What are we talking about?

A lot of my thinking involves trying to get working definitions of important things. 

Let me give you an example. Take the word "conflict." It's a very important word. Most people don't like what the word refers to, and some use it as an excuse for violence. Karl Marx even built a world-shaking theory out of it. Here is my definition:

Conflict is when one person takes a stand and another person takes an opposing stand.

That definition comes from my experience in a movement called "Worldwide Marriage Encounter," a weekend experience based on talks written out beforehand by married couples and a "team priest." I devoted important parts of my life to that movement for several years. Its goal was to improve the relationships between people committed to marriage, especially Christian marriage. One of the talks given as part of the program was titled "Rules for Fighting." Here is what they said:

Rule Number One: Fight!

The rule was not advocating physical violence. "Fighting" essentially meant that one party would take a stand that she or he knew the other party would not agree with. People can't live together without dealing with such situations, but not facing them in a constructive way is destructive to the relationship. So they wrote "rules for fighting."

In sociology courses I found a definition of violence that I found persuasive. It was developed by a scholar (whose name I have forgotten) who was widely cited on the topic of violence. His definition was: "Violence is the intent to hurt someone physically."

The friar I mentioned earlier, Al Merz, spent years of his life offering workshops on conflict resolution, and he disagreed with the word "physically." He argued that attempts to hurt someone in any way should be labeled "violence." In my mind, an attempt to hurt someone in any way is aggression. Violence, the intent to hurt someone physically, is a subcategory of aggression.

As I walk around doing things like the laundry, I like to think about issues like "conflict" and "violence," and keep thinking about how well my definitions hold up. Definitions should be brief enough that you can memorize them and think about them in idle moments. What good is a definition that tries cover every possible situation, even if it looks nice in a textbook? Nobody can use it.

And we need to use definitions, because if we want to talk about important things, we have to know what our words mean.

The first thing we need to talk about is "truth."

 

Truth

The world of social media has shown us how powerful untruth can be. But we need to have a definition of truth. Here is my definition: Truth is the story as God would tell it.

You don't have believe in God (or gods) to use that definition. The definition simply asserts that there is, "out there somewhere," a story about what happened that accurately describes what happened. The definition is not very precise because stories are not precise. Every experience we have can be expressed in a story, but we cannot even describe our own experiences exactly. Each time we try to describe what we have seen or felt, we tell the story in slightly different ways. The situation gets even more complicated when two people try to tell a story about what happened. Nobody can say exactly what happened. But something happened, and it should be possible for someone better equipped than we human beings to reach that level of exactitude. Such a mythical person is God.

Speaking of God.

I am a member of a Catholic religious order, so naturally I have an interest in God more than most people. Or at least I should have such an interest.

Mother Teresa said that she went years without a rewarding experience of God. Many of us religious people could say the same thing. God never seems to say much. In fact, God never seems to say anything. That does not make for a very satisfactory relationship, and is probably the reason why so many people have found other things on which to center their lives.

Years ago I found myself wondering if this whole God-thing is just a projection of my own thinking. I remember telling a close woman friend of mine, "I'm not even sure God exists, but I just know God doesn't want me to marry you." She went on to marry someone else, and the marriage has so far lasted fifty years.

We religious use the psalms a lot. The psalms are poems or songs given to us by Jewish composers several hundred years before the time of Jesus Christ. I said to myself, "Well, I don't know if there is a God out there, but maybe I can just hitch a ride on words that all kinds of people have used for hundreds of years."

So I have been hitching a ride--sometimes I use the term "piggy-backing"--for years and years. Strange thing. I was in religious life for forty or fifty years when the thought occurred to me that I am really addressing Someone when I pray. I started paying attention to when a psalm was speaking directly to God and when it was speaking to other people.

That's enough God-talk for now. I'm a sociologist who specializes in studying religion. I am convinced that whatever future there is for religion in our modern societies, there won't be any future unless people try to know God. The story of Jesus Christ doesn't mean much unless we have some sense of what God is like.

