Religion for Understanding Beyond Physical

In keeping with my preceding article Religion is Crucial for Understanding People, let's look at more issues and insights on religion, especially as it is an integral area in The Tripartite Model.

Question: As a "bright," what do you believe?

James Randi: The term "bright" I don't much care for, but hey, we did the best we could with it. I was with Richard Dawkins in Clearwater, Florida and a few other people who brainstormed and came up with idea of having the "brights." I think I was maybe the third or fourth person to sign the membership roster. And a "bright" is someone who thinks logically and rationally; bases his or her decisions on rationality, upon logic, and upon evidence—that's the major thing right there. And if we don't have evidence, we can express our belief or lack of belief in it, but it has to be provisional. I believe that this is probably true, though I don't have any evidence for or against. It's a perfectly safe statement. And so, brights base all of their decisions and their beliefs on logic, rationality, and evidence. That's the thing in which they differ from the average person who takes anything that comes along that looks attractive. "Oh, I like that; I think I'll believe in it."

Question: As the scientific picture of the universe gets weirder, could any religious claims ever be verified?

James Randi: Not that I know. I am an atheist, tried and true. I have been since I was, oh I guess about this tall. I'm only about this tall now. And I made up my mind that I was going to investigate all of these things and question them. I went to Sunday school. I was tossed out of Sunday school immediately. But it gave me 25 cents that I could have put in the contribution plate there, so when they pass the plate around, and I found out that at Purdy's Drug Store, you could buy a two-flavored ice cream sundae for 25 cents. And that was a great discovery of my childhood, I must say, and I took full advantage of it.
My parents, bless them, never found out and I went off every Sunday morning as if going to Sunday school, but I lied. And I'm ashamed to admit it now, and if my dad and mom are up there someplace, or down there someplace, I have no idea, I ask them to forgive me.

What James Randi speaks to in the first part resonates quite well with my views à la Theory of Algorithms and The Tripartite Model.  It's about adopting a curious, questioning approach to knowing, grasping and solving things.  What is the evidence? is akin to my more epistemic phrasing How do we know what we know?  While some of us will do what Randi acknowledges, namely, believe wholesale what we run into, I encourage us to step back a bit, think it about some, and then believe or not believe accordingly.

In the second part, however, I beg to differ with Randi.  Investigating or questioning things doesn't necessarily make people an atheist, although evidently it is true for him.  The question of evidence and verification vis-a-vis religion is a complex one. Science is founded on empiricism, which is essentially about seeking to understand via our senses: sight, sound, scent, taste and touch.  If we can see it, hear it, or hold it in our hands somehow, then whatever it is, it is a real phenomenon.

But not everything about ourselves, the world around us, and the broader cosmos is material or tangible, and therefore to rely exclusively on an analytic frame of reference (i.e., science) and to seek truth mainly via evidence (i.e., empiricism) is necessarily to limit our knowledge and understanding.  If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves the notion of a different sort of evidence, that is, one beyond the material or the empirical, then we pave the way for verification.

Take the thoughtful, wonderful TV series `Joan of Arcadia.  Joan is a high schooler who, much to her consternation and confusion at first, finds that she can talk with God.  Cleverly, the writer brings God to her in the guise of everyday people she may encounter at school, in the streets, or at parties.  One time God was a cute fellow high schooler, and as they walked to the park, Joan demanded that he prove he truly was God by creating a miracle.  He pointed to a tree.  'That's just a tree' was her dismissive retort.  No one else can really make a tree was his comeback.

The scientific method is arguably the best way to grasp our physical, material world, but it falls short otherwise.  I haven't fully figured this out yet, but I argue that we have to rely on the religious method, such as faith, belief and miracle, to grasp and thus verify the non-physical and non-material.