Investigating religious sensibilities

Oliver Sacks had an interesting way of pursuing problems. I think he had the kind of mind that gets carried away by curiosity, a mind that can’t do its homework if it’s interested in something more interesting. (It might take one to know one.)

Here he is talking about religious sensibility:

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. … Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route — the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

I think there are two religious sensibilities — not one. The two are not compatible, and lumping them together leads to confusion.

In the first kind, people feel a sense of intimacy with the divine.

The other is suggested by Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which claims that God is a logical necessity.

The implications of that view are not acceptable to people who claim that a person can know God.

If God is a logical necessity, no fact about this world could have any relevance about what we could say. The fact that there is baffling beauty in the world could have no bearing on a logical certainty. Neither could the fact that there is evil in the world. Evidence is simply not relevant to something that’s logical certain.

If you hold that sensibility, though, you hold the view that divinity is simply beyond humanity. There’s nothing more we can say.

I think that’s one of several things Wittgenstein had in mind when he said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Scholars sometimes speak of “Spinoza’s God” or “Einstein’s God,” neither of which is much liked by those who are intimate with the Almighty.

• Source: The long quotation is from Oliver Sacks, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” The Atlantic, December 2012.