And, to repeat how I started, Truth is the story as God would tell it.

 

Science

Science is two things: 1. It is a combination of research and theory. 2. It is a community of people criticizing one another's research and theories.

What is research?

Research is observing something carefully, and if possible, counting something.

Observing means using one or more of our five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling (which means feeling something physically, like feeling a rough surface).

The goal of research is to observe correlations. A correlation means that when one thing happens, another thing usually happens. For example, where there is a poor neighborhood, there is a lot of crime. That is a correlation.

In science we can never observe a correlation such that where when one thing happens, another thing always happens. We can never say "always" because even though we have observed something happening 10,000 times, on the 100,001st time, the second thing may not happen. There are some poor neighborhoods where there is not a lot of crime.

Nevertheless, when we look for observations, we are looking for causes, and a cause is when one thing happens another thing always happens. Since we can never be sure that a correlation actually is a cause, to say tht one thing causes another is fiction.

 

Theory

Science is a combination of research and theory. That is half of my definition of science. I will treat the second half in a few paragraphs.

Theory is a story about causes.

Since we can never say one thing causes another thing for sure, every theory is just as much a fiction as the idea of "cause" is a fiction. This is where the second part of the definition of science comes in, the community of people criticizing one another's research and one another's theories or stories about causes.

Here's a classic example of how science works.

Back in the 1800s there was an epidemic of cholera in England. As we have learned from our experience with Covid-19, it takes time for us to develop an understanding of what is causing the disease.

A doctor named Snow made a street map of London and put an X on places where there had been a case of cholera. He noticed that the X's clustered in a particular neighborhood. He had observed a correlation. He went to the neighborhood and noticed that there was a pump in the center of the neighborhood from which the residents got their drinking water. On a hunch he removed the handle from the pump so that people couldn't get water from it. The epidemic stopped. Another correlation: handle on pump, cholera. No handle on pump, no cholera.

But why did the epidemic stop? Eventually he and others developed a story (theory) about why it stopped. The story went like this:

There is a bug in the water that causes cholera. When people quit using the pump, the bug can't get to the people and the epidemic stops.

That story is a fiction, a narrative developed from observing a correlation. That's how theory operates.

 

Peer Review

Here is the second part of my definition of science Science is a community of people sharing one another's research and evaluating one another's theories. Scientists share their observations and theories with other scientists in "journals," which are scientific magazines. There are thousands of journals. Each journal contains "articles," which are descriptions of individual research projects and the theories that the scientists create from their observations.

A typical journal might contain ten or fifteen articles. Scientists are grouped into communities who do work similar to one another--the members of each community are observing the same kinds of things (for example, a particular species of plant). When they describe their research, there are other people in that community who do the same kinds of research and are considered good judges of how well the scientist did his or her work. When scientists finish a research project, they write up what they did and what they found and what they think their findings mean, and send their work in an article to a journal that their fellow scientists are likely to read. If their fellow scientists think they have done a good job, those scientists are likely to name the research article in their own work, which is published in a similar journal. The more other scientists refer to your work (we say they "cite" your work), the better your reputation and the more likely that your work is considered good science and not fake science.

The whole process is called "peer review." A peer is a partner doing the same work you are doing. Eventually one of your peers will do research on the same thing you have described. We call that "replication." When your work is replicated, the work becomes good testimony.

If somebody cites credible evidence that you have cheated on the descriptions of what you observed, you may get a reputation as a poor scientist. That is what should happen, but, like the rest of us, scientists can sin, and they sometimes do the less ethical thing, which messes up science.

 

Meta-analysis

There are thousands of journals and tens of thousands of articles, so there are now computer programs that can sift through all the articles dealing with your kind of research and say how many agree with you and how many disagree. We call this "meta-analysis." If there are fifteen articles that agree with you and only two or three that disagree, your work is likely to be considered good science.

