Boot Camp Day 2: A Different Kind of Faith

How open should an open mind be? What are the limits of tolerance and understanding, and what happens to those limits as our knowledge of the natural world grows?

Today I had lunch with an old friend—an intelligent woman in her late thirties, the executive director of a thriving arts organization. We met at a vegan Indian buffet. Since our last meeting had been at a vegetarian restaurant she’d picked, I asked her a few questions about her vegetarianism. She said she hadn’t eaten any meat or fish for 12 years. I admired her commitment. I told her that although I’m attracted to the environmental, social, and health benefits of vegetarianism, I enjoy eating a moderate amount of meat too much to make the complete change in eating habits.

Later, I asked what I thought was an innocent question: Is there anywhere in Houston where one can learn to practice meditation in an environment free of religious influences? I’ve been interested in exploring meditation for its supposed health benefits—lower blood pressure and stress-related hormones—and in hopes of gaining some relaxation, focus, and clarity of thought. I want to learn a few meditation practices from experts—people who’ve practiced and experimented and studied the methods and techniques they teach. But as an atheist with a scientific/naturalistic approach to knowledge and understanding, I’m not particularly interested in any particular mythology or theology or scriptural tradition in support of meditation.

To my surprise, without even asking me to give any further explanation for my question, my friend went on the attack. She accused me of closing my mind to the possibilities of what the religious meditative traditions have to teach me.

I said, “I don’t want to spend a lot of time studying ancient sacred texts.”

She answered, “How can any time spent learning be wasted time?”

I tried to say something to the effect that there are a million other things to learn that are more interesting to me than the mythologies of gods and goddesses and revered and sainted teachers. She sputtered something about the duality she sensed in me, and some other things I couldn’t quite make sense of.

She went on to suggest that my irreligiosity was the product, somehow, of my Catholic upbringing. She didn’t explain how Catholicism led to my secular humanist worldview, and I didn’t get a chance to ask. I was too busy trying to defend myself against the suggestion that wanting to learn a little something about meditation without having to endure religious teaching or preaching somehow signifies that I’ve closed my mind.

With astonishingly few words, she communicated that I was an unenlightened soul, the product of a twisted religious formation that I’d obvious failed to transcend, some kind of pragmatist asshole who couldn’t think of any learning except in terms of the specific benefit I might gain from it. I didn’t defend myself very effectively. But I think that my friend eventually sensed that she’d hurt my feelings, or insulted my intellect, or trampled on my worldview. (She’d managed to do all three.) As she paid for my lunch—it was her turn—she offered to ask around and see what suggestions she might be able to give me about the meditation question.

I drove home from lunch feeling browbeaten, trivialized, and ashamed of what an incompetent defender of my worldview I am. I tried to think of better ways I might have explained my request.

“Say, for example, we agree that the Roman Catholic Church offers some valid and useful moral teachings. But you’re a non-Catholic. Do you go to Mass every Sunday to try to find the two minutes of valid moral teachings mixed in with 48 minutes of rituals, incantations, readings from ancient scripture, and bake-sale announcements? Or do you find some experts who’ve distilled the best of Catholic moral teaching, and learn from them?”

Maybe she wouldn’t agree on the basic premise of that line of reasoning. Let’s try something else: “Imagine I go to a Zen center where they teach Zen Buddhist meditation. Suppose 50 percent of the lesson is practical instruction in meditation techniques, and 50 percent is teaching about the history of Buddhist spirituality, or the life of the Buddha, or other religious content associated with Zen Buddhism. Is it unreasonable for me not to want to waste half my time learning information that has no relevance to my worldview?”

Is my worldview inherently closed-minded? If I limit myself to knowledge of the world that can be understood and tested and verified by the scientific method, does that make me some kind of bigot?

I got to thinking about a podcast I listened to yesterday. The show was Point of Inquiry, the radio show and podcast of the Center for Inquiry, a secular-humanist think tank. The show explores issues related to pseudoscience, the paranormal, alternative medicine, atheism, secular humanism, nonbelief, and so forth. In this particular show, host D. J. Grothe was interviewing Dr. Joe Nickell, a research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly the Center for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). I love the committee’s work, which is reported in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. They investigate ghosts, UFO sightings, crop circles, Madonnas sighted in pieces of toast, and all sorts of other extraordinary claims.

Dr. Nickell was talking about his work, and about the notion of skeptical inquiry. He said that the most important thing is to keep an open mind. He said that we must be willing to do the work of skeptical inquiry, to look into the reality of any claim of the paranormal or supernatural, to study it with the tools of science, and to reach conclusions based upon the evidence we find. He criticized those who have already made up their mind: “There’s no such thing as ghosts. There’s no such thing as Bigfoot. There are no alien visitors.” He said that it’s important to test each claim individually.

I felt a [1000 words] little betrayed by his criticism of us unflinchingly skeptical folks. There I stood, accused of close-mindedness by someone whom I’d thought of as a staunch ally in the war against unreason! And then I ruminated on his argument some more, and I thought about what I take for granted. I take for granted that people who are doing work like his—applying science and reason to extraordinary claims—have my interests (and those of humanity as a whole) in mind. I assume—in recognition of his education, his stature in the field of paranormal investigation, the reputation of CSICOP and the Center for Inquiry—that I can trust him to do the investigating for me. My confidence in the scientific method as a way to obtain knowledge and my faith in people who have demonstrated over and over again that they are committed to the scientific worldview make it unnecessary for me to test every claim myself. If Joe Nickell has visited the house and determined that there’s no evidence that it’s haunted, I have “faith” that the house isn’t haunted.

And I can further extrapolate, from the enormous and convincing body of scientific knowledge on the subject, that no other houses are haunted either.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick