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We all know that asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is at the heart of most intellectual activity. Questions must be encouraged. We all know this.

But are there any questions which may not be asked? Questions which should not be asked? Although many a young undergraduate might initially say “No! Never! All questions must be encouraged!”

I think most thoughtful people will realise there is a little more to it than that. There are, for example, statements which present themselves in all the innocent garb of questions, but which smuggle in nasty and false assertions, such as the phrase “why are blond people intellectually inferior to dark people?” There are questions which mould the questioner, such as “will I feel better if I arrange for this other person to be silenced?”

Questions can serve horrible purposes: they can focus the mind down a channel of horror, such as, “what is the quickest way to bulldoze this village?” Even more extreme examples could be given; they make it clear that not all statements that appear to be questions are primarily questions at all, and not all questions are innocent.

Once you start to think it through, it becomes clear that every question you can ask, just like every other type of utterance you can make, is not a simple self-contained thing, but a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral. This makes it not just possible, but sometimes important and a matter of honour and duty, not just to refuse to answer, but to raise an objection to the question itself. More precisely, one objects to the assumptions that lie behind the question, and which have rendered the question objectionable.

“Have you stopped beating your children?”

“Tell me, my daughters … which of you shall we say doth love us most?”

“How do you reconcile your rationality with your religious faith?”

In all three cases the question renders any honest person speechless.

But in the first case, if the question is pressed, and I am hauled up before the judge in a court of law, then I will protest, at length and forcefully, that I never did beat my children in the first place. And in the second case, if the question is pressed, then a loving daughter may choose to handle what comes of her silence, and show her love by her behaviour. And if the third question is pressed, then I might explain, as patiently as I could, that the attitude of the questioner is as deeply distorted here as it is in the other two cases, and I will add that my faith was never divorced from my rationality in the first place, and that being required to explain this is like being required to explain that you are honest.

Now we have arrived at the point of this blog, which is not, I will come clean, the general issue of questioning the question, but the specific issue of public discourse in the area of religion. But the two are closely related, because I am interested in focussing attention on where the issue of questioning the question really lies.

The issue is not, “are there questions which are objectionable?” (I think we already settled that), nor is it, “let’s have some intellectual amusement unpicking what is objectionable about this or that ill-posed question which we find it easy to tell is ill-posed.” No, the heart of this issue is, what about the fact that there may be questions which are in fact ignorant and domineering in themselves as questions — like “have you stopped beating your children?” — but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the unquestioned assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes.

The third example above is the one which invites the reader to explore this. Is that question objectionable or not?

I will give two reactions: first a subjective one, then the beginnings of an objective one. Subjectively, the question, and others like it such as, “how do you reconcile science and religion?” make me feel every bit as queasy as the “beating your children” one. The hollow feeling of having been pigeonholed before you can open your mouth, of being in the presence of someone whose mental landscape does not even allow the garden where you live, the feeling of being treated like dirt, it is all there.

Now, objectively, are these feelings of mine a sign of trouble in me, or a sign of trouble in our wider culture? I invite reflections. Here I will offer three.

First, my reaction is strong because rationality is a deeply ingrained part of my very identity; it is every bit as important to me as it is to anyone else, so that to face a presumption of guilt in this area is to face a great injustice. Secondly, though, religion is a broad phenomenon, having bad (terrible, horrendous) parts and good (wonderful, beautiful) parts, so the question might be a muddled attempt to ask, “what type of religion is going on in you?” It still remains a suspicious question, like “are you honest?” but in view of the nastiness of bad religion, perhaps we have to live with it, and allow that people will need to ask, to get some reassurance.

Having said that, (and thirdly) we can only make a reply if there is enough oxygen in the room–that is, if the questioner does not come over like an inquisitor who has already made up his mind. The question needs to be, in effect, “I realise that we are both rational; would you unpack for me the way that rationality pans out for you?” We need the questioner at least to be open to the idea that willingness to recognize God in personal terms can be a thoroughly rational thing to do, in a similar sense that recognizing other humans as consciously willing agents is a thoroughly rational thing to do. In both cases, it requires a willingness that is in tune with reason, not unreason, but which is larger than reason, as a chord is larger than a single note.

Headline image: King Lear: Cordelia’s Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1898. Public domain via WikiArt

The post Questioning the question: religion and rationality appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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For the most part, Buddhists have historically been less concerned with explaining the world than with generating personal peace and enlightenment. However, the emergence of “engaged Buddhism” — especially in the West, has emphasized a powerful commitment to environmental protection based in no small part on a fundamental ecological awareness that lies at the heart of Buddhist thought and practice.

People who follow ecological thinking (including some of our hardest-headed scientists) may not realize that they are also embracing an ancient spiritual tradition, just as many who espouse Buddhism — succumbing, perhaps, to its chic, Hollywood appeal — may not realize that they are also endorsing a worldview with political implications that go beyond bumper stickers and trendy, feel-good support for a “free Tibet.”

Biologists readily acknowledge that living processes are connected; after all, we breathe and eat in order to metabolize, and biogeochemical cycles are fundamental to life (and not merely to ecology courses). Nonetheless, biology — like most Western science — largely seeks to reduce things to their simplest components. Although such reductionism has generally paid off (witness the deciphering of DNA, advances in neurobiology, etc.), ecologists in particular have also emphasized the stunningly complex reality of organism-environment interconnection as well as the importance of biological “communities” — which doesn’t refer to the human inhabitants of a housing development.

Although “community ecology” and complicated relationships among its living and nonliving components has become a crucial part of ecological research, recognizing the existence — not to mention the importance — of such interconnectedness nonetheless requires constant struggle and emphasis, probably because the Western mind deals poorly with boundary-less notions. This isn’t because Westerners are genetically predisposed to roadblocks that don’t exist for our Eastern colleagues, but simply because, for reasons that no one seems as yet to have unraveled, the latter’s predominant intellectual traditions have accepted and embraced the absence of such boundaries.

