Can We Approach Religion Entirely Through Experience?
Exploring the Phenomenology of Transcendence
Contents:
Introduction
Overcoming Darwinist Reductionism
Types of Failing Experience-Religion:
I - The Fad of Eastern Spirituality
II - Christian Worship Culture
Forms of Mind-Shattering Transcendence
ἄγνωστοσ θεόσ - The Need For a Second Revelation
Epilogue
Introduction
I have written extensively in other essays about the inherent problem with religious belief in the modern era, that is that we have come to split truth into incompatible subject/object categories that mire them in something less than they have always meaningfully been. Religious doctrine and a large amount of its practice comes under the analysis of ‘truth’ in our scientific sense, that is to say truth that has excluded all forms of meaning or experience as mere epiphenomenon and therefore, unsurprisingly, we have found them to be wanting.
This is in some ways entirely predictable. A miracle for example is by definition the violation of the rules of reality itself as we understand it, and if we take Hume’s requirement that a miracle demands evidence that must be more miraculous to be false than the miracle to be true, then we already know such evidence cannot exist or it would not be a miracle, it would be an ordinary fact and we would already accept it. To such an analysis the fact that a miracle is by definition a revelation of profound meaning or symbolism as much as a scientific proposition is irrelevant. It is either demonstrable or it is nothing.
One could argue that our approach to religion in the modern world is akin to someone saying poetry or plays are pointless because they don’t just say things simply and descriptively. The idea that truth can be contained in forms not reducible to the literal because truth itself must expand to the absolute and the eternal, is an idea our modern worldview has profound difficulty with.
Not that this has always been the case. While many modern public scientists espouse a tiresome materialism plenty of eminent physicists and mathematicians over recent centuries have recognised that truth cannot be limited to science, and recognised the essential nature of values and subjectivity. As Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner put it “Where in the Schrödinger equation do you put the joy of being alive?” It seems to be largely limited to our recent and small sphere of the modern West that we have banished meaning, limited truth to its most heuristic and literal of functions and disposed of the idea that consciousness and value might be as intrinsic to reality as matter.
But since the idea that we might ‘believe’ religious propositions or doctrines seems like an avenue many find closed, can we begin an approach to religion purely through its phenomenology? Can we find a path from our own experience to its own experiential revelation and so climb through Dante’s spheres, reading our way by the sign-markers of subjective knowledge? How far must we integrate the need for a surrender to whatever ‘belief’ can be to us who seek a truth that bursts open the door to meaning?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to This Isle is Full of Noises to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.