(Editor’s note: The following responses have been lightly edited. Subjects’ names have been changed.)
I want to talk a little bit about your own experience. I know you’ve very interested in science; a lot of atheists have become very vocal in saying that religion is irrational. You seem like a pretty rational person but I know that you went through a period in which you were deeply affected by existentialism. What was your own journey back to religion? What were some of the intellectual issues you had to grapple with when you started going to church again?
I would say that I had a kind of loss of faith in the possibility of human rationality. I accept as true, on the criteria provided, what science has discovered. Science has good, scientific answers to good, scientific questions, and if a question is judged as not a good scientific question then it simply is set aside as unanswerable. There are questions, however, that remain in the human mind even when science doesn’t address them, and it was thinking about that that pushed me not back toward any religion in particular but away from the sense that science was entirely rational or complete. There was an incompleteness about it that began to trouble me. It was that loss of faith in the secular alternative, you might say, that opened me to the reasonability of choosing a way of life — not so much a way of thought but a way of life — that was in accord with religious tradition.
I don’t think that religion is the same as philosophy; it’s not trying to do that. It’s not the same as science; it’s not trying to do that, either. They have to do with learning, and religion has to do with coping and with life. One may conclude that life is better lived as a member of a church; life is better lived when certain rituals fill the day or fill the year, when certain days of the week or periods of the year are just deeply different from other periods of the day or of the year; one may choose to join a community simply because it opens that possibility. One selection in our anthology is by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish rabbi and theologian, and he talks about the Jewish sabbath as architecture in time, in which one day of the week becomes a kind of space that you enter as you might enter a building. You stay there until the sabbath is over, and then you come back out, so you have the experience of entry and exit. Even though you might be too poor to build a cathedral, you can have a cathedral in time in that way.
What does that have to do with scientific views about where matter originated? So many questions that science is asking are still unanswered, and I think there will be deep, radical questions unanswered at the time when the human species finally goes extinct — and I believe it will go extinct. You and I are mortal, but our species has a life expectancy as well. We don’t know what it is, and you and I don’t know what our own individual life expectancy is, actually, either, but eventually there will be no human species, and at the time when it’s gone some big questions of a scientific sort will remain unanswered. Meanwhile, we have to cope with our human condition personally in one way or another, and I finally concluded it was better not to do that alone but to do it in company, and to allow certain usages to structure that relationship.
Where is God in the middle of this, you might say? I’m agnostic on the existence of God. I think I can practice the usages of a religious community without claiming that God created the world in six days or lives up in Heaven or raises the dead or any of those particular features that are part of the scriptural stories. I know that others take them literally; I don’t, but I don’t think that rules out religious practice for me.
I’ve had that same feeling when I occasionally go to my own childhood church, and this is a realignment. I instantly fell out of my self-obsession, you know? There’s an opening-up and a connecting and a realizing that we’re all in this together; there’s a lot of things that happen that are so positive.
Yes, and my question to you would be… You have all these positive associations with that experience, and though God is a problem for you, when you go into the old church you still derive these various benefits from it that you mentioned. My question to you, as I put it to myself years ago, was why should I deny myself that simply because I have these intellectual difficulties with a very traditional formulation of a very complicated question? I couldn’t see why I should impoverish my life by stripping all those things out simply because, for example, I didn’t believe that God had created the world in six days.
I know for a lot of people this idea that you can accept and respect and maybe take from different religions… a lot of people think that that undermines faith. What’s your take on that?