What We Talk About When We Talk About God (5 page)

This truth about hierarchy and parts leads us to something called
holism
.

To explain holism, imagine the best scientists in the world, taking you apart, bone by bone, cell by cell, atom by atom

—well, maybe not. That's fairly gruesome, isn't it?

Let's try coming at this from a different angle: There's a good chance you have an elbow, probably even two. It's
your
elbow, and yet where would we find
you
in
your
elbow
? An elbow is made of skin and bones and blood and tendons, all of those basic elements made of even more basic elements that are ultimately made of atoms that are constantly coming to and going from you, leaving to make other people and things and places and maybe even other elbows on other people.

All of it raising the question:

So where are
you
in your body?

Your body could be taken apart all the way down to the last atom, and yet we would never begin to locate the unique essence that we know to be you. A bone is a bone is a bone; same with an eye or a tooth or large ears that stick out. They're each made of the same material that everything else is made of. At the same time, though, if they belong to you, they are uniquely yours.

This is because there are dimensions to you that transcend the actual parts and pieces that you refer to as your body—qualities and characteristics that emerge only at a larger, collective level, when all those parts are assembled to form you.
Holism is the reality that emerges only when all the parts are put together but can't be individually located, labeled, or identified at a smaller, component, parts level.

Hierarchy is about parts, and your body is made of lots of them—

206 bones,

proteins that run into each other a billion times a second,

enzymes that do a thousand jobs a second,

a brain with one hundred billion interconnected neurons,

each neuron having ten thousand connections and synapses—

and yet you are more than the sum of your parts in the same way that

novels are more than just the words,

songs are more than just the notes,

and boats are more than just the planks.

Holism is when two plus two equals infinity.

Holism is the truth that your consciousness and personality and awareness cannot be located in your physicality, in the same way that your identity and thoughts and fears and favorite ice cream and opinions about Jim Carrey movies can't be detected in your elbow or your nose or your pancreas.

Holism is your awareness that you cannot hold
soul
in your hand.

Holism is the living, breathing truth that you-the-whole are more than the sum of your parts.

Holism is the mystery at the heart of your existence—the fact that whatever it is that makes you most uniquely
you
cannot be measured or assessed or even found in any conventional, rational, scientific way.

Holism is your sense that there's more going on here, even though it can't be located in any one person, thing, or event.

These truths about the holism that is each of us leads us to a larger holism, one that continues to unfold across and outside of time itself.

Think back hundreds of millions of years ago to the most primitive life-forms that existed long before any humans roamed Earth and made fires and hung fuzzy dice from their rearview mirrors.

Were primordial bacteria discussing where they came from?

Were single-celled heterotrophs singing songs about love?

Were dinosaurs writing poems about their desire to make a difference in the world?

No, they weren't. They weren't because dinosaurs weren't aware that they were dinosaurs, and algae and bacteria and trees and swamps didn't have thoughts, and fish didn't wonder why bad things happen to good fish.

Obvious, but astonishing.

Consciousness didn't come until later in creation, with the arrival of humans,
and probably not even in humans until relatively recently in history.

Alphabets and written language and poetry and reflection and organized societies and laws and Oprah's book club and all of the things that make up civilization and thought and culture came much, much later in human history.

You are aware that you are you, which is a phenomenon that simply didn't exist here for billions of years.

There is a movement forward, toward greater and greater awareness and consciousness and connectivity, that has been unfolding across the history of the universe, an ever-expanding enlightening that transcends any one of us, all cultures, and humanity as a whole. A massive and epic holism that continues to increase in complexity and depth and dimension to this very day.

 

So why all this talk about hierarchy and holism?

Because often people have a hard time believing there's a God because we can't see God, we don't have hard evidence for the existence of God, and we don't have any proof we can study or analyze or evaluate in any scientific, tangible way.

The twist on all of this is that we all agree you exist. You, your elbows and pancreas and sternum are tangible and able to be measured and evaluated in very straightforward ways, but your soul? That's a bit more difficult to capture. Let alone measure or study.

And yet we all agree that there's more to you than your physical body.

It's been said that the soul is naked of all things that bear names.

A bit like God, because when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about a reality known, felt, and experienced, but one that cannot be located in any specific physical space in any tangible way.

When we talk about God, then, we're talking about something very real and yet beyond our conventional means of analysis and description.

The Germans, interestingly enough, have a word for this: they call it
grenzbegrifflich
.

Grenzbegrifflich
describes that which is very real but is beyond analysis and description. When I'm talking about God, I'm talking about your intuitive sense that reality at its deepest flows from the God who is
grenzbegriff
.

To explain more about what
grenzbegrifflich
means, I need to talk about what happened when I went skateboarding in North Carolina twenty years ago.

 

IV. The Sea We're Swimming In

I was visiting my friend Ian in Charlotte, and late one night he took me skateboarding all over the city, showing me his favorite spots and embankments and parks. One of the places he took me was a flat, open concrete space that sank down into a large bowl at one end. He went first, building up speed and then dropping down into the bowl and skating around the inner rim. I quickly followed him. (Note to self: skateboarding in the dark in an unfamiliar city in spots you haven't skated before isn't always the smartest thing to do.)

