The human mind is a probe. From a spear to a telescope, we keep reaching beyond where our physicality can take us. And beyond reaching with tools, we move our feet, or fly, to other places. We are explorers. And beyond physical exploration, we do mental exploration. We are always wanting to know what’s behind it all. How it works, and why it is there. Why we are here.
The evolutionist who interprets all such expansion of powers in terms of survival success would have to say that a probing, exploring mind has survival value. But, as evolutionists themselves have often pointed out, an emergent skill has often being turned to uses beyond what it was originally evolved to cope with. The hand that grasped a branch or held a spear has become the hand that holds the artist’s paint brush or manipulates a remote. The optical rods and cones that helped early humans distinguish the movement and characteristics of other animals and the contours of landscapes later enabled those early humans to reproduce those forms on the walls of caves. So with sound. So with our other potentials.
And so, particularly, with mental constructs. From organizing hunts, we have gone on to organize ideas. The probe is still at work. Exploration has never ceased. We are a frontier-crossing animal. The horizon always beckons. We have evolved to transcend. We get that word, transcend, from the Latin, where trans = across and scandere = to climb. And scandere is akin to the primitive Sanskrit, scandati, he or she leaps. Humans are leapers. We climb across. And we leap physically and we leap conceptually. And even when it is argued that our mind is an embodied mind and that our categories are neurally structured by our sensorimotor experience, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson do in their book, Philosophy in the Flesh, yet the metaphors thus formed project way beyond their immediate physical context.
One of the biggest projections humans have ever made is the concept of God. Among the 200 million searches a day powered by Google, God is still up there with sex and jobs among the top. The God-concept was an attempt to answer the question what is behind it all. The primitive science of early humans left numerous gaps of understanding as to how the world worked, and they filled the gaps by saying that some force they called divine did it. Or gods did it. Or spirits did it. Eventually, the notion came to dominate - at least in the West - that there is only one such supreme force. One god.
THE HEBREW APPROACH
To attempt to describe this force, humans resorted to metaphor. The early Hebrews looked at the V.I.P.s of their society and they said God is like that: God is king, God is judge, God is warrior chief (or Lord of hosts, as they phrased it), and God is the patriarch, the father of the nation. God was also a potter. And God was moved with the womb-based compassion of the mother. Their god was a concept embodied in the society they knew. What happens to this concept if the God-believer lives in a democracy? How does one democratize the idea of God? As is well known in our circles, Felix Adler attempted to do this. He jettisoned any individualized notion of God and said he was replacing that idea with an infinite society of persons. In other words, the divine is of the people, by the people, and for the people. God is embedded in humanity writ large. But democracy is more than just a congeries of people. Ours is a constitutional democracy. As has been said, the United States is as much an idea as a place. The governing force in our democracy is the idea of what humanity is like ideally - free but responsible. Using that metaphor, we would say that God is the constitutive principle of the universe. Or, in George Kelly’s personal construct system, God is the construct by which humans interpret the universe as sustained and permeated by a force that is just and caring.
THE BUDDHIST APPROACH
There is an alternative to this Western approach. Someone may ask, why not draw on the resources of such a religion as Buddhism, which, unlike Western religion, does not have a concept of god? But the lack of such a concept does not mean that the Buddhist is shut up only to sense experience in this world. The Buddhist typically says that we must go beyond the sensory and conceptual dualities of this worldly experience. To what? To the ungraspable but experientially attainable. One exercise of such a religion is to say, “I have hands, but I am not my hands. I have feet, but I am not my feet. I have a stomach, but I am not my stomach. I have eyes, but I am not my eyes. I have a brain, but I am not my brain.” What am I then? Whatever that is, it is transcendent to sensorimotor experience. The approach is not conceptual, but the experience is attainable if we follow the right directions - the path of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path of thinking right and doing right.
