Skepticism, Spirituality, and Doubt
(an essay by Chris Miller, originally posted on Unquiet Desperation)
As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.
This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches. We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.
These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves. I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love. There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.
There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.
To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skeptic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.
However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith. I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.
In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling. One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.
The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt. I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.
I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight. If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?
January 8th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Amusing that you should mention how your life tastes — today I was thinking of taste as a metaphor for this very issue. The bitter skeptic can explain taste by the physiology of the tongue, nose, digestive system, and so on, but would be wrong to say it doesn’t really matter what ingredients you use when cooking. The doubtful mystic experiences the taste but worries that without a good explanation for it all the taste isn’t real. These are objective and subjective approaches to the same content, the food. The best approach is to balance them and understand how flavors work together, the better to cook, and when to stop thinking an enjoy the taste.
In my life, this means respecting people’s spiritual experiences, and pursuing some of them when I have a clear explanation for a process to follow (e.g., Zen is a straightforward process). I am skeptical about what any such experience discloses about the world (if I visualize something, I don’t take that alone as evidence of that thing’s existence). Where these impulses collide, I have fun sorting through the mess with tools of thought like Occam’s razor and common sense, and also finding satisfaction in the experiences themselves. I can veer toward cynical or doubtful, but generally I find the proper balance of these impulses results in a good philosophical life.
January 8th, 2009 at 1:02 am
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January 9th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
There came a point in my life, somewhere around the age of 45,that I felt “slammed”, and a slight chill at the thought that when I held the hand of someone I loved, or paid for food at the grocery store, or cried over a family situation, that the ONLY thing that WE have is each other. In this huge universe (which includes our very own sub-conscious), THAT IS ALL WE HAVE.
It’s just us.
You are a parent, and so am I. I have been married for 35 years and have two children and a grandchild on the way. My cornerstone in THIS life has been family. I am a Mother. This has been quite a ride. It is through this lens that my consciousness “sees”.
Recently, it has come to me as a pagan (who is studying R.J.Stewart, whenever I have free time)and a soon to be senior citizen, that while I am grateful and amazed; thankful and hopeful for all the people who have come into my life, what keeps me whole is the fact that there are people I LOVE.
So I don’t worry whether or not there is a god or goddess. I am so grateful that there are people I love. Focus on that; hold on tight, pay for the groceries, eat good food, get plenty of exercise, do the right thing, love your family, friends, pets and the people you deal with every day , because WE are all we have….. each other.
Blessed Be,
Suzi
January 9th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
This issue continually comes up when I attempt to reconcile dualisms between the communities of which I’m a part. On one hand, I take part in ceremonial rituals based on native South American shamanism. In that realm, spirituality is the primary mode of thought. Science has no place. Everything is governed by “feeling,” “Will” as modern pagans sometimes call it, or energy work. One doesn’t do research on herbalism in this paradigm. One talks directly with the plants to see if they should be used and how.
On another hand, I take part in an online consciousness-based e-list community (with physical gatherings I might add) where skepticism is healthy, promoted, and abundant. Science and the notion of strict, objective observation and experimentation to prove or disprove a certain set of criteria is very strong in this community.
My father is a Presbyterian minister with rather liberal viewpoints generally. I grew up with protestant Christianity in a non-threatening and gentle way. If anyone would choose Christianity as a lifelong religion, I was a good candidate. But still I moved to something else. As I transitioned genders (a major spiritual growth as well), I found the direct spiritual experiences I was having, including one that saved my life, were not actively supported by Christianity, which largely demands we accept other people’s spiritual experiences from the past rather than seek our own truth. Essentially it came down to the argument of gnosticism, and the idea that there can be no substitute for direct experience, despite the assertions of established religions that all that can be seen or spoken has already been seen or spoken by the prophets.
