The Traveler’s Dark Night of the Soul
ONE OF THE MOST WELL-KNOWN spiritual travelers of the twentieth century, the Catholic nun Mother Teresa, was also one of the most darkly conflicted. Though she labored long and hard for the cause of the sick and suffering in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, she herself was bereft of the spiritual presence of Jesus Christ. Her life was, shockingly, one long crisis of faith—the kind of deep crisis St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul. Mother Teresa wrote: “In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist” and “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains” and finally, “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”1 She didn’t feel the presence of God. Why? Did God just ignore her? That seems cruel. As we will see in this chapter, the Bible recounts a much crueler act . . . made even worse because, as with the case of Mother Teresa, it is impossible to distinguish the intentional cruelty of the act from the random, unintentional cruelty of nature. One might well wonder what the difference is between a cruel or capricious God that doesn’t reach out to someone like Mother Teresa and no God at all.
Though the extreme nature of Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul is surprising, everyone knows that the spiritual traveler will suffer at least one such night. The traveler’s way is difficult and burdened with hardships unique to such a quest. Demons and spiritual dangers loom in the shadows, but the most dangerous and most frightening of these demons is doubt. Beset on all sides, eventually everyone falls face first into the Slough of Despond (the infamous swamp from John Bunyan’s influential Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678). The temptation to stop, to abandon the journey, is strong. Many do abandon it.
As we’ve discussed, science is one the main culprits here. Of course, science—scientific truth—was not always the demon it is today. Worldly temptation held that spot for most of history, and still does for many travelers (this is a major theme in Pilgrim’s Progress). But no one can deny the problems public and repeatable truths, the bedrock of science, have caused modern religion. Such truth causes doubt. Doubt causes anguish. Anguish derails the quest. Awash in doubt, we often succumb to the voice that says: “Give up the quest and the anguish will cease.” Science-caused doubt is now gigantic simply because of science’s successes. But as much of a danger to spiritual fulfillment as science is, the biggest demon today by far is statistics, or rather, the reason for statistics. Statistical doubt dwarfs even science-caused doubt, for statistical doubt is far more ubiquitous, as we will see. All of us are the beneficiaries of a robust and sweeping science. But more importantly than this, we are the beneficiaries of a statistical and probabilistic view of the world. And our spiritual quests are its victims. This chapter is about how the statistical, probabilistic worldview besets us latter-day pilgrims, causing trials and tribulations that are different and far more formidable than those besetting pilgrims of former times.
WE BEGIN BY EXAMINING an act crueler than what God did to Mother Teresa: the Bible’s story of Job. Both Mother Teresa and Job provide outstanding examples of how the dark night of the soul is caused by witnessing randomness in the world. What finally happens is that a capricious and cruel god becomes indistinguishable from bad luck. To see this, we next consider the unlikely magical being Santa Claus. Using him, we will see that all spiritual travelers have to have a split personality, they have to live in two realms: the mundane and the spiritual. The problem of what to do about randomness, however, is everyone’s problem. Even the One Billion have to come to terms with it. They, too, suffer a similar split of having to live in two realms: a more or less nonrandom, rational one and a random one. Next, we look at the epistemic and philosophical foundations of this split. This will show how deep the split runs and why it is so upsetting. From this vantage point, we will be able to see how having to deal with the world’s randomness causes the statistical and very dark night of the soul.
ONE OF THE BEST (and oldest) books in the Bible’s Old Testament confronts the issue of randomness versus capricious deity head-on. The book is concerned primarily with unjust bad luck: why do good people suffer? This is the central question of the Book of Job. (This question is also, importantly, called the problem of evil. In the next chapter, we will couch this question as how to “justify the random, even evil ways of God to humans.”) The question of the good suffering is of course much more pointed in the book, since to its writer (or, more probably, writers), the Hebrew god obviously exists and is all powerful and not evil. Indeed, Yahweh perhaps is at least sometimes just and caring. So, now, why do good people, innocent people, suffer, given that the universe is ruled by an all-powerful, nonevil god? Specifically, why did Job suffer?
