A Faith Built on Awe

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

WORLDVIEWS

brill.com/wo

A Faith Built on Awe Reframing Atheism Kenneth Shapiro Animals and Society Institute [email protected]

Abstract Reframing atheism as a set of positive beliefs, I describe a way of living in the world in which atheism requires faith, defined as a commitment to beliefs that are both logically and empirically not subject to proof. Faithful atheists have faith in and take spiritual nourishment from being in the presence of a world which is awesome and wonderful both in that it is immediately available and that it is and will always remain at least partly opaque to understanding. They do so without positing a God or inflating the reach of reason. Their way of living is characterized by “sensational presence” (full attention to and staying with a present moment) and the courage to accept that their access and understanding whether in relation to other people, other animals, and nature more generally, is always limited. This inherent residual opacity grounds their respect and sense of mystery in each of these realms.

Keywords religion – secularism – atheism – humanism – ecology

1

Introduction

My interest in differences between the experience of the world of theists and atheists is partly occasioned by my puzzlement at the persistence, particularly in the United States, of the belief in God in modern times. No doubt, polls (The 83 Problems: 2007 Pew Report, 2007)1 evidencing the popularity of this belief

1 A Pew Survey in 2007 found that of the 92% people in the US-based sample who reported

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15685357-02203103

200

shapiro

are inflated by social pressure and the likelihood is that, for many, God is only a vague abstraction, far from the personal and omniscient God of the three major Abrahamic religions. Still the level of belief in the West in the deity of one of these three monotheisms is surprising. My interest is also occasioned by my own experiences of awe and wonder for example as evoked by the following: I stand at the base of a towering oak that reaches up to the sky, glimmering against the last moment of sunlight, its girth beyond human proportion, its bark cragged with age, its stalwart uprightness seemingly ageless. How do I understand these moments of awe and wonder that disrupt the daily round—a moment of closeness with another person, a magnificent suspension bridge spanning a river, the deer in my local park who pauses to look at me, the cloudburst that saturates the land? What is their source? For many, understanding turns on belief in a divine creator. However, rejecting this belief provides an opening for other sources of the awe and wonder to come into view.

2

Awe and Wonder at “What Is”

My argument is that the awe has two sources and that, while it is more likely to be appreciated in these aesthetically and emotionally laden peak moments, it is available at any time. One source is the elemental fact of our ability to experience the world. At any and every moment, we are present and inexorably connected to a world which appears as a plenum, as complete in itself. I will refer to this immediately given upsurge as “what is.” The second source is that our understanding of the world, both the human socio-cultural and the natural world, is never complete. Although we have some understanding and will gain more—of its history and meaning in the case of the former and, in regards to the latter, its causal antecedents and correlative conditions—there is and always will be something beyond our understanding. There will always be a residual opacity, never a complete transparency. Our amazing intelligence and the technology that we have devised that extends its reach notwithstanding, partial ignorance is a condition of our existence. We are faced and must live with Melville’s “pasteboard mask” (1961/1851, p. 167) and

belief in God, 60% conceived of God as “personal,” 25% as “impersonal force,” and 7 % had an unspecified conception (The 83 Problems: 2007 Pew Report, 2007).

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

a faith built on awe

201

the Bible’s “through a glass darkly” (1Corinthians 13:12 King James Version). Traditionally, this impenetrable surplus or excess was dealt with by invoking the existence of a God who is the all-knowing creator and, partly in reaction to that religious discourse, by the modernist view that reason and science can clarify every phenomenon. We find acceptance of this residual opacity in many spheres of contemporary thought: from the natural sciences, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the discovery that at the level of micro-particles our knowledge of matter is limited to a probabilistic description; and from the social sciences and cultural studies, the ideas that phenomena are socially constructed and shaped by language that limit and relativize our access to full understanding. These views of the limits of our understanding are the culmination of an historical progression from the unpredictability of pre-scientific eras which provided fertile ground for the rise of religious beliefs, to the modernist claim that reason and empirical demonstration assure predictability and full understanding, to postmodern critiques of these Enlightenment era claims.2 My thesis is that acceptance of this veil of ignorance informs and is one source of our experience of wonderful and awesome moments. This acceptance can allow us to appreciate and stay with such moments, undercutting the move to redirect the awe to an alleged creator (theism) or to an alleged full understanding of it that reduces it to antecedent conditions (modernism). More generally, it can inform all of our experience—the peak moments of wonder and the mundane, the awe-ful and the sometimes awful. From an early age, we are primed to seek understanding and, as Piaget (1977) described in great detail, the drive to understand motivates much of a child’s cognitive development—witness the child’s early and persistent query, “why?” And, clearly, understanding increases our appreciation of the world we live in—whether that understanding reveals the mind-boggling complexity of phenomena, their latent simplicity, or the elegance and beauty of their architecture. Sagan (2006) and Dawkins (2006), scientists who wrote and write for the general public, induce amazement in their readers, respectively, at the extent of the universe and the intelligent products of gradual evolution. Their views are based on the splendor of “what is” as revealed by our understanding of it. What we are highlighting here is the awe and wonder at what exists but cannot

