This is the title of a book by Thomas Burnet, who also wrote a famous book
called Archaeologicae philosophicae, which is where Coleridge
got the epigraph for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum
universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit, et
gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt?
quae loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium
humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in
animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem
contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat
nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea
invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a
nocte, distinguamus.
The other book, Telluris theoria sacra, means "The sacred theory
of the Earth" -- it's a book of natural history from a supernatural
perspective. The theory is sacred because it is religious (like the
NMH "Sacred Concert", where the music is all of religious origin); so
the title means something like "What religion tells us about where
the world comes from", and it could be contrasted with a book called
Telluris theoria profana, although Burnet never wrote such
a thing.
So Burnet gave some influential theories about the history of the world,
himself influenced by Christian scripture and theology. He argued that
the Earth used to be very smooth, in the old days, and its surface has
become rougher over time.
("Antiquitas mundi iuventus saeculi: nostra profecto antiqua sunt
saecula non ea quae computantur ordine inverso initium sumendo a saeculo
nostro." Francis Bacon.) The very first geologists agreed with Burnet
that mountains had been formed over time, and hadn't existed at the
creation of the world.
A strange idea, really, because the more common religious theory had been
that the physical features we see in the world today had been created this
way; Burnet's account of the true religious theory was that the world actually
changes over time, as it ages.
Geologists nowadays don't usually quote scriptures. But it's interesting
that Burnet thought that there was a "sacred theory of the Earth"
and tried to find it. Obviously, his attitude was that, because religion
is true, facts about it can serve as evidence or as hints about other
aspects of the world; religious evidence will be admissible, in this view,
because the religious evidence is true. (On the other hand, scholars who
are not Christian will not necessarily be expected to believe the sacred
theory.)
It's interesting to consider where in life religious belief or disbelief
shows up. I remember always going to synagogue when I was young on
Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. (My father also took me at other times,
and I went voluntarily by myself at other times when I was preparing
for my bar mitzvah.) The rabbi's sermon on Rosh Hashana always,
every year, included a plea that people in the audience should come to
synagogue at other times of the year, not just on the high holidays. (I'm
fairly sure that Easter sermons in Christian churches often suggest that
it's good to come to services more regularly.) So the phenomenon was
that people identified in a way that seemed to me to be superficial with
Judaism (and I think this would not happen in an Orthodox Jewish
congregation), enough to want to go for "family reasons" or from a sense
of guilt to services at the high holidays.
But at the same time, it wasn't clear that Judaism (at least Jewish
liturgical worship) was integrated into their lives very much. I mean,
it's a common statement that you can't tell "what religion someone is"
by looking, or even by observing the person for a while. (I've often
gone months without hearing about someone's ideas about religion --
a situation I hear is more common in the U.S. than many other places,
where people feel more comfortable discussing religion with one another,
or where religion is more thoroughly integrated into popular culture.)
So there was a point that people shouldn't compartmentalize religion
and shouldn't make it something they "only do on Saturday" (heh!) or
only on certain holidays and only at certain events. It should be
taken seriously if it is believed at all, and this means that it
affects every part of one's life. Concretely, the rabbi would suggest
that regular participation in community prayer services was important
for people who took their religion seriously.
Jesus, we hear, didn't see a problem with Jews whose practice of
religion was private:
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they
love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street
corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have
received their reward in full.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray
to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what
is done in secret, will reward you.
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for
they think they will be heard because of their many words.
(Matthew 6:5-7 (NIV))
But elsewhere he says to be evangelical and tell other people about
the news:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And
surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
(Matthew 28:19-20 (NIV))
(This is called the Great Commission.)
Clearly there is a difference between public prayer and evangelism,
although I think that distinction has blurred and plenty of evangelists
have been accused of ignoring Matthew 6:5. But possibly these two
instructions are compatible.
So religion can show up or not show up in many different places in a
person's life. It's most evident if someone is wearing an "I agree
with Paul" shirt or asking us if we're saved, or handing out Jews
for Jesus flyers in the subway. And some people are professional
evangelists or professional clergy, and we know (supposedly) how
they think about things and how their lives are affected. But other
times things show up only in unusual circumstances -- for example,
during the Vietnam War, a lot of religious people who had rarely
had occasion to talk about their beliefs felt an obligation to
criticize the war, or to assert their beliefs so as to obtain C.O.
status.
And others, like Daniel Berrigan, for whom we had that birthday party
not long ago, felt compelled to make a whole career out of religious
opposition to wars.
Other times, people might be presented with something to eat and refuse
for religious reasons. Dietary laws seem to be one of the longest-surviving
aspects of religious practice among people who are otherwise completely
disconnected from religious communities. Many people (including many
believing Jews) say that Jewish dietary laws were constructed -- by God
or by people -- to make Jews feel a sense of difference. (There
are other theories, such as that they have a sanitary benefit or a
nutritional benefit, that they are arbitrary and intended as a test
of faith, or that they represent a hidden order in the world which is
not yet intelligible to people.) And they've been remarkably successful at
creating a sense of difference, so that today many assimilated and secular
Jews who are not vegetarians refuse to eat pork, and practically their
entire sense of being Jewish may well be "I don't eat pork". (I don't
know why that corner of kashrut is more firmly entrenched than not eating
shellfish or not combining milk and meat.)
