Adelphiasophism
Professor Ursula Goodenough on Religious Naturalism
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 02 April 2002
Ursula Goodenough
Ursula Goodenough is an internationally recognized academic biologist and a popular teacher at Washington University. Goodenough is author of the textbook “Genetics” which she wrote as a postdoc and is recognized as a classic in its field. The book has been through three editions and translated into five languages.
Goodenough felt a need to address the concerns of young women scientists. In 1972, at a senior scientific meeting in Boston, all the speakers were male, so Goodenough and Mary Clutter arranged a dinner to allow the women to discuss their research. The group began a newsletter. Thus it was that a women’s committee of cell biologists was formed. Goodenough wants to promote meetings of young women scientists with more established women scientists.
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Goodenough’s devotion to science, and to promoting women scientists, is matched only by her devotion to her family. She is well qualified as a mother, having five children spread over 15 years. She feels that the critical factor for women balancing the demands of raising children and developing a career is believing that you can have both. She says that realizing and accepting that a child’s development are influenced by many people in their lives other than their mother has helped her achieve both her personal and professional goals.
Goodenough describes herself as a non-theist and religious naturalist, and she has written a short book called “The Sacred Depths of Nature,” which sounds like an exposition of something close to Adelphiasophism. However, according to Eugene Selk, she is the daughter of a Professor of the History of Religion at Yale who started out as a Methodist preacher, attends a Presbyterian congregation, sings in the choir, says her prayers, and listens to sermons—a curiously active level of doubt about God. He implies she remains unsure whether she is a Christian or even believes in God. Goodenough informs us:
I find much to admire in the Christian tradition but do not consider myself to be a Christian, and I don’t think any Christian would consider me one either!
There are things to admire in Christianity but it sounds rather Christian only to consider the admirable things. Everything should be judged in the balance and Christianity has so much on the negative side for a supposedly loving and compassionate belief system that its positive aspects cannot be said to equal them without hypocrisy. Still, Goodenough says she is not a Christian so why should we disbelieve her as Selk implies we should? One reviewer of her book says “faith and reason, in her view, are not mutually exclusive, and her well-written treatise makes a good argument for bridging the gap between the two.” She might be right, depending on what she means by faith, but she plainly is not ready to accept any compromise between the two contenders.
Stephen Gould: Reconciling Science and Religion
Stephen Jay Gould in “Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life,” also seeks to reconcile science and religion, but Goodenough gladly takes on this giant of popular science exposition. Gould coins the acronym NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, for his proposed system of reconciliation:
NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of Nature (the magisterium of science) and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).
For Gould, a magisterium is a domain of inquiry which “frames its own rules and admissible questions, and sets its own criteria for judgment and resolution.” Gould considers that the only people who would not accept NOMA are creationists and militant atheists with a “blinkered concept of religion.” Gould therefore has not a blinkered view of religion, and presumably neither have Christians, Moslems, Hindus and the rest of the participants in the religious horserace.
The tools that govern the magisterium of science make up the scientific method, whereby “conclusions must remain open to empirical test and potential rejection.” Ursula Goodenough points out, though, that he does not say what the appropriate tools are for meaningful discourse and resolution in the magisterium of religion, though the outcome of religious inquiry is meaning and morals, and the process, whatever it is, is “logically distinct” and “fully separate in styles of inquiry” from science. Ken Wilber, in “Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion,” seems more radical and arguably correct in writing:
If religion is to survive in a viable form in the modern world, it must be willing to jettison its bogus claims.
But Goodenough asks, “What is to replace them?” She explains that each religious system is based on a cosmology rendered in poetry and art, infusing the texts with meaning and value, and from which ethical precepts flow. Gould forbids religions from having cosmologies because they are in the magisterium of science. Whether this is a necessary condition for NOMA or simply just a desirable one, it will not get much support from the various religions already built on their own cosmologies. If, in addition, the scientific understanding of Nature is disallowed as a source of new stories, as Richard Dawkins seems to think (see below) then where are the new stories to be found? By what criteria do we validate our moralities if we throw out revelation, authority and scientific inquiry?
Ultimate Meaning and Moral Value
Gould habitually refers to the magisterium of religion as generating two outcomes, ultimate meaning and moral value. Goodenough sees them as arising from different sets of propositions: asking about ultimate meaning generates answers to “why” questions whereas ethical questions are on the lines of “how should we proceed?” neither of which can easily be answered by science, but whose consideration entail different tools of inquiry. Ultimate meaning normally comes down to personal beliefs and can be as irrational as the individual desires. In contrast, moral values are social values and entail social conditioning, meaning that their “truth” must make some sort of communal sense before it can carry the “de facto” validation of consensus.