2 There are many forms of understanding, each with its own position on the limits of that form. I am confining the discussion here to the seminal distinction between erklären (explanation, causality, objectivism) and verstehen (description, interpretation, and empathic participation).

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

202

shapiro

be fully understood and we are arguing that some level of residual ignorance is a perduring and irresolvable condition of our existence. (For a description of the structure of experience that assures this condition, see Shapiro on the elusiveness of experience, 1976). Underlying and complementing this residual opacity of any immediate moment of experience, whether awe-ful or awful, are more general imponderables that resist full understanding. For examples, how can we understand that there is something rather than nothing or that the emergence of consciousness is fully comprehensible as the stimulation of complex arrays of interacting neurons? We speak of the beginning of time and the finitude of space, but how can we fathom time having a beginning or space having an ending? While in common usage, “wonder” often simply refers to the amazing, the astonishing, it also suggests the puzzling, the unknown or the unknowable. It is this latter evocative sense that I offer provides a constitutive part of the experience of atheism. Atheists can have faith in and take spiritual nourishment from being in the presence of a world which will always remain at least partly opaque to their understanding and that they can do so without assuming the existence of a God or inflating the reach of reason.

3

Faithful Beliefs

Faith is a belief in someone or something the existence of which is not subject to proof by reason or empirical evidence (see for example, Merriam-Webster, 1999). A faithful belief is one in which a person has full confidence and trust despite, or really in the face of, this unverifiability. By comparison to faithful beliefs, most other beliefs are verifiable in that predictions can be made that prove or disprove them—I believe that winters in the next decade will be milder than in the past decade. Others are so complex or vague or ideologically laden that they remain equivocal with evidence piling up on both sides of the issue—I believe that America is exceptional and has not yet seen its best days. The term “faith” is sometimes used in a broader and looser way as when a person states that he or she has “faith in science” or “faith in reason.” In the context of the present paper, this is a metaphoric and incoherent use of the term as faith, again by definition, refers to beliefs that are not subject to rational or empirical proof. In the philosophy of the Enlightenment, science and rationality replaced reliance on theistic beliefs as providers of our understanding of the world. Through science and reason, the promise was that the domain of the supernatural would dramatically shrink and eventually disappear as science

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


203

could and would provide intelligible explanations for all natural (and cultural) phenomena. “Man” could be the measure and measurer of all things, displacing the need for an omniscient God. Regarding the belief in the nonexistence, rather than existence of a phenomenon, it is generally accepted by philosophers that it is not possible to prove the nonexistence of someone or something. All we can ever say is that we have not yet found that someone or something fitting that description. If this is the case, then belief in the nonexistence of a phenomenon, like belief in the existence of a phenomenon the existence of which is beyond reason, requires a leap of faith. Regarding the specific areas of beliefs under discussion here, the theist belief in God is a faithful belief as, most contemporary theists agree, the existence of God is a matter of faith—it cannot by proven or disproven by reason or empirical demonstration. Dawkins (2006), however, offers the minority view that proof of the existence of God is, at least in principle, subject to scientific inquiry. It is hard to understand what that would look like as traditionally “proofs” of the existence of God are precisely phenomena for which a natural science cannot offer an explanation—the burning bush that is not consumed. If we found someone or something that could burn bushes without consuming them, that would be evidence that that entity is God. But then belief in God would not be beyond reason and would not require faith. However, in any case, Dawkins is not arguing that the nonexistence of God can be established by scientific method—and that is what is at issue here. Again, the demonstration of the nonexistence of God is not subject to proof as we cannot prove the nonexistence of something. It follows from this that belief in the nonexistence of God requires faith. An atheist has complete trust and confidence in the nonexistence of God. Atheists are faithful believers—they have a faith. As is the case for theists, atheists cannot fully prove the veracity of their belief, but they can, through an act of faith, commit themselves to it. While faith is beyond reason, there is no reason that faith should be limited to “in God we trust.” Atheistic faith locates itself in the “supernatural” in the limited sense that it asserts the existence of phenomena and conditions beyond those which the natural sciences can make intelligible. While atheists accept the limits of reason and empiricism, they find those limits in mundane existence rather than in unconsumed burning bushes, terrestrial incarnations of God, or divinely authored texts. While traditional theistic faiths3 makes a vertical move from terrestrial signs as metonymic

