Although I have not sat in a pew for over year, family, friends, and delivery vans have allowed a satisfactory continuance of normality. I have missed singing hymns, but one can be close to creation and get a light on life without sitting on a wooden seat. Lockdown has not stopped me thinking and as readers know that I ponder a lot the next 500 words may be heavy reading. But stick with me, and I hope a light will flicker.
I lit up recently whilst reading books by Professor Carlo Rovelli an Italian Quantum Physicist and Oxford Philosopher Professor Roger Scruton. Both men have international repute, but Carlo is kept at a distance by the political and religious establishment in Italy, whereas Roger, now deceased, was disdained by the social liberal establishment in Britain which seems threatened by his ideas and conclusions.
Both men are polymaths and explored the nature, motivations and actions of mankind from its beginnings. Both counted themselves Atheists although Roger also saw religion as important because it added historical roots to the existential paradoxes from which none of us are truly free.
Both are sensitive to religious believers but see the notion of God as a response to cosmic events. Events which early man could not explain or control and so he invented Gods as being responsible.
This sounds reasonable, although my recent reading, prompts me to ask why, when man invented God to explain things that could be seen, they could not equally have created God to explain things they could not see? I ask this because all humankind has an innate (sixth) sense that tells us that there is much more to life than that revealed by our five external senses?
We know our brain receives sensory data, and that one of its hemispheres works in logical deductive sequences, and the other is structured differently and has a more freewheeling manner of processing. (Some folk call this the artistic side) However, recent research suggests that we may have more than five senses, possibly over twenty. So, we might then ask how ‘nature’ set up our brains to process those senses and what do they tell us?
A few months ago, I mentioned Cardinal (now Saint) J. Henry Newman 1801-1890. He explained that we have the capacity to understand more than the outer world of our five senses, and so deduced other senses. He did this in the same way that two Greek philosophers Leuccippus & Democritus deduced atomic structures two thousand years before they were physically discovered. He even laid out the mental processes which led him to challenge those secularists who built theories of humanity based only on the deductive logic generated from our external senses. He figured that each of us has ‘hard wired’ circuitry in both sides of our brain but they are wired differently. He then concludes that we should give equally balanced weight to both the logical deductive side and the ‘free-wheeling’ circuitry that allows us to understand the nascent inner world of beauty, empathy, sympathy, love, joy, altruism, music, conscience, values and good and evil.
To summarise: Newman saw that reason, deductive logic, inductive logic, beauty and ugliness is an inbuilt capability, and also saw that this innate capability lay behind the belief that each of us has the capacity to create options and choose from them. We do have free will and can know that our choices have effects beyond our own life span.
I said earlier that I hoped readers would get a flicker of light but if not, maybe this old letter in the Daily Telegraph from a Rodney Stone will lighten your day.
Sir, In our church we had just embarked on prayers of general intercession when a mobile phone left on a seat burst into life. A man’s voice rang out saying,. “I’m sorry but I cannot accept any further requests, please try again later.”
Rodney wonders if the smart phone has achieved the final breakthrough in ‘astral’ communications.
View from the Pew 