Job is a wealthy, pious man living in the land of Uz. But Satan thinks that Job’s piety results from his successes in life, which have been bestowed and protected by God. (Satan is most decidedly not the Christian Devil, but is rather an esteemed member of God’s divine court. The Bible, or at least the Old Testament, is clear about this. It reports in the Book of Job that Satan comes and goes as he pleases, for example. Satan is, in fact, God’s cosmic prosecutor—think of Satan as God’s attorney general.) Satan points out that it is easy to be pious when everything goes your way. Satan then suggests to God that Job would lose his piety were all Job’s riches and joys destroyed. To prove otherwise, God hands Job over to Satan. And Satan makes Job’s life a living hell (to use a phrase). Job loses nearly everything: his sons, his cattle, his health.
Job, of course, on top of all his other suffering, is quite confused as to what is going on. He considers the idea that he wasn’t pious enough and hence had to be punished by God. But he rightly rejects this. Job also toys with the idea that God is his enemy. A notion that has some credence, obviously, since we, the readers, know that God gave Job to Satan just so Satan could test him—clearly not the behavior of a friend. So, Job sits there, covered in boils, ashes, and dirt, suffering, bereft of most of his friends and family (who have been killed by Satan or have abandoned him) and his livelihood (as mentioned, his cattle have also been killed), wondering, Why?
The writer of the Book of Job cannot just shrug and say, “Randomness . . . the world is like that” because, then as now, this is darkly unsatisfying (which is not to say that it is not true). Also, it would imply that God doesn’t exist, a thought unthinkable by the writer of the book. It is self-evident to the writer that God exists. But it is impossible to reconcile the idea that God is an all-powerful, all-good, nonevil being with Job’s tragically wrecked life. God has to be all powerful; otherwise, what’s the point of God? So, the writer instead kisses off justice and goodness: God is king, period. He can do whatever he wants. Furthermore, his ways are mysterious to us. So we’d better not pout, we’d better not cry. And we certainly better not criticize.
Does the writer of the Book of Job actually explain the reason why good people suffer? No, of course not; he doesn’t know (and he won’t accept randomness). He basically says, “It’s a mystery. God is a powerful king who rules by caprice, and you can’t complain because God is also touchy, vain, and overly sensitive.” So, in fact, and without knowing it, the writer of the Book of Job does say that randomness is the essence of the universe. It is Holy Randomness, to be sure, but it is randomness all the same. Blessed be the name of our god: Randomness.2
We are now at a scary place. A God-King who rules the universe by caprice is no different from no king at all. Being good and pious cannot, in the end, be counted on to bring rewards. Being evil and nasty cannot, in the end, be counted on to produce just retribution. Statistically, yes, being good has its rewards, though they often seem small. Driving while sober usually results in your getting to your destination, but only usually.
And this returns us again to those one billion unaffiliated people. A good many of them probably believe that a god compatible with the randomness of the world is no god at all. The parts of the universe that aren’t random, that are rational, are the very parts we understand, through hard-won scientific struggles with Mother Nature to unlock her secrets. We clearly don’t need any god for that. All of that hard-won knowledge is due to our own brilliant and valiant doing, our own success. God is for the irrational and random parts . . . the days like September 11, 2001. But, almost by definition, any god that cannot make the irrational and random parts of life go away is no god at all. A god of chance is just chance. A loving god compatible with chance is just chance. This is precisely what at least some of those one billion humans believe. Life has its ups and downs. Believing in a god in the face of this brute fact is meaningless . . . a waste of time. . . . And more than a little crazy. Or maybe there’s something else going on.
NO ONE WANTS TO BELIEVE in a god and a religion that are not real, no one. And the reason (as we saw in chapter 3) is that something real is going to be demanded of them. Even children who believe that there is a Santa Claus believe that he is real; they believe in Santa Claus.3 You can’t put your trust in something you believe is imaginary, even if you are a child, for trust is real, and trust requires something real of us. A discussion of the stages in Santa Claus belief will give us a template for understanding the arc of any spiritual journey.
So, to begin: When I was eight years old, I discussed the important Santa Claus matter with a friend of mine. I had figured out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. My conclusion (and it was a conclusion) was based on the fact that Santa Claus’s existence didn’t accord with everything else I thought I knew about the world. For example, how can reindeer and a sleigh fly? And even if they could, I knew that the fastest jet or rocket couldn’t visit every house in one night. I sadly told my friend, “Santa Claus doesn’t exist.” My friend said, “He does so, I saw him.” That would of course be definitive—if true . . . “Where?” I asked. “At the shopping mall,” he said. I knew then that he hadn’t seen him. For two reasons. I, like many children, had sat in the laps of many a shopping mall Santa. Nothing more than ordinary observation was required to reveal that they were men just like my dad dressed up to look like Santa Claus. Second, I knew that around Christmas, Santas were at all the shopping malls, and more places besides (for I watched TV). Santa Claus was one person. He traveled extraordinarily fast on Christmas Eve, but even he couldn’t be at two (or more) places at once, nothing could—I knew that, it was part of what I had learned about the world. When I pointed all this out to my friend, he got mad and went home.
