Copyright 2002 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved. A version appeared in Ultimate Reality and Meaning 25 (2) June 2002: 148-158.
by
ABSTRACT.
Because scientific research suggests how the universe, including ourselves, operates and comes to be, science can and does suggest how we might increase our happiness. These strategies have evolved into us. This is an aspect of God at work, however, and thus the happiness strategies say something about how we might live in tune with the work of God. The present article is a prolegomenon for a scientific study of happiness and other human qualities in the hope that such an undertaking might offer us the opportunity to learn about our spiritual selves and the nature of God in relation to us.
CONTENTS.
2. To Think Theologically, Think Scientifically
2.1. A Convergence of Science and Theology
2.3. Questions from a Common Method
3. To Gain Knowledge of Our Spiritual Selves, Use Science
3.2. The Theological Use of Science
3.3. Limitations of Following a Natural Desire
3.4. Making Decisions toward a Balance
4. To Gain Knowledge of God, Use Science
I live in
the center of
Bacon (1220-1292) lived during medieval
times. We remember him because he promoted experimental science well before its
rise to dominance (Welch 1992, pp. 174-7). In 1242, he became the first person
in
My sense of what theology is about follows a usual line. The subject of theology, what it addresses, is human life and making sense of living. The object of theology, what it centrally refers to, is God.
1. Theology peers through the lens called God, the core theory by which it tries to find meaning and make sense of our lives and the world.
I carry with me other decisions about how to develop a theology and here I deviate from the usual line. I suggest that theology adopt the empirical or scientific method. Several people have considered this matter or something like it before; I want to push it further and look more deeply at the data that theology entertains. How might we investigate with science the nature of God? How might we think theologically with the method and results of science? First, I want to explain why I believe that theology ought to follow the approach of science.
To me science and religion are both universal, and basically very similar. The Nobel Prize physicist, Charles Townes, reflects on the convergence of science and theology and writes that they become almost indistinguishable if we look at the real nature of each, their differences largely superficial (Townes 1966, p. 301). In spelling out their near identity, he comments on the goals of the two: science tries to discover the order of the universe and to understand through it the things we sense around us, including, I would add, us. The principles and laws of science express this order and strive to state [it] in the simplest and yet most inclusive ways. Theology tries to understand and accept the purpose and meaning of our universe and how we fit into it. To help find this purpose, we often interpret a supreme purposeful force, which we call God, as the unifying and inclusive origin of meaning (Ibid., p. 305).
Townes continues:
Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart. It is interesting that the Japanese word for physics is butsuri, which translated means simply the reasons for things. Thus we inevitably link closely together the nature and the purpose of our universe (Ibid., p. 305).
Townes argument leads him to believe that science and theology will join together. Both attempt to understand the universe and both deal with the same substance (Townes 1966, p. 310). New strength for each arises through their convergence (Sharpe 1984).
Townes comments match Michael Polanyis work on human knowing (Polanyi 1964). Polanyi argues that the process of discovery, the key to all understanding, unites two methods: the one by which we gain scientific knowledge, and the other by which we gain theological knowledge. As science is a creative human enterprise, so is theology; they work together at knowing.
To justify theologys adopting sciences method goes beyond noticing the convergence of the two fields, however. I need more than Polanyi and Townes impressions. I need more because two recent emphases
theology says nothing worthwhile, and
theology needs isolating and defending against anything secular,
separate the disciplines. To proceed in my proactive way will, therefore, face resistance. Would that I could offer a deductive proof of my approach, but I cannot. Only suggestions, like those from Townes and Polanyi, come to mind. Other suggestions flow from the recognition that modern western culture believes the scientific method creates the paradigm for creating truthful, useful, and perhaps meaningful knowledge:
Theology should be rational and empirical, like science, because it invests in truth. John Godbey writes: theology must wrestle with the best human knowledge available in the historical epoch in which a [person] writes. This admissionarisesout of a concern for the wrestle of theology with truth (Godbey 1970, p. 208). Many of the great theological thinkers right down through the ages Origen, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, and Tillich, for instance have grappled this way. Today, Godbey continues, the method of science offers the best human knowledge available.
