I'm reading the book THE LANGUAGE GOD TALKS by Herman Wouk. I've almost finished it in just a few days. Wouk wrote several very successful novels about World War II. He lived among the most secular of intellectuals, yet found the simple Judaism of his youth stuck with him through terrible tragedies and great triumphs. Even the horrors of the Holocaust didn't (even to his surprise) destroy his faith. Being a big booster of science, he decided to write a book about faith, reason, and how they can co-exist within a mature mind.
This is that book. Wouk spent a lot of time around the great scientific minds of the 20th century and those relationships form the backdrop for the book. His particular focus is on his long friendship with Richard Feynman, one of the great minds of modern physics and a man involved in the building of the atom bomb. Feyman's family was Jewish like Wouk's, but the two men ended up in very different places on matters of faith. Wouk seems amazed by this, more by his own holding on to faith than Feyman's abandonment of it, and the book is basically Wouk just thinking out loud about all of this.
The book has held my attention better than most. It isn't written that well, as Wouk is not really good at non-fiction. Halfway through the book he seems to realize that he's not making his point effectively, and so he starts telling stories to try to 'show' his point rather than 'tell' it. At this point the writing gets much better. Wouk gushes a lot about Feynman, who he admired and really loved, you can tell. He tells stories from his life, and the lives of other people he has known, and gives some overview of important characters of some of his books. These are supposed to be like portraits that help us understand what Wouk's philosophy is all about.
The picture I got was of a man who was more pursued by faith, than pursued it. Wouk found God staring back at him everywhere he turned. Not just any God, but the God of Judaism, the religion of his forefathers. There was something about life itself that made Wouk feel trapped or imprisoned, and religion freed him of this. Religion is, for Wouk, liberation: from fear, from selfishness, from the loss of identity. Wouk has never stopped loving the trappings of religion, and the beliefs behind those trappings are, for him, the keys to making it all 'work'. For Wouk, the difference between he and Feynman was that Feynman did not feel pursued in this way. Atheism and agnosticism were just too much work for Wouk, whereas for Feynman they came naturally.
Wouk garners no judgment of Feynman. Far from it. And that is an important lesson to pull from all of this, I think, refraining from judging beliefs held in matters like this. People who disagree on important matters can be friends. The important part is to recognize the ambiguity involved in belief. Some things we know, some things we believe. We can believe some things with less or more justification, but never with total justification. That is just part of being human. Feynman framed his atheism by saying that religion suggests the human drama is central to the universe, and the universe is too big for the human drama to be what it is all about. Wouk frames his own theism differently, but as a response to Feynman. Religious people and atheists need each other. The inter-play is part of the dance that makes life interesting and gets us closer to truth. But as soon as everything becomes about judgment, the dance is over. I can call you sinner and you can call me irrational, and basically we are doing the same thing, for similar reasons. But perhaps we can as human beings forego all the judgment and start learning about each other, and what we believe and why.
Some of our beliefs are cherished and important to us. That doesn't mean they need to be above criticism or above reflection. Everyone owes an account of reasonableness. Once that account is given, however, the critical function of dialogue ends, and the function of human connection begins. That is where the real magic happens. If Wouk and Feynman can find common philosophical ground, then we all can. On that level, if no other, I found the work inspiring.
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