35. The Value of Religion (3)

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The relevance that most people seek, almost reflexively, is conformity to the established materialistic world-view. Modern criticisms of religion generally therefore tend to focus on what religions say as statements of fact. Does GOD exist? Is heaven a real place? Are there objective moral rules? Do the stories of the Qur’an or the Bible tally with the latest scientific accounts? In other words, does religion fit within our (greater) frame? One verse that indirectly addresses this line of questioning is Q2:259:

Some of the ancient commentators cited by Ibni Kathir believe that the one who passed was Khidr, the same servant from among Our servants (Q18:65) mentioned in Chapter 14 of this book who became a spiritual guide for Musa (peace be upon him). But in our day, a person who asks this kind of question would likely assume that God could not give life to this place following its death. Rather his mental vision would be blocked by the large, opaque, and seemingly solid and impenetrable structure that we take science with its mass of facts to be. A demonstration of how a donkey is wholly resurrected from bare bones, as mentioned in the above verse, would be wasted on him, as per another passage, Q15: 14-15:

By insulating the one who passed, along with his food and drink, from the ordinary passage of time, and then effectively reversing time by bringing his donkey back to life, GOD revealed what His servant should have known from the start – that the so-called laws of nature, such as the second law of thermodynamics, are merely sunnatul-Lah, GOD’s customary way of doing things, regularities that can bedazzle and bewitch us into thinking that they are our rulers and not just temporary rules. We do, of course, need regularity and predictability to function reliably, efficiently, and meaningfully within this realm of entropy, facts, and figures, and so the world has an order and consistency that conforms to our own constitution.

When we take these provisional frames of intentional regularity to be picture frames, hanging on solid walls, rather than window frames, through which we can see the spiritual landscape stretching out in all directions past the bounds of space and time, we become trapped and isolated inside the constructs of our own minds and begin to deny what is going on beyond.

This mentality of favouring solid facts over expansive views corresponds, according to Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, to the brain’s left hemisphere with its naïve rationality dominating the more intuitive, open-minded outlook of the right hemisphere:

. . . it prioritises the system, regardless of experience; it stays within the system of signs. Truth, for it, is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with. . . . For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of being ‘true’ to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.¹

In this house of the fact-filled mind, therefore, religion provides the panes of glass, and faith is the willingness to look, not merely at the patterns on them, but farther, into the heavenly scenes beyond. When those panes are clean and wide, they are not only moral or spiritual but also practical; they show us where we came from (the Kingdom of GOD), where we are headed (back to Him), and what the road there looks like. Yes, those panes are mostly ready-made, i.e. given by revelation or tradition, but they offer enough scope for everyone to have his or her own particular outlook. If we choose to manufacture our own glass, we are at liberty to do so, but the final product will not only be ‘from scratch’ but itself scratched and diminished by our peculiar idiosyncrasies and failings, and in the end will give us nothing more than the same view we could have had from the start, and for free. Why try to elbow a Lao Tzu, a Muhammad, or a Guru Nanak away from your little did-it-yourself square inch of glass, when you can borrow their spectacles, so graciously bestowed to every succeeding generation, and see how far you can emulate their gaze?

Through religion, we come to know that, besides the worldly facts that occupy so much of our attention and our schools’ curricula, there are heavenly facts that defy our attempts to describe or circumvent them. If we define facts as objective truths concerning which there is a broad consensus, then the values we use to identify facts, such as coherence, consistency, reliability, and relevance, are in some sense also factual. Universal beliefs such as justice being better than injustice, or peace and harmony being preferable to violence and disorder, are harbingers and messengers of a celestial dimension where measurement gives way to instant recognition and consent. Religion trains us to honour and prioritize these higher, eternal facts.

Where am I now? Where am I going? Where should I be going, and how do I get there? These are practical – no, urgent – questions, and most of us have much less than one lifetime to get them answered. As I mentioned in the Prologue, the debates are endless, and time is short. Religion is the travel package that sets us on our feet, dusts us off, and pushes us out the door and on our way with the least hesitation and the greatest expertise.

Why, then, is the modern physicalist narrative so compelling and attractive, despite its lack of a transcendent perspective and a potentially fatal deficit of long-term practicality? Why are we so inclined to take scientism as the gospel of reality?

¹ McGilchrist, p. 193

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