3 By “traditional theistic faiths” I refer to systems that emphasize a personal, omniscient,

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

204

shapiro

representations to their origin in an extra-worldly empyrean, atheistic faith is horizontal, limited to, as it were, an earthly horizon. Given the epithet of “infidel” (one without faith) assigned historically to atheists, it is ironic that the faith of the atheist is arguably more difficult to sustain than that of the theist for it must be held in the absence of such alleged signs. (Although some might maintain that the oft-cited “problem of evil,” such as the genocides of the 20th century, for many irreconcilable with a belief in God, is the burning bush of atheism). It also must be held in the face of strong social disapproval and deep-seated psychological needs that make belief in God hard to resist—the needs for security, a strong authority figure, some form of immortality, easy answers to the problem of living a meaningful life, and relief from the burden of freedom. When we lose belief in God we are tempted to invest a crypto-divinity in political leaders (Fuehrer) or super-heroes; or inflate the reach of our own rationality and its handmaiden, science; or, foreswearing even such backdoor Gods, repress these psychological needs by seeking satisfaction in narcissistic and materialistic self-nourishment (Lasch, 1979). To this point, it might seem that faith of the atheist is primarily a negative belief—a belief in the absence of something. However, the burden of our thesis is to show that atheism is also a set of positive beliefs. In the same way that theists, given their faithful belief in the existence of God, build a world based on it that provides meaning, purpose, guidance, and support, atheists can constitute an atheistic way of being and live guided by that. That the definition of atheism has been largely restricted to a negative belief is historically contingent. For a human history that did not include a belief in God, the positive beliefs that we are about to describe more fully as constitutive of atheism would, then, be definitive. The name given to that way would not derive from an absence of faithful belief—as does “a-theism.”

4

Positive Faith

Here I reframe atheism as a positive faith, not one confined to a belief in the absence of something. I describe how the negative belief clears a space that omnipotent, and judgmental God. Throughout the paper, I use this form of theism as a helpful contrast with an atheist experience of the world. In modern times, this traditional position has been revitalized in some and eroded in other quarters—the latter resulting in changes in views of the environment that, arguably, are closer to the horizontality that I attribute to atheism.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