As direct spiritual experiences drew me out of suicidalism and depression, I moved more toward systems that encourage these positive life-affirming experiences. This started with paganism, but most systems of paganism seemed so distant to me, living in America, not Europe, Egypt, India, or elsewhere. Native American shamanism has most recently been of great interest, and I am studying both Northern American traditions as well as Southern American. Additionally, I have found benefit to the notion of the power of local energies as Chris often mentions. Calling on local spirits of trees, hawks, the nearby lake, and other nature spirits has had a profound effect whenever it has been done.
But all of this is leaning in a direction for a reason. My desire for direct spiritual experiences is derived from my skepticism for spirituality, which in turn was likely derived from growing up as a pastor’s child.
Through all my studies, I still cannot come to any clear idea of whether anything I do in my spirituality has any basis in factual reality. I honestly still say that it is quite possible spirituality is completely bogus. However, then I have hawks flying around me in abundance when I need signs, hearing amazing unworldly sounds and music in dreams or ceremonies, having lightning strike an unlikely tree right before my eyes at the entrance of a labyrinth days before monks come to visit, and the list goes on…
I can’t say I can’t explain some of the experiences, because there is a rational scientific explanation for all of them, including the power of suggestion, subconscious re-programming of memories, optical illusions, anthropomorphism of animals and objects, and much more. However what I can’t explain is why, after knowing that it could all be bunk, I still stick with it.
The best explanation, I have been able to come up with so far is that I choose spirituality over atheism, because the world would be a hell of a lot more boring if I was an atheist. Still, I take everything I experience in spirituality with “small Siberian salt mines” as I believe Michelle has once quoted Isaac Bonewits.
So to keep these two in balance, I think my best tool so far has been to keep an open mind, never take my spirituality too seriously, always contradict someone when they try to codify a definition or illustration of what my spirituality sounds like in words, and generally waffle as much as possible without annoying people too much — really important by the way: not annoying people too much. Lately, keeping quiet about my spirituality has served me well, allowing me to creatively explore and critically question it as much or as little as I desire.
But desire has a way of pulling us in one direction or the other. This is when I learned the lesson of being sated by a lack of satiety, though I would now call it a *sometimes* satiety by a *sometimes* lack of satiety. Conditional modifiers have increased in my vocabulary over the years, seemingly to my benefit.
I am not an atheist and probably never will be, yet I dislike the word “believe” when used in reference to me. I *could* call myself a spiritualist, but I’d never allow anyone else to do so, nor would I necessarily admit to it openly either. I live by a motto that has been very useful to me for the last several years: moderation in moderation.
For Chris: Every computer program ultimately leads some kind of interaction with a human. Herein lies the connection between logic and WTF?, and why people like you and me are stuck in the middle being yanked along the continuum like tightrope walking on elastic.
Blessings,
Ora
January 10th, 2009 at 4:37 am
I always look at everything with a bit of skepticism. I believe it to be a good thing to a certain extent. For instance, I have seen and experienced things that cannot be proven, yet I have seen and experienced these things so I know that they are real. This is how I balance things: I stay in the middle of things, unless I have experienced something for myself, or it has been disproved. For example, I have seen spirits so I know that they exist. I have yet to see a God or Goddess so I cannot say for certain that they really exist or not. Really, you cannot prove that they don’t exist, but I have yet to see proof that they do exist either. So I just say well, maybe their or maybe their isn’t. Who knows? And you can’t prove it either way, so I leave enough room to believe that it could be possible that they exist.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Hi Chris,
Yes, I used to fight that internal fight every day. Then I read as many arguments for and against theism as I could find, thought about it over and over, bought John Michael Greer’s “A World Full of Gods” which really helped, and finally realized that most theists and atheists are asking the wrong questions of each other. The whole process took about a year.
Now after the ritual’s over, I apply critical thinking to EVERYTHING. I don’t listen to those people that say you must be either skeptical or spiritual; it’s a false dichotomy. I never ever suspend my skeptical faculties; why would I want to? They are how I make sense of literally everything else in my world.