Now I was mad, too, and sad. I went to ask an authority: my mom. Like every child, I considered my parents decent authorities on most matters and ultimate authorities on some matters. “Mom, is there a Santa Claus? I don’t think there is.” She smiled, I remember, and said, “No, there isn’t. We put the presents out after you’ve gone to bed. But please don’t tell your sisters.” A mom-confirmed truth—which was a certification beyond all possible doubt. I never told my sisters.
Shortly after my Santa enlightenment something unexpected happened: confusion set in. I didn’t understand why I was sad and angry. Before I figured out that there was no Santa Claus, the world contained tables and chairs, dogs and cats, and Santa Claus. That was just the way the world was. If I wanted a Space Robot for Christmas, Santa brought it. No big deal. After I figured out there was no Santa, the world contained tables and chairs and dogs and cats. That was just the way the world was. If I wanted a Space Robot for Christmas, my parents bought it using money. No big deal. So I shouldn’t have felt sad and angry—nothing substantial had changed. But here I was sad and angry. I had to puzzle over this for quite a while.
The first thing that I discovered was that I wasn’t sad the way one would be if one’s dog had died, or one’s pet lizard. I also wasn’t angry the way my friends and I were when Chuck’s older brother took back his bats, balls, and gloves right when we were in the middle of a game. Both of my feelings were tinged with a kind of resignation, as if I had always known that the nonexistence of Santa Claus was a real possibility. But I hadn’t always known that. It was something about growing up and the falling away of childish fantasies. One was expected to lose them—like baby teeth. Of course, Santa Claus and the like weren’t childish fantasies before we lost them. Before we lost them, we couldn’t point to our fantasies and say: “I’m going to lose that one as soon as I grow older,” for we didn’t know which were the fantasies and which was reality. Precisely the opposite of baby teeth: Mom was very accurate in pointing to which tooth would be lost as a result of getting older.
Then it came to me: the feeling of resignation came from possessing the truth. Truth is like that: it gives one a certain power over the ecstasy of the fantastic. Truth pares away the strange, the fanciful, the exotic. But as we noted in chapter 1, truth is a slippery thing, depending as it does on interpretations of facts. The “fact” that truth is slippery will be our central concern in part 4, where we will see truth open the fantastic and the strange for us to experience. But for many, truth seems to make the world banal. Another name for truth, recall, is the cold, hard facts. The facts are cold and hard because warm, soft fancies of the imagination are destroyed. Truth gives one a new power over things: the power to be bored by them.
Such is the power of truth that when something fantastic is eliminated by it, that thing changes, morphs in our memory into something that, we now claim, merely had utility for us in the past. It is then discarded like an orange peel; it used to be useful, but now it is useless. Truth not only gets rid of wonderful things, it changes their history, too. We come to believe that they never really were wonderful, they were always the objects of confusion. But before the morphing in our memory, the fantastic thing was not merely useful, it was much more than that—it produced the giddy joy of the weird, it thrilled the imagination. Truth, therefore, is revisionist: it not only flattens your present, it flattens your past, too. Santa had fallen to the scythe of truth. “Oh well.” I shrugged. “I never really believed all that stuff, anyway.” And I moved on. . . . Almost.
The second thing my puzzling revealed was that as I approached the time of ascension, the time of “Knowing the Truth About Santa,” the transition wasn’t abrupt. Shortly before Santa was eliminated by truth, but quite a bit after he ceased to be a part of the ordinary world that only a fool would deny, he became quite strange, different from the other inhabitants of reality. And he thereby became exciting. That something so strange could actually exist and would actually bring me a Space Robot was very appealing. My sadness and anger came from this in-between time, and not the time before this, when I thought that Santa had the same existence status as my parents. I wasn’t sure how long this time had lasted. Possibly as long as a couple of years.
So, as I was turning nine, I concluded that there were three stages of believing in Santa Claus.