205

can be filled by a way of being in the world built on positive faithful beliefs. While at first inspection the distinction may seem sophistic, vacuous, or both, the negative belief in the nonexistence of God can readily become full trust and confidence that “what is” is all there is. This positive belief provides a foundation for and informs certain ways of living. I refer to people who live this way as “faithful atheists.” To situate the claim that atheism can be built on positive faithful beliefs, I locate faithful atheism between, on one side, traditional beliefs in a personal and omniscient God and, on the other, positions that reject all faith claims. Traditional theism defers and deflects appreciation of the wonders and mystery of the world to a creator who for the most part is an absentee landlord. At the other end of the spectrum, secularism is “…. a system of political or social philosophy that rejects all forms of religious faith and worship” (The Free Dictionary, 2011). Secular humanism is a denial of the necessity of faith that replaces the need for it with belief in the sufficiency of human reason. All phenomena can be understood through rationalism and science. As there is nothing beyond reason, any faithful belief, whether negative or positive, is unwarranted. Secular humanists hold that there is no residual opacity in “what is” and their mantra is that “further research” will answer all questions. By contrast, for faithful atheists existence is rife with the irresolvable, the impenetrable. As it is contended that rationalism and science are the exclusive domain of humans (recent findings in cognitive ethology notwithstanding [Ristau, 2013]), this secular humanism is inherently anthropocentric—as its name insists (see Shapiro on humanism as a form of speciesism, 1990). Other intermediate or hybrid positions on this theoretical spectrum further locate faithful atheism. While I have relied on a number of ideas from existential phenomenology, existentialism is a humanism which, like secular humanism, is anthropocentric and, in fact, radically individualistic as each individual has the burden of the freedom and necessity of self-definition (Sartre, 1956). Unwilling to commit to any faith or to the rejection of all faiths, agnostic atheists sit on the fence between them. Like faithful atheists, they do not make the diverting vertical move of the theist in the face of the opacity. But, arguably, for them the unresolved and irresolvable question of a supernatural creator is itself a diversion from full apprehension and engagement with the awe of the sensational presence. By contrast, faithful atheists accept the burden and task of living in a world where part of the nature of being is its opacity. Prehistorical human beings had not yet developed the traditional theistic view of the one all-powerful and all-knowing God. However, the archaeological record suggests that they did develop religious beliefs and rituals to deal with (answer or deny) the issues of opacity and ignorance through personi-

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

206

shapiro

fication and deification. In response to the angry volcanic mountain spewing forth destruction and demanding tribute, they offered ritual sacrifice. While not the vertical move of traditional theism, this practice is a deflection. Similarly, some contemporary Native American worldviews share with atheism respect for and awe at the natural world, (incidentally, refusing any categorical distinction between nature and culture), but personify, animate, and imbue with spirit even plant species. The belief in a Godless world allows or really forces atheists to accept the limits of their understanding. The residual opacity of our knowledge of the world is acknowledged and opens up the possibility of a positive belief about or posture toward the world. The limit on understanding is a source of wonderment. “What is” resists transparency; it is a condition of our existence. It grounds, anchors, and sets limits to our relation to each other and the world. With awe and wonder, we stand before a world that will never completely show itself. The acceptance of the opacity allows atheists to stay with and appreciate the experience of any moment for its density and its inexhaustiveness. The atheists’ faith is a realistic one founded, not in negation, but in affirmation. It is the acceptance, appreciation, respect for, and celebration of reality and the limits of our understanding of it. This realistic and respectful view of the world is not a historical contingency for it is real all the way down. The acceptance that there is something rather than nothing and that that something now appears before us in a complexity that is awesome and ultimately impenetrable is an act of and a commitment to a faithful positive belief. Beyond moments of prayer, conversion experiences, and other peak moments, theist beliefs have a strong formative impact on everyday experience. Including as they do the beliefs that God oversees, provides guidance, and judges individual lives, theism is, for many, a way of living that pervades their experience of the world. If atheism is more than simply a negation of this way of being can we identify a generic atheistic way of being? My purpose is to describe atheistic experience in such a way that reframes and reconstructs it as a way of living in the world that is sui generis. What are the gains and losses of this way of living as compared to theistic ways? If, as we are arguing, atheism requires faith, how does that faith stack up against theistic faiths?

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


5

207

Sensational Presence

In Kosinski’s screenplay, Being There, Chauncey Gardiner describes how: In a garden, growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well. 1970, p. 54

While people in high offices take his horticultural pronouncement as an extended metaphoric remedy for an ailing US economy, Chauncey is a gardener talking about his garden. Given his major cognitive impairments, he is limited to giving his full attention to his garden and appreciates it as such, without any further referent in mind. We will refer to a mode of experiencing in which we give full attention to a moment and appreciate it as such as “sensational presence.” It is akin to the common admonition, “don’t forget to smell the coffee (or, in deference to Chauncey, the roses),” offered to people who are too wound up in their daily round to do so. In the philosophical tradition, it is in the spirit of Husserl’s call for a study of experience grounded in “returning to the things themselves” as immediately given in experience (Husserl, 2001/1900, p. 168). Sensational presence is a mode of experiencing that stays with the immediate perception, resisting those associations prompted by context, history, provenance, analysis, and, in general, further reflection. However, this way of being present cannot be fully achieved for two reasons. The first is familiar to those who practice meditation. When we try to “empty our mind” by focusing on our breathing or repeating a mantra, inevitably and, at least for the neophyte, very quickly thoughts and feelings distract us. We, then, catch ourselves, “let go” of the intruding content, and return to the target focus. The meditative session consists of repetitions of this cycle. In like manner, staying with an immediate perception, while it can improve with practice, is never mastered. The second reason is even more problematic: All our experience is mediated by social constructions, language usage, and implicit and explicit assumptions and ideologies. In other terms, all experience is from a certain perspective, as “there is no view from nowhere” (Nagel, 1976). For example, I cannot “… see a landscape as it is when I am not there” (Simone Weil quoted in Freeman, 2015, p. 164) and the way I am there is always already densely constituted. There is no unmediated perception; no complete access to the thing as such. In fact, this inaccessibility is of a piece with the residual opacity and one of the sources of awe discussed earlier. Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