In The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling captured the power of such recognition in the magical phrase by which Mowgli the human boy gained entrance into the life of animals: “We be of one blood, you and I.” Being of one blood, and acknowledging it, is also a key Buddhistic concept, reflected as well in the biochemical reality that human beings share more than 99% of their genes with each other. At the same time, there is no reason why Mowgli’s meet-and-greet should be limited to what transpires between human beings. After all, just as the jungle-boy interacted with other creatures — wolves, monkeys, an especially benevolent snake, panther, and bear, as well as a malevolent tiger — everyone’s relationship to the rest of the world, living and even nonliving, is equally intense. Thus, we share fully 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, and more than 92% with mammals generally; modern genetics confirms that we literally are of one blood, just as modern ecology — along with modern Buddhism — confirms that the alleged distinction between organism and environment is an arbitrary error of misperception, and not the way the world really is.

The interpenetration of organism and environment also leads both ecologists and Buddhists to a more sophisticated — and often paradoxical — rejection of simple cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, the absence of clear-cut boundaries among natural systems, plus the multiplicity of relevant factors means that no one can be singled out as the cause — and indeed, the impact of these factors is so multifaceted that no single “effect” can be recognized either. Systems exist as a whole, not as isolated causative sequences. Are soils the cause or effect of vegetation? Is the prairie the cause or effect of grazing mammals? Is the speed of a gazelle the cause or effect of the speed of a cheetah? Do cells create DNA or does DNA create cells? Chickens and eggs, anyone? “Organism” and “environment” interconnect and interpenetrate such that neither can truly be labeled a “cause” or “effect” of the other.

It has long been known, for example, that organisms generate environments: beavers create wetlands, ungulates crop grasses and thereby maintain prairies, while lowly worms — as Darwin first demonstrated — are directly responsible for creating rich, loamy soil. On the other hand (or rather, by the same token) it can equally be concluded that environments generate organisms:  the ecology of North America’s grass prairie was responsible for the existence of bison genes, just as causation proceeds in the other direction, too. Even as ecologists have no doubt that organism and environment are inseparable, ethologists — students of animal behavior — are equally unanimous that it is foolhardy to ask whether behavior is attributable to nature or nurture, i.e. environment or genotype. Such dichotomies are wholly artificial … something that Buddhists would call maya.

Western images are typically linear: a train, a chain, a ladder, a procession of marchers, a highway unrolling before one’s speeding car. By contrast, images derived from Indian thought (which gave rise to both Hinduism and Buddhism) are more likely to involve circularity: wheels and cycles, endlessly repeating. Although there is every reason to think that evolution proceeds as an essentially one-way street, Eastern cyclicity is readily discernible not only in ecology — a discipline that is intensely aware of how every key element and molecule relevant to life has its own cycling pattern — but also in the immediacy of cell metabolism, reflected, for example, in the Krebs cycle, or the wheel of ATP, the basic process whereby energy is released for the metabolism of living cells.

At the same time, and as we have noted earlier, there is no single entity labeled “Buddhism,” just as there is no single phenomenon identifiable as “Christianity,” “Judaism,” or “Islam.” And certain schools of Buddhism (e.g. Zen) are more sympathetic to ecological ethics than are others (e.g. Theravada, which remains more committed to personal enlightenment). To be sure, the science of ecology is partitioned as well, to some extent between theoreticians (fond of mathematical models) and field workers (more inclined to get their hands dirty in the real world), but also between ecology as a hard science and ecology in the broader sense of ethical responsibility to a complex natural world. Most spiritual traditions have some sort of moral relationship to the natural world built into them, from Christian stewardship to shamanic identification. Yet another reality, and a regrettable one, is that for the Abrahamic religions in particular (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), separateness — of soul from body, individuals from each other, heaven from hell, human beings from the rest of the natural world, and so forth — is the primary operating assumption. This is assuredly not the case with Buddhism.

For me (and I assuredly am not alone in this), Buddhism is not a religion but rather, a practice system and philosophical perspective. And it is with pleasure and optimism that I point to the convergence between Buddhism and biology generally — and ecology in particular — as something that is not only fascinating but also deeply reassuring.

The post Engaged Buddhism and community ecology appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Harnessing the Energy of Love

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Reading this quote this morning made me more aware that a future direction of Christian theological reflection will be, as it is in physics and medicine, on the nature of energy.  Energy is what underlies everything.  Energy is what make the universe tick (e=mc²), energy is what gives life to the body and creates abundant health, and energy is the active component of both intuition and love.

I personally believe that as we explore the depths of human intuitive capabilities as they are grounded in empathetic love rather than in the showy but superficial distractions of ESP and some other extraneous psychic phenomenon, we will rewrite a new theology.  Just as Thomistic theology and liberation theology represent significant philosophical and political points of view, I believe there will be a Christian theology of energy that may one day unite religion and science.  Developing intuition and observing nature as concurrent and equally important tasks, along with being inspired by revelation, will be the keys for this unfolding.

Everything we have ever learned and will learn will come through our marvelous bodies which are receptors and communicators of healing energy.  As humans we also have the ability to observe and reflect upon that energy and how it works, especially through intuition and dreams.  They tap us into the universal power source and inform of us of this underlying energy that drives us both as individuals and as beings who are connected with every other being in the universe.  Our challenge will be to integrate our new understandings of energy, especially the healing and loving kind, with divine revelation.  Just as we have learned to harness atomic power, I do hope we learn to harness the power of intuition and dreams and use the insight we gain in the service of love.  Then, we will have harnessed an exponentially greater fire than our ancestors did.