Concerning Aliens, Faith, Reason, Memory, and Religious Experience

The following gem comes from the movie "Contact" based on the novel by Carl Sagan.  A video of the scene from which the dialogue is taken can be found here.

Senator: You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that, to put it mildly, strains credibility... Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith?

Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. . . . As a scientist I must concede that. I must volunteer that.

...

Mr. Kitz: Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony and admit that this journey to the center of the galaxy, in fact, never took place?

Ellie Arroway: Because I can't. I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not — that none of us — are alone! ... I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish.

 Dr. Arroway, an admitted unbeliever, is here describing and defending the reality of her remarkable journey into deep space.  The surprise is that everything which this woman of science is describing about the effect of her journey can be applied to a mystical/religious experience.  Religious experience (and the resulting belief in God) is something which can't really be proven.  Evaluated in the cold light of reason, there is always another possible explanation, which is often simpler (cf. Occam's razor).  Yet faith is something given which touches the very core of a person's being, transforming the believer and opening up a way of seeing things which is endowed with meaning.  "The thing that people are most hungry for, meaning, is the one thing that science hasn't been able to give them," reflects the character, Palmer Joss.  Religion, on the other hand, has.

There is a difficulty, however, in communicating a faith which stems from experience.  It is the experience itself that creates certainty in the believer.  Reason cannot verify the experience, but somehow the heart knows what it has experienced is true.  As Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."  But if faith comes from experience, my personal experience will probably not be convincing to you, no matter how vividly I feel it.  Recall Dr. Arroway's line: "I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish."

In reflecting on the relationship between faith and reason, I've thought that perhaps faith ultimately has to come from experience, or something like it.  By some means or another, the heart has to be moved to believe.  Reason can't give us faith, because, without any premises from which to start, it is impossible to prove anything by reason.  We cannot even prove that we are awake instead of dreaming.  Again I turn to Pascal:

We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument.

Here is the real problem: If God is known through experience or intuition, then why are there unbelievers? Wouldn't God want everyone to know him?  Why doesn't he make his presence more known?  Why doesn't he give us surer intuitions or experiences, ones which our reason cannot so easily question?  There may not even be a satisfactory answer to this question, so I will not attempt a detailed explanation here.  Perhaps God reveals just enough of himself so that only those who want to find him can, and those who don't want to don't have to.  Pascal proposes another reason: it is our sinful passions which obscure God from us.  "Convince yourself [that God exists]," he writes, "not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions."  But if Deus absconditus est most of the time, God does appear in hints and shadows, if only in hints and shadows.  Orual sees the palace for a split second in C.S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces, a work which conveys Lewis' own answer to the problem.

I want to suggest that memory is indispensable for having faith in a universe where God's presence isn't overwhelming.  Experiences, like Orual seeing the palace, are isolated to a particular point in time.  Memory allows those experiences to be brought into the present.  This is part of the reason memory plays such an important role in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  The Jewish feast of Passover is a memorial of the original Passover meal, when the Jewish people were freed from slavery and bondage in Egypt.  When Jews today celebrate the Passover meal, they understand they are not simply reenacting the meal that saved their ancestors thousands of years ago.  Rather, they understand that they are participating in the ongoing saving action of God, who saves them personally in the here and now.  It is in a similar light that Christians understand the exhortation of Christ to offer bread and wine "in memory of me." The act of commemorating the Last Supper is understood as something which brings Christ's once-and-for-all, saving sacrifice on the cross into the present, so that the merits of this action can be communicated to the believer. 

Perhaps we've all had those moments of great clarity or insight, when we finally we able to see the meaning in all the work we've been undertaking.  Or we've had that moment when we're sure that God exists because of some great grace that we've received.  Some of the great saints, the mystics, report having experiences in which they were indescribably enlightened.  St. Ignatius reported mystical experiences that were so powerful that even if the Bible didn't exist and he had no other source of religious knowledge, he would have willingly died for the faith in light of his experience.  At the same time, the mystics, who had such vivid experiences of God, were often the ones who went through the greatest experiences of isolation, the dark night of the soul.  How could they have possibly gotten through those times?  The answer must be memory.  Their only source of hope was the memory of the Lord's blessings, the trust that at some point they would be brought from darkness into light.  Though to a lesser extent, I reckon we all go through moments when life seems meaningless and lonely.  These moments are the true test of faith, when a trusting leap is required.  It is then we are called to remember.