208

shapiro

Sensational presence is a relatively unmediated mode of perception the goal of which can never be completely fulfilled. However, it is a mode which can be adopted as a regulative ideal—a desirable but unreachable stage toward which we strive. In the context of the present discussion, we offer relatively unmediated perception, staying with the immediate perception and appreciating it as such, as an achievement of atheistic practice. It is a moment that grounds the faith of atheism and, as I describe now by contrasting it with theistic practice, it is, as it were, the prayerful moment of atheism. “Every time I hear a new-born baby cry, or touch a leaf, or see the sky then I know why, I believe” (Drake, Graham, Shiril, & Stillman, 1953). The lyrics of this popular song, recorded by over a dozen major crooners in the 50s and 60s, illustrate a contrast between theistic and atheistic ways of living in the world. For the theist, belief in God directs people away from these immediate experiences to their alleged creator. How does this redirection affect their experience of the baby’s cry, the autumn leaf’s colors? Does it enhance or diminish the appreciation of the wonder of what is at hand, or the likelihood of their openness to these moments as wonderful? In like manner, how does it affect their experience of the awful, the evil in the world? How does it affect what they call good and evil? I believe that belief in God directs people away from the wonders of this world. This redirection can diminish attention and dilute the direct appreciation of the baby’s life-affirming cry and the autumn leaf’s dying colors. When the striking painting we come upon in an alcove of the museum is primarily a vehicle for reflection on the painter, we are taking the creator of wonder as more wonderful than his or her product. Whether it is explicit or implicit, redirection to the creator of the object of my experience is mediated experience. The atheist’s experience is distinguishable from the theist’s in that it is relatively unmediated or, at least, unmediated in a way that dilutes and distracts from the present world. I distinguish sensational presence from a posture that valorizes God. On the other end of the spectrum, the comparison to positions that reject all faith claims, such as secular humanism and its handmaiden, science, is more complex. A child walking in the fall woods asks his father, “Why are the leaves all different colors?” Father typically replies with “explanatory talk.” Depending on the age of the child, he or she refers to the effect of temperature or the role of chlorophyll in the life cycle of plants. Alternatively, he could say, “Because it is beautiful” (Van den Berg, 1961/1975, pp. 66–69). The former response, while in and of itself informative and engaging, redirects the child from the immediate appreciation of the moment to its analysis. Underlying or antecedent con-

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


209

ditions supplant the colorful, impelling scene. By contrast, explicit acknowledgement of the beauty underscores it. Of course, explanatory talk can and does inform subsequent observation of the falling leaves such that the appreciation of the beauty can be enriched. However, more often the child, particularly as he or she matures, stays in the realm of explanation and “forgets” or loses access to appreciation of the color of the leaves or the smell of the roses. In the context of the present discussion, a more insidious pitfall is that science, having provided a window that is clearly more transparent than religionbased “explanations,” then claims that full transparency is simply a matter of “further research.” There is no unresolvable opacity that sustains our awe and wonder. The possibility of a positive faith affirming that opacity is replaced with a positivistic science before which all the mysteries of the universe will yield. Rejecting that claim as “naïve and untenable” (Fish, 2009, p. 3), it might appear that our position is closer to the darkened glass of theists. However, having accepted the residual opacity, we need not then defer to an omniscient God for the answers. Nor, by adopting a stance of analytic observer, need we distance ourselves from a world that ultimately eludes comprehension. Rather, it is an opportunity for a more intimate and respectful relation to that world. Access to and sustaining moments of sensational presence involves work as it requires recognizing and stripping away mediating constructs—both those associated with theism and those with science. Historically and to the present, Gods have taken protean forms locating themselves in us, in the trees, in the heavens, or before time. As a result, they can pop up at any moment and in any place, redirecting and diluting our appreciation of the moment. Similarly, impressive inroads into our scientific understanding of so many phenomena have enhanced the allure of scientific explanation. Analogously to the practice of meditation, we can learn to let go of (deconstruct) these constructs and revisit a now relatively unmediated present. When we do develop this form of apprehension, it can provide a touchstone for other aspects of the way we live in the world.

