November 15, 2008

Hello everyone,

This semester has been a hectic one for me, and I have not had a great deal of extra time to write newsletters. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to write a newsletter documenting spiritual conversations I have had with students recently. I will weave particulars of the semester throughout this newsletter, but for now, I would like to begin by noting that in literary symbolism, the archetype of the blind man very often is necessary in paradoxically helping those with perfect eye sight to see. That has certainly proven true in conferencing with students this semester.

When students drop by my office, they are of course there to see me about critical thinking. Now that we are in the second unit of the course dealing with deductive reasoning, doubling as an introduction to logic, that is especially true. For most of us, critical thinking is not intuitive, and this semester has threatened to swallow me more than once, trapping me in my intellect rather than allowing my intellect to augment the total person that is me. Simply put, a steady diet of logic to the exclusion of our creative impulses is stifling, taxing to both mind and body. That is not to criticize logic or critical thinking either one, however: they are tools, and like all tools, while their abuse should be avoided, that is not therefore grounds to denigrate them. Using a hammer for every task we are confronted with in life is counterproductive, but we do not therefore on that basis denigrate hammers. Likewise, logic is a tool that people sometimes overuse—certainly teaching it day in, day out, week after week for the first time keeps one immersed in it more than is probably healthy—but we should not on that basis say that it has no value for a purposeful, creative, energized life. So, I repeat: logic is what it is; logic is a tool, and like all tools is useful in certain contexts and virtually worthless in others.

Students usually drop by my office in a state of relative panic, and if not panic, then certainly in a state of relative anxiety or insecurity. What we are covering in class is truly “tough stuff,” and (bless their hearts), many of my students work their tails off and still fail to capture the grade they hope to receive. I do what I can, of course, and I suspect that part of the onus falls on my own shoulders, being new to this curriculum and its unique demands. However, students do not generally leave my office feeling anxious or insecure either one. In a good many cases, the conversation naturally, as if by magic, transforms into an hour- to two-hour long conversation about spirituality and the deeper, more meaningful aspects of life. Naturally the conversations vary from student to student, depending on previous background in religion or its lack. However, in many cases there has been a distinctive pattern: many of my students come from either a Catholic or a conservative Protestant background and find themselves torn between apparently contradictory worlds. On the one hand, there is some kind of deep emotional connection they have to the faith of their youth. On the other, it seems that what they are learning in college contradicts what they have been taught. That conflict appears to be even more apparent in students who come from a conservative Protestant background, or perhaps there are just more students in this area who were raised in that kind of Christian home.

The story these students tell could be the reprise or variation on a theme of my own experience as a freshman in college. Like me, many students inherited a sort of intuitive sense that in order to be a true believer, one had to be set apart in a way that sharply defined the enemies of God from his friends. Not in so many words, of course. Nevertheless, the outer culture at large was to greater or lesser degree a constant threat, always ready to encroach on the life, hearts, and minds of the unsuspecting, always intent on seeing the overthrow of the Godly. (One almost pictures the Psalmist crying out in a tortured voice to God about the enemies of God camped all around him.) In more extreme forms, Godless institutions and even Godless men seek to erode these core Christian values, not willing to rest content until they have effectively purged society of what they perceive to be a menace. Is there any truth to these claims? I believe that there is to some degree, at least to the extent that there is an ongoing clash of values. The deeper question for me, however, is whether or not these particular Christian values thus described accurately reflect the heart of God. I am asking, in other words, whether these values are really even Christian values at all, or if they actually represent the fear response (however understandable) of a cloistered community, a fear response that inadvertently, in its efforts to preserve its own internal purity and integrity, inhibits spiritual growth and positive, productive change.

It has proven effective when talking with a student who faces this challenge, new to college and its offerings, to begin talking about energy. I have always enjoyed doodling, and a small stack of blank paper and a pen is always instrumental when I am talking to students. I am the same way when I lecture: I feel almost naked if I can’t have a piece of chalk, or, in my case, a dryboard eraser to scribble away as I talk, regardless whether anybody is taking notes or not. That goes back to doodling as a child, I suppose; the whiteboard (or blackboard) is like an oversized sheet of paper, connecting my thoughts on a medium much like pen and paper. Before I erase—which I have to do at least twenty times in a half hour—the board is filled with sprawling handwriting, wild and disconnected charts, diagrams, arrows and lines, and to top it off, I have a tendency to either draw circles or boxes around my words, which might serve to emphasize them, save for the fact it is an artistic impulse with me, and they’re all circled and boxed! Nevertheless, even as I laugh at myself, I recognize it is effective: I am me, and my verbosity shows through no matter what I touch, from these newsletters to the wild and erratic sprawlings on the board to my doodles when I conference with students. I am usually a little embarrassed when, knowing that I am about to throw away the several pages of doodles, students request the copies for their personal records as they are leaving. I suppose I find it difficult to believe that such erratic scribbles would be decipherable in any other context than a guided tour. They are to me like lectures on the whiteboard, to be erased as soon as there is no longer room on the other half of the board. (But hey, maybe I am looking at it all wrong—maybe I should start charging money if students also want the pages autographed, the whole Picasso-on-a-paper-napkin kind of thing—laughs.)

