Natural Religion

I was hanging out with other math graduate students last night, having dinner and a beer before going to a Live Arts presentation featuring experimental computer-generated music.

Socializing with grad students is an eclectic combination of typical small-talk, pseudo-intellectual babble, and pure nerdiness. Amidst the pseudo-intellectual babble, religion is often a topic of interest.

One of my friends said something that I've heard enough times to trigger quite a number of thoughts on it: When faced with the question of whether there is any reason for living our lives, especially in any sort of moral way, it is "natural" to look to (or create) religion for answers.

I don't know what struggles this particular friend has with these questions, but I've noticed that in general this kind of statement is used to explain religion away. The implication can either be patronizing (as in, "Oh, well, it's fine that you believe that... it's perfectly natural") or condescending (as in, "How can you still believe that in this enlightened age?").

But the obvious question is, what else should one turn to? It sometimes seems like a blasphemous question in the academy, the church of secularism. I wondered aloud what would become of society if most of the world started to believe there really is no transcendent meaning to the world.

As if annoyed, my friends responded that the world has gotten on for a long time already, and it would surely continue on the way it is. This statement is highly presumptuous, and then again it is also rather depressing.

Presumptuous, because to say such a thing is to utterly fail to acknowledge the achievements of religious worldviews. For instance, to act as if the Christian way of thinking had nothing to do with the achievements of the Western world is, I dare say, shockingly stupid, though many people who act this way are not stupid.

Depressing, because it implies that not only is there no meaning, but there really has never been. The things we have accomplished as human beings have only come about because we wanted to do something with our little blips of existence in this meaningless universe. Under this philosophy, we humans would continue to do that even if we didn't believe in God or anything else, because we just can't help it.

In light of how depressing this idea is, I suppose religion is "natural." But I was musing on that word for a while, and I realized that there are really at least two senses in which we use it.

One use of the word "natural" is when we're saying something is easy, or obvious, as in, "It's only natural that he would think only of himself." It's the way we are when we're not trying very hard. Thus my drum line coach in high school used to yell at us, "Don't just do whatever feels natural! Do it right!"

On the other hand, we sometimes use "natural" in a more positive sense to mean that something feels right. When I started doing mathematics as a young child, it felt natural to me. For others, this could've been used in the first sense, meaning it came easily to me. But for me, it was more than that. I worked hard at math because it felt right.

You don't get good at anything just by taking it easy. You have to do more than what comes "naturally" to you. That's the first sense of the word. But surely when you find something you love to work hard at doing, it feels "natural" to you. You feel you are in your element.

In this way, I think at least a few of the world's religion could be considered quite "natural," in the second sense of the word. They make sense. Once you carefully consider their deepest and most powerful teachings, you can see how someone might believe such an idea.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (for example) all have ideas that really make sense of the world. In that sense it is "natural" to turn to one of them for answers to questions about the meaning of life. It makes sense.

Atheism, on the other hand, doesn't seem natural to me at all. It doesn't feel right. Is there really no transcendent meaning? What is the point, then?

But in the first sense, atheism is very natural, in the sense that it really is the most obvious answer. Is there a God? Well, I can't really see one, so I guess not. This is a very "natural" answer.

I imagine atheists would be extremely divided about this statement. I have read many opinions (from atheists) that say much the same thing that I am saying. Atheism is the obvious answer, and it's only this irrational desire for the second kind of "natural" that leads us to develop religion.

But I imagine other atheists would be deeply frustrated with my evaluation of their beliefs. Many atheists have had to really struggle to come to the conclusions about life they now hold. Given the culture in which they live, it is often a battle to leave the faith of one's youth and embrace a life of not knowing if there's really any point to it all.

I certainly don't want to diminish that struggle; I take it seriously. Yet I wonder if atheists take seriously enough the way in which religion has created a way for society to pass on the virtue of struggling for one's beliefs. "Seek, and ye shall find."

Christianity, in particular, does not assume that it is the default belief. (Many atheists, on the other hand, claim that atheism is the default belief.) Even where it is culturally dominant, Christianity admits and even insists that it is not the "natural" thing to believe.

This is why Christianity says faith is so important. True, "faith" can become a tool that the powerful use to brainwash the weak; but in its purest form "faith" is simply a statement of belief in something that is not obvious, yet is extremely important if it's true.

What if we lived in a society where struggle for one's beliefs was not considered a virtue? Sure, atheists are typically known for struggling to seek out knowledge now, in the culture in which we find ourselves, but what if it were different? What if no one felt the slightest urge to believe something that wasn't immediately apparent to all people?

Science would utterly collapse, just as much as any religion. Indeed, science is a religion, from a certain point of view. Although it easily passes as the true universal, uniting people from all cultures and all faiths, it really isn't any such thing.

Anyone who does math or science goes through a process of initiation, in which knowledge is revealed through many, many stages. Scientific knowledge is not natural in the first sense--it is not obvious--but it is natural in the second sense, in that once you see all the evidence, it begins to feel very natural, even if it's surprising.

To me, the truly atheist worldview has nothing of this second kind of naturalness that both scientific and religious knowledge have. Atheism just doesn't explain why. Worse, it almost seems to discourage asking such questions. All we can really know, it seems, is what.

Of course, my friends may continue to disbelieve in religion because religion lacks evidence, but I think that by this they mean only a certain kind of evidence, which does not include those indescribable connections a believer has with God.