6

A Possible Atheistic World

I take direct issue with the common position that “to view atheism as a way of life … is false and misleading” (Smith, 1989, p. 21) and offer here faithful atheism as a way of living or being or worldview. I have largely restricted the description to the imminent, the immediate moment, and within that, to the aesthetic appreciation of that immediate upsurge. However, the development

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

210

shapiro

and recognition of this mode of apprehension readily fosters other postures, attitudes, and personal attributes. 6.1 Mystery Mystery is an antonym of understanding. A world that never fully reveals its workings to us, that contains, as it were, hidden or secret regions, is a mysterious world. Acknowledging and appreciating the limits of our understanding of it is to accept that we are embedded in a world of mystery. Part of our experience of the awesome, what was called in the Romantic period, the sublime, is this sense of mystery. Mystery is also part of the theist’s experience as evidenced by the common etymology of “mystery” and “mystical.” But theism is ambivalent about the antinomy understanding/mystery as, for many theists, God, the omnipotent creator, provides the explanation for the world and their place in it. “And God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light’.” Pardon the pun, but how is this illuminating? It would seem on its face an empty form of understanding that merely pushes the mystery back to an unearthly and even more mysterious realm. As deus ex machina is a weak and anachronistic theatric device, so as a foundation for living in the world is replacing a mystery with a mystery—“God moves in a mysterious way” (from a hymn by William Cowper, 1774/2010). For secular humanists, the laws of nature are discoverable and will provide full comprehension of how things work, how they came into being, and some idea of their future trajectories. While historically and to some extent currently, the excitement of scientists was in the conquest of and mastery over nature (Leiss, 1972), for many contemporary scientists, it is more the “rush” that accompanies discovery and the prospect of applications that will improve life. Although accepting these advances, faithful atheists work to stay with the mystery rather than assuming it can be captured and tamed in a laboratory. They embrace the mystery and live in the wonder of it. Rather than being redirected to an otherworldly mystery, they remain focused on mystery, what I have called residual opacity, as an inherent part of living in the world. Their experience is that of reverence in the face of mystery. Although they may engage in efforts to increase their understanding, they respect that condition as an important part of their existence. 6.2 Courage Living with, staying with, embracing, respecting an unknowable world—all these require courage. To live without having all the answers, to resist deferral, denial, or “forgetting,” is not for the faint of heart. However, it is the courage of humility and is clearly in contrast to the “arrogance of humanism” (Ehrenfeld,

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


211

1981) that valorizes human beings and science or the submission to a heavenly father that is part of theistic postures. Rejecting the view of the world through the transparent glass claimed by science as well as the parti-colored stained glass offered by religion, atheists have the courage to give up the security of relating to the world from behind any window. The experience of and attitudes toward death provide a dramatic example of courage. For traditional theists, death is an opportunity to “meet your maker,” or “abide with me”; it is a transition to another life and the promise of a reunion with our loved ones. For atheists, death is more a departing than a meeting. It is a radical termination which countenances no deflections—“Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely” (Dostoevsky, 1880/1950, p. 789). There is a realization that each individual ultimately faces death alone. Both in the moment and in our life-long anticipation of it, death is the end of “what is” and the awe that we often feel in its presence. It is also the end of that peculiar perspective on reality that the dying developed through their lifetime and that constituted the world for them. It may be preserved in its influence on the lives of loved ones or in their memories of it; or, it may be expressed or embodied in a legacy of writings or projects. But these are, for most, relatively pale substitutes—thin vestiges of the original that may be likened to the “shades” of the Classical view of afterlife. While fully living in the world of and with others, atheists also anticipate and have the courage to accept that they live and will die alone. In terms of psychodynamic psychology, acceptance that “what is” is all there is and that knowledge of it will always remain incomplete likely arouse important motivating aspects of human (and nonhuman) behavior. We all have security needs, important components of which are needs for predictability and control. Inquisitiveness and novelty are themselves dependent on maintaining a certain level of security. Traditional theism valorizes the security side of the safety/novelty and predictability/uncertainty or indeterminacy polarities by deferring to an omniscient determinator. Science and rationalism promise what they can only partially deliver. By contrast, faithful atheists face living with the unknown and unknowable either by dint of will or by risk-taking enabled by the achievement of a basic sense of individual security. 6.3 Inter-subjectivity and Ecocentrism To this point, I have lumped cultural and natural phenomena together as sources of awe and wonder. Here I distinguish them—first with a description of the presence of other people and animals and then with that of the ecosphere more generally.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