So, as I said, I have found it helpful recently to begin talking to students about energy. And I am not content to merely talk about energy, I am hastily scrawling pictures on paper as I do. I first sketch out a chart something like this one, except much less elegant and typically on a horizontal axis rather than a vertical one. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Perhaps we should ask, first, “What is energy?” A tricky question by any estimate, we know at the least that energy is vibrations, though if we ask “vibrations of what,” we have to admit we know not that of which we speak. (Physics has long since given up on that question.) We also know that as human beings, we are uniquely interfaced with sense organs that translate these vibrations into relevant data and information. The most obvious areas are the realm of visible light (here I would be drawing a circle around the rainbow bar) and, further down and not shown would be the spectrum of audible sound (here I would be furiously underlining the bottom edge of the drawing, indicating that visible light is “off the page,” but would be found “down here on this end” beneath red, as red wavelengths are larger than violet ones, and sound waves are considerably larger than either). Of course, at this point, students are listening, wondering what in the world this has to do with spirituality. All is well, however.

At this point, I return again to the circle I drew around the rainbow bar. But then I check myself, realizing I have failed to completely explain my thoughts. So I pause and say, “As human beings, our sense organs enable us to translate limited portions of the energy spectrum into sensory data. Our eyes can see colors, which are found at this part of spectrum (indicated by touching my pen to the rainbow stripes). Our ears can hear sounds, not featured on this diagram, but found down here beneath what is shown (my pen again points, this time to the bottom of the page). Presumably, we could map all energy on a continuum like this one—at the least, we can easily conceptualize energy as being laid out along a continuum.” (The whole time, I am thinking, but not talking about, Emmanuel Kant, and, even more to the point, German theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll.) Having summarized what I wanted to make clear, I now return to the circle I drew around the rainbow bar.

“What does a blind man see?” I ask. My pen is tracing even more circles around the original circle encircling the rainbow bar. Well, it is obvious that the blind man cannot see this portion of the visible spectrum. Based on that profound insight, I then like to ask the question, “Is the blind man a liar?” That question tends to startle, as it is a total non sequitur. First, we are talking about energy rather than about spirituality, and now we are interrupting our elementary discussion about energy to ask about the ethical habits of blind people. Of course it is a ridiculous question. Some blind men may be liars, just as some men who can see perfectly well may also be liars. We certainly do not assume, however, that all men blind are liars because they cannot perceive waveforms from around 400 to 700 nanometers in size. So, while some blind men might lie, we would evaluate each blind man’s tale on its own merits, just as we would any other person. We typically do not expect that people are going to be lying to us; rather, we listen to and evaluate each person based on the particulars of that encounter. Sometimes we do conclude we are being lied to, but that is probably the exception and not the rule. People generally do not lie unless there is some reason to lie, which is usually to save their skin or to try to protect somebody’s feelings or for similar reasons.

Singling out blind people might seem silly and unnecessary, and of course it is entirely reductionist. That is part of the point. Just because people cannot see visible light does not mean that we cannot therefore benefit from their words and ideas. The fact of the matter is, we share a lot more in common with each other than we do apart, whether we can see visible light or whether we cannot. We are all human beings. And certainly some of us are aware of aspects of reality that other people are not. Most of us on this mailing list, for example, would like to believe that we have a level of spiritual awareness that not everyone shares. Nevertheless, we are all human beings, and while the world over there are liars to be found, lying is fortunately not the dominant trait of our species. For every liar you find, you are going to find at least that many more people with no intent to deceive anyone about anything, or, if they do, then very rarely and to their own regret.