Theology dare not drift too far from sciences way to find truth lest it fail to communicate with society and thus fail to change secular life and institutions. The central motivation for theologys adopting the scientific method will probably arise, therefore, from a desire to serve secular life and experience, the theologians secular being. We need an empirically-based theology, Brian Cooper writes, in which religious affirmations and creedal statements are formulated in a manner analogous to scientific formulae and natural laws (Cooper 1969, p. 11). To do this would give weight and vibrancy to the theological enterprise of knowing and help it face more openly its conflict with the secular-scientific world in which it and we live.
A guide to the joining of scientific and theology is what I call the camellia model (Sharpe and Walgate 1988).
A camellia tree flourished in the front lawn of my childhood home. The leaves and petals of its flowers represent aspects of each of scientific thought and theology. Some connect through the center of the flower they belong to, while others connect through the twigs and branches between them. Each relates to, feeds, and depends on the rest. Though each petal and each leaf and each stalk is separate from the others, they form an intricate whole that eclipses the parts.
Applying this model to the relationship between scientific and theology directs our attention to the numerous points of contact and shared segments of knowledge (the petals of a flower, the stalks and the branches of the tree) over which scientific and theological theories can hold things in common. I regard a shared method as a substantial branch or trunk through which connections and flow can occur. Theologys adopting the scientific method provides, in the vision of the camellia model, a vibrant, colorful, and living complex. It becomes a whole where all parts and aspects connect.
I propose three more ground rules for applying the scientific method to theology, points I glean from the work of Ian Barbour, Nancey Murphy, Arthur Peacocke, and others (Barbour 1974, Murphy 1990, Peacocke 1984, and Sharpe and Walgate 1998). The following three rules add to number 1 above:
2. Theology focuses on the creation of models.
3. Theology depends on experience, some of which is public and repeatable.
4. Theology can find inspiration in anything, and every event becomes a potential datum that theology can measure itself against. (In other words, the data for theology can lie outside what people may claim as spiritual experiences, practices, moralities, meanings, purposes, faith healings, and so on.)
These three points about method apply to all the sciences, but the degrees to which each applies vary across the sciences according to their aims and peculiarities. The rules also vary by degree from the sciences to theology (Barbour 1974; Clayton 1989). For instance, each person holds her or his own theology built from universals (public and repeatable experiences) and shared basic theories. Theologies build in individualized ways according to the persons unique life story, biology, and personal peculiarities. Physics, in contrast, does not usually build its theories in individualized ways. While theology differs by degree from many other fields of inquiry, it can still follow the same basic method.
What follows develops the above numbered points 1-4 about method. I try with them to understand something about God and our spiritual nature. Questions that now arise and I address include:
What types of models ought theology to focus on and where might it find them for example, models like those in physics or models like those in history?
How does theology depend on experience for example, to what extent can the core idea for God within a system of theology change if it conflicts with experience?
To what data ought theology especially pay attention for example, data like those in quantum physics or like those in historical analysis?
I use happiness to illuminate the method I develop and this leads me to address three more questions (Sharpe 1998 and Sharpe and Bryant To appear):
How does happiness relate to God?
How does happiness relate to our spiritual nature?
How might we become happier in a spiritual way?
I start with the relationship between happiness and our spiritual nature. First, for clarification, what is our spiritual nature? The answer to this depends on the idea of God. My foundational belief reduces approximately to this:
God is responsible for all that happens and for everything that is, was, and will be. Every thing and every event, therefore, is spiritual. I take seriously the oneness of monism; no devil or other reality exists independent of God (Sharpe 2000).
As everything is spiritual, so all of each of us is spiritual.
This understanding differs from a more typical point of view. We tend to discern a particular aspect of God that we want to associate with the title, God. We reduce God to a facet of everything but, we judge, the most important facet or to a being alongside other beings but, we judge, surpassing them. To recognize God entails that we distinguish it-her-him from everything we could or do experience. We approximate the whole in order to know it.
We similarly single out aspects of our being and behavior all of which are spiritual as especially spiritual; we bifurcate ourselves to help us understand and live. Western culture thereby artificially isolates a sense of spiritual in which our spiritual self refers to a moreness that surpasses what we do or are physically. Some forms of happiness, for instance, exceed eating our favorite foods and other such physical activities. That extra is spiritual.
