I am guessing you may have been troubled by the inability of the religion you were taught as a child to help you deal with the complex experiences of your life.  I think it is fair to say that a religion (or belief system) should help you deal with difficulties.  If it doesn’t, it should expect to be replaced.

Most of the religion professors in school did not study Joseph Campbell, but they should have.  He pushed me (with hints by Einstein) to an improved understanding of religion.  My problem had always been not having a big enough picture.  What I got from Campbell was a picture of the profound human needs that religion addresses.

Campbell says that everyone has a desire (and a need) to grasp: (a) the mystery of existence (metaphysics); (b) the structure of the universe (physics, biology, etc.); (c) how we fit in (the social order); (d) how to behave (ethics). 

What religions have gotten right is that these things are all tied together.   A belief system that tells you about the social order and how to behave will fail if it is not based on a consistent approach to how the world (universe) works and the problem of existence.  Great philosophers, like Aristotle, tried to describe a complete system covering all four, but, it was really hard to figure out (a) and (b).  So, after a while, philosophers gave up on the big picture and started to deal with special aspects of the whole problem.

At that point, reasonable people lost interest in Philosophy as a guide for living, leaving Religion as the only game in town.  Unlike the Philosophers, the people running Religion (Priests) were not seeking the truth.  They were seeking a system would appear to address people’s needs and stay in business year after year.

People in the modern world (since Enlightenment) have tended to take Religion less seriously, because some of its answers to “the structure of the universe” were found pretty inaccurate, and its descriptions of “how we fit in” tended to lag behind the progress of social evolution.  The Catholics and Muslims have been especially slow to adjust their versions of (c) to social evolution.

Reductionist scientists like Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking think we only need to know (b) from which we can derive (c) and (d).  But their insistence that everything happens randomly doesn’t exactly ring true.  Even if it did ring true, it would not satisfy most people (including me).  The reductionist scientist belief that “there are no mysteries” leaves something important out.  When Einstein said “God doesn’t play dice”, he was referring directly to (a) the mystery of existence.  Einstein did not believe the details of the book of Genesis, or the Flood myth, but he did believe that the universe looked more like a design than like something that arose from random events.  That is the mystery of the universe.

I wish I could say that I know a pastor who can describe an ethical code and social structure derived from truths about the structure of the universe, who can help you contemplate the mysteries of the universe, but I don’t.  A rare modern thinker who tried to address (a), (b), (c), and (d) was Ayn Rand.  She did not get it done before she became dotty, and she made some errors.  Still, I believe the political/social ideas that are now called libertarian derive from a scientifically accurate world view, and show some respect for the mysteries of the universe.

Categories: Commentary, Philosophy