Stage 1: The world is the kind of place where someone can fly in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Such a being would of course bring toys to children.
Stage 2: The world is the kind of place where sleighs and reindeer cannot fly. But it is also a world with magical corners, out-of-the-way places that contain special things—special sleighs that could fly, for example . . . and who knows what else.
Stage 3: The world is the kind of place where flying sleighs and reindeer are impossible. It has no magical corners, and no rotund, magical being brings toys to children.
Perhaps my Santa Claus experience is the experience many Santa believers have. Perhaps not. But the experience does look like it can be turned into something like a recipe for describing the arc of a spiritual journey, especially the failed kind. Before one begins one’s journey, the world is just the ordinary, everyday world. Then as one starts out, one has no doubts: deities of various sorts are just part of the furniture of the world. Then one realizes that the ordinary world really is most of the world. There are small corners, oases, of spirituality here and there, and the journeyer tries to sojourn within them and travel quickly between them. But they are small, indeed. Then one realizes that the spiritual oases are mirages. They don’t exist. The world is, and has always been, flatly natural—just the ordinary, everyday world. And then the journey is over, not having reached its goal, having fizzled instead.
Most religious types, most journeyers whose journeys haven’t fizzled, live at stage 2. They drive ordinary cars that burn ordinary gas to get to an ordinary building on Sundays (for example), where they can have, it is hoped, an extraordinary experience. Then they go back to their ordinary home and finish up their ordinary Sunday with, perhaps, an ordinary football game. We branch out of the ordinary for the extraordinary, but only in small time increments. Most of the time, even the most religious among us are completely ordinary. We might envy those who never come back from the spirituality of the extraordinary (which we might classify as stage 1.5, say, rather than stage 1, because in stage 1 the spiritual realm is the ordinary one—one talks to God or Santa Claus just like one talks to one’s friends), but we don’t really want to be them—we’ve got to go to work on Monday to earn some money to pay all the bills. God certainly isn’t going to pay them . . . no god will, not even Juno Moneta—the Roman goddess of money.
In fact, some of us are a bit afraid that we might wind up permanently in the realm of the spiritual, never able to be ordinary. We are afraid because frequently such people are labeled as crazy, as having a mental disease of some sort. Yes, some of these people are necessary to keep religion edgy and otherworldly, and hence alive, but not many constantly ecstatic journeyers are needed and certainly we don’t want to be one. Besides, what if they really are just crazy? And besides all of that, no one really likes prophets, whether they are men and women of the Christian god or work for Apollo at the Oracle at Delphi—look what happened to St. Stephen and all the rest of the Catholic martyrs. Crazy or reviled—the two choices life in the spiritual world has to offer. Better to remain mostly ordinary—or even completely ordinary, and just go through the motions, faking it.
So, most of us spiritual travelers combine living in the ordinary world with briefly visiting the extraordinary, spiritual one. Sort of like having a house in town and a cabin in the mountains or by a lake for special weekends. For most of us, our spiritual journeys consist of going to the mountains for the weekend to refresh and renew ourselves for the daily grind down on the flats. That really isn’t much of a journey, is it? One can easily imagine a drug that would accomplish the same thing (such a drug is important in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: soma, the wonder drug: “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”). Hence, for many, their spiritual journey could be better traveled if a drug was used instead of genuine spiritual seeking. But this can’t be right, can it? Something is clearly amiss here. (Terence McKenna [1946–2000], a well-known ethnobotanist, advocated spiritual journeying via the use of hallucinogens, but this is quite different from advocating using hallucinogens in lieu of such journeying.)
I am certainly not insulting the spiritual retreat, the cabin-in-the-mountains approach to spirituality. If that works for you, great. In fact, in many ways, it is the most honest approach, for Juno Moneta really won’t pay the bills. Consider anything else that is typically considered noble or special or even just fun, from fighting in a just war, to art, to music, to sports of all kinds, to sex, to gardening, to doing philosophy and high-energy particle physics—no one can do any of these constantly. One does them and then returns to the ordinary world. With all of them, one returns refreshed and renewed, but one does have to return. There are aspects of Buddhism, especially Zen, that teach seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary . . . buttering bread, for example, or making tea. But most people find the trip-to-cabin approach much easier and much more practical. And they are upfront about this. Hence, the honesty.