You can find a few articles describing research that agrees with you on almost any topic, so it is easy to claim that your idea is “proved by research” and that people who disagree with you are using fake science. Tobacco companies were able to cite studies for thirty or forty years "proving" that smoking does not cause cancer. The studies they cited were far outnumbered by other studies that showed that smoking does cause cancer. Eventually almost all scientists agreed with the theory that smoking causes cancer.

An example closer to our time is climate change. No one can claim with absolute certitude that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change, but when thousands of studies point to the conclusion that they do have that effect, the scientific community concludes that there is cause and effect there.

But they can never be absolutely sure.

There is no such thing as absolute certitude in science.

 

Faith and testimony

Faith is when I act on an idea that I am not sure is true. For example, there is a possibility that the cereal in the box from which I get my breakfast is poisoned. I can't be sure it isn't poisoned, but I go ahead and eat the cereal anyway.

Faith depends on testimony. Testimony is when someone tells me that  a story is true. Scientists accept one another's theories because they trust that other scientists, their peers, are telling the truth. Every so often a scientist says that he observed a correlation that he did not observe. It can take a while, but eventually other people will make observations similar to the ones he made (we say they "replicate" his work) and get results that lead to a different story. His reputation should be ruined, and he should be exiled from the community of peers. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, which is an indication that every human being is affected by political considerations.

Most of the things we accept in everyday life are based on the testimony of others. In our age, many people get their information from "siloes," media that use testimony only from people they agree with. The users of such media are getting tainted testimony. The only way to remedy the situation is for people to try to get their information from a wider set of inputs, especially from media in a silo different from theirs, information likely to disagree with the stories told in their silo.

This is not a new problem. Jesus defended his teaching and actions on the basis of testimony, and his critics used other sources of testimony. It can be very hard to determine the truth when there are conflicting testimonies. Until the day of his death Pope St. John Paul II accepted testimony that Marcel Maciel was a holy man. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, accepted testimony that Marcel had fathered several children by different women and banned him from leadership in the Catholic Church.

We have conflicting testimonies about climate change, and about who won the 2020 presidential election in our country. We all have to evaluate the credibility of the witnesses who are giving us testimony about their stories. We have a name for that kind of evaluation. We call it critical thinking. Critical thinking is looking for testimony from people who do not agree with a story you like.

I titled this essay "Don't interrupt me, I'm thinking." What I am doing when I am thinking is doing thought experiments about stories I want to tell. I am looking for evidence against what I want to say. I prefer to find that evidence myself. It's more comfortable that way. But I do keep snooping around, looking for people who disagree with me. I'd just rather not meet them face to face. That gives me time to tweak the story I want to tell.

 

Love

Love is the most used and least defined word in our language. For years I looked for a definition of love. Everybody talked about it, but nobody said what love is. Without a definition I can't find correlations, and if I want to think about love in a scientific way, I need correlations. When there is love, X tends to follow.  

Finally I got a definition I was satisfied with, from one of my fellow Franciscans. He wrote a book with the title Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy. He never claimed to define "intimacy," but he talked about it so often in the book that a phrase he used became a definition of intimacy. Intimacy is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

That became the definition of love that I had been looking for. Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

A word about "passionate." Passion is something that we do not produce on demand. It is not under our control. It comes when it is ready. It is a gift.

So I drop the word from my working definition of love. Love is something that we want to practice every day, and we can't get passionate every day about everyone. Marriage Encounter insisted on the principle: Love is a decision. We make decisions on demand. We decide to be respectful, to be vulnerable, and to be faithful. There's no mystery here.

Dorothy Day liked to quote Dostoevsky: "Love is a harsh and dreadful thing." When we welcome people off the street and are involved with every such person, as she was, we welcome a lot of pain. Some of the people who walk in off the street are not nice people. Dorothy treated them with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. Especially vulnerability. The reason we do not welcome people off the street is that we do not want to be that vulnerable.

Science goes best when the people doing it treat one another with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. There are stories of scientists who live their lives in bitterness about things other scientists have done to them. Bitterness messes up the peer community that we need in order to have our work evaluated critically, but also graciously.