We should not neglect (as Sumana pointed out in connection with the
Annalee Newitz article I wrote about recently) that there are vast
numbers of people who refuse to have sex before marriage for purely
religious reasons, who otherwise might well behave totally differently.
Newitz seemed to be totally uninterested in this phenomenon -- it seemed
that, for her, the only interesting reason not to have sex was a lack of
attraction or interest. (She did deal with the idea that people should
only have sex with people they love, but Sumana noted that religious
ideas about marriage can be quite different from this. For example,
there are few religions which say that you have to love
someone whom you will marry or whom you have married. For many people,
whether two people are married is a far more important issue than
whether they love one another in judging whether they should have sex.)
But these things are obvious and direct; nowadays, without a single
orthodoxy in charge of a religion world-wide (even the papacy has gotten
much milder about proclaiming doctrines and about dealing with dissenters),
a lot of things about how religion works in people's lives, and how they
think about it, have gotten really subtle. (It's not that religious
belief wasn't subtle before, it's just that, until recently, orthodox
organized religions had much more influence about how people talked about
their beliefs -- that in many communities, expressing a variant view would
have been seen as such a big deal, perhaps leading to excommunication and
even wars. Don't forget that religious wars were the longest-lasting
and bloodiest wars in European history until this century. "Tantum
religio potuit suadere malorum." I think
that people were much more afraid about "novelty" in religion in those
days, and about preserving a claim to orthodoxy. They would try to
speak of the sacred theory about a particular topic -- although
the definite article isn't actually part of Burnet's title -- and
there can perhaps only be one sacred theory about a particulartopic,
the rest being heretical.)
What a change it is that heresy is treated so differently today! It
sounds as though, at some times and places, calling someone a heretic
was like calling someone a child molester today. But without this
stigma, people really show the diversity of their thought, and life gets
very confusing.
I was writing yesterday about religious belief and personality and the
lack of a direct connection. I have a dear friend whom I met a few
years ago. When we met, I wrote, she was a religious person who was
a humanist at heart. I was an atheist who was a religious person at
heart. In her personality, in the way she thinks about things, she
was deeply involved in the secular, the here and now, the indepedence
and critical judgment of the individual; she embodies many of the
ideals of the Humanist Manifesto. (See
Humanist
Manifesto I,
Humanist
Manifesto II.) But she professed
beliefs about how and why we exist that placed her in a church, and
she was uneasy with the traditions and interpretations of theology
that that church had often employed, and what people had done with
their beliefs. I think a lot of her concerns were that the church had
not been pluralist enough, had not been tolerant enough, had not been
adequately and vocally concerned with the health and well-being of
everyone in this physical world...
And I was an atheist whose personality turned toward the theoretical
and the absolute, and toward reverence for impersonal law ("the law
is not a respecter of persons"! "a government of laws and not of
men"! "avia mens hominum audet insectas leges adamante perenni
assimilare suas"!) and abstract principle. And I was known to say
that organized religions were the great triumphs of human culture and
effort except that they were wrong about all the facts, which
was their great tragedy. And I was attracted to systematic philosophy,
especially idealist philosophy, and I admired the efforts of systematic
theologians except that I thought they were all wrong. Also I wanted
things that were permanent, perfect, and complete -- and only religion
and mathematics have made serious claims to possess truth like that.
(Gödel eliminated the "complete" part from mathematics; there
is a great interview with Chaitin about this.)
I was not a humanist at heart. I thought that we should live
according to laws not of our own devising; I thought that we should
wish for certainty. But I just thought that the religions of this
world have never found what they claim to have found, that they were
founded on historical errors and misperceptions, and they did a good
job within the constraints of being wrong, and they made sense.
I think my friend and I admired, even chased after, one another's
traditions, in the theoretical sense: maybe she wanted to be free of
theology, and I wanted to be subject to it. (Mortimer Adler says
somewhere that theology is the Queen of the Sciences -- which is
what Eric Temple Bell said about mathematics -- and that one reason
universities are in such a mess is that they've stopped teaching
theology. And without theology, he says, nobody can really help to
understand the unity of all other disciplines: so the universities
have become fragmented this way. I think this is complete nonsense,
but it's such attractive complete nonsense!)
I wrote in two works which I've mentioned in my diaries -- my essay
"Romance and Failure" and my epic poem "Existence and Uniqueness" --
about the fact that I had explicitly religious conceptions of dating.
I think I first noticed that when I was a junior in high school,
that I had religious attitudes relating to dating, that I thought it
called for religious faith, that I was comfortable thinking about
romance in religious terms. But I didn't really have much to say
about it until recently, when I wrote those two pieces and had
lots to say.
Let me say that I had an "Amoris theoria sacra", a sacred theory of
love. And one of my main points here is that it's not really unusual
to have a sacred theory of things that aren't subjects of traditional
theology. It's not unusual to have sacred theories about the things
that are most important to us: I had a sacred theory of love and a
sacred theory of knowledge, and I think Bertrand Russell did, too:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my
life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable
pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds,
have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great
ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so
great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a
few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves
loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold
unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the
union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring
vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what
I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is
what -- at last -- I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to
understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars
shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which
number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I
have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward
the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries
of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured
by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the
whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what
human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and
I too suffer.
