THE BURDEN OF BELIEF

Jerry Harkins

Shortly after our ancestors developed a settled, agricultural way of life, they sought an explanation of why there were four seasons.  This was only one of many such questions people wondered about but it was an important and highly practical one.  As hunter-gatherers they had already learned that the cycles of the seasons were intimately associated with the availability of food and now, as farmers and stockmen, they discovered that not only were these cycles not precise, but they could also be somewhat capricious.  In most years the food supply would be just reliable enough.  In others it failed in whole or in part for reasons that seemed trivial.  An early frost or an untimely storm could ruin an entire harvest.  Like so many other things it must have seemed inscrutable, mystical and somehow sacred.  It would have been natural to wonder how and why things worked as they did.

In Greece, by the time of Homer, there had evolved a coherent explanation of the seasons which became part of Greek theology.  It was said that Hades, the giver of wealth and Lord of the Underworld, had abducted his niece, the lovely Persephone, daughter of his brother Zeus and their sister the harvest goddess Demeter.  The besotted Hades installed her as his Queen of the Underworld.  Demeter was outraged and so withheld the harvest causing a famine on earth.  Zeus affected a compromise with his brother whereby Persephone would spend only a quarter of each year in the Underworld.  During that time which came to be known as winter nothing would grow on the earth.  When Persephone returned, so would the cycle of fertility, maturity and harvest, respectively spring, summer and autumn.  It was vitally important to keep all these divine players happy through prayer and sacrifice but it was never clear what might make one or the other unhappy.  The Romans adopted pretty much the same story.

As an explanation of the seasons, the story of Demeter and Persephone is preposterous.  But myth is not meant to be either science or history and it is futile to judge it by the standards of either.  The point is that the citizens of two of history’s most sophisticated civilizations believed such nonsense for more than a thousand years.  It was part and parcel of a philosophical system that was centered on astrology and prophecy, that reasoned from unprovable first principles and that was often enforced by the state.

The believers were not ignorant people.  They knew their myths were ambiguous and unreliable.  Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, spoke in tongues which had to be interpreted by the priests of Apollo.  This imparted power to the priesthood while shielding Apollo himself from error or misdirection.  The Oracle continued to be a central religious figure even as scientific astronomy was being developed by such luminaries as the mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus and the navigator Callippus of Cyzicus in the fourth century BCE.  Through the generations believers clung to the myths as though they were the truths of their childhood, familiar and comfortable.  In the second century CE, the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus suggested that humans invented the gods themselves to explain things that frightened them.  He was careful to attribute this heresy to the long-dead Democritus even while asserting that “dogma,” any assertion that is not evident to the senses, exists in a realm of knowledge beyond proof or non-proof.  It may be believed as a possibility but not defended as truth.  Empiricus was standing on the shoulders of Titus Lucretius who had written De Rerum Natura about 250 years earlier.  In it, he did not deny the existence of the gods but maintained that everything could be explained by natural laws.  His work was highly influential among Roman intellectuals but disappeared shortly after the consolidation of orthodox Christian dogma in the fifth century.  It was rediscovered in 1417 and is regarded by some as a catalyst of the Renaissance. [1] At a minimum, it certainly set the stage for and gave legitimacy to a profound shift in the way we perceive truth, a shift toward empirical observation and experimentation.

Empiricism has sometimes been thought of as grim and rigid because it seems to alienate us from any possible solution to our most poignant questions.  Why am I here?  Does my life have any meaning?  How did evil evolve in the world?  What are the invisible forces that shape my life and where do they originate?  To understand the centrality of these questions and the persistence of the mythical answers you have to imagine living at the whim of forces you cannot predict or control.  Think of Job, a paragon of virtue, suddenly dispossessed of all he had without discernable rhyme or reason.  We know why:  God has made a whimsical bet with Satan.  But Job is not privy to the wager.  He cries out not against injustice but against the seemingly irrational ways of his tormenter.  “If only I knew where to find him;
 if only I could go to his dwelling!  I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments… But if I go to the east, he is not there;  if I go to the west, I do not find him.  When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
 when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.” 