 

 

 

 

 

What is God like?

People in our country seem to be abandoning religion. Or at least they are abandoning churches.

Is this a bad thing?

It’s not a new thing. As I read the Old Testament book of Chronicles, I am struck by how much of the history of the Jewish people was a history of abandoning the religion of Abraham and Moses. Often the abandonment was the people’s turning to other gods. But I suspect that a lot of their abandonment was a simple tossing aside of the faith handed on to them—busy with other stuff.

Then a prophet would arise and call the king back to true worship. The king was always central to the story.

 

Coercion

Kings coerce. They order and punish. Is that what is needed in order for religion to flourish?

When it comes to religious issues, we have quit ordering people around and punishing them when they deviate. We have decided that God doesn’t want that. So what does God want?

God wants people who relate to God freely, and lovingly. Churches exist to help people do that.

Here is how we should be helping them.

 

People of the Book

They say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions of the Book. All three faiths take writings seriously. The reason they do that is because they believe that writings, stories and all the things that grow out of stories, are our best tools for learning about what God is like.

And that is the fundamental question, at least for these three faiths: what is God like? Our religions are schools of what God is like, and to explore the question we use a book.

What is God like?

Perhaps there are some people for whom that question is not important. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, some of the people think about God all of the time, and (almost) all of the people think about God some of the time, but all of the people don’t think about God all of the time. And maybe some of the people never think about God at all.

All of the people think about God some of the time. I think of children, who ask questions like “Why is there anything?” Or of people facing death, who can wonder about what God thinks of the way they have treated others. Certainly people who suffer seem to be drawn to religion.

And conversely, people who do not suffer can forget all about religion. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to know what God is like. We of the western world are rich. We suffer, but we suffer alone. We want the camera to see us smiling. And as long as we are smiling, we are embarrassed to let others see us being concerned about what God is like.

 

Let’s start with the essentials

First of all, none of us knows much about what God is like.

Start with the question of whether there is a God in the first place. We can’t prove that there is. It seems reasonable to assume that if something happens, there must be a cause for the something (one of Aquinas’s arguments, I believe). But just because it is reasonable doesn’t make it certain.

On the other hand, nobody can prove either that God doesn’t exist. The issue is not amenable to empirical proof. Which means it is an issue of faith.

That shouldn’t bother us. We operate on faith 99% of the time in our lives. If I had to be sure about everything, I would be afraid to step out of the door in the morning. Maybe the earth in front of the door wouldn’t really be solid the next time around.

Okay, so we can’t be sure that there is a God, any more than a husband can be sure that his wife really loves him. Still, things go better if the husband can believe that his wife really loves him. Sometimes husbands are deceived, but not always, and it is reasonable for them to trust in that belief.

Once we’ve gotten past that hurdle, the next question is, what is God like?

Here is where religion steps in. Our religions, at least our Book religions, are schools of what God is like. If they are not that, they are nothing. Perhaps one of the reasons people these days toss religions aside is because their religion does not seem to be helping them to know more about what God is like.

Religions are not in the business of entertaining us on the sabbath, or making the world better, or helping us live happier, or even of making death easier to face. They can do all of those things—Jesus did a lot of those things—but that is not why religions exist. They exist to help us know God better. Knowing God better can lead us to live better lives, but we shouldn’t confuse the effect with the cause.

The Book religions present us with a life project of knowing God better each day, no matter how many days we have. They do that by starting with the Book, and then using the Book to draw us to one another and then to do things with those others—actual physical behaviors—that are the results of our reading the Book. Some of those physical behaviors are “worship”—because what the Book teaches us about God suggests that if God is who the Book says God is, we ought to respond with courtesy and grace, and join with others in our response.

That is how we become religious people. We learn about what God is like, we respond with courtesy, and we do this with other people because that is what the Book suggests and doing it with others makes the experience come alive. To paraphrase an old sociologist, Emile Durkheim, doing religion with others can add zest to our lives.

