subscribe to metaphysics for the practical benefits of religion. I am glad to see that central point stated so clearly.
However, the Vervaeke style approach to the alternatives does not to my mind offer a clear enough view of the drawbacks of naturalistic metaphysics - and how it can be used in exactly the same (but opposed) way as supernaturalistic metaphysics. Any absolute view can be used equally well for shortcut group bonding, appeals to authority, infinite rationalization, repression, projection etc., whether 'religious' or 'enlightenment'. We instead need a clearer view of how we can avoid metaphysics altogether and embrace provisionality. Vervaeke's approach to 'meaning' also conflates basic embodied/associative meaning with beliefs. It is our awareness of new embodied meaning as possibility, that is not the basis of current belief, that makes provisionality possible, so it is hard to give a coherent account of provisionality without a sufficiently clear account of meaning, and hard to escape traditionalist metaphysics if you don't have provisionality as a genuine alternative to metaphysics with all its absolutizing assumptions. All these people who are drifting back to metaphysical religion may well be doing so because they assume that metaphysics is everywhere and inevitable anyway - although they are wrong.
In my view the Middle Way, avoiding metaphysics on *both* sides, incorporating the provisionality of scientific practice at its best, and also taking archetypal inspiration from religion seriously (as solely meaning, not belief), can offer the basis of a much more coherent and effective approach to your central point here. I have written extensively on this, in books published by an academic press.
This analysis is just in time, the "tech-right" needs to hear it. From Peterson to Thiel, the intellectual dark web and elite tech bros recognize the importance of the practices but then do mental gymnastics to justify the religion. The rest of us athiest scientists and engineers are left lost and confused when those thought leaders suddenly start talking about Jesus. For people who are otherwise so smart, it's surprising they don't consider the possibility of separating the grounding traditions from the theistic beliefs.
Just at Halloween - it has very little religious significance anymore, it's simply...fun!
Halloween still has religious significance in many religious communities. Any public school teacher who has worked in diverse school communities can tell you about kids who were not allowed to participate in the Halloween fun because their religion forbids it, or because they have different metaphysical beliefs about ghosts and spirits and such. It's now a formerly-religious-but-now-secular event for us, a category which might also include Christmas for many, but there are probably more people who imbue it with the metaphysical than you might think.
Meh
I've been to secular events, that are attempts to have religeon with God, and it's awkward because everyone there is trying hard to 'have community' which feels weak, rather than worship. The supernatural beliefs do have a function. I don't know if we can do away with that entirely and still have something actually compelling.
Could religions' super natural beliefs be load-bearing shibboleths?
The problem of metaphysical baggage is real. But I can't shake a feeling that most religious people have, at least implicitly, addressed it with a different solution. Basically, believing a few core supernatural beliefs but holding them at arm's length.
I don't think its the sort of approach you'll find appealing (and I don't either). But I've got to acknowledge, it seems to work. And it preserves just enough of the scaffolding that makes the practices powerful.