At this point in our conversation, I like to turn my attention back to scientists. Those men and women who participate in the various disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to the physical sciences, from sociology to psychology to biology to chemistry to physics and everything beyond and in between: are they liars? Do they, as a group and on the whole, intend to deceive the public? Are they themselves well-meaning but deceived? That is certainly one way to view them, but it seems unnecessarily reductionist. Much more likely is the fact that they are reporting what they see of the world. Their report might differ from the reports of Christian clergy in some areas, but does that mean that they are therefore lying? Probably not. It might not even mean that there is any real conflict, once we dig down a little more deeply. It may only be that there are different—and ultimately complementary—levels of analysis taking place.

The students who come to my office hours are diverse, and many of those who come from conservative Protestant backgrounds are not entirely free of the conflicts between evolution and the account in Genesis, which for other groups of students, of course, has absolutely no emotional hold. However, in this area of the United States, a good many Christian people are conflicted as to what the book of Genesis suggests in relation to the claims of modern science. Depending on our perspective, we no doubt have an opinion about the matter. Whatever we might think, however, many of my students are freshman—their first real time away from home—and they come from small, rural communities with deeply held convictions about the bible and its often one single, appropriate interpretation. Many have been taught that the Godless influence of the world at large includes, perhaps most especially, the scientific community who promote theories of evolution because, consciously or unconsciously, scientists are at enmity with God. Some have even been through church-based courses that teach them how to respond to Godless theories in college.

So I return to the blind man. The blind man probably is not lying; at the least, if he lies, it is not because he is blind, whatever other reason. He may not see the world quite as we do; there may be things we know and believe that he does not. Nevertheless, his perspective of the world most likely will harmonize with our own far more than it clashes. The blind man may not have visual information about his world, but he has other senses—senses that may even be enhanced—and thus he reports about his world as accurately as he knows how. Because he is human, because he is truthful, and because he shares the other four senses and his intuition in common with other human beings, we stand to learn much from him. His perspective is different—he doesn’t “see” the same things we see—yet his perspective is valuable in enhancing our own. The same is of course true of all people everywhere, of all different nationalities, all different religions, all different professions and occupations. Realistically speaking, since human beings as a species share more in common than they do apart, they probably are saying far more complementary things than it might at first seem. Their choice of words might be different, the way that they dress or their personal preferences. But they are still human beings, filled with the capacity to be curious, to wonder, and to try to interpret as best as they can this rather startling world in which we live.

Scientists then, as a group, do not always “see” the same things a religious believer sees. But they are not liars, most of them, nor do most of them intend to deceive. Rather, they report on the world that they see. And what do they see? They see a world in which babies gradually unfold from the womb, plants from the earth: they see an evolutionary process unfold from moment to moment, a world in which the “ever-new” is the norm. They know of Mendelian genetics, named after that famous monk with his peas, who taught us about genetics and genetic probability in a form that allows us to engage in artificial selection, creating strains of plants and animals based on laws that have proven highly reliable again and again and again. They also recognize that scientific theories are provisional frameworks, but frameworks that, for the time, provide the best interpretative framework: they explain and predict the largest amount of phenomenon most accurately. A good theory, then, serves both to explain, unify, and predict new data, and it does so accurately, though it is provisional, always open to new data, correction, and modification. One student I spoke with who hopes to become a biologist was quick to acknowledge all of these things are true: as a burgeoning biologist, she knows how all these pieces fit together.

We think nothing of planting a seed in the ground, expecting that in due time it will blossom and mature into a fully grown plant. We are all familiar with the birthing process, and we know that all various birds and mammals undergo an embryonic stage in the womb or egg before being born into a world in which they still require nurture and sustenance until they grow into maturity. Even our spiritual lives follow a process of gradual unfolding; we certainly do not begin our journeys the paragon of spiritual maturity. The universe itself is constantly unfolding as well, and the process of creation happens moment by moment, is happening moment by moment, is happening right at this moment, and will be happening in the next moment as well as the one after and so on, until perhaps, some day, the process collapses in on itself. At least on the level of the everyday, evolutionary processes are so much the norm that absolutely no one questions them. Few pause long enough to consider the utterly dynamic nature of the universe; few pause to recognize that everything, virtually everything is undergoing an unfolding, all of creation groaning in pangs of expectation. An evolutionary scientist, then, is simply reporting on the world that he or she sees. If the evolutionary model really is the best and most thorough explanation we yet possess as to how life arose, what sorts of things would we expect to find in the book of Genesis, assuming that the book of Genesis tells us anything true or noteworthy about the world?

