YOU’VE GOT ANSWERS?

I’VE GOT QUESTIONS!

Delivered at

The High Plaines Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

Colorado Springs, CO

1 July 2007

By

Rev. Robert M. Eddy, M.Div.

Minister Emeritus, UU Church of Pensacola, Fl.

Twelve years ago at the other end of the earth, Adelaide Australia actually, I was privileged to fill the Unitarian Pulpit of South Australia for 13 consecutive weeks.  I arrived a week early and heard a visitor ask,  “ How does a Unitarian Church differ from other churches?”  The greeter answered,  “Well, in other churches they offer answers.  Here we offer better questions.” That’s as good an “elevator speech” on UUism as you’re likely to find anywhere.

The great philosopher Anonymous once wrote: “Philosophy asks questions that may never be answered.

Religion gives answers that may never be questioned.”

We UU don’t have final answers. We live the best answers we can find but we continue to search for better answers.  But as Shelly Jackson Denham concluded in the hymn we sang earlier,

We believe in life and in the strength of love

And we have found a joy in being together.

And in our search for peace, maybe we’ll finally see

Even to question truly is an answer.”

A century ago,  W. B. Yeats wrote in his prophetic poem, “Second Coming”

“The best lack all conviction,

while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. “

Journalists are trained to ask five questions: Who, What, Where, When and Why.    I have  four additional questions for those who have all the answers whatever labels they attach to themselves: Christian, Jew, Moslem, Secular Humanist, Atheist.

The questions were designed to help UU’s respond to  Fundamentalist Christians but the same questions should be asked of any who confuse the intensity of their convictions with the veracity of those convictions.

These are the questions:

1. SAYS WHO ?

2. COMPARED TO WHAT?

3. IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?  –   IS IT REALLY  THAT COMPLICATED?

4. SO WHAT?

My four questions were designed for real life situations but after reading Daniel Dennett’s recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon last summer I realized they have broader philosophical applications.

The  first question one should ask when someone makes a challenging assertion, an “unquestionable answer”,  is:

1. SAYS WHO?

The  answer for Orthodox Jews, Christians and Moslems is “It’s in the book.”       If you ask Fundamentalist  Christians  why they think the Bible  is authoritative  they say “because it says in the Bible that “every word in this book is true.”

Now we can easily spot this as circular and therefore fallacious reasoning.  They’re confusing an assumption with a proof.  We dismiss such people as incapable of reasoning, and  many are.

But the philosophically sophisticated among them will point out that whatever criteria one establishes for testing the truth value of assertions – whatever the criteria, that criteria itself also rests on assumptions.  Somewhere it is necessary to accept a premise; somewhere it is necessary to make a “leap of faith.”

In what do you put your faith?  Not, I suspect in a book – neither Torah, Bible, nor Koran or any other book or collection of books.   When someone asks, “Who Says?”  How do you respond?

Many of you would say that you put your faith in Reason. Why?  “Well, because it’s only reasonable.”  But isn’t that also circular reasoning?  Haven’t you also made a “leap of faith?”

What do you find indubitable: beyond doubt?  Where do you make your leap of faith?

Many people put their faith in intuition, or “the inner light” or “the still small voice within.”

All historical religions are rooted in a person who heard  a voice and found it indubitable: beyond doubt.  From Moses to  Job to Jesus to Mohammed to  Ralph Waldo Emerson to Shirley McClain there are people who heard a voice they “knew” was the voice of a god or God and they not only believed; they acted on their belief. If  you asked them, “Who said? ”, they would reply, “God said!”  That’s the shaman’s way of being religious.

The great shamans, like Jesus, were followed by disciples who, when asked, “Who says?” replied  “Our shaman said that God said … and we believe the disciples.”

The disciples, who knew the Shaman, wrote  down what the Shaman said and eventually died.   The disciples, were followed by the orthodox believers.  The orthodox  would reply to our question, “Who says?” thusly:

“The Disciples wrote that their shaman said that God said and we believe the disciples.”

Most people who claim to be religious today are orthodox believers.  Their faith is in “the book” allegedly written by the disciples.

There’s another group who also consider themselves religious: the Latitudinarians.  When you ask them, “Who says?” the Latitudinarians reply,  “The orthodox said that the disciples said that the shaman said that God said – but what they all really meant was…”   Latitudinarians redefine the written words of the disciples and the interpretations of the  orthodox to mean whatever they want them to mean.