The only thing we can do as spiritual people for whom blind faith is not an option is to gather evidence. I try for physical evidence that fits with my hypotheses, and accumulate it until I find it reasonable to draw a reasonable conclusion based on the data. I don’t mean I have all the answers, and I don’t pretend to be able to explain it to anyone but myself. Arguably it’s possible, but I haven’t had the chance. For example, I know that I will most likely never be able to completely prove the existence of Zeus (as he exists in myth) to myself, much less to anyone else, but if the question is a more general “Do spirits/gods/powers exist?”, I have gotten to a point where I’m comfortable saying yes. I base this assertion not on denying my rational side, but in cultivating it.
In my case, I reached that point one night after a ritual of offering to the Nature Spirits. A spirit physically tugged on the necklace I was wearing while I was fully conscious, motionless, awake, and completely aware of my body. To the extent that I know anything happens, I know that happened. I have the evidence that satisfies for me the existence of spirits…and I’m continuing to find more.
I really think that if you’re questioning now, the best thing to do is search for physical evidence.
Are you perhaps questioning more and more because of Deo’s rejection of Paganism? My take: his reasons for doing so are flawed. All he seems to be concerned with is making Paganism palatable to an audience of philosophers, he’s still arguing from a basic lack of evidence. Logic tells us this is bad.
Best of luck,
fire_is_born
January 19th, 2009 at 7:13 am
As someone who comes originally from a strongly atheist upraising I can really relate to this. Personally I’ve reached a point of simultaneously believing that all the mystic are completely valid and also a complete crock of shit. Maybe that dissonance doesn’t work for everyone but there’s no harm in trying to do both at once rather than flopping between them.
I guess that didn’t add much to it but that’s my comment and if it helps it helps and if it doesn’t well that’s ok too.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:42 am
Wow. There are some truly amazing responses here. Thaks for giving me so much to think about.
Clearly, I need to post more of these essays.
fire_is_born asked: “Are you perhaps questioning more and more because of Deo’s rejection of Paganism?”
Nope. I had no idea he’d moved on until you said something. I’ve not spoken with him in some time, so I’m not sure what the reasoning is, but if I know him, it’s been well considered and is the most appropriate move for him and Mandy.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
I can’t give you an answer, but perhaps I can give you somethings to think about.
The absence of proof that something exists is not proof of its’ nonexistence.
Faith is belief in something without any proof to support this belief. If proof existed belief would be a given and require no faith.
You can’t control how you feel, but you can control how you act on those feelings. You clearly find comfort in belief in god. You find discomfort in disbelief.
You are like a child that has been asked his opinion on a subject. Half your friends hold one opinion and half hold the opposing view. You want to KNOW your answer is right before you give it, but as is the case with matters of opinion there is no RIGHT answer only the answer that is right for you. If your friends could respect each other’s views there would be no problem, but each side is plagued with doubt and so must prove that the other side is wrong and their’s is right. All this despite the fact that they know they will find no proof regardless of their side.
I am a big Calvin and Hobbes fan, visualize this if you will…
PANEL 1
God looks down from the heavens upon the fretful face of Calvin. Calvin asks, “God please prove to me that you exist so that I may have faith.”
PANEL 2
Nothing happens.
PANEL 3
Fist upraised and angry Calvin Screams at the heavens, “God, if you do not do something right now to prove to me that you exist I will become from this moment on and athiest!”
PANEL 4
Nothing happens.
PANEL 5
A dejected Calvin leaves the clearing a small tornado of squiggles above his head indicating his disappointment. As he passes Hobbes the tiger replies, “Told you so!”
One last thought on being logical. At one time physics said that a bee couldn’t displace enough air with its wings to actually fly. Upon seeing a bee take flight a physicist came to the conclusion that perhaps he didn’t understand everything about even an issue as simple as this.
I hope that provided food for thought.