 

Our Books are dangerous

The sacred texts of these religions of the Book are creations of people who did not know God very well. They knew God better than any of us do when we are starting out, but some of the ideas presented in the books are ideas that we no longer think are good. For example, “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

That should not surprise us. Jesus taught things that earlier sacred books did not teach. He said that he didn’t come to abolish those books but to bring them to perfection. He brought them to perfection by teaching us things about God that the sacred books before him did not teach, like the idea that God is more like a parent than like a dictator.

We people of the Book get into trouble when we think we have to use every word of our Books as a guide to how we should relate to God and one another today. We Christians believe that the earlier Book people did not see God as three persons—admittedly a hard pill to swallow—but the story of Jesus seemed to leave us no other choice. This makes us part ways with Jews and Muslims, but we believe that Jesus did not tell us to make Jews and Muslims into Christians. He told us to make “disciples,” and a disciple is someone who is learning (the Latin root of the word means “to learn”). We are to invite others to share in the project of learning what God is like. And we know that others can teach us a thing or two about that—things not necessarily in our Books.

That means that we should be going through the world like fellow learners, with the hope that anybody we meet might teach us something about God.

We Christians believe that when Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were that we should love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves—and that every person on the face of the earth is our neighbor—Jesus perfected a lot of the older moral norms.

Love is a difficult thing to define, which is probably why it is hard to find a definition of it. It is also probably why we can say we love our neighbors and then go out and kill them.

 

Love

Here is a working definition of love that has served me for the last thirty years or so. There are surely better definitions, but this one is the best I’ve found so far.

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with others, including God.

For practical purposes, when I am sharing this definition, I leave out the word “passionate,” because passion is not under our control. We can’t produce it on demand. It’s a gift. And since it is a gift, for practical purposes, if we want to talk about love, we can bracket “passion” and hope that respect and vulnerability and faithfulness will gift us with it.

“Respect.” The first characteristic of love. Respect is just courtesy, and most cultures have customs of courtesy. Striking someone physically seems to us, at least in our culture, disrespectful. We say it violates a person’s physical integrity. That’s why we don’t use the rod in spite of the warning that we might spoil the child. We’ve gotten past that.

Our culture seems to see the gun as essential to safe living. If striking someone is disrespectful, how can shooting someone be respectful? Not to mention entering people’s neighborhoods with tanks, throwing exploding munitions at them from mikes away, and annihilating them with atomic weapons?

We do all these things not because we really want to be disrespectful, but because those things make money, and we too often put money ahead of more important things in life. Jesus said we cannot serve God and money.

But I’m getting away from my topic.

Love is also vulnerable. It is when another person “opens up” to us in genuine vulnerability that our hearts open up in love of that person.

And faithfulness. Faithfulness means that each involvement with another human being, even starting with the check-out clerk in the store, can be open to future involvements, to future interactions. Faithfulness keeps us from “using” people. We want to be able to greet them with warmth even weeks or months from now.

The four gospels are one of the Christian’s most important books. Surely the gospels show us a Jesus Christ who was respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. And because we believe that Jesus was God, we believe that God is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in dealing with each human being. Which means that we can no longer fear God as one who might condemn us to an eternity of hell because of a moment’s behavior. 

Exploring the doctrine of hell would take me away from the main point I am trying to make here. But I can say one thing: the way we describe hell may be one of the reasons why so many people walk away from religion.

 

To sum up

We do religion because we see religion as a good way to learn about what God is like. Many of us may not worry much about what God is like, but many of us experience moments when we do want to think about the question. Churches exist to help people to learn what God is like. Jews and Christians and Muslims use a book as their main tool in learning. Then they surround the book with other ideas and rituals, and in the process they can experience life as more bearable and even more delightful.

That won’t fill huge churches, but it will fill small ones. When churches get too big, what God is like gets crowded out by keeping the lights on. We don’t need lights. We need our Books and one another.