Both sets of questions must be asked and responded to in the context of an overarching cosmology. We seek the meaning of the universe, life, human self-awareness, time—topics that Goodenough emphasises our scientifically derived understanding has much to tell us about. Similarly, as we seek ways to generate ethical consensus, we bring to the table our concepts of human Nature and the dynamics of social systems, topics about which our scientifically derived understanding also has much to report. So whereas religion may not have much of “factual” relevance to say to science, science has plenty of interesting things to say to religion: it provides much of the “what” for the “why” and “how” questions that confront us. All we as Adelphiasopohists can say is, “Bravo! More! and Hear! Hear!”
Goodenough continues that sure enough there are other important inputs on offer as well, notably in the art and insights inherent in our wisdom and religious systems. But if there is a membrane separating the magisteria of science and religion, it is decidedly semipermeable, and one might add that the osmotic pressure is from science to religion, not the other way.
Gould is curiously self-contradictory on this point. He can write, “Science and religion must ask different, and logically distinct, questions—but their subjects of inquiry are often both identical and maximally meaningful,” and can acknowledge that Nature is “bursting with relevant information to spice our moral debates.” But then he claims that ethical questions “cannot be answered, or even much illuminated, by factual data of any kind:”
Scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.
Gould speaks of “the imperialistic aims of many scientists, particularly in suppressing claims for possession of moral truth based on superior understanding of factual truth in any subject.” Goodenough sought the imperialistic aims in their recent books of scientists and science-popularizers, Daniel Dennett, E O Wilson and Robert Wright, but came up short. These books showed great respect for the magisterium of religion as Gould defines it, and indeed scientists are often excessively tolerant of conventional religious gibberish.
Scientific understanding of Nature has sometimes been accorded the status of ultimate truth and ethical certainty by scientists and nonscientists alike, and Goodenough praises Gould as a guide calling this scientism to our attention. Yet, though Gould caricatures “many scientists” as having “imperialist” agendas, he does not document these claims with the care he documents the statements of 19th-century theologians. His reluctance to celebrate the role that scientific understandings can play in informing our quest for meaning and ethics flows from his fear that scientists will somehow abuse this process. Goodenough rightly agrees with Gould that Nature:
greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings. We are therefore left with no alternative. We must undertake the hardest of all journeys by ourselves: the search for meaning in a place both maximally impenetrable and closest to home—within our own frail being.
And:
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.“Wonderful Life”
Religious Naturalism
Goodenough’s own book describes the complexity of Nature and wonder of biological processes, each account of which has attached her revering emotional reflections, and vibrant commentary. It is a sort of moral exegesis of science. Exploring scientifically based narratives about the creation of the universe and the origins of life, Goodenough reflects on evolution and arrives at a world view she calls “religious naturalism.” It reconciles the scientific understanding of reality with our yearning for reverence.
Goodenough offers a crash course in cosmology and the life sciences for her readers. Looking at topics such as evolution, emotions, sexuality, and death, Goodenough writes easily and simply about the workings of Nature and living creatures. Her easy style, she began university intending to read English, allows non-scientists and perhaps even some journalists, to see that science is wonderful in itself, and religion does not need false mysteries at its base. She encompasses the basics of biochemistry in just a few paragraphs, touching on Darwinian biology and population dynamics and even chaos theory.
The origin of the universe, the origin of earth and life, the biochemistry of life, the mechanisms of evolution, the evolution of biodiversity, the development of human consciousness, including the physiology and chemistry of neurological systems, the evolution of sex, and the role of death in the evolutionary process, lead her to conclude that, although the cosmos is vast and grand, the emergence of life is unlikely, and so it should be held as sacred. Though, why life should not be held as sacred even if it is a common occurence, is hard to understand. Anyway, she quite properly makes an epic of evolution that supplies a myth of religious origin.
She observes that the genetic homology of all living things is the ground for the fellowship and community of all life—what Adelphiasophists call Nature’s kinunity—and the scientific base of the claim of all religions that all humanity is a community. Because of our common heritage and the genetic homology between all living things, we ought to have empathy and compassion for all living things. And because of their closeness to us in the evolutionary tree, we should have special concern for our closest relatives, the great apes. Biological diversity evokes a sense of amazement and humility—awe, perhaps—and, she finds in this the origin of the practice in most religions of bowing before the divine. It is, of course, the true origin of mysticism. Finally, the amazing complexity and diversity of life should lead us to express gratitude.