Faith is an inexhaustible subject for reflection.  I in no way intend to be definitive about the relationship between faith, experience, and memory.  Perhaps, I miss the mark in saying that faith comes from experience and intuition.  But, I do believe that faith is a gift.  It is not reducible to reason, but is something, like love, which goes far beyond our reason.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat mourning and weeping when we remembered Zion.
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you, If I do not exalt Jerusalem beyond all my delights.

Psalm 137:1, 5-6

Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School

I recently finished watching this film for the second time.  If you get a chance to watch it, I highly recommend you do so.  (You should be able to instantly watch it on Netflix.)  It's sentimental and a little sad, while weaving together a number of different threads, making for a thought provoking movie.  To provide a bit of context, I had to watch this film for the first time as part of Professor David O'Connor's wonderful Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love class.  One of the themes which comes through in the movie's thoughtfulness about love is the connection between romantic love and art (specifically dance).  My intent is not to summarize the plot, but rather to take a quick look at some interesting thematic elements.

A chance encounter leads the protagonist Frank Keane to Marilyn Hotchkiss' dance class where he is at first unwilling, hesitant and uninspired on the dance floor.  However, in what I take to be one of the most striking scenes of the movie, Mr. Keane, asked to demonstrate the lindy hop, loses all his inhibitions and lets the dance take control.  This is a powerful moment, one of deep emotional expression for Frank.  At this moment, Frank in some way is able to move past his grief, and is opened up for what is a budding romance.

Here, Mr. Keane learned an important lesson about dance.  "Dance is a very powerful drug Mr. Keane," says the Marienne, his instructor, "If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed."  Throughout the movie, we see how dance helps characters to channel their feelings and to exorcise their demons.  Yet, dance is not something meant to be unbounded.  In this moment of abandon Mr. Keane must be reproved and called back within himself.  He is disrupting the dance class.  This is why dance must be "embraced judiciously."   Marienne continues: "One must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its rewards."

You see dance, just like anything else of great power, has a right way it is used.  If there were not rules for dance, it would no longer hold its form and degenerate into something disorderly.  This is not only true of dance.  Marienne admonishes another character: "There are rules, Mr. Ipswitch, in life, just as there are rules in dance. Those rules may seem arbitrary at times, they may seem impossible at times, they may seem unfair or onerous, but they are rules nonetheless. And they must not be broken."

This connects to another aspect of the movie which involves the flashbacks to 1962 when another key character, Steve, is twelve and is unwillingly signed up for Marilyn Hotckiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School.  Steve is at the age when he is starting to be interested in girls, but hardly knows how to express it.  The closest he gets is giving Lisa Gobar a black eye.  What Marilyn Hotckiss is doing, though her students hardly realize it, is teaching these young men and women a way of expressing these new feelings appropriately.  The boys learn, though it is at first full of rigid formalism, how to ask their partner for a dance.  The girls then respond with the formulaic "I'd be enchanted.."  Then the two begin a rigid boxstep.  If you've tried to learn how to ballroom dance, you know that this process of learning how to dance can be kind of awkward.  You try to avoid stepping on your partner's feet as you count your steps (hopefully not out loud) and pretty much just stick to the basic formula.  It is only after learning the basics that dance can become a creative, beautiful, flowing thing which takes on a life of its own.  But it still must stay within the bounds of what makes it a dance.

I reckon that one of the things we are missing in our society today is ballroom dance.  How many of us were really taught how to show our feelings of love and affection properly?  How many of us were taught how to show proper respect to members of the opposite sex?  I'm not here to pine away for a bygone era, but there was a reason for the rules of etiquette, and something is lost when many of them have fallen away.  Sure they may be rigid and awkward to get used to, but it is within those guidelines that true love and respect can be given direction and allowed to flourish.  In the same way, the rules of dance allow true expression and creativity to be realized.  This leads me to the Chesterton quote of the day: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Let it suffice to say that this film is one whose imagination very much brings out the connection between love and art about which I have previously written here.  Here, the art is a way to give expression to feelings and emotions which are otherwise inexpressible and even unmanageable.

Another interesting connection to which this film gives a nod is the connection between violence and love.  Watching it this time through, it seemed to me that violence was often an expression of some emotion and even of love that was perhaps misguided.  We see this when the girls insist on joining the boys' game of British Bulldogs, a rough and tumble version of sharks and minnows, and we see it when Steve (accidentally) gives Lisa a black eye.  This almost innocent "violence" connects with my own experience that teasing and picking on another is often a sign of affection.  For the adolescent (boy at any rate), nothing says I love you like drenching the beloved with water or decking them with a snow ball.  Indeed, I don't know if that is ever really outgrown.  We just learn other ways to express our affection as well (like hopefully ballroom dancing).