The bind here is really tight. Look again at stages 1, 2, and 3. Stage 1 looks like the stage to live in if one wants to be truly spiritual. But one cannot live at stage 1; the difficulties of the world intervene too much and are solved, when they are, by ordinary means. Loved ones get sick; Santa doesn’t help; so, doctors have to be called. Mundane medical research comes to the rescue.
But stage 1 has a worse liability. There is an important sense in which it is not spiritual enough. If Santa Claus or God exists just as surely as your parents or friends, and you can communicate with either effectively (writing a letter addressed to the North Pole, praying), then where’s the extraordinary? Where’s the otherworldliness? The glimpse of the infinite? The Holy? The communion with the mysterious sacred?
No, stage 1 clearly won’t do. And of course stage 3 is out—it represents a failed journey. The only stage that works for the spiritual traveler is stage 2. But stage 2 commits us to living two lives: an ordinary one where bills have to be paid while children and dogs are fed and cared for, and another one, tucked into the corners of the world, where we hope to experience communion with the sacred, if only briefly and minutely. And, finally, stage 2 can really only work if it is not a stage. One has to live there. One cannot sojourn at stage 2, on the way to stage 3.
So, it appears the spiritual traveler lives in two realms, lives two lives. Each traveler is split in two, each side facing in a different direction. In one direction is the spiritual realm, however it exists for the individual traveler. In another direction is the mundane world, the world the traveler shares with all other humans and inhabitants of Earth, the world of bills, sick children, and ordinary duties and responsibilities.
The issue underlying the need for the two realms is reliability. Praying for healing doesn’t work nearly as frequently as penicillin or chemotherapy. But more importantly, it doesn’t work nearly as reliably. It wouldn’t matter if praying only worked 10 percent of the time, if it could be counted on to work that 10 percent of the time. What really matters in life is reliability. As we’ve seen, this is one of the bedrocks of science. The truths of science are based on reliable, repeatable evidence and experiments that are open and can be challenged by anyone. All spiritual realms lack this reliability. So, though we pray for a deathly sick child or spouse, it is also important—indeed, crucial—to seek the best medical care in the ordinary world. To repeat a point made in chapter 3, the pope gets some of the best medical care available, perhaps supplemented with prayer, but he does not rely on prayer exclusively.
Spiritual unreliability takes many forms, and some are far less dramatic than the failure of prayer, but cause far darker nights. One cannot even count on just experiencing the holy in some religious ritual. From Easter services to Summer Solstice rites, experiencing the sacredness of the event, the moment, or the place sometimes comes and sometimes does not. So, though we live in two realms, even when we are completely within the spiritual realm, immersed in some ritual or other, we cannot count on the spirit moving us, speaking to us, communicating with us, filling us, touching us, or appearing to us. This, I think, causes the darkest night of the soul. Never mind trying to cause the forces or beings of the spiritual realm to cross the boundary and heal our dying child or spouse or keep our loved one safe, . . . even restricting our selves to merely experiencing the sacred, we are not guaranteed any such experience. The sacred is as unreliable as prayer.
This, then, is the fate of all spiritual travelers: a dark night of the soul caused by the unreliability of the spiritual realm; a dark night of the soul caused by having to live in two realms, the spiritual and the mundane. But being split is also the fate of the One Billion. Their two realms are the arational (not the irrational) and the rational. So it doesn’t matter whether one is a spiritual traveler or not. One has to deal with a world in which only some things happen for understandable reasons. In this sense, everyone has a dark night of the soul. We now turn to discussing these two new realms, the arational and the rational, in some detail.
THE RATIONAL REALM IS WHERE things happen for understandable, sometimes even predictable reasons. Jones got the flu because his wife had it. She got it at the office, where three people had it last week. The sun reappears every morning, seeming to rise, because the Earth spins on its axis. The corn is ready to harvest in September because it was planted in May in a well-cared-for field and nurtured with rain and sun. Polly flunked the math test because she didn’t study for it. The bowling pins fell down because they were hit by a rapidly rolling bowling ball. Things are constantly happening, and a lot of them make sense. That is because there is an order or pattern to them. If we didn’t live in a universe with ordered patterns, nothing would make sense, and science would be impossible, of course; but worse, such a universe could not harbor life—all life, even bacteria, requires some order.