Gratitude and Meaning
Eugene E Selk, of Creighton University, reviewing Goodenough’s book in the “Journal of Religion and Society” sarcastically wants to know to whom she would be grateful, betraying his own belief that gratitude must be expressed to a conscious being or person. Surely that is not true, unless we all believe in God, despite ourselves. If we have a narrow squeek we all will say, “Thank God!” or say, “Boy, am I grateful that car missed me,” or whatever, without implying the presence of a god or anything conscious to be grateful to.
Bertrand Russell was once seriously ill in China with pneumonia and was delirious for a fortnight. His wife was with him, but otherwise he depended on a saintly Christian nun on missionary work to attend him. In his delirium, Russell would cough and mutter an expletive like, “Good God!” or “Jesus Christ!” Fortunately, the pious nurse took him to be saying these words in supplication, though Russell was not having a conversion experience. In the west, we have all been brought up with this concept of God up there and will use the idea colloquially without being obliged to be Christians or even pseudo-Christians.
The same is true of gratitude. It is relief, gladness, or whatever, but need not imply conscious reception of it. We can all be grateful we lived at all to the fortuitous combination of genetic mixing and experience that makes up our personality. Nothing conscious there, unless you are determined that everything must be motivated by a supernatural giant. Or one can be grateful to fortune, once personified as the Goddess, Fortune—so she will do if necessary.
Anyway, Selk does not think Goodenough can construct a system of meaning and value from scientific theory and natural history alone. Any such attempt is bound to fail, he tells us. They will not give us the meaning of life or produce moral principles. Needless to say, he does not say why, except that such systems have to be based on tradition. Selk doubtless has a Christian agenda, but he might be right that it is easier to have a foundation already standing rather than having to dig out fresh footings to build a new one.
Mysticism, Spirituality and Awe
Ursula Goodenough says in her book how wonderful Nature is, and speaks of being in awe of Nature, seeing it as an inspiration for spirituality. She is right. Spirituality means nothing outside of Nature. It means nothing other than “religion” to most people, but properly it is a mystical sensation—the very sense of awe that Ursula Goodenenough speaks of, and can be glimpsed in Nature by most people. It is unlikely that the awe and the “spirituality” are different things. So to speak of the one inspiring the other is wrong. They are the same, but we can take her point. Nature is the source of it!
Richard Dawkins, author of “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker,” in a review of Goodenough’s book called “Snake Oil and Holy Water,” dismisses her pantheism as a viable religious stance.
It is true that Goodenough’s book in some ways looks suspicious. She denies she believes in any sort of supreme being, and denies she believes in any sort of life after death, yet the book is sold as a religious book, it is endorsed by theologians’ blurb on the cover, and its chapters are punctuated with prayers and devotional meditations. It is suspicious, in short, because it looks like another attempt by the clergy to retrieve Nature and science for the Christian church. Dawkins complains that Goodenough sounds religious, but her beliefs do not differ from scientists who are atheists.
By any normal understanding of the English language, she is no more religious than I am. She shares with other atheistic scientists a feeling of awe at the majesty of the universe and the intricate complexity of life. Indeed, the jacket copy for her book—the message that science does not “point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless,” but on the contrary “can be a wellspring of solace and hope”—would have been equally suitable for my book, “Unweaving the Rainbow,” or Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot.” If that is religion, then I am a deeply religious man. But it isn’t. And I’m not. As far as I can tell, my “atheistic” views are identical to Ursula’s “religious” ones. One of us is misusing the English language, and I don’t think it’s me.’
Well, Dawkins should take care here. The view of the Adelphiasophists, and evidently of Ursula Goodenough, is that it is precisely the feeling of awe at Nature that has given rise to the idea of the numinous, mystical or spiritual, or whatever you call wonder in your religious outlook. If it is not a feeling of awe at something in Nature then it is something supernatural. Dawkins cannot mean that. The scientist tries to find natural explanations, and here is one that Dawkins pooh-poohs because it does not meet the definitions that he is used to. Like many things religious, simple people have tried to explain them, and mystical experiences, felt quite naturally, have been put down to the supernatural because they were inexplicable
Steven Schafersman says supernaturalists misidentify the imagery of the human mind, the functioning of consciousness, which is part of Nature, with the transcendental and supernatural. Mind, ideas, values, imagination, logical relationships, and so on are confused with transcendental and supernatural things that include gods, spirits and souls. Consciousness and personality are given other worldly qualities and an independent existence and become classified as soul and spirit. Simple people can experience consciousness and are aware of their own personality, but know they are not material things themselves and are easily persuaded that they are the ghosts within that are freed to go to Jesus at death! Supernaturalists pander to ignorance and misinformation about science to keep alive foolish and wrong headed beliefs.
