TM15. 27 April 2005.
Copyright 2005 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Presented to the First Roundstone Conversation on Place and Story, Roundstone,
Co. Galway, Ireland, 23-27 March 2005. Chapter 8 from Science of God.
Graduate College, Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
ABSTRACT.
How might we do theology in the context of the way we gain knowledge today? To answer this, I draw on happiness as an example.
Many drives compete within us. To gain greater happiness is not the only one. Our self-awareness enables us to decide this, drawing from our memories about what our previous decisions lead to and from cultural wisdom about what others decisions suggest. The best way to act emerges from a constant process of discovery: a discovery of who we are in relation to each of the inclinations that compete within us, and a discovery of what each inclination means for us.
Decision-making between inclinations is significant spiritually because we employ our free will to choose and achieve a balance between them. To be spiritual means to ask what a balance between our inclinations and attributes means, and then to seek it. In particular, if we want spiritual happiness, we should answer what comprises the balance of happiness with the other demands on us (what is more important for us to choose) including the fact that we seek justice and try to achieve it.
Happiness is only one human quality that leads to theological insight through scientific research. Such investigations could launch all of theology. Scientific research can generate knowledge of God and our spiritual selves. The universe that science explains leaves behind the image of cold and mechanical matter; matter involves endless depths and mystery. It ties intimately with human subjectivity. It is spiritual. We matter.
CONTENTS.
To
Think Key-Theologically, Think Scientifically
Questions
from a Common Method
To
Gain Knowledge of Our Spiritual Selves, Use Science
Key-Theological
Use of Science
Limitations
of Following a Natural Desire
Making
Decisions toward a Balance
To
Gain Knowledge of God, Use Science
The empirical approach to theology called key-theology looks at the world
to see what God is like; what does this suggest about God? That God acts as the
great mathematical orderer? The producer of chaos? The great lover? The great
tyrant? Or what?
This paper presents an example of applying the key-theological method. It focuses, to create a prolegomenon for a key-theology, on happiness, one of the chief aims if not the chief aim of many people.
Because scientific research suggests how the universe and its facets (including human beings) operate and come into existence, science can and does talk about happiness. It suggests how we might increase our happiness, for instance; it also says these strategies have evolved into us. Theological reflection would consider both of these aspects of God at work. The happiness strategies that science uncovers thus say something about how we might live in tune with the work of God. The study of happiness and other human qualities should offer the opportunity to learn about our spiritual selves and the nature of God in relationship to us.
A visit to the method of key-theology might help further orient the picture before providing more detail on God and happiness.
The subject of key-theology, what it addresses, comprises the world and making sense of living. The object of key-theology, what it centrally refers to, is God.
1. Key-theology peers at the world through the lens called God, the core idea by which it tries to find meaning and make sense of our lives and the world.
Key-theology adopts the empirical or scientific method. Several people have considered this matter or something like it before; this book has pushed prior deliberations about this further, and looked more deeply at the data key-theology entertains. How might key-theologians investigate with science the nature of God? How might they think theologically with the method and results of science? Three more ground rules help apply the scientific method to key-theology, points that especially rely on the work of Ian Barbour:
2. Key-theology focuses on the creation of models.
3. Key-theology depends on experience, some of which is public and repeatable.
4. Key-theology can find inspiration in anything, and every event becomes a potential datum that spiritual thought can measure itself against.
These three points about method apply to all the sciences, but the degrees to which each applies vary across the sciences according to their respective aims and peculiarities. The rules also vary by degree from the sciences to key-theology. For instance, a key-theologian builds her or his key-theology from universals (public and repeatable experiences) and shared basic theories, but also in an individualized way according to her or his unique life story, biology, and personal peculiarities. Physics, in contrast, does not usually build its theories in individualized ways. While key-theology differs by degree from many other fields of inquiry, it still follows the same basic method. This an empirical stance on the nature of God promotes a radical but exciting theological challenge: What God exists?
What follows develops the above numbered points
Addressable questions that now arise include:
What types of models ought key-theology to focus on and where might it find them for example, models like those in physics or like those in history?
How does key-theology depend on experience for example, to what extent can the core idea for God within a system of key-theology change if it conflicts with experience?
To what data ought key-theology especially pay attention for example, data like those in quantum physics or like those in historical analysis?
The proposed beginning to a key-theology uses happiness to illuminate this method and, in doing so, addresses three more questions:
How does happiness relate to God?