Of course there are many other things I could say about the movie, and many details that could be interesting think about.  For now, my hope is that I have sharpened and not dulled your interest in seeing this movie.  I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the movie for what it is, and appreciate the richness and depth of the film.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the some of the characters escape from civilization into what is called the Green World, a forested place of enchantment.  It is here in the Green World, away from the constraints of society where love is able to flourish.  Granted, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Green World is not quite so simple as that.  There is plenty of romantic confusion until the lovers finally end up with the right people.  But my point here is not to provide a literary analysis of Shakespeare's Green World.  Rather, I want to seize upon the basic point (or at least the point I want to make): reaching the place of true love and enchantment requires movement away from other considerations and into the wilderness.

The lesson, as I take is, is that we all need to spend time in the Green World, able to completely forget about the cares of society.  We need a chance to eschew work, school, and all the familiar places. It is the Green World, where we learn to fall in love again.  Here, we learn to love the beauty against which our hearts have been hardened.  We learn to love life itself once more.  We learn to love the people around us once again (or for the first time).  Here, we learn to love God.

In a phenomenon which may be related, I've recently experienced the desire to surround my self with beauty.  This past week/weekend I was stuck in a car for several hours I had nothing better to do but listen to Bach and read Evelyn Waugh (at the same time!).  The Bach and the Waugh were amazing, and filled me with a desire to spend all my days immersed in beautiful things like those.  Then a rainbow showed up.  Ahh!  These are the moments we live for, moments that pierce the soul.  I hope I'll remember that moment forever, just like I remember going to see Jeremy Denk and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform one of Beethoven's Piano Concerti (No. 1 in C Major, I believe).  It was absolutely stunning, but perhaps not as memorable as Denk's encore piece, in which he played a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  He executed the piece so well, that the audience literally laughed out loud at one of Ives' musical jokes.  Real laughter came from my mouth because of what someone played on a piano!  Or I remember the time I was able to go backpacking in the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  One incident in particular from that trip I remember.  We were on a precipice, several thousand feet up, from which we could the place where the mountain range on which we were standing began to rise out of the plain below.  The rock on which we were standing was most unusual: it was pitted.  We're talking softball sized holes that held rain water.  There must have been hundreds of them in the surrounding area.  They were made, so I was told, by lightning which naturally strikes the highest point in the area.  And as I was standing there, staring at the beautiful scene below me, I could feel energy start to build in the atmosphere behind me, that exciting, stirring change, which signals a storm is approaching.  I could see the thundercloud swiftly approaching.  Something was so exhilarating about that moment, on the verge of extreme danger and extreme beauty.  The situation also seemed to serve as a living reminder that all things are passing away, that we have to come down from the mountain eventually.  It's moments like these which we remember most, which we are forever grateful we experienced, which shape us into better people.

Now comes the plug for Aristotelian Ethics.  Like experiencing the Green World, experiencing the beauty described above requires a movement away from the ordinary.  It requires, in a word, leisure.  We do not recreate so that we can be a more effective production factor in our capitalist economy.  No, we work precisely for those moments of leisure so that we can nourish the soul, and learn what it really means to be human.  This is why civilization kicks barbarism's butt.  Civilization allows the flourishing of the arts.  When people are just trying to stay alive, living in a subsistence economy, the arts can't flourish.  It is only when a culture has 'left over' time, after keeping everyone alive, that time can be devoted to artistic pursuits.  We get individuals who can devote their time to nothing but creating beautiful things, and others who can take the time to appreciate them.  Here the arts flourish.

The astute reader will have noticed that I described the Green World as necessarily a place of removal from civilization, while at the same time praising civilization for giving us the arts.  Is there a contradiction somewhere in here?  I expect any seeming contradiction is resolved upon realizing that both natural beauty and artistic beauty are necessary at times to help us get in touch with that part of us which is most human, to sharpen our sensitivities, and to help us love.  Leisure is needed for both.

Thought: Philosophy is parasitic, just like the arts, coming out of society's collective leisure time.  It has a lot to do with love and beauty as well.  Lurking somewhere here might be a justification for my academic discipline.

Note to Self:  Read Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture.