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from the dept. Salon has done an interview with Barbara J. King, author of Evolving God. What caught my eye immediately was this exchange: Salon: I understand you don't want to get caught up in modern debates over belief and what we think about God. But isn't the core of religion the sense that there is some transcendent realm out there -- something that's separate from our world of everyday experience? King:Oh yes, definitely. But the emotional connection to that transcendent realm is what I'm looking for, rather than a mental or rational formulating of beliefs about such a realm. A word that's so important to me is "embodied." It's an embodied religion. Religion is based in our senses, in our emotions. The book sounds fascinating, and King's views on religion seem to be complicated in exactly the same places as mine. Steve Paulson, the Salon interviewer, tries to pin her down on whether a supernatural realm exists, and this is her response: I'm always open to that possibility. But that's veering really close to asking whether I believe in God. For me, it's a private question, but even more than that, it's a question that doesn't really reflect the depths of what we are as a species.To which I would say: yes, exactly! Chasing the intellectual questions of whether there is a God or which religious practice is best is completely missing the point, to my mind. Neither a yes nor a no to the question of God changes the essential awe of existence. In that sense our religious traditions are far too "in-the-head" in their concerns to be relevant to life today; whereas a truly embodied religion would never make the mistake of thinking ideas were more real--or more important--than this astonishing, messy, intricate world of existence. Paulson asks King about the current crop of scientific theories regarding religion, and she's witheringly blunt, especially when it comes to Dawkins and Dennett. It might be interesting if she were merely critical of their ideas, but in fact there's more: You can believe in science or you can have faith in God -- the Richard Dawkins school of thought. Or you can say there are "non-overlapping magisteria" -- the famous Stephen Jay Gould answer that religion will help us with meaning, and science will tell us about other things. I'm actually in a third place. If you can avoid being a biblical literalist, and if you can avoid being an arrogant scientist who tells everyone else what to think, you can think on multiple levels at once. There's a lot of beauty in seeing that religion and science are really about the same things. They can be perfectly compatible.The Dennett/Dawkins view of religion is vulnerable because it assumes religion has something to do with ideas; it's part of King's point that it doesn't. --Or, rather, when it does, it's in its institionalized form, which is really a different phenomenon than the one she's talking about and researching. If religion is based in our senses and emotions, then it's no more contradictory of science than, say, art. It's telling, in fact, to compare the relationship of science to art with the relationship of science to religion. Art is all about embodiment; it's about the senses. Everybody accepts that, and nobody thinks that it's a threat to science. Scripture-based religions are, though, and we usually think that this is because they present contradictory ideas of how the universe works. Could it be that the root of the problem is actually that they deny the embodied nature of existence, while science and art cohabit comfortably because both celebrate it? In which case, it's possible to imagine that an embodied religion would also cohabit with science and art in equal comfort. < Mind-Reading Helmet for Gamers | Retrocausality to be Tested >
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