Does my sense of 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 the Dane, Viggo
Mortensen, suggests, wordswe could just as well do without (Mortensen 1987,
p. 197). Perhaps a fully naturalistic account suffices.
Not so. Everything is spiritual contributes something that atheistic
accounts overlook. It emphasizes the importance of subjective experience and
the entanglement of God with our world. It points to an approach to life and
meaning that we usually fail to notice. It starts toward a more wholesome
perspective on what is real and significant, how we might behave, and the
nature of our spiritual selves.
I sought a beginning point from which to comprehend our spiritual nature. Now I turn to the nature of happiness (Sharpe 1998, pp. 301-14). Happiness developed through our evolution. As Robert Wright tells us: 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 (Wright 1994, p. 298). We naturally desire it and should seek to achieve it. Striving toward greater happiness continues in us as an innate drive and must be good for us natural-selection-wise.
Science suggests how the world, including ourselves, operates including, therefore, what we can do to become happier. The research of social psychology helps dislodge this information: it suggests ways to live that increase our happiness and conditions under which these ways tend to work (Sharpe, To appear). For instance, we experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow when an activity absorbs us and time flies (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). In flow, we optimally engage our skills and talents. In flow, we achieve a sense of satisfaction, meaning, purpose, control, and greater happiness. We should open ourselves to such scientific findings (noting their provisional nature) in our quest for greater happiness. The class of drugs that includes Prozac offers another example of scientific research that can lead to increased happiness.
The findings of science tell us not only how to become happier, but how to become happier spiritually. This claim may seem odd because we usually apply 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? Is taking Prozac a spiritual activity?
The operation of God produces the world that science seeks to describe. Science, therefore, tells us how God works, how the spiritual operates. Science studies the spiritual. In particular, scientific research on how behaviors or drugs promote happiness tells us how the spiritual operates vis--vis happiness, and helps us devise ways to increase our happiness spiritually.
To learn from science about happiness increases our spiritual or theological understanding both in my 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 (Sharpe 1998, pp. 303-4). The spiritual and the physical highlight different facets of the same phenomenon but, in principle, view the same faces. The spiritual can equal the biological even though we may think of the spiritual as different, as perhaps involving the biological but exceeding it. The spiritual can provide ways to achieve the biological, ways to raise our 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 each other that we cannot separate them.
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. Traditionally, we might ask, If God wants happiness for us, why do we not feel happy all the time? Neuro-pyscho-biologically, we 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 be happy?
Why do we not want to be unhappy?
What is the biological purpose of not feeling happy all the time?
Unhappiness is not necessarily the lack of happiness. Does feeling no unhappiness equal 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, we are safe, we are out of danger it is 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 feel unhappy. It pushes us automatically to escape unhappiness and the danger unhappiness represents.
Pushing us to obtain more and more happiness, the drive to escape from unhappiness continues beyond its immediate goal.
This answer leaves much unanswered. The happiness-spirituality relationship is more complex than the biological function of happiness and unhappiness. If happiness evolved into us, so did aggression and other negative feelings and behaviors. Is pursuing them also a spiritual activity? Further, writing this paper could so engross me that I fail to notice a fire about to consume children trapped in the building opposite; happiness-increasing activities such as flow could absorb me so much that I do not see something wrong in front of me. Wrong or ill-pursued happiness seeking exists. There is a moral dimension to happiness seeking that the spiritual also concerns itself with and which my above reliance on scientific research did not address.
A way into this follows a traditional idea augmented with biology. Modern westerners think highly of freedom. We hold it as a paramount virtue for each individual, for each society, and, increasingly, for other animals and nature. An aspect of our freedom is free will. A dictionary defines will as: The power of making a reasoned choice or decision or of controlling ones own actions. Free will is: Freedom of decision or of choice between alternatives (Websters New World Dictionary). Free will exists and we experience it. That biology and culture influence and direct your mind to believe in your autonomy does not deem your free will illusory. But it is complex. I freely choose to edit this paper though my sense of obligation under pressure from others and myself to finish before its deadline in part influences my choice. The idea of free will can overrate our sense of choice because it often ignores the other factors biological, cultural, genetic, and coincidental that influence and sometimes determine how we act, feel, and think. Free will is usually not all or nothing; we possess a degree of it. How to understand it is another matter.
