I know people who try to say that their experiences of awe and wonder at the universe provide the equivalent of what religious people get from religious experience. I find this strange. Is anything really, truly 'awesome' and 'wonderful' in an atheistic universe? It seems to me that atheists are playing games here with the term 'experience'. They are confusing having an experience with actually experiencing something. If I hallucinate a yellow duck, I have had the experience of a yellow duck, but I have not, in fact, experienced it.
Awe and wonder are, by my lights, non-eudaimonistic emotions (that is they don't have to be tied up with my own life story) that indicate something has great value. But what truth can there be behind non-eudaimonistic emotions in an atheistic world? Aren't all judgments of value tied up with the plans and life stories of human beings, if there is no higher moral authority than humanity itself? The judgment of the universe as awful and wonderful really seems like no big deal if it is eudaimonistic, if it is all about human flourishing. It parses out to you just saying that you like the beauty of the cosmos. Well, actually now that I think about it, let me be more iconoclastic. It parses out to saying you just like the way the cosmos looks. I mean, I suppose a serial killer finds his work 'beautiful'. What makes his judgment incorrect and the judgment of cosmos-lover correct? And if they all parse out to the same thing, then who would care?
That some people find some things awesome and wonderful isn't very interesting except from a biographical point of view. I mean, really, "good for you" is the only real response. What we want to know is whether our judgments and experiences of awe and wonder correspond to something outside our own minds. Is the universe awesome and wonderful or does it just appear that way to some of us? I know some people, not incidentally, who could care less about the beauty found by the Hubble telescope (for instance) and others who find it all rather depressing.
And then there is the phenomenology of awe, wonder, and beauty. What is it like to experience the value in the cosmos? To me, when I talk about the beauty of galaxies and the like, all of that comes to me as information-containing. It is like someone is trying to tell me something, particularly that despite the horrors life contains that all is well and love is the supreme cosmic force. When I see a painting, I feel the original artist trying to communicate. I may not know exactly what is being said, but it is the sense of communion between the artist and myself that makes art so powerful. Roughly speaking, this is the same experience I get when looking at natural beauty. This is just what I call 'awe and wonder'.
It seems to me that the atheist or more accurately the reductive naturalist is stuck saying that this appearance of informational content, of being communicated to is just the lucky end result of a random arrangement of a great number of events over a long period of time. That parses out to saying that the universe is not really awesome and wonderful, it just appears that way to (some of) us. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the illusion, but an illusion it remains. I'm not even sure that last part is right, because I find that once I'm convinced it is an illusion, it just becomes the depressing joke some of my friends find it to be.
In the end awe and wonder cannot replace religious experience because they are religious experiences. That everyone has religious experiences is hardly surprising. That some could enjoy them so much without really reflecting on them is only slightly more surprising.
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