But life also requires some randomness. Life cannot adapt to changing environments unless there’s some slop in the system. Evolution would be impossible without randomness. There’s an interesting sidebar here. If the universe were static and had life in it already (never mind how), life would not need randomness—there would be no need to evolve at all. A static universe need not be devoid of processes in general: a static universe could contain exactly repeating processes that never decayed. But the trouble is that a static universe would never produce life in the first place. Our universe is not static—far from it. Hence, to continue to live in the universe, life must change to its advantage. That is what evolution is really all about. Also note that the question “could there be a static universe with life in it?” might seem to have a “yes” answer: the Christian heaven is often defined as such a place. However, it is not static either, as those lucky enough to die in grace enter it from time to time, changing its population.
However, randomness definitely has its downside, to put it mildly. John gets lung cancer suddenly and dies at the age of sixty. Why? He wasn’t a smoker; no one in his family smoked; he worked in a smoke-free environment; he never worked around asbestos or any other known lung carcinogen. What’s going on? The doctors shrug and cite . . . probabilities and statistics, the last form of “knowledge” before complete chaos takes over. A lot of things are like this—they happen for no discernible reason. Polly flunked the math test even though she studied hard. The world is like that. And this is a sad fact. This sadness exists even if Polly’s mom wins the sixty-million-dollar state lottery. Winning the lottery makes her happy, of course, but its absolute randomness discombobulates everyone—from Polly’s mom to those reading about her win in the newspaper. This sad fact runs deep, for probabilities govern everything.4
Sixty-five million years ago, life on planet Earth was romping along merrily. Plants flourished; insects droned; dinosaurs cavorted (though this probably doesn’t quite describe the snarling hunting of Tyrannosaurus rex or the mad fleeing of his or her prey). Dinosaurs were the dominant large animal. There was a five-toed mouse-like mammal running around eating bugs, but it was insignificant. Then for statistical “reasons,” a large asteroid slammed into Earth in what is now the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, forming the Chicxulub Crater. The Earth was engulfed in cold and darkness caused by the vast, globe-encircling dust cloud that resulted from the collision. The sun was gone. This thick darkness lasted for at least many months, possibly as long as several years. Around the globe, plants and the animals who ate them died rapidly. Then came the deaths of the predators. Lastly, the scavengers died off, too. And the dinosaurs were gone. In all, something like 60 percent of the existing species at that time went extinct—plant and animal. That’s a lot of death. But guess who didn’t die? Guess who could cope with the cold? Guess who could eat some of the remaining 40 percent of the species that lived? That’s right—the five-toed mouse-like mammal. The significance of its having five toes per paw is that is how many toes, and fingers, you have, for this creature is you, sixty-five million years ago. This creature is your great great . . . great grandmother. So what was a spot of rather bad luck for the dinosaurs was great luck for the mammals. And ultimately, great luck for you.
Hence, randomness divides into what we call good luck and bad luck, as well as a third category: unjudged randomness. Most things that happen for no discernible reason are neutral with respect to being good or bad . . . think of a leaf falling in the autumn: why that leaf, and why did it follow that trajectory?
Randomness makes even good luck disconcerting. Since you are never sure when you will receive some, you can’t count on it and you can’t make it happen (in spite of folk “wisdom” to the contrary). And randomness makes bad luck even worse, since there’s no tried and true way to avoid it; in fact, bad luck happens even when you try to avoid it. (Just because you don’t smoke doesn’t mean you won’t get lung cancer: around 8 percent of male lung cancer patients have never smoked and 20 percent of female lung cancer patients. No one is sure [of course!] why the two numbers vary so much.)5 Randomness represents loss of control. And without control, good and evil cannot be made sense of, to the point where perhaps they don’t exist. And this is a terrible predicament.