But such clever men as Dawkins should not let their dislike of terms used by supernaturalists mislead them from natural explanations of how these terms arose in the first place. At one time reflexions, shadows, dreams and thought were inexplicable, and religion offered explanations in terms of spirits, shades, souls and ghosts. That numinous feeling in open spaces, forests, moors, and, yes, sometimes deliberately inculcated in buildings like churches, is a vague sense of the kinunity of Nature that our personalities normally suppress to better our individual instincts for survival. Now we need to learn how to suppress our personality to seek longer and longer glimpses of our relationship with the cosmos, and discard the traditional hocus-pocus of religion.
More Dawkins Objections
Dawkins points out: “If you allow the cosmic awe of Goodenough, Davies, Sagan, and me as true religion, then religion and science have indeed merged,” but, peculiarly, Dawkins does not like it, if it has. He does not want religion to become rational because he complains that if it does, then there is no word to describe irrational religion. What then is wrong with mythology or magic or primitive belief, or many other suitable words and phrases that Christians used of the “primitive beliefs” of people before Christianity was imposed? Conventional religious books are mythology like older religious works discarded by modern religions, and the ritualistic miming and gesticulating before altars and idols are no less magic than they were before modern religions took them over.
He makes a similar complaint about the word “God,” because rationalized it removes the idea of a supernatural God that can supposedly perform miracles and answer prayers. Dawkins is being sarcastic, but we are happy to leave God where he is as a falsehood, and simply identify Nature with the Goddess. That should save his complaint, and, anyway, Dawkins himself doubtless believes in prayer being answered in a psychological way, and healing miracles being performed similarly, through the placebo effect.
A little more chuntering in similar vein leads us to Dawkins’ real complaint, and it is a true one—that the false analogies, pseudo-science and fads that he cites, claimed to be manifestations of religion, are ways of confidence tricksters to make money. Religion rarely is not! But science is equally being used in these scams by the con-men, and supposedly respectable companies like Unilever have used pseudo-scientific advertising for decades. Anything can thus be used, and those who do these things should be condemned, but false usage does not invalidate what is being falsely used.
Dawkins real object of derision is the pseudo-scientific religions that have sprung up in recent years, religions that use scientific terms like energy, entropy, vibrations and so on in false and meaningless ways. Dawkins retorts:
Sorry, but mumbo jumbo is precisely what it is… pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo… It is also religion, masquerading as science in a cloying love feast of bogus convergence.
Well, no one is denying that, but is Goodenough using scientific terms in this way? Goodenough is, after all, a practical scientist and not a phony psychologist, social semi-scientist or quack salve seller. Nor should any reconciliation between science and religion come from the religious side, which will merely ensure that the shyster priests and huckster evangelists will retain power over people’s minds. It should come from the side of science and be science based. If that is what Goodenough is proposing, then what can be wrong with it? If it is going to be forever impossible to stop people from believing in gobbledegook, there may be no merit in any sort of popularization of science, but equally it will be impossible to stop pseudo-scientific shysters and hucksters from doing what Dawkins complains about. If some religion had a genuinely scientific base, then it would be subject to the checks and balances on belief that science itself is. What can be wrong with that?
Dawkins complains too that when the main Christian church, through its pope, makes crocodile apologies for its many crimes and crocodile offers of reconciliation with science, that liberal intellectuals eagerly concede religion its “own magisterium, of equal importance to that of science, but not opposed to it,” presumably digging at Gould and his NOMA. Religion will answer the “Why?” questions while science answers the “How?” questions. Goodenough has adequately addressed this above.
Conventional religions are a lot more arrogant than science which admits that there are questions that it cannot answer, and perhaps never will be able to answer, but religion has no better qualification for answering them than science. Why is the priest or minister able to answer a “Why?” question better than an astronomer or ecologist? The reason is that they claim to have some insight into ultimate questions, but that is the original scam. God is for these people the “God of the Gaps,” invoked as the author of some priest’s personal musings, but having no authority and of no value to anyone at all in real terms.
The Greek philosophers spoke of God simply to mean the order, harmony or reason in Nature—the belief that Nature is knowable, though we might never get to know it. This god was never understood as a big man thinking to himself on some other plane, but simply as an abstract law. By calling this, God, the philosophers could avoid accusations of being atheists and perverting the nations’ children. Some philosophers called this notion “reason” or “Logos,” and this got purloined by the Christian Churches. Would Dawkins object to our taking it back again, and using it as it was meant to be?
Adelphiasophism is not a religion of conciliation with Christianity, or indeed any of the patriarchal religions. Some might say that, since it is impossible either to prove or disprove that there is a God, it ought to be left to the individual to decide what to believe. It is certain that some people will choose to believe in a god under any circumstances, let alone anything as unsure as this, but would it not be better to have the argument that since the universe is itself divine, an additional divinity is somewhat spurious? And by considering the whole of Nature as divine, peoiple can be taught to respect it as it deserves.
Religions: Stick to your own Knitting!
Dawkins also argues that religions still make claims about the world that are scientific claims. Religious apologists steer clear of science when talking to intellectuals, but, when talking to “hoi polloi,” they readily intrude into scientific territory. They are therefore not sticking to their own magisterium.
The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.
This is quite true but seems to be an argument for a scientifically based religion, not for ignoring religion all together. Dawkins seems to be arguing against orthodox religions, particularly “our” religion, Christianity. He concludes:
Convergence? Only when it suits. To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.
Quite so, but what has Dawkins against a scientific religion? That is what Adelphiasophists want, and Goodenough too, it seems. Dawkins reveres Nature, but sees nothing religious in it, whereas others see in the reverence and awe of Nature the origins of mysticism, a sensation that many feel slightly but few feel strongly, and those that do, attribute to some transcendental divinity. If the source is natural then the divinity is Nature!
In “What is Religious Naturalism?” on the internet, Bernt Rostrom, a Swede who sounds like an Adelphiasophist himself, tries to clarify the issue for us, citing a few interesting comments. He cites zoologist Frans de Waal as saying, “I do not necessarily see a conflict between science and religion,” adding that he nevertheless does not understand how religious people can take the bible as literally true. He wants “a much more spiritual approach, where the emphasis is on the meaning behind the words, on the spirit of the words, not on what is literally said. Why should that conflict with science?”
One suspects that this is what Dawkins is complaining about because the meaning behind the words is their meaning, and it is their meaning that makes the bible plainly wrong. The author means the opposite of the “meaning behind the words.” He wants the words to lose their precise meaning and be interpreted metaphorically. Ultimately, that means any way you like. The bible already means everything to anyone, and therefore means nothing. It is like the personal saviour that modern evangelists say Jesus is. A personal saviour is your own construct and can be whatever you desire, what you want to be but know you cannot. It is a purely subjective and psychological thing, so Christians declaring that “Jesus lives” mean he lives only in your head. So too does Santa Claus. Everything in patriarchal religion is the same.
By all means let us discuss the meaning of words like “mystical” and “spiritual” that conventional religions insist are manifestations of the supernatural. Let us not stop seeking rational explanations for these phenomena. If these are sensations that are desirable to have then the scientific religion will eventually be able to show every one how to experience them. By discovering the psychological basis of awe or mysticism or spirituality, whichever word you prefer, we shall enable people to experience it. This is a scientific programme not one for conventional religion, but since most people consider it to be religious, it can be undertaken in a religion of science.
Adelphiasophism is Religious Naturalism!
Because most religions exploit people’s fancy for the supernatural does not mean that it is a necessary aspect of a religion. Supernatural belief is no essential part of being religious. Many churchmen and politicians in the twentieth century considered communism to be a secular religion. It might have been, especially as it was built on the secular aspects of Christianity. Holding goods in common was the practice of the early Christians of “Acts,” of the Essenes of whom Jesus was most likely a member, and therefore of Jesus himself, explaining his advocacy of poverty as a virtue. This virtue was soon forgotten by Christian bishops for opportunistic reasons, but had it been held as it was originally as an essential requirement of the religion, we might all have been communists, long ago.
Dawkins seems to think that anything called religion is roguery, and there is good historic evidence for the view. Adelphiasophism knows it too, but challenges the notion that it always must be so. A natural religion can be an honest one.
Goodenough seems to be evolving toward the viewpoint of the pre-Christian Pagan religions. Adelphiasophism is in the set of neoPagan religions, or draws upon the neoPagan tradition to do what Goodenough wants to achieve. Paganism stems from the ancient belief in a Nature Goddess, so the tradition Selk thinks necessary already exists. If Goodenough, from her interest in Christianity, is hoping to find a traditional basis in that awful patriarchal chewing-gum religion, she should forget it and turn to Paganism. she will find that what she hoped to do has already been done. “Religious naturalism” is Adelphiasophism! She should be one.