212

shapiro

Our experience of the subjectivity of others, both human and nonhuman animals, in important ways is similar to our experience of the inanimate world. Our ability to empathize with the experience of other animate beings is a primary way that we understand each other (see mirror neurons; Rizolatti, 2004). We can see the world through others’ eyes. However, that access to others’ experience is always colored by our own experience as we are limited to our perspective on others’ perspectives. In the same way that our understanding of the inanimate world is never complete, our understanding of each other, suffers this residual opacity. We are never completely together, of one mind or heart. We have again here in the realm of inter-subjectivity mutatis mutandis the two sources of awe with which I began the paper: this amazing access to the experience of other individuals—to their experience of “what is”—and, at the same time, the awareness that there is and always will be more that we cannot know of their world. This veil of ignorance parallels the opacity of knowing the inanimate world and its imponderables and is another font of mystery, wonderment, awe, and respect. While other individuals can and do illuminate our view of the world, their own view is never fully known to us. Given this ultimate elusiveness, other people remain, if not Sartre’s “Hell is other people” (1955, p. 47), “other” in that we have a sense of distance and assumed difference from each other. This sense of the “otherness” of other subjective beings extends to nonhuman animals as it has recently been shown that individuals of many species have perspectives on the world and other animals, including us, to which we have some but limited access (Griffin, 1976)). In fact, the existence of mirror neurons was first discovered in monkeys (Rizolatti, 2004). We can know something but not all of “what it is to be a bat” (Nagel, 1974). Of course, animals, both human and nonhuman, are part of the ecosphere. The way of being of a faithful atheist—awe and wonder, mystery and respect, humility and courage, acceptance of finitude and ultimate aloneness—is consistent with particular attitudes toward and valuation of the ecosphere. While for theists, the earthly landscape requires another dimension to be complete, for faithful atheists the earthly landscape is an amazing array the topography of which is dense and inexhaustible. Absent the deflection to the theist’s vertical, the world is the exclusive focus of our concern, an open and apparently infinite space within which all meaning and purpose must be contained and played out. Levinas argues that the realization of the subjectivity of other persons can provide the basis of ethics. An inescapable consequence of seeing the face of another person is an awareness of the demand that others make on us to take

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


213

their interests in account in our actions. Derrida adds that that burden obtains in our experience of other animals as well—at least for those that we perceive as able to look at us. The loss of biodiversity of both plant and animal life, the sixth great extinction, the dramatic decline in wildlife populations (WWF, 2016), and climate change are, of course, deniers notwithstanding, our responsibility because our actions as a species contributed to these changes. What I am adding here is that the towering oak with which I began this paper also makes a demand on us independent of our agency. We have a prior responsibility for the tree because when we open ourselves to it, its inhabitants, and the ecosystem in which it is embedded as sources of wonder and mystery they make a demand on us. As Abram has shown in his phenomenological ecology, they speak to us—in Levinas’ sense, they have a face. This engagement with the ecosphere is a primary relationship of mutual dependence that requires and, in fact, depends on there being no third party, no triangulation. Nor is it a one-sided relationship in the service of an anthropocentric fulfillment of personal spirituality (Curry, 2007) for we are all in this together. In the terms of ecophenomenologist Evernden, it is a reenchantment, a rediscovery of the sense of awe and wonder and humility (1993). For the faithful atheist, the preservation and betterment of the ecosphere— humans, other animals, and the earth itself—is the only transcendent good. “From dust to dust,” it is the one home that we all cohabit and an obligatory object of our caring.

