Too Many Questions, Too Many Answers?

​Too Many Words?
A citizen of the early 21st century who approaches the “Big Questions” (Is  there a God/Spirit? Does existence have meaning? How do we know Goodness, and does it even matter if we attempt to follow it? What is the nature of consciousness/soul/individualized spirit, and can it exist independent of a material substrate such as the human body, and if so, what is that post-embodied existence like?) is confronted with both an infinite number of explanations of “what it’s all about” and an infinite amount of data/information (religious, philosophical, literary ideas; scientific and social scientific theories; sacred texts, religious doctrines, dogma, creeds, theologies, etc.) from cultures across the world, from at least 10,000 years ago to the present, which are used to support various answers to those big questions. Brilliant minds on all sides offer equally erudite and, in varying degrees, rational defenses of their preferred position, yet no one can really sort this out! Perhaps an AI will do better than humans have (just (mostly) kidding, of course).
 
Faith by Argument and Faith by Experience
So, in the context of this overwhelming array of various answers to the big questions, what do we do? Philosophers and theologians, academics and intellectuals, and even everyday folks who have been infected with what might be called a case of gross overvaluation of reason, operate as if we just need to think it through more thoroughly: new ideas, new symbols, new concepts, new arguments strung together with varying degrees of logical precision, new articles, new books, new blogs, and so on.
 
But what if our awareness and understanding of Spirit is not something that is acquired through objective observation and rational analysis? What if, however vague, imperfect, and variable it might be, our awareness of Spirit is more like simply a sense of something, an intuitive awareness, a taste of Spirit, so to speak?
 
Kierkegaard wrote at length about the misunderstanding that faith is the product of objectivity, claiming instead that religious faith is a subjective state of the heart and mind that can never be reduced to mere propositions, and is forever elusive and hence resistant to being neatly organized and categorized as can knowledge acquired through objective reason. Kierkegaard, of course, applied this subjective understanding of the nature of faith specifically to Christianity, but there is no reason to confine his subjective/experiential perspective to a single religion: one can similarly say that any religious belief is ultimately the product not of a chain of reasoning but rather the result of an experiential sense of, or taste, of Something More, namely the Spiritual dimension of the Cosmos.
 
We choose that which seems to be true based on our intuitive sense of meaning and goodness. That’s not to ignore objective “data” and logical reasoning, but rather to recognize that data and rationality alone do not lead to a firm conclusion. So we rely on something that the human species has developed over the long evolution of our consciousness: a sense of something, a dim perception, a feeling of rightness and truth, however vague and objectively and rationally unsupported it might be.
 
Religious faith thus becomes more of a moral and spiritual act than a strictly rational/cognitive one, although it is not therefore an irrational act in any sense. We believe because we accurately, though vaguely, sense Something More, but not because we first have been convinced of a Something More through rational argument. Experience and reason are not necessarily antagonistic: that which we know intuitively can and must be articulated, clarified, and defended through words. But the starting point is the ineffable awareness, not the words that are used to clumsily describe that awareness.

​Before All of the Words
For readers not familiar with David Bentley Hart, he is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary philosophy, religious studies, literary writing, and cultural analysis. Few contemporary writers possess his depth of knowledge across multiple fields, his capacity to meticulously construct lengthy arguments which incorporate a remarkable treasure of historical and cross-cultural perspectives, his uncanny vocabulary, and his sometimes biting sense of humor. And yet, even this brilliant figure who has few if any peers in the use of language and construction of logical arguments, clearly recognizes that when dealing with Spirit, the primacy of the ineffable must be acknowledged.
 
In a review of a book on Zen, for example, Hart states with reference to religion that “knowing how to comport oneself towards reality is already the experience of truth” (Dreamchild’s Progress, 198). In other words, how we experience the world, rather than how we articulate abstract arguments about the world, is the path to truth (which is, of course, a very Zen sort of perspective).

He follows this up with a stronger acknowledgment of the limitations of philosophy (and, by implication, all verbal efforts to capture the essence of Spirit, including creeds, dogma, and theology) when referring to: “the classical notion of what philosophy is: an attempt to give imperfect verbal expression to a knowledge that both precedes and surpasses all words; a passage through language from a pre-conceptual wonder at existence to a post-conceptual Theoria of unconditioned reality” (Dreamchild’s Progress, 199 – my parentheses).
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Elsewhere he touches on this same theme of Spirit as something which cannot be adequately known and described through words when he refers to “those regions of human experience that cannot really be accounted for within the framework of philosophical naturalism,” and affirms that there are “essential and perennial mysteries” which “point beyond themselves to what is ‘more than nature…they are, to adopt the mediaeval term, transcendental”(The Experience of God, 44-45).
 
The point here is that, contrary to what has perhaps become the cultural norm of understanding religion in the context of belief in a set of propositional statements, the essence of religion is an experiential awareness of the real existence of a spiritual quality of the Cosmos – a sense of Something More, a taste of the Transcendent, a dim awareness that there exists a Supreme Good, the basis of Goodness and Meaning, in spite of the often brutal suffering, pain, and waste of life that we perceive in everyday existence. The propositions that attempt to describe in more precise terms the nature of that Spirit follow from the experience, and hence it is the experience rather than rational propositional linguistic elaborations that are the essence of religion/spirituality. 

​Implications for Post-Traditional Religion
This suggests that the religion and spirituality of the future may well move in the direction of a faith that is rooted in an experiential dimension more so than in the realm of creeds, doctrines, theologies, etc., all of which function as attempts to rationally articulate that which precedes and eludes all efforts to be reduced to and captured by the limited capacities of language. Twenty-first century awareness includes a recognition of the historical, cultural and related circumstances that produced what eventually came to be seen as sacred texts, along with the creeds and theologies which were created from the myths, stories, concepts, ideas, etc. found in those texts. We now recognize, for instance, that the Christian New Testament is a human product which, while sometimes wise and inspiring, is subject to the same cultural biases and error as any human attempt to talk about Spirit. Similarly, we now recognize that such a fundamental Christian document as the Nicene Creed is not the product of a divine act or divinely inspired church fathers, but rather is the product of socio-political influences and contentious wrangling over attempts to reach agreement on what constitutes being a Christian. The more that one studies the history of these and other religious texts, however ancient and in whatever religion, the more we realize that they are fallible human creations, sometimes expressing wisdom and sometimes expressing the biases and errors of their time. Hence, faith based on ancient texts (and their derivative doctrines) alone is no longer credible in light of a fully informed 21st century consciousness.
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But faith remains a viable and credible option if it is based not on ancient texts (or even contemporary ones) but on the same experiential awareness of Spirit that was the inspirational source of those ancient texts. Contemporary humans have access to that direct sense of Something More, that intuitive sense that in addition to the material dimension of time, space, matter, and energy, there is a dimension of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty (and other spiritual realities) that eludes rational articulation in carefully crafted propositions, but nonetheless provides a firm certainty of the presence of Spirit. In a spirit of epistemological humility which will necessarily be part of religion of the future, we will learn to confidently rest in that awareness of Spirit, even if it must remain free from the intrusion of the words, propositions, arguments, etc., that have been attached to all traditional religions. A spirituality rooted in direct awareness of Spirit rather than a spirituality rooted in the secondary propositions of doctrines and theologies, is what that future sense of Something More is likely to grounded in.