Nor is Job alone in his protest against the unknowable.  Saint Paul compares our earthly state with the perfection of heaven, saying, “…now we see through a glass darkly;  then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  More broadly, the French scholar Henri-Charles Puech wrote that the human condition seems to include a sense of apartness from the experience of time and the material world, a desire for deliverance from what seems to be some kind of fall.  The Scottish polymath J.B.S. Haldane  put it more poetically in his oft-repeated remark that, “...the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”  Thus religion—irrational, incredible, paradoxical religion—became what Marx was describing when he wrote, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.”  In an age when opium and its derivatives were openly advertised as medicine and taken for a wide variety of complaints, Marx was not necessarily disparaging religion but placing it in the context of the human condition.  He understood its power and its potential for abuse by despots.  For thousands of years, people bowed to the tyranny not so much to gain its promises as to find solace in them.

No longer.  All over the world, religion is losing its grip on how people think and act.  Where it remains successful in attracting adherents it is largely because it has become a form of inexpensive socializing and entertainment or, far worse, of inciting the discontented to join violent sociopathic causes.  Certainly religious extremism has always been a source of human misery but now it may be the most prominent characteristic of religion itself.  In America, the more moderate and more educated Protestants, Catholics and Jews have distanced themselves from institutionalized religion.  One indication of this is the rate of religious intermarriage.  In 1960, about 20% of married couples were of different religions (defined to include marriages between Protestants of different denominations).  In 2013, that share had grown to 45%.  Religion is just not as important as it used to be.

In part, the institutions themselves are to blame.  As information has become more ubiquitous, it has become increasingly difficult to hide the depredations committed in God’s name –– the sexual depravity, the terrorism and the animosity preached from so many pulpits.  But it is much more than that and it has been going on for much longer than the information revolution.  The mystery that gave rise to religion is, for the most part, no longer a major factor in our lives.  We may not know precisely how tornadoes are formed or what causes long term droughts.  But most of us believe the answers are to found in science, the dynamics of meteorology, not in theology or mythology.  Some of us may still pray for rain.  A few of us cling to other exotic beliefs.  Illness is said by some to be an illusion best “cured” by prayer alone; the second coming is at hand and will conquer evil; a menstruating woman is ritually unclean; a virgin conceived the son of God through the “overshadowing” of the Holy Ghost.  As recently as 1997, 909 members of a California cult committed mass suicide in order to reach an alien spaceship that would save them from the imminent “recycling” of the earth.  Perhaps the most persistent and widespread mythical belief is the creation story related in the Book of Genesis.

There are many such stories from cultures all over the world and some are quite similar although few are as detailed and specific as the biblical account.  We know Genesis is not even close to the truth and we know that the modern scientific synthesis of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution is.  Theoretical physics is nearing a fundamental discovery.  Soon we will know whether there is a discoverable “theory of everything” or that such a theory must inherently be incomplete.  Either result will confirm Marquis de Laplace’s perhaps apocryphal reply to Napoleon that he had had no need for the God hypothesis.  Most creationists, of course, are scientifically illiterate and cling to Genesis for a variety of understandable reasons.  First, it is a good story.  It “listens” well and is at least superficially consistent.  Second, it relieves the existential angst described by Henri-Charles Puech.  Finally, it explains to some degree the presence of evil in the world, a puzzle even more profound than the progress of the seasons.  That it is no longer needed cannot compete with the simple fact that it is still very much wanted.

What is really wanted is bedrock certainty but truth is not like that.  It is rather a pastiche of knowledge derived from very different sources including art, science and philosophy.  It also proceeds from experience, memory and imagination and other more enigmatic parts of our subconscious and unconscious minds.  An example of the latter is what C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious, a class of “archetypes” which seem to be universal, not individual, inborn, not acquired and ambiguous.  In the absence of some sort of psychic DNA, it is hard to imagine how such a mechanism might arise in humans.  Still it might explain both our almost universal sense of the divine and the tenaciousness with which we cling to religious ideas.

No matter how tenaciously it is held, truth is notoriously fickle.  It changes; it is malleable and inconstant.  It is a journey with roadmaps that are imperfect.  As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.  It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”  Cardinal Bellarmine was right to complain that the sun seems to move around the earth from east to west.  It does.  His rejection of the theory of Copernicus was commonsensical.  But as soon as Galileo published his work, “truth” changed in the sense that informed people had to conclude that they and Aristotle had been wrong.  Furthermore, it was no longer possible to read the Bible literally, a lesson many find fearsome.  To them we recommend the prayer of Saint Brendan the Navigator:

Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust you to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in Your hand.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven, and somehow, make my obedience count for You.

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1.   Most notably by Stephen Greenblatt in his remarkable book The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2011).  This is the book that won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.