For me, knowledge of God must begin with the heart, and all reason must subordinate itself to the connection found there. Surely this connection is not admitted as evidence by everyone, and perhaps with good reason--whose heart are we to believe, after all?

That is why I hesitate to insist upon how much I really know about God. I will say I know Him, but my mind is very limited in expressing this. Faith is a matter of the heart, and it is not always natural in the first sense. Yet it is natural in the sense of being beautiful, the way it is meant to be.

Christmas

Tonight is Christmas Eve, and my cousins and I just watched The Muppet Christmas Carol again, simply because we have done it for at least ten years in a row. I love that movie. It is a delightful rendition of Dickens's famous story, and really, who can resist the muppets?

Seeing that movie one more time got me thinking about traditions. So much of what we do comes from the familiarity of it. My mom's side of the family always goes to Pittsburgh for Christmas. From the time my brother and I and our three cousins were children, we always made a big event of Christmas, with all the gift-giving excitement you would expect in a typical American consumerist family. Why get rid of a good thing?

I'm happy to be here in Pittsburgh again this year, but I can't help notice how different things are. My brother, just like last Christmas, is on the other side of the Atlantic doing Christian missions. (Fortunately, he'll be with us tomorrow thanks to the wonders of Skype.) My cousin Loren is engaged to be married next year. Ethan and Eric are now thoroughly into their military careers, and I'm in graduate school. The "kids" are not kids anymore.

This is also the sixth Christmas I have celebrated without my father. Although I am glad to know that he rests in the arms of his father in heaven, I can't help but feel a little sorry for myself for having been without him all these years. I am astonished at how much more I have thought about him this Christmas season than I did in any of my four years of college. Perhaps that is because Christmas has given me the chance to reflect on these past few years more than the summer after my graduation. Perhaps I needed to look back at where I came from, so that I can assess where I've really gone since then, particularly in my college years.

I could go on about that, but I won't. Not here, anyway. I guess I was just thinking about how we tend to fall in love with the familiar patterns of life. All cultures develop some sort of calendar to keep track of time, both for practical and sentimental reasons. We need to know what's coming--what the weather will be like, for example--but we also need to set aside time to think about important events, themes, values, etc. which are represented by our various holidays.

What results from this scheme is a very cyclic view of the world. Every Christmas, we see something very familiar, and there is comfort in that. The New Year will come around just like it did last year, and we can look forward either cynically or optimistically to a lot more of what we've already seen. There is surely something good in this cycle. After all, it is part of nature for things to come in cycles.

But Christmas really isn't about cycles at all. If there's one thing the birth of Christ tells us, it's that history is going somewhere. Just as my cousins and I are not kids anymore, history also has grown up. Every year we are approaching the fulfillment of all God's promises; otherwise Christmas--the incarnation of God--is meaningless.

Human beings really have no excuse anymore for the way we continue to tolerate immorality and injustice. We have a perfect model in the man whose birth we celebrate this time of year. When I think about the atrocities of the world, whether it be the genocide in Darfur, or the terrorism of Al Qaeda, or perhaps the secret atrocities that we in the West commit daily, though we prefer not to think of them as such--I think, how can this be, seeing that God himself was born to us more than 2,000 years ago?

Yet the whole story of the world, according to Christianity, is one in which human beings cause both the downfall and the renewal of God's perfect world. "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God." (Romans 8:19) Indeed, you can already see signs of life in the dead race of man. There is love, there is joy, and there is peace this time of year, in many places all over the world, where people gather together to celebrate the God of all goodness and beauty and wonder.

God is doing something among us, and that is why we see our lives moving forward. For me, it means that these years ahead of me in are not just about building a career for the purpose of gaining enough of an income in my adult life to be comfortable. My future is all about God's future, which means ushering in an era in which people really do act like Christ. It means standing up against atrocities, showing people the most excellent way, and hopefully living ever more consistently with the message I endorse with words. I cannot just sit idly by while the world suffers, especially when God really has been so good to me.

God is moving history forward. In a world of cycles, it is easy to believe that what has happened cannot be undone, and that every year we know what to expect. But the challenge of Christmas is to believe that in fact the dead can rise again. Not only do we celebrate people being changed from Scrooges into saints, but we also look forward to a literal resurrection, in which people like my father will once again live on the earth, never to die again. No matter what it is in this world that makes our hearts sigh and yearn for things to be different, we know because of Christmas--because God is now with us--that things can be different, and they will be different.

I suppose that's the whole reason I started this blog. I know that even though history tends to repeat itself, nevertheless everything we choose to do with the time we are given matters. Every word we say, every stand we take, and every person we reach is a building block in God's project of history. If I didn't see it this way, I think I'd go insane. It's nice to take comfort in what's familiar, but a life that only goes around in circles really is meaningless. I guess I have just enough faith to believe that God is using these silly little blog posts as part of His mission to change the world.

Having said all of that, I really do think one of the best ways to change the world is to celebrate. There's nothing like a celebration to show the world that love and joy really will prevail. There's nothing like a celebration to show people that the King really is here to make things right. After all, we ought to be living in light of our hope for the future given to us by Jesus Christ, so how can we help but celebrate? The world needs to see what a real party looks like!

So to all of you out there in cyberspace...

Merry Christmas.