Many UU’s are Latitudinarians – as are many Episcopalians, Methodists and members of the United Church of Christ .  Even  some Baptists are Latitudinarians.  Latitudinarianism is  a comfortable way to be religious.  I was raised a Methodist, attended a Methodist college and a Methodist seminary and served for a number of years as a Methodist minister though I never believed  in the creeds I recited every Sunday.   I was  a Latitudinarian. I redefined the traditional terms to make them  compatible with my scientific world view.  I am no longer a latitudinarian Christian.  I now call myself an “epistemological pragmatist.” More about that later.

Why do so many people in our country choose to put their faith in a book like the Bible?   The mega church preachers – whether on TV or in person – make it hard not to.  They convince their parishioners they’ll go to Hell if they don’t become and remain bible believers.  They scare them into believing in Hell and assure them that all they need to do to escape Hell is to “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.”  If you will “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior” say the preachers, your lives here and now will be fuller and will make sense.” For many listeners that is what happens.

People will always choose irrational simplicities over meaninglessness.  Meaninglessness: the sense, as Hamlet put it,  that life is no more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”  Meaninglessness!  It’s unbearable for most humans.

THE  SECOND QUESTION  I ask  “Mrs. Know It All” is  “COMPARED TO WHAT?.”

As a practical matter this may be  the most important question of all, both in our personal lives and as citizens.  Children think in terms of either-or but adult thinkers realize that there are few things in life that are either-or; that are, for example either good or evil.  One of the books I have on my list to read is titled, A TRAGIC LEGACY: HOW GOOD VERSES EVIL MENTALITY DESTROYED THE BUSH PRESIDENCY. (by Glenn Greenwald.)  But it is not only our president who sees the world in terms of “either/or”  Most humans do.  Most of the time our thinking is two dimensional.  It’s hard wired into the most primitive parts of our nervous system and much as we UU’s especially like to think we’re cerebral,  those most recently evolved parts of our brains are not the “first responders” to crisis situations.  When we’re emotional it’s easy to think childishly; to resort to what I call “deadly dichotomies” like “good and evil.”  A more evolved way of thinking is to ask, “compared to what?”  For example, when I was working as a marriage counselor and heard someone say,   “my marriage is  terrible!”  I would ask, “compared to what?”  Usually the unconscious comparison was to some impossible dream.  We do it all the time, unconsciously comparing a present reality with an imaginary dream.

You could think of dozens of examples.  I’ve made my point.  Always avoid those deadly dichotomies.  Ask, “compared to what.”

Let’s look at the third Question:

3.  IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?  or alternately,  IS IT REALLY THAT  COMPLICATED

I say it’s neither. To explain why I say that I have to ask you a truly mind boggling question:

HOW TRUE IS TRUE ENOUGH?

Pilate, before condemning Jesus to crucifixion is alleged to have said, “What is Truth?” It’s a good question.  Let me suggest  preliminary, answer.  But first  I need to  tell you a story.

Many years ago a young science teacher was trying to explain to a peasant in China that the world was a globe revolving around the sun  but the old woman said, “not true, the world is really the back of a huge turtle.”   Thinking to reason with her he asked, but what does the turtle stand upon?  “Another turtle,”  she replied.”  And where does that turtle stand?” he asked. “On yet another turtle” she replied.  “ And …”  he started to repeat but she interrupted, “Oh, I know where you’re going, young man!  It’s turtles all the way down.”

I tell you this story because I’m going assert that  “it’s metaphors all the way down.”

About ten  years ago I wrote a Halloween sermon titled, “What’s really real?”  in which I  examined the latest attempts by scientists to formulate “a theory of everything.”  They’re still working at it,  and will, I believe be at it forever.  Why?  Because that’s the nature of science: finding ever better explanations.

Let’s think for a minute about thinking about thinking.   The branch of philosophy that deals  with that question is called Epistemology.  Epistemology deals with the question, “How do we know what we think we know?”  After seven decades of pondering that question  I’ve come to the – tentative – conclusion that all we  really know are metaphors, models and maps.  Now there are subtle and significant differences between metaphors, models and maps but for my purpose this morning I’m lumping them together as mental tools that help us to organize  the hurricane of sense impressions that impact us from   “out there” and “in here” in a way that leads to pleasurable or less painful experiences. Of course, you need to remember that “in here” and “out there” are also themselves metaphors.