When speaking with the biology major (who is a committed Christian troubled by the differences in view), I asked her, “Let’s pretend that we could somehow prove the theory of evolution. And let’s pretend that we knew nothing about the bible at all. What would we expect the bible to say if it were to accurately describe this truth?” She looked at me blankly, so I said, “Let’s say that we somehow know that evolution really happened as scientists suggest. We pick up a bible and we begin reading in Genesis. What do we read?” Again, a questioning look. “First we have a formless void. We do not even have day or night.” I could see that a light was beginning to dawn in her mind. “So God separates the darkness and the light. Then we see water separated from land, we see the creation of plants and animals, and, finally, once this process is finished we see the creation of man, the pinnacle of creation, created in God’s image.” My student was positively beaming, her naturally joyous personality shining through in all its radiant beauty: it had never occurred to her that if evolution was true, then the account we find in Genesis, of all creation accounts, was by far the most sophisticated and most closely parallel to what scientists tell us about the world. Now certainly we could argue that the scientist is “blind”—he or she often omits the visible spectrum that believers take on faith: namely that it was God who caused this unfolding. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the unfolding itself is necessarily an inaccurate or poor model of the world.

The central question on most students’ minds really is not about evolution and its intersection with Genesis, however. That is simply a nice way to enter in to a more productive conversation about the assumptions these students have been taught about what authentic faith really involves, and how they have been taught to take a polarized view of the world that greatly distrusts other perspectives, which necessarily includes much of the world of education as well as people of other religions, to say nothing of traveling to or living in other countries. They have been taught to take an all-or-nothing view: they must choose. Either they remain Christian and reject their college educations, or they keep their college educations and reject Christianity. The latter view is particularly troubling for the spiritually minded, and entirely unnecessary. For that matter, this view on the whole is a greatly unfortunate one and unnecessarily small minded, as the more experiences we have in life and the more that we learn about the world, the broader our horizons become. Far from keeping us from God, rather the more varied and wide our experiences are, the more true understanding, compassion, and empathy we tend to have. Our lives are enriched, not threatened, by such diversity. We begin to learn that our differences are vastly overrated, and, regardless, they are not things to fear as a rule, but rather beautiful, like the diverse colors an artist chooses to harmonize together on a single canvas. All the diverse colors form a single picture, it takes every diverse color to make that picture, and the end result is enriched immeasurably because of the many and varied range of colors. Spiritually speaking, the artist is God, the earth is his creation, and humanity appears (at least from its own perspective) to be the very pinnacle of this creation. All men are brothers, all women sisters, and the golden rule of charity is a far truer test of authentic spiritual transformation and faith than any polarization between the few true defenders and the many Godless fiends.

It certainly is true that when people venture out into the world, they will find those who war against such narrowly defined religious beliefs. And for very good reason. It is not because, as a rule, the outer world is filled with Godless liars. The reason people reject such narrowly defined religious beliefs is not because these beliefs are religious, but rather because these beliefs are too narrow, too limiting. The world is filled with beautiful diversity, and God comes in many forms wearing many guises. All human beings everywhere are created in God’s image. All human beings the world over are curious, they are sensitive, they are inquisitive, they seek to understand and to be understood. They use different words sometimes, different languages even. There are variances, just as there are variances in the colors of their skins or the climates in which they live. But there is substantial overlap as well. Perhaps the various stories that each tell need to have a few rough edges trimmed off; perhaps a “theory of everything” has to round off some corners, yet we all know that truth is truth is truth: truth is all part of the same whole or else it is not truth but something else. In the end, I maintain that if we were to collect all of the stories together, we would not have a scrap book of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive tidbits. What we would have would be a kaleidoscope or a prism that together harmonized beautifully, at times offering many different perspectives as though viewing a glittering gem from many different angles. The gem is the same gem, the light sparkling on its surface the same light that all eyes see. The people who see the dancing light are all different, have different vantage points, different perspectives, different views. That is not contradictory, however, merely complementary. It is the same light, the same precious gem, and each perspective is true, told accurately through the eyes of the one who sees.

Students very often come in to my office anxious and feeling insecure about their grades, their difficulty in understanding logic and their utter frustration in being able to understand Venn diagrams or symbolic notation coming to a head. Many of them leave my office, however, with a larger perspective of life, filled with a renewed hope for humanity, often with a clearer perspective that there really are valuable things that they learned from the faith of their youth, and that they can have both their spirituality and their education without contradiction, only a change in perspective. Other people are not enemies, no matter how great our disagreements. Other people are just people. We are not referring to “us” and “them” any more. Rather, we celebrate the complementary we.

In sum, there is good reason the motif of the blind man in literature is that of the man with eyes to see.

God bless,
Eric