How does happiness relate to our spiritual nature?
How might we become happier in a spiritual way?
The relationship between happiness and our spiritual nature continues the discussion. First, for clarification, what constitutes our spiritual nature? The answer to this depends on the idea of God. The foundational approach taken here reduces approximately to this:
God is responsible for all that happens and for everything that exists, did exist, and will exist.
This statement takes
seriously the oneness of monism; no devil or other reality exists independent
of God. Further, God, by being responsible for all that exists and happens,
transcends everything; nothing but God transcends everything. It also means
that every thing and every event is spiritual, including all of each of us.
This understanding of God differs from the more typical point of view. People tend to discern a particular aspect of God love, for example that they want to associate with the word God. They reduce God to a facet of everything (but, they judge, the most important facet) or to a being alongside other beings (but, they judge, surpassing all other beings). To recognize God entails that they distinguish God from everything they could or do experience. They approximate the whole in order to know it.
People similarly single out aspects of their being and behavior as especially spiritual; they bifurcate themselves to help them understand and live. Some forms of happiness, for instance, exceed eating favorite foods and other such physical activities; that extra constitutes the spiritual in relation to happiness. Western culture thereby artificially isolates a sense of spiritual in which the spiritual self refers to a moreness that surpasses what people do or are physically.
Does the sense of spiritual advocated in this chapter (that everything is spiritual, not the cultural sense of the extra) empty the word and leave it redundant? Perhaps everything is spiritual produces a tautology like all water is wet. Perhaps it turns spiritual ideas into nothing but words, as Viggo Mortensen suggests, wordswe could just as well do without. Perhaps a fully naturalistic account suffices.
Not so. Everything is spiritual contributes something
that atheistic accounts may overlook. It emphasizes the importance of
subjective experience and the entanglement of God with the world (in a way that
needs elaborating). It points to an approach to life and meaning that people
usually fail to notice. It starts toward a more wholesome perspective on what
comprises the real and significant, the nature of our selves, and how we might
behave.
This idea for God also allows the key-theologies
built from it to feel true because this God symbol feels as though it refers to
something that exists. Everything we know for sure to exist does exist, and
everything we know for sure to happen does happen. Most people feel that
something is responsible for these existences and happenings. That something
this chapter calls God.
Gods relationship with the world therefore impinges
on all facets of the world. God makes a difference to the world. Key-theology
ought therefore to have something to say to each of the sciences, and each
science ought to have something to say to key-theology. Together they ought
empirically to develop a theologically
The above sought a
beginning point from which to comprehend our spiritual nature. Now the
discussion can turn to the nature of happiness.
Happiness developed through our evolution. As Robert Wright relates: we are designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals − sex, status, and so on − often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive. We naturally desire it and should seek to achieve it. Striving toward greater happiness continues in each person as an innate drive, and the genes that produce it must help our species under natural selection.
Science suggests how the world, including ourselves,
operates including, therefore, what people can do to become happier. Research
in social psychology helps divulge this information: it suggests ways to live
that increase happiness and it relates conditions under which these ways tend
to work. People experience, for instance, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow when an activity absorbs them
and time flies. In flow, they opti
The findings of science tell not only how to become happier, but how to become happier spiritually. This claim may seem odd because western culture usually applies the word spiritual to something other than the only physical and natural. How does increasing happiness through scientific ways relate to our spiritual selves? How is this becoming happier spiritually? Does taking Prozac constitute a spiritual activity?
The operation of God produces the world that science seeks to describe. Science, therefore, tells how God works, how the spiritual operates. Science studies the spiritual. In particular, scientific research on how behaviors or drugs promote happiness tells how the spiritual operates vis--vis happiness, and helps in devising ways to increase happiness spiritually.
If happiness raising constitutes the or one of the chief motivations for humans, the seeking of happiness ought to sit at the core of a key-theology. To find out about the nature of God means to find out about the spiritual nature of ourselves. It therefore means finding out about happiness and relating the findings to what else theology might suggest.
Learning from science about happiness increases spiritual (key-theological) understanding both in the broad understanding of spiritual and in the restricted sense that refers to behaviors surpassing physical activities like eating. This follows because the state of spiritual happiness involves or equals subjective well-being, which co-occurs with biological happiness, a particular range of dopamine, serotonin, and their receptors in the brain. The spiritual and the physical highlight different facets of the same phenomenon but, in principle, view the same things. Thus, the spiritual can equal the biological (though people may mistakenly think of the spiritual as different because they consider it to involve but exceed the biological). Further, the spiritual can provide ways to achieve the biological, ways to raise the level of happiness measured through biology and psychology. The spiritual can also invoke an ethical dimension. Biological and spiritual happiness so intertwine with and depend on one another as to become inseparable.
Life especially life lived spiritually meets more complexity than a mere, Three scientifically proven steps to increase spirituality and happiness. The following questions help pursue this recognition. Traditionalists might ask, If God wants happiness for us, why do we not feel happy all the time? Neuro-pyscho-biologists might ask:
If happiness is biologically important for us, why do we not feel happy all the time?
Why do we possess the state of happiness?
Why do we want to feel happy?
Why do we not want to feel unhappy?
For what biological reason do we not feel happy all the time?
Unhappiness does not necessarily equal the lack of happiness. Does feeling no unhappiness equate to feeling happy all the time?
Why do we possess unhappy feelings that motivate us to want the happy ones?
Part of an answer may follow like this:
If we felt bountifully happy all the time, we would not desire it. We would take it for granted like the attraction of gravity. So happiness in its degrees and absence serves useful purposes. What are they?
Like the experience of pain, unhappiness means something needs fixing. It evolved into us as an internal warning system that alerts us of danger.
Paralleling this, happiness functions to say we are OK, safe, out of danger it constitutes the involuntary neural and subjective state for when we do not feel unhappy. The desire for it also evolved into us.
More than an alert, unhappiness also drives us. It impels us automatically to desire and seek happiness rather than to feel unhappy. It pushes us automatically to escape unhappiness and the dangers unhappiness represents.
Pushing us to obtain more and more happiness, however, the drive to escape from unhappiness continues beyond the fulfillment of its immediate goal.
This answer leaves much unanswered. The happiness-spirituality relationship becomes more complex than the biological function of happiness and unhappiness. If happiness evolved into us, so did aggression and other negative feelings and behaviors. Does pursuing them also constitute a spiritual activity? Further, writing a book could so engross the author that he fails to notice a fire about to consume children trapped in the building opposite; happiness-increasing activities such as flow could absorb a person to the extent she does not see something wrong, something she would otherwise notice and do something about. Ill-pursued or even immoral happiness-seeking exists. A moral dimension pervades happiness seeking, something with which the spiritual also concerns itself and which the above reliance on scientific research did not address. (Key-theology could develop the moral dimension in a similar way to the above approach to happiness, basing it on inherent values in human existence, given the idea of God above and that God acts consistently.
A way into this follows a traditional idea augmented with
biology. Modern westerners think highly of freedom. Western culture holds it as
a paramount virtue for each individual, for each society, and, increasingly,
for other ani
A perspective on free will starts with evolution: will,
including free will, emerges in and as a result of human biological evolution.
Free will requires, for instance, self-awareness that the person can see and
consciously weigh up alternatives a characteristic that seems to arise from
the evolved human capacities for consciousness and memory. The degree of
self-awareness and therefore ability to choose constitutes a human talent that,
in its magnitude, distinguishes humans from other known ani
Choices allow us to balance happiness with its competing drives and each of us can choose how to achieve that balance. We can ask what happiness is best for us means. What is best for us also constitutes something our self-awareness enables us to decide from our memories about what our previous decisions led to and from cultural wisdom about what others decisions led to. We can ask: What for us balances happiness and other things, like justice? Where do we place our priorities in life? We can discern the limits to our happiness seeking in each situation; it feels like trying to discern the roots of our selves. The best way to act emerges from a constant process of discovery, a discovery of what each inclination that compete within us means for us and who we are in relation to it.
This choosing offers another place for science to help.
Key-theologians can examine each inclination within its evolutionary and
behavioral contexts, results obtained through scientific inquiry. This helps in
understanding the inclinations and why we respond in the ways we do. It helps
show how to achieve or avoid any of the traits including happiness that we
may choose to follow, explore, or avoid. Science allows a pause in the process
and an examination of our behavior.