As infants we have the very simplest of maps.  As Tagore wrote in one of the most beautiful poems in our hymnal, “my mothers voice gave meaning to the stars.”  As we go through life we discover or are taught maps, models,  and metaphors – ever more complex – increasingly powerful –  to mentally manipulate the great “bustling confusion” pouring in through our senses.  In time these maps, models and metaphors became – it seems – real in themselves.  And we find people arguing  over which model or metaphor or map is really real.

But real scientists do not ask, as did the ancient Greek Philosopher Thales,

“Behind the infinite variety of life,

is there a common, immutable thread?”

Real scientists ask instead,  “what model best explains the totality of data available to us today?”

I go a step further.  I ask,  “How true is true enough?” Newtonian Mechanics are true enough to get a rocket from earth to the Moon and back but one needs Einstein’s Relativity to build an atom bomb. To predict the behavior of the vanishingly small particles within the atomic nucleus one needs quantum mechanics.  Each model is “true enough” for the appropriate task.

There is no “really real” there are only useful and non useful metaphors, models and maps!

I repeat:

There is no “really real” there are only useful and non useful metaphors, models and maps! That’s frightful to nearly everybody: No firm ground to stand upon, nothing;  It’s just metaphors all the way down;  nothing, nada, zilch.

Can you live with that?  Can you live with the conviction that “there is no ‘there’ out there?”   I can and many others have since Job first recognized that we humans cannot know the purposes – if any – of the putative creator and sustainer of  the universe.   We are like the flea on a dog trying to understand the dog.  Or better yet the fleas’ fleas.   Or the fleas’ fleas’ fleas.  Remember the old verse,

“Dogs have fleas,

and fleas have fleas,

upon their backs to bite them.

And they in turn have smaller fleas

And so ad infinitum.”

“Ad infinitum” meaning without end.

I tell you friends, it’s not fleas, or  turtles or  subatomic particles, it’s metaphors, models and maps  all the way down.

That’s what the nuclear physicists are discovering as they search for that – of which there is nothing smaller and the cosmologists  search for that – of which  there is nothing greater. Like the fleas and turtles these new “realities” go on and on – up and down – ad infinitum.

I say, the truth is neither simple nor complicated: it is merely more less useful or non useful. That’s why I call myself an epistemological pragmatist.  It is, I think hubris to believe as Stephen Hawking has suggested that we can “know the mind of God”.  We cannot know more than human beings are capable of knowing; to believe otherwise is to be guilty of what Pascal called, “concupiscence of the intellect.”

Which brings me to my fourth and  final question:

4. “SO WHAT” or, less colloquially, DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

I’ve yet to see, when presented with one of those lists of possible theological positions, my position, “epistemological pragmatist.”  So I usually mark “secular humanist.”   For me as with Protagoras over 25 centuries ago,

“ the individual human being, rather than a god or an unchanging moral law, is the ultimate source of value.”

That being the case, when I asked on Halloween a decade ago,

“Are God and Satan, Angles and Demons,

as the Fundamentalist Christians believe, really real?

Are Goddesses and Gods,

as the new Pagans believe, really real?

Are “ghosties” and goblins and “things that go bump in the night”, as most children believe, really real?

I answered then and I still believe that

“none of these are really real.   Do I therefore come to the conclusion that nothing is really real; that each person’s “reality” equally valid?.  No.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the nuclear physicists and the cosmologists ask today  is the wrong question.[They should ask] not “What is the best theory of everything?” but this question:

“Given an increasing ability to explain, predict and control the non human world, how can that knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?”

“How can knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?”     That is the question that the founders of all the great religions have asked.   The “really real” for them were, and for me are,  the  non material things like Justice, and Mercy, and Humility,  Forgiveness,  Gratitude, Remorse, Loyalty, Grace, Friendship, Encouragement, Peace and Love.

I asked you earlier, “Where do you make your leap of Faith?” I make my leap of faith at the level of values.  Everything else is a merely a metaphor, a model or a  map; more or less useful or useless and sometimes,  even,  destructive.

Please join me in a few moments of quiet contemplation of the words you have heard in preparation for your thoughtful response.

If you wish to discuss these ideas you may email Rev. Eddy at

bobeddyuu@aol.com

Earlier sermons by Rev. Eddy and biographical information may be found at

Uupensacola.org

.