S-
January 24th, 2009 at 2:13 am
I have gone back and forth between these two points on a continuum, only to come to a conclusion that the two can work together. Although Galileo was probably not thinking in the same vein as I when he said it, I think that his words are close to how I approach life in general, including my spirituality and my religious life: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
This same God/Goddess/Spirit/Energy/I, what-have-you, has also given us the ability to feel emotion, experience intuition and phenomena that is unexplainable by the earlier-mentioned gift of reason. That Being has given us a great gift: Mystery. Life itself and its wonders, if you see them as such, can be something to ponder, puzzle, beat our brains in over and make some conclusions about. For a while, I doubted myself, my abilities, beliefs, all of it, because I could not personally prove it to my skeptical being. What is there to prove, though? The God or Goddess I called upon to show up is immediately deposed by my inner skeptic as hallucination or fantasy, something that my mind plays with to grapple with an inner demon or a personal revelation garbed by a God-figure. I hit a point where the dangerous, but sometimes-liberating word of belief came into play.
During a trying period in my life not long ago, I was actually losing a lot of sleep over my inner conflict between what I knew to be true, religious/psychic/etc. experiences, and what my skeptical mind told me was false. I looked at what I had been through up to this point, from my many years as a Catholic, to my movement into Neopaganism, and all the experiences, paranormal and otherwise, I had had. I ultimately came down to a few questions:
Were my religious/spiritual/psychic experiences false because they flew in the face of skepticism, and modern science?
Were my religious/spiritual/psychic experiences less valid because I and others could not verify them as actual, physical truth?
Were my religious/spiritual/psychic experiences no more than a collection of feel-good (or bad) things, designed to coddle me through life and make it seem better than it was?
If I were to suddenly drop everything as hallucination, or somehow explaining away ever experience I had up to that point, would I be a better person?
Why were my skeptical side and my religious/spiritual/psychic side in conflict, anyhow?
1) I came to the conclusion that my experiences were just that: my experiences, and do not need to substantiated (though it is nice sometimes) by anyone else, not even science. This is because as long as I have gained something, whether or not the experience was ‘real’ by scientific/skeptical standards, that ultimately betters myself and others, and propels my life forward in a positive direction, I do not view it as something needing removal from it.
2) Just because science does not have the capability to measure something does not make it false; just because I cannot logically explain a thing does not make it false, stupid, or nonsensical. There are many layers to the human experience, to wit I hope I will always be delving deeper into. Life without experience, without further lessons and without deeper knowing to be had, would, to me, be boring. Physically ‘proving’ an experience may help further impact a person who has it, or having witnesses to it may help them work against their skeptical side, but I have come to grips with this too. Many of my experiences I cannot prove, and sometimes cannot cite people who witnessed it; if I explain this to another person, why should I care if they do not believe me? I have gone rounds in this way with family members and sometimes friends, and have not only developed a thicker skin for this, but also a peace with it, since these experiences are mine and do not need to be for anyone else but me.
If flicking about a lightsaber as a Magick Sword does the trick for me and casts circle for me just as well as a metal blade, then more power to me, because the spiritual experience does ultimately come from me. I also would put it like this: if I can cast circle with my mind or a finger, using a lightsaber as a Tool is no less effective.
In terms of having an experience with a God/dess that does not match their historical credo (i.e. a snuggly Morrigan), I think that sometimes God/dess touches us in different ways, but that those who are told of these experiences by others have every right to have a full salt mine when talking to them. Our precedence for why God/desses are the way they are informs their incarnation when it interfaces with us, but the God/desses are not only the Past, to me, They are in the Present, and Future and can appear to us in a variety of ways. My experience may not be yours, but if I can gain something from our mutual interaction with a God/dess, and come out of it a little wiser, or do the same for you, so much the better for sharing. I don’t have to agree with your experiences, but I can respect you based on the fact that they are your experiences, though I may think your experience with the earlier example may be another Goddess or Being. Skepticism and evaluation of experience is not a bad thing.