Randomness has troubled us since we became human.6 The fundamental problem is that randomness is deeply at odds with our basic human understanding of the world, and even more deeply at odds with how we feel the world is. We must explore this, and to do so, we again need to delve into philosophy. This topic makes up the next section.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ (1646–1716), the great German philosopher and mathematician, formulated and subscribed to a principle underlying human optimism about what we can know, about what is knowable. The principle is the Principle of Sufficient Reason: “There must be a sufficient reason [often known only to God] for anything to exist, for any event to occur, for any truth to obtain.” And, “The fundamental principle of reasoning is that there is nothing without a reason; or, to explain the matter more distinctly, that there is no truth for which a reason does not subsist.”7 Most humans feel, deep in their innermost being, that for everything that could have been different, there is a reason why that thing is the way that it is and not some other way. Usually, we accept that frequently the reasons are not deep because the event is not very significant: “This leaf fell when it did and the way it did because of its mass, its shape, its position on this tree, the wind, and the nature of gravity.” The leaf could have fallen a different way at a different time, but it fell this way, here and now. Even if we have to add an “et cetera” at the end of the list of reasons, we are certain that the “et cetera” can be cashed in for real reasons: this leaf fell as it did because of its mass, its shape, its position, the wind, gravity, et cetera, where the “et cetera” allows for details like a bug on the leaf that increased its weight and affected its aerodynamics. We also usually accept that we will never know the exact details that fully explain why something is the way that it is. The leaf fell where it did because of the details of the relevant physics, but we will never know these details, and we don’t worry much about that. We simply believe that the details are there to be known, if only to God, as Leibniz says.8
As Leibniz pointed out, God is the backstop for the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We may not know the details, but God always does. That God knows shows that the details, the reasons, are, in fact, knowable. The poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) put this very well at the end of “Epistle I: The Universe,” from his Essay on Man:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
One of the most important ways in which our belief in the Principle of Sufficient Reason manifests itself is in our belief in universal causation: everything that is has a cause. Causation is fundamental to our understanding of the world. This is very unfortunate because we humans know nothing about causation. Of course, we know the specific causes of many, many things—this is one of science’s fortes—but there is no accepted, robust, general theory of causation. We don’t know what it is that all cases of causation have in common. Here’s proof of this rather surprising claim: philosophers work on causation and have been since before Aristotle. If philosophers are working on something, especially for a very long time, then you can be assured that the thing is a stone cold mystery. Causation is a stone cold mystery. Consider: we say that a bowling ball hitting bowling pins causes the pins to fall down, the moon causes the tides, fear of governmental registration of handguns causes people to buy handguns, fear of an approaching hurricane causes people to rush out and buy groceries, hatred of the United States caused the planning and carrying out of the September 11 attacks, not brushing your teeth causes cavities, smoking causes lung cancer, love causes sacrifice, the backlash against the presidency of George Bush caused Barack Obama to be elected president, news about housing causes the stock market to go up (or down), human consumption of fossil fuels is causing climate change, my love for my dogs causes me to buy them toys, and so on. All of these are cases of causation, but what do all of them have in common? They must have something in common, but it has proved extremely difficult to explain what that thing is.9
To make matters worse, science tells us that universal causation is wrong. Causation goes away completely at the quantum level. Events at the quantum level are not caused and are instead governed solely by probabilities (it was this fact that prompted Albert Einstein, who hated quantum mechanics, to say, “God does not play dice [with the universe]”). And the Big Bang was, on most theories, uncaused . . . it just happened. That such things are uncaused or acausal only makes matters worse, for now we have to explain what causation is such that it goes away at the quantum level, and such that the universe itself was uncaused.
So, humans by and large believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As a corollary, they also believe in universal causation. But causation is not universal, and where it is known to exist (above the quantum level), it is not understood. And the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be meaningless if God or some such ultimate knower couldn’t know all the reasons of which we are woefully ignorant.
But we are not crazy to believe in the Principle, at least as a heuristic. And non-quantum-post-Big-Bang causation is very useful, indeed required, even if we don’t understand it. So, if we modify our beliefs, if we believe instead in the Heuristic of Sufficient Reason (“very often there is an understandable reason for what occurs”) and in non-quantum-post-Big-Bang-somewhat-universal causation (“many macro events do often have a discoverable cause”), then our beliefs will at least be true, if not comforting. But such modification, such compromise, comes with a cost: the dark night of the soul. For coming to understand the unmarked limitations of both the Principle of Sufficient Reason and universal causation makes us sophisticated and wise, and world-weary and disenchanted. We can now hardly be spiritual travelers anymore, innocently searching for God.
We have now looked at two general cases where we humans are required to compromise our deepest beliefs about how the universe operates. If we are religious, we have to compromise and live in two worlds: the mundane one and our religious one. If we are not religious, if we are a member of the One Billion, then we still have to compromise our belief in a rational universe and accept the fact that important parts of the universe are arational: some things happen for a reason, and we can often understand that reason, but some things appear to happen for no reason at all, or if there is a reason, it is beyond our reach. The best we can do about such seemingly uncaused events is collect statistics on them. Some things, some important things like life and death, just happen some percentage of the time. That’s all we can know.
