For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get going for a few weeks yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down, and Kevin has been posting as regularly as ever. Kevin himself is one of the more unusual religious figures I know: a trained theologian and an elder of the Presbyterian church, he’s also a non-theist.
Today he offers an interesting rumination on the Vatican’s position on Christianity for extraterrestrials; it’s well worth a look.
Meanwhile there’s other news on the religious front: a revealing letter by Albert Einstein, in which he writes with unequivocal clarity about his unbelief, and about his low opinion of religion generally.
We hear a great deal about the relationship of science to religion; for the past few hundred years organized religion has had to cope with a continuous encroachment of science upon the aspects of truth to which it can credibly lay claim. Copernicus and Darwin in particular conquered a great deal of territory, but science has been waging a patient war of attrition all along, and, in some parts of the West such as Northern Europe, has almost claimed the day. (Other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan and Kansas, “not so much”.)
This means that believers are always on the lookout for scientists they can name as sympathetic to their cause. We hear at fatiguing length, for example, of the obsessive and idiosyncratic piety of Newton. Maxwell was a devout evangelical, Mendel an abbot, and Boyle saw science as an expression of the glory of God. But the best catch of all was the great Einstein himself, who made more than a few comments that seemed to mark him as a believer: for example “God does not play dice”, and the oft-cited “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Well, as they say in these parts, fuhgeddabouddit. The letter in the news today, which was written a year before Einstein’s death to philosopher Eric Gutkind, seems clear enough:
…the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
Einstein also had this to say about the Jews (of which he was, of course, one):
…for me, the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. …the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than all other people…
As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.
This is not to say that Einstein was not a spiritual man; it is well known that he had a deep and abiding sense of the numinous. But this letter should make quite clear that he would be no willing ally of old-time religionists looking for endorsements.
Finally, speaking of the distinction between religion and spirituality, New York Times columnist David Brooks had a good piece on that very subject in today’s paper. It touches upon free will, neuroscience, our experience of the sacred, and the nature of the self, and you can read it here.
6 Comments
Doggone it Malcolm,
I “sort of” wish I hadn’t linked to your site from you know where. I think I’ve added about 15, maybe 25 sites to “My Favorites list.”
But thanks anyway.
JK
Thanks for the shout-out, Malcolm.
FYI, I wouldn’t describe myself as a trained theologian, as I haven’t gone through seminary, nor have I made a deep and extensive study of Christian scripture. What I am is, as you noted, an elder of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), a title that conveys no spiritual authority but indicates that I have a function within the church’s polity (active elders vote on policy matters and engage in other aspects of church government). My academic background does contain some of what might be called “theology,” but most of my background falls more appropriately under the rubric “religious studies,” which is, in many ways, a close cousin of “soft” disciplines like anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. (An atheist can comfortably engage in religious studies, for example; he need not have a personal religious commitment. A theologian, on the other hand, almost always has a vested interest in the doing of theology. Exceptions to this are exceedingly rare.)
The terms “theology” and “religious studies” represent concepts with blurred boundaries; while not truly interchangeable terms, they are used interchangeably in some surprising contexts. Example: when I was a French major at Georgetown University, my minor was listed as “theology” — GU had no other category to describe the courses I was taking.
All of which is to say that, in the eyes of Georgetown University (more specifically, in the eyes of the people who wrote up the undergrad course catalogs), I might be said to have a theology background, but in truth my background is more properly in the field of religious studies. My MA from Catholic U. was in Religion and Culture, which is essentially religious studies plus a Catholic theological component (interesting experience for a Protestant).
Kevin
Hi JK,
Not quite sure what to say about that, but you’re welcome, of course.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the clarification. Indeed I was using the two terms without care as to the important distinction you point out, and you are quite right to correct me.
You are still an interesting case, though, as your upcoming walk seems intended not simply to study the phenomenon of religion, as a cultural anthropologist might, but also to be something of a religious activist — to influence the practice of religion itself.
How do you suppose your nontheism will affect your conversations with believers? Are you going to be keeping that “close to the vest”?
(Perhaps that should be “close to the vestments”.)
Malcolm,
I’ll likely be honest about where I stand if people ask me, but this walk is — to steal an idea from Hillary Clinton — all about listening. It’s a listening tour; if dialogue happens along the way, that’s great. Otherwise, I’d like to find out, in as candid a manner as possible, what people of various religious traditions (and even those not in a particular tradition) feel about other traditions. I’m sure some of the conversations I have will bleed into the area of “OK, we’ve talked about other religions, so what happens next?”, and I’ll be curious to hear various traditions’ insights into that matter, too. So perhaps I will be playing things close to the vestments, but such a strategy will be more in the service of listening than because I don’t want to alarm people with my frighteningly nontraditional views.
(As you might guess, a lot of people within these traditions don’t toe the line, and it often comes as a relief to them to hear that they’re not alone. Check out the Catholics.)
Kevin
Kevin, this is going to be an amazing adventure, and the best part is that you are going to get to the end of it and write a fascinating and important book, which will then be picked up by Oprah. Mark my words.