Decision-making between inclinations becomes significant spiritually because we employ our free will to choose and achieve a balance between them. This unique ability of ours equals, in more traditional terms, self-awareness at the core of God. Self-awareness constitutes the human image of God. Spirituality (traditionally, Gods way for us) asks our self-awareness to develop ourselves as best we can. To live spiritually means to take account of all the aspects of ourselves and to choose the best for us from among them. To live spiritually means to ask what a balance between our inclinations and attributes means, and then to seek it. In particular, if we want spiritual happiness, we should decide what comprises the balance of happiness with the other demands on us (what appears more important for us to choose) including perhaps that we also seek justice and try to achieve it. The passage above that introduced our spiritual side referred to this discernment and action and called it moreness. It requires our self-awareness and this carries it beyond what we do physically.
To seek greater happiness is a natural drive, but not one we must follow because science or anything or anyone else says so. We can decide if we want greater happiness and, if we do want it, how we might achieve it possibly with input from scientific research and how we might balance it with other inclinations. In this case, fact does not define value.
To explore and decide between our inclinations can add to what we know of our spiritual selves. It can also add to what key-theologians know of God. A series of questions and answers helps demonstrate this:
Where does key-theology find knowledge of God? The universe presents the only face of God we can see or comprehend. Key-theology must inquire of the universe, therefore, to find out about God vis--vis us.
How does key-theology gain this knowledge from the universe? Science shows how reality functions and offers the best way to understand the universe. It thus tells about aspects of God we can know.
What aspects of knowledge of the universe pertain particularly to God? What key-theology knows of our spiritual characteristics also comprises knowledge of God and in-so-far as key-theology considers them the most important in the universe scientific understanding of them concerns what lies centrally in God.
Key-theology discovers the nature of God from our spiritual nature and it discovers that with science. Conversely, the nature of God as it pertains to our lives constitutes our spiritual selves. Scientific knowledge of our (spiritual) selves, therefore, fits hand in glove with knowledge of God.
This discussion lends itself to a related question: Since our spiritual nature includes happiness, does God enjoy happiness too? Might key-theology personify God and say God achieves greater happiness the same way that we can? This is ridiculous. On the other hand, the sentence, God feels happy and wants us to feel happy as well, includes two things:
It includes, God feels happy, an ontological statement about Gods happiness. Inasmuch as God matches or mirrors the spiritual nature of human beings whatever the extent to which God transcends our versions of these properties key-theology can personify God as happy. God is also sad, ill, tired, well, and so on. What do subjective qualities mean when applied to God? This divinized version of the qualities becomes so vague and thwart with difficulties that key-theology ought not to pursue them at this time. Further research into the nature of God with respect to human qualities may, however, give them meaning.
It also assumes that God exists. This entails the idea that God creates the universe, the means by which God does this, and therefore that and how God evolves humanity. An important and evolved thrust of humans urges us to increase our happiness. Key-theology might therefore say that God desires our happiness and creates us to seek it. God encourages us to hunt for greater happiness in balance with our other inclinations and tells us (for instance, through the results of scientific research) how to do it.
This paper derives from the proposal for a theological methodology that emulates sciences. Drawing on happiness as an example, the paper starts to develop such a key-theology, but only a suggestion for a beginning because similar investigations to that on happiness would launch a more rounded study. Key-theology might not only use such results of scientific research. It could also frame and put to empirical arbitration new hypotheses that involve theological assumptions and what science already knows. Thus it can find out about God using empirical techniques, perhaps even launching itself from traditional categories and puzzles such as morality and teleology. Further, when they study the nature of what comprises a human person, scientists become key-theologians undertaking science of God.
Key-theology can empirically know about God. Also, the God model used (God is responsible for everything) itself has empirical dimensions; as a hypothesis, factors can infirm it, even if it tenaciously resists this ending up with a hopelessly inconsistent or irrational God, for instance, calls the model into question. An alternative exists: nothing need be responsible for everything, not even nature. (If nature is responsible, then nature constitutes the God this chapter assumed.)
Western society desperately needs such accounts. The usual stories that culture teaches about the world and ourselves involve the evolution of the universe from the big bang to us as biological beings. These explanations brand as primary both matter and the science that seeks to explain it. The west also needs an equal story that makes human experience primary. Key-theology offers that within the account of evolution by advocating the inseparable intertwining of the spiritual and the physical, the human and the material. Evolution becomes as much spiritual as biological or physical, as the monist approach to happiness shows. Scientific research can generate knowledge of God and our spiritual selves. Thus, the universe that science explains leaves behind the image of cold and mechanical matter. Matter actually involves endless depths and mystery; it ties intimately with human subjectivity. It is spiritual.