The effect of this compromise on our spiritual travels is huge: no religious realm is reliable; no god, no prayer, no magic can be counted on when the chips are down. But even for the One Billion, the effect is huge: there is no Principle of Sufficient Reason and no universal causation. There are only the compromised versions of each.
So here we all sit, covered in boils, ashes, and dirt, wondering, Why? Only now we know that often the only answer to this question will be statistical: “because things like this happen some percentage of the time.” Thus, our statistical and very dark night of the soul.
WE ARE NOW READY for some conclusions. As we saw in chapter 3, people test their religion every day, just as they do various laundry detergents or toothpastes (but importantly, not as scientists test their hypotheses). People ask the relevant god (Jesus, Jehovah, Krishna, Changing Woman, Diana) to deliver. Usually nothing big is requested. Usually, the supplicant merely asks for a sign . . . a sign of existence, a sign that the supplicant is on the right track, headed in the right direction. If randomness enters here and a flower blooms, a sunbeam hits a piece of glass, a baby hiccups and seems to say, “Hi, Mom,” a comet appears (never mind that it shows up every seventy-five years), then the supplicant is satisfied and feels that she’s touched the transcendent. It is crucial that the supplicant not ask for world peace, or for a cure for cancer, or for a just solution to our world population problem. These will not be provided, and every single religious person knows this to his or her very core. Yes, I know, every priest, minister, rabbi, imam, monk, shaman, and high priestess can rebut this observation with much cleverness and misdirection. Undisclosed cosmic plans are the most common form of apology for a world that continues to suffer from profound and dangerous conflict, from diseases, and from the blights caused by overpopulation. But, seriously, how convincing is such an apology? And anyway, the vast majority of believers believe without such an apology, or at least without putting much weight on such an apology.
We arrive at our final station. We do not ask enough of our gods. We can’t. Perhaps they aren’t even there, for they are indistinguishable from chance, from statistics. This is why Mohandas Gandhi’s famous quotation is famous: “Be the change you seek in your world.” This puts the responsibility for improvement squarely on our own shoulders, which is where it belongs, for our shoulders, like we ourselves, do exist and are available to carry (or to attempt to carry) the burden. Unlike any deity. Do you doubt for a second that if you could be god-for-a-day you would instantly put a stop to all the sexual assaults that occur each minute around the globe?
In spite of all the pain in the world, and in spite of one billion nonreligious people professing indifference to religion, most humans remain religious, and many are deeply religious. And humans have been religious since we first appeared (as perhaps have other species in the genus Homo—Neanderthal graves have been discovered that were adorned with offerings such as flowers, talismans, and amulets). So, clearly, something is going on. It is not just that in the face of no evidence, people believe in God or embrace their religion. It is far stronger and hence far stranger than this. It is that in the face of overwhelming contravening evidence—the deplorable abundance of badness and evil in the world—humans not only continue to believe in good, caring gods, but actually increase the strength of their beliefs in such gods. Nothing helps a religion more than bad news.10
So, as we sit here suffering our dark night of the soul, it is time we asked a pointed question: why are we religious; why do we believe in God, gods, angels, and demons? We can’t use a religious answer to this question, for it will be indistinguishable from chance. Our question is a scientific question: given that we believe in the face of no evidence (for statistics explains the occurrence of what we take to be evidence), why then do we believe? This takes us into the evolved psyche of the human mind.
Here is a preview. In chapter 5, we examine the recent scientific attempts to explain religion as just another natural, biological aspect of being human. In chapter 6, we explore the psychology and evolution of morality. Seeing morality as the result of natural processes removes its need for religious support. And in chapter 7, I demonstrate two ways of having morality without religion. By the end of part 2, religion—all of it—will look like a bit of our evolved psychology, and unlike a mother’s love for her children, this aspect of our psychology perhaps has outlived its evolutionary usefulness—just like our love for fat and sugar. Our love of fat and sugar was crucial to our evolution; all of our recent evolutionary ancestors required fat and sugar in their diets in part to sustain their large brains, which required lots of energy. But this was long before the emergence of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. Now our love of fat and sugar has become a dangerous gustatory addiction, threatening the health of millions. Just so with religion.