THE SCIENCE APPROACH
Another alternative is that of modern science. Based on this approach, says the humanist, the human mind has moved on from such myth-like metaphors to see the universe in terms of the concepts of modern science. Of course, the same passion to probe and explore is still there, but we are now looking for the algorithms, or formulae, that define and determine the operations of all the forces - physical, chemical, biological - that make up our world of experience. There are also scientists constantly on the edge of our experience that speak of a Theory of Everything (TOE). They would like to combine all the forces, nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic, in one grand explanatory algorithm. It is the same impulse that led to the theory of God as explanatory of the universe. We may call it the God-algorithm.
But there is one vast difference. The Theory of Everything is a construct of physics. It does not contemplate such notions as justice and care. The still-to-be-probed question is how such a theory would explain the nature of human consciousness. Because it is from human consciousness that we have projected our metaphors of the force behind it all as personal and so capable of being just and caring. Adler was on to that too. He said that our ethical experience was the best clue to a constitutive element of the universe.
So here we have theistic Western religion, non-theistic Eastern religion, and agnostic Western science, all on the same quest. A God-project. What’s behind it all?
But, say many scientists, count us out of this project. We see nothing that represents justice and caring in the universe. We see only - in Bertrand Russell’s phrase - “chance collocations of atoms.” Of course, chance eventually builds structures which no longer work by chance but by purpose, but we cannot extrapolate back from human purpose as we experience it to a universal purpose leading up to it.
CHAOS AND CREATION
The ancient religionists dealt with chance too. Genesis begins by saying that at the creation, the earth was TOHU and BOHU, that is, chaotic and unstructured. The Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, like an undertow of doubt in the midst of the solemn commands, the soaring psalms, and the serious prophecies of the Bible, tells us that “time and chance happen to all” (9.11). There is a quantum uncertainty deep down things. From time to time, a baptism of doubt, while it threatens to drown the soul, may, rightly received, refresh the soul. To be sure is to be not there yet. Doubt moves us on. The horizon beckons.
But humans do not do well living in a state of perpetual doubt. A state of existential angst. We do need to cross a river to get to a new land, but the ford must have some degree of solidity underfoot if we are not to be washed away in the rushing waters of doubt. I find comfort in the thought that as we explore the universe, the revelations of algorithms discovered increasingly affirm that we can make sense of the universe. It’s as if those algorithms are out there waiting for us to find them. The universe is "makes sense" friendly. My favorite example is that of the mathematical Fibonacci series, named after an Italian mathematician of the13th century. The series starts with 0 and 1, and proceeds by adding the last two numbers to produce the next, thus: 0,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, and so on. Long before a human mathematician discovered it, it is now known that nature had been employing the pattern involved in the Fibonacci series for millions of years. Spirals in sea shells, branching patterns on bushes, seed formation in certain flower heads, and other configurations conform to the series. So Nature knew it and used it before humans consciously did. Fibonacci simply recognized a constitutive element of the universe. In James Jeans’ famous words, “from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.”
JACOB’S LADDER
I call this the Jacob’s Ladder approach to understanding. One scientist (Daniel Dennett) has spoken of “skyhooks” versus “earth cranes” in probing the universe - skyhooks representing revelation from above and earth cranes representing human effort towards finding out. In the story of Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob dreams of a ladder set up between earth and heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. If we take angels to stand for communication, then Jacob’s mind probed beyond where he was and was met by the discovery of structures already there. The effort is human but the universe provides answers. We don’t make them up. We discover what is there. The energy released by the Big Bang was netted by “laws,” “algorithms,” constitutive principles of the universe. Millions of years later the human mind is beginning to trace those principles, and to ask is there a "mind principle"?
Many humanists will reject the use of such a term as the God-Project. The term “God” is too laden with bad associations to be rescued for other usage. I sympathize with that concern, but I don’t carry that emotional baggage. One hears such thinkers trying to find a comparable notion. Often there is a certain nostalgia for spirituality, redefined from its roots in the religious idea of Spirit and soul. Often scientists speak of a sense of wonder before the manifestations of the universe. There is frequent recognition that to be altogether “rational” is to truncate the human experience. One comes across basic, foundational, humanistic notions like “intrinsic individual worth” that cannot be rooted in a naturalistic empirical behaviorism. One has to make a leap to see worth in every individual in face of frequent compelling evidence to the contrary. And, as already said, there is the ever pressing urge to find a oneness behind the multitudinous appearances of the universe.
Calling our quest the God-Project, is, for me, to see a continuing link today with our fellow-humans of the past. It points to an area of human thought that has not lost its hold on humanity. But, at the same time, I would argue with religionists that they too need to accept a transformation of the concept. The God-construct has evolved and keeps on evolving. One can see that even in the Bible. The prophet Amos, for example, saw natural disasters such as drought, locust plague, and famine as punishments by God against the nation for its behavior. In the name of his God, he says: “Three months before harvest, I kept back the rain. Sometimes I would let it fall on one town or field but not on another, and pastures dried up.” But Biblical thought evolved so that when we come centuries later to Jesus, we find him saying that God “makes the sun rise on both good and bad people. And he sends rain for the ones who do right and for the ones who do wrong.” This recognizes the moral neutrality of nature.
A RELIGIOUS HUMANIST MANIFESTO
We can go further and reframe our understanding of the message of Jesus to see in it a compelling humanist manifesto. Consider a few examples. Jesus said that when one comes to the altar to offer a gift (that is, to connect ritually with God) and one remembers that someone has something against one, one should go and make peace with that person first, and then come and offer one’s gift. In other words, the path to God is through our fellow human. Jesus said that we should not swear to a promise by calling on something outside of ourselves, like God or temple, but we should simply say Yes or No, and let those answers carry the weight of our character. Jesus based his ethics on transcending limited loyalties of family or class or nation or race. “If you love only those who love you,” he said, “there is nothing special about that. Extend your love even to those considered to be the enemy.” And taking a scene from the moral theater of his day, which spoke of sheep and goats at God’s right and left hands, destined for reward or punishment, he reversed the whole picture, stood it on its head, and declared that the religious righteous may get a surprise on judgment day for it would not be religiousness that would count, but humanitarianism. What you do to the most unimportant, by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the prisoner, is what connects you to the constitutive principle of the universe.
I still, as a humanist, pursue the God-project. And I believe humanism has an important role to play in that project by helping us to focus on humanity, by helping us to clear away superstitious constructs and magic shortcuts, by giving us the tools to achieve more than was possible in the past, by democratizing religion, and by revealing the algorithms that make our world tick. But humanism needs what religion gives: a passion for purpose, a concern to embody the good, and the sense of an all-embracing universal oneness that encompasses all existence - whether you spell it TOE or GOD.
THE ROMANTICS’ APPROACH
I close with a word from the Romantics, who have been my lifelong inspiration and guide. Tennyson plucks the “flower in the crannied wall” and contemplates that in that one piece of nature, could he understand what it is, he would know “what God and man is.” Wordsworth felt “a presence” that disturbs with the joy of elevated thoughts, a “sense sublime” of something far more deeply interfused in setting suns and round ocean and living air and blue sky and in the mind of man. Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw “every common bush aflame with God” but noted “only those who see take off their shoes: The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” Emerson comes upon the woodland Rhodora and it evokes philosophical thoughts in his mind of beauty that is its own excuse for being, but then he muses that the self-same Power that brought him there brought the Rhodora too. Blake would “see a World in a Grain of Sand.” Dickinson, noting the abdication of belief in her day, asserted that that “makes the Behavior small,” and affirmed “better an ignis fatuus than no illume at all.” To which I add a verse of my own:
THE PUZZLE PIECES
Long ways to go to find the truth,
Long ways to learn to love:
We search the hidden depths of soul,
We scan the skies above.
We seek through many schools of thought
The wisdom of the sage;
We seek for clues in ancient bones,
For light from ancient page.
We travel on a narrow road,
This human path we take;
We share a fragile planet's course,
Beset by storm and quake.
But light of art, and stir of song,
Bespeak the heart's desire,
To find a meaning for our life,
To read the primal fire.
And not alone in forge of skill,
But in the marketplace,
The puzzle pieces take their shape
From every human face.
John Hoad