3) In contrary to being consistently told ‘everything is and will be fine’, or similar things, my experiences with God as a Catholic and my Gods today, tend to challenge me. I have found in my working with Yahweh that He very-much wanted me to live up to the challenge of my spiritual life at that time: to be Christ-like. That took me to places I was not comfortable with: I talked and made peace with people who used to beat me every day, I sat and talked about God with Neopagans and Atheists, and I experienced psychic abilities that neither my faith nor Church could explain. I watched as people in my Church tore each other up behind one another’s backs, as my priest went off with the collection funds and spent it in Vegas doing who-knows-what, as men of the cloth were prosecuted for pedophilia after twenty years of silence. I was still a Catholic for a few years after all of this; I came to the Gods because I heard Their call and listened.
My experiences with the Gods have been no less challenging; they simply have been challenging in different ways. I have seen people been taken for a ride by a priest that stood up and said “Follow me”, and then left everyone high and dry once money had been put into his pot. I have seen the community bicker and rip on each other for things as petty as calling them the ‘wrong’ thing.
This does not mean that Catholicism has provided all-bad experiences, or all-challenging experiences, the same with Neopaganism, but it has not been ‘coddling’ or ‘easy’. I don’t think that many things worth going for are.
Have I become a better person through my path? I believe so. I think that so long as I keep balance with my skepticism and my spirituality I will continue to do so.
4) I think that anyone who simply ‘drops’ all their experiences from a religion and labels them as hallucinations or without merit, is not giving themselves, or those practicing the faith any credit. Even if the experiences had were nothing more than chemical processes running through the brain and playing themselves out in a pleasing (or not-so pleasing) way, if they have ultimately had a positive or deep impact, what does it really matter? If you are changed from it, you are changed, and I think that is what matters. It really is kind of like The Matrix in that way; our brain experiences what the senses tell it, whether it is technically ‘real’ or not. For instance: the new crowd-control ADS (Active Denial System), which is a truck-mounted heat-projection device, “projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm ). Does it actually burn? No. It doesn’t make the sensation any less real, though, or your reaction to it. Denying that my skin is burning does not stop the sensation, but it does not mean that I have to panic or ‘know’ my skin is on fire. In a way, this informs my approach to my spiritual life; that it really doesn’t ultimately matter if it’s real or not, but my approach and reception to what happens does.
5) My skeptical and spiritual sides were in conflict because I allowed them to be put there by myself, society and what others thought. I allowed skepticism to override my spiritual life in part because it was ultimately the ‘safer’ option. Skepticism, and alongside it logic, and science, became disproving forces rather than neutral ones because I put them in that place, rather than acknowledging that these things rarely equitably explain spirituality and peoples’ experiences with it. Do science, logic and skepticism have a place in spirituality? Yes, they do, but alongside it, enhancing it, helping to make sense of the experiences and/or grounding the person in physical reality, not overcoming the experiences and instilling doubt where there need be none. Sometimes, skepticism can help to make sense of a situation, or act as a filter to our intuition. Yes, sometimes it can be an obstacle, if we make it one, but I feel a healthy dose of skepticism is good. I just believe it should be balanced alongside spirituality and vice-versa.
Hope that this post wasn’t too long. ^_^
Sarenth
January 25th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Thanks Chris. It seems Deo ignited an Internet firestorm on “outgrowing” Paganism with his post, and I saw your post on Unquiet Desperation as part of that storm. It seemed like it was all anyone was talking about for a few weeks.
BTW, I really should mention that I find only his reasons for leaving Paganism AS STATED ON HIS BLOG to be flawed. I don’t know him, and I’m sure he has good personal reasons for leaving. I only disagree with his articulation of those reasons. My post was more about reassuring you and others that yes, there are still Pagans that value the scientific method, and much less about taking Deo down a peg.
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 am
I’m not sure if I can add much to this but I’ve been dealing with a similar issue lately. I’m not religious in any sense but I do believe in an after life, reincarnation (as well as psychic ability and the ability to manipulate energy but that’s another story). I’ve derived my beliefs from my own experiences. I know that I’ve had these experiences but I can’t prove that these experiences where what I believe they where or something my head made up. However, I can’t really prove that my experiences are invalid either. The saying goes that it’s not in the destination but the journey. My journey for truth and knowledge continues because without the journey, life would be pretty dull.