I was going faster and faster as I got closer to the edge of the bowl—which I didn't reach, at least on my board. What I learned is that this open space used to be a parking lot, and when they removed those cement curbs that you nudge your front tires up to, they didn't remove one of the embedded iron bars used to hold the curb in place. Three inches of iron bar, a half-inch wide, sticking up out of the concrete. In the dark. Just enough to bring my board to an instant halt, launching me Superman style out and above and then down into the bowl—nine, eight, seven, six feet to the concrete below.

It was the kind of thing fifteen-year-old boys discover on YouTube and play over and over and over again, laughing hysterically at the guy who got launched into the bowl.

And yes, there was lots of blood.

Now, as I tell you that story you aren't surprised—about the physics part of it, that is—because in high school we were all taught that (everybody together now)
an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force
.

We know this because in science class we learned what's called a
classical view
of the world, based on Isaac Newton's mechanical laws of physics. These laws are so basic to our thinking about speed and motion and mass and movement that it's hard for us to comprehend just how revolutionary they were when Newton's groundbreaking book
Principia
was first published in 1687. At that time, the reason the majority of people would have given as to why the world works the way it does is because, well,
God made it that way
.

That's just how things are; why would you need an explanation beyond that?

But Newton, Newton didn't see it that way. Newton insisted that there were predictable, knowable, rational rules and explanations that govern how the universe operates, causes that lead to effects, and clear connections between the two.

(If a man is traveling at a certain speed in a certain direction, and he has a certain mass and there is a certain amount of friction involved, and an opposing force interrupts that particular motion, the man will travel a particular distance through the air before making contact, face, knees, and wrists first, with the concrete at a certain speed with a certain amount of impact force—and a certain amount of blood.)

Newton showed that you could know the speed
and
position of something because
motion was understood to be continuous and consistent
. Given enough data about weight and speed and a number of other variables, outcomes could be computed and accurately predicted. This new worldview brought with it all kinds of exciting possibilities. Things could be built, engineered, created, and designed by plotting trajectories and paths and measuring how much opposing force would be needed to stop and move and push and pull things of certain weights and certain speeds.

As more and more natural explanations were discovered for why things are the way they are, the idea of a clock, with its precise measurements and enduring consistency, replaced the actions of the gods as the primary way people began to understand how the universe functions. Cogs and wheels and buttons and pulleys became popular images—with all of the parts working together like an efficient, well-calibrated machine.

A new way to see the world arose, one governed by precise regularity—

orderly,

exact,

predictable.

Along with these new ways of conceiving the physical world came new ways of thinking about
how
we know what we know. We've all heard the phrase “I think, therefore I am” from René Descartes. It's so familiar that it's easy to lose the sense of how groundbreaking it was when he first said it, because for the majority of people at that time knowledge was seen as something that humans were given by God through what's called
revelation
. If you asked how we know what we know, the standard answer was, “God told us.” But Descartes didn't see it that way. He insisted that we can know what we know not because a divine being chose for some reason to reveal it to us but because we arrived at that knowledge through our own reason and logic. Now obviously this wasn't the first time anyone used logic or reason, but as his idea caught on, it was new to have that many people across that wide an array of disciplines and pursuits embracing such a new understanding of how we know what we know.

That era, called the Golden Age of Certainty, gave birth to what we call the scientific method—the testing and poking and prodding and experimenting and examining of evidence, the running of multiple tests, the comparing of data from one trial to another. Instead of humans as passive recipients of knowledge the gods decided to give them, the image of the scientist emerged, standing over the subject, detached and objective, actively making precise observations and arriving at valid conclusions.

This explosion of discovery and exploration, also called the Enlightenment, moved human history forward in an astonishing number of new ways, out of the Dark Ages and medieval world and into a new era of staggering technologies and knowledge and breakthroughs.

This Enlightenment leap—this good and needed leap—handed us a number of ways of understanding the world that have worked on us and influenced us for several hundred years now in positive ways. But these understandings also have limits, limits that we become acutely aware of when we talk about God.

Let's look briefly at two of these limits and how they've deeply shaped the beliefs and practices of our modern world before we move on.

First, a limit that affects how we filter knowledge.

As reason and logic became more and more prominent,
other ways of knowing became less emphasized.
If the only way we know things is through the testing and poking and prodding of the scientific method, what happens when we know something in a way that bypasses those particular tests and processes? Does
everything
you know have to be able to be proven intellectually?

In the lab, for something to be valid it has to be proven repeatably and repeatedly through multiple tests and experiments. There has to be demonstrable evidence. But what about those things that you absolutely, positively know to be true but would be hard-pressed to produce evidence for if asked?

Explain how that particular song moves you. Articulate why you fell in love with
that
person. Provide data for the manner in which that meal with those friends made your soul soar.

Most of the things in life we're most sure of, many of those events and experiences that are more real to us than anything else, lots of sensations we have no doubt actually happened—these are things we cannot prove with any degree of scientific validity.

Which leads us to a crucial truth: there are other ways of knowing than only those of the intellect.

In the lab, we can stand objectively over the subject, testing and retesting and examining, filtering the data through the lens of rational repeatability.