7

Conclusion

A couple of disclaimers may be helpful. I have described a way of living in the world that is ultimately grounded in a kind of faith. My “method” has included conceptual analysis, recourse to etymology, and experiential evocation. Faithful atheism is a possible way of living. I have made no claim to or undertaken any investigation of its empirical basis. Evaluation, then, of the present work should rely on criteria of coherence, consistency, and resonance with readers’ experience. The focus of the paper is not a critique of the three major monotheistic religions. References to it are in the service of the description of the experience of faithful atheism. I do admit to an occasional barb, but they should be taken in good faith.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215

214

shapiro

References Ariès, P., 1981. The hour of our death. Oxford: Oxford University. Cowper, W., 2010. God moves in a mysterious way. In Newton, J. (Ed.), Twenty six letters on religious subjects. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Ecco. (Original work published in 1774). Curry, P., 2007. Post-Secular nature: Principles and politics. Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 11, 284–304. Davies, P., 1992. The mind of God: Scientific basis for a rational world. NY: Simon and Schuster. Dawkins, R., 2006. The God delusion. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Deacon, T., 1997. The symbolic species. NY: Norton. Dostoevsky, F., 1950. The brothers Karamazov (C. Garnett, Trans.). NY: Random House (Original work published 1880). Drake, E. Graham, I., and Shiril, J. and Stillman, A., 1953. I believe (Recorded by Frankie Laine). Ehrenfeld, D., 1981. The arrogance of humanism. Oxford: Oxford University. Evernden, N., 1993. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Second ed. Toronto: University of Toronto. Fish, S., 2009. God-talk: Part two. Available from 2009http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/05/17/God‑talk‑part‑2/?8ty&emc=ty. [Accessed June 2015]. Freeman, M., 2015. Beholding and being held: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the ethics of attention. The Humanistic Psychologist, 43, 160–172. Griffin, D., 1976. The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience. NY: The Rockefeller University. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and time (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.) NY: Random House (Original work published 1927). Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations. Ed. D. Moran. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1900/1991). Jung, H. 1993. Francis Bacon’s philosophy of nature: A postmodern critique. Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, 10, 3. Kosinski, J., 1970. Being there Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Kindle Edition. p. 54). Lasch, C. 1979. The culture of narcissism. NY: Norton. Leiss, W. 1972. The domination of nature. NY: Braziller. Levinas, E. 1969., Totality and infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University. Melville, H. 1961. Moby Dick or the white whale. NY: New American Library. (Original work published 1851). Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary., 1999. 10th Edition. Springfield, MA: MerriamWebster. Nagel, T. 1974. What is it to be a bat. Philosophical Review, 83, 4, 435–450.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215


215

Onions, C. (Ed.), 1978. Oxford dictionary of English etymology. Oxford: Oxford University. Piaget, J. 1977. The grasp of consciousness: Action and concept in the young child (S. Wedgwood, Trans.) Cambridge: Harvard University. Ristau, C. 2013. Cognitive ethology. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4, 5, 493–509. Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L., 2004. The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. Sagan, C. 2006. The varieties of scientific experience: A personal view of the search for God. NY: Penguin. Sartre, J.P. 1955. No exit and three other plays. NY: Vintage. Sartre, J.P. 1956. Existentialism is a humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufman (Ed.), NY: World Publishing Company. Shapiro, K. 1990. Animal rights v. humanism: The charge of speciesism, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 30, 2, 9–37. Shapiro, K. 1976. The elusive in experience. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 6, 2, 135–152. Smith, G. 1989. The case against God. Amherst NY: Prometheus. The 83 Problems: 2007 Pew Report., 2007. Available from https://sites.google.com/site/ the83problems/information/conception‑of‑God. [Accessed February 2016]. The Free Dictionary: Secularism, 2011. Available from http://www.thefreedictionary .com/secularism. [Accessed August 2015]. Van den Berg, J. 1975. The changing nature of man: Introduction to a historical psychology. NY: Delta. (Original work published 1961). WWF, 2016. Living planet report 2016. Gland, Switzerland: WWF International.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 199–215