Isn't this obviously sacred theory, even though Russell doesn't care for
scriptures? "I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring
vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined"?
(I haven't shared Russell's "unbearable pity for the suffering of
mankind" all the time -- not to the extent that I have shared his other
passions -- but perhaps I will when I'm older.)
I wanted things that were unique and permanent (as God is) and yet
also really existed (as perhaps God does); I wanted to have perfect
love and devotion (as religious believers are often told to do); I
wanted to have purity. I wanted to have faith.
It seems that I am a very religious person, although I don't believe in
God. ("Would you want to see it if seeing meant that you would have
to believe?") I'm certainly very evangelistic; Sumana said I'm one
of the most evangelistic people she knows. Evangelism just makes sense
to me, although there's the funny question of why it's one particular
person's job to convince another. The thing that most irritated me
about talking to some religious evangelists was the sense that it was
their social role to convince me; I was merely the subject of their
evangelism and they would succeed if they convinced me and fail if they
did not. There was no other possible outcome -- how different from an
ordinary conversation this is. I wrote in an earlier diary entry that
Linux evangelism normally assumes that people have never heard of
Linux before, not that they have heard of it and rejected it.
It seems that this was historically true of Christian evangelism --
the overwhelming majority of people had never heard the Gospel,
the euangelion, at all! So it supposed to be this surprising
thing, like "You have been living in ignorance all this time, but I'm
hear to tell you the good news which you don't yet know about".
This was literally true of the famous speech on the Areopagos,
in Acts 17, which I've been very interested in lately. The Athenians
said to Paul: "May we hear what this new teaching is?" (Acts 17:19) --
in other words, they were actually asking Paul to evangelize
because they didn't know what he had to say!
This is the classic paradigm of evangelism, that it's like teaching,
because if you know about some good news that other people haven't
heard, you want to share it with them. And this is why evangelists
are angeloi, messengers: they have news which is actually news.
But nowadays, the Christian gospel has been preached almost everywhere
in the world -- it's not news any more! So the role of evangelists
changes in a strange and interesting way, because they go out and
argue with people who have already heard them long ago. Once an
evangelist in New York stopped me and asked me whether I had heard
the gospel of Jesus. And I told her "Yes". Then she asked me whether
I believed it, and I said "No". What a strange situation! What is an
evangelist supposed to do about this? How can this be, that someone
would hear the gospel and not accept it?
(But who today would not know what Paul had to say? What
Athenian has never heard the Gospel?)
Someone once told me that the Great Commission is just supposed to mean
that the Christian church should be international -- in other words,
that evangelists are supposed to go out to all nations and find
disciples from each one, but not that everyone is supposed
to be a disciple. (So it would be translated "make disciples
from among all nations", not "make all nations into
disciples".) That interpretation allows for the possibility that
some people who hear will believe, and others won't.
But to the extent that evangelists think that everyone is supposed to
believe -- which makes sense if you're preaching an important truth --
the situation with regard to people who don't believe is very
tricky! Most evangelists I've met have taken the position that it
is their job to convince me and my job to be convinced; so they're
content to keep on trying until I'm actually convinced. This is
very tricky: there's clearly some difference between a person who
has never heard news and a person who's heard it and disbelieved it,
isn't there? Is a messenger's job to report news or also to advocate
and to debate on its behalf?
If facts aren't self-evident, someone has to gather the evidence for
them.
(And then "martyr" means "witness" -- do witnesses just testify or do
they also argue a case? In some legal systems, they certainly do both
at once.)
Getting back to my theme, since I've been such a religious person at
heart, I should never condemn people for religious faith, although I'm
happy to argue against them if they suggest that a religious belief is
justified or that other people should believe it. But when someone
says "Credo quia absurdum", I suppose I can only reply "Credis
ergo absurdum".
In fact, I was in a cafeteria at Davis at the beginning of this year
and I was telling my friend something about my theory of love and how
things were supposed to work: and she burst out laughing and said
"Seth, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!". Far from
being offended, I was on the verge of saying "Credo quia absurdum"
or, much more likely, "Certum est, quia impossibile est". And it was
amazing that I (and I belong to
JREF and to the 2000 Club) could
have said that. But it's true. I almost did. I came so close. I could
have said it.
What business do I have saying that? But there was nothing else that I
could have said; all I could think of in reply was "This absurdity,
this impossibility for you is the structure of the world in my
mind".
So it's amazing how little connection, or how much connection, our
stated religious beliefs can have with our personalities and with how
we think about things. It's amazing to see what sacred theories there
are and where they enter into life. The "religious" person defends
humanist values, the "atheist" defends religious values. Or in some far
corner of life which is actually very central and key to how we think,
we discover who we really are and how we really think about things.
Everyone, go take a train across the country. Alone there by yourself,
just after midnight, read "Surprise" by Martin Gardner. Who are you? Are
you surprised?