A perspective on free will starts with evolution: will, including free will, emerges in and as a result of our biological evolution. Free will requires, for instance, self-awareness that we can see and consciously weigh up alternatives a characteristic that seems to arise from our evolved capacities for consciousness and memory (McCrone 1991). The degree of our self-awareness and therefore ability to choose constitutes a human talent that, in its magnitude, distinguishes us from other known animals. Because of this gift, free will offers advantages for our species survival and capacity to adapt to different physical and social environments. Because of it, though, life became more complex. We now must choose ways to behave that are best for us, including those that lead to greater happiness. We now must choose between often competing, perhaps conflicting, inclinations, many of which offer positive or desirable values.
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 me means. What is best for me is also something our self-awareness enables us to decide from our memories about what our previous decisions lead to and from cultural wisdom about what others decisions lead to. We can ask: What for me balances happiness and other things, like justice? Where do I place my 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 whom we are in relation to each of the inclinations that compete within us and a discovery of what each inclination means for us.
This
choosing offers another place for science to help. We can examine each
inclination within its evolutionary and behavioral contexts, results obtained
through scientific inquiry. This helps us understand the inclinations and why
we respond in the ways we do. It helps show us how to achieve or avoid any of
the traits including happiness that we may choose to follow or explore.
Science lets us pause in our process and examine our behavior.
Decision-making between inclinations is 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 is the human image of God. Spirituality (traditionally, Gods way for us) asks our self-awareness to develop ourselves as best we can. To be spiritual means to take account of all the aspects of ourselves and to decide from among them what is best for us. 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. I referred to this discernment and action above when I introduced our spiritual selves and called it moreness. It requires our self-awareness and this carries it beyond what we do physically.
To seek greater happiness is not a natural drive that we must follow under the direction of science or anything or anyone else. 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. 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 we know of God. A series of questions helps demonstrate this:
Where do we find knowledge of God? The universe presents the only face of God we can see or comprehend. We must inquire of the universe, therefore, to find out about God vis--vis us.
How do we gain this knowledge from the universe? Science shows how reality functions and offers the best way to understand the universe. It thus tells us about the only aspects of God we can know.
What aspects of knowledge of the universe pertain particularly to God? What we know of our spiritual characteristics is also knowledge of God and in so far as we consider them the most important in the universe scientific understanding of them concerns what lies central in God.
We discover the nature of God from our spiritual nature and we discover that with science. Conversely, the nature of God as it pertains to our lives is our spiritual selves. Scientific knowledge of our (spiritual) selves, therefore, goes hand in hand with knowledge of God.
Since our spiritual nature includes happiness, might God enjoy happiness too? Might we personify God and say that it-she-he achieves greater happiness the same way science tells us we can? This is ridiculous. On the other hand, the sentence, God is happy and wants us to be happy as well, offers shorthand for two things:
It offers an ontological statement about God being happy: God is happy. In so far as it-she-he matches or mirrors the spiritual nature of human beings however much she-he transcends our versions of these properties we can personify God as happy. God is also sad, ill, tired, well, and so on. What do subjective qualities mean when applied to God? I find their divinized version so vague and thwart with difficulties that at present I prefer to avoid thinking about them. Further research may give them meaning.
The phrase, God is, entails the means by which God creates the universe and therefore that God evolves us. An important and evolved thrust of ours urges us to increase our happiness. Therefore, 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.
The usual stories that our culture teaches about the world and ourselves involve the evolution of the universe from the big bang to us as biological beings. These accounts brand as primary both matter and the science that seeks to explain it. We also need, however, a story that makes human experience primary.
I have
shown that to accept the inseparable intertwining of the spiritual and the
physical can help elevate the human to sit alongside matter. Evolution becomes
as much spiritual as biological or physical. My monist approach, for instance
through the way it handles our experience of happiness, shows that physical
phenomena are also spiritual. Scientific research thus 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.
I mentioned
that I aim to follow the example of Bacon. I also mentioned that I live close
to
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