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Maria Popova digs into physicist Alan Lightman’s new volume of essays, The Accidental Universe, finding this gem on what distinguishes the sciences from the humanities:

At any moment in time, every scientist is working on, or attempting to work on, a well-posed problem, a question with a definite answer. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.

But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. …

For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago, “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Then there are also the questions that have definite answers but which we cannot answer. The question of the existence of God may be such a question. As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers?

Lightman goes on to place this “tolerance for the unanswered” at the heart of faith:

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

With support for marriage equality is surging in Utah, it should come as no surprise that the LDS Church recently issued a memo directing congregational leaders to review “The Family,” which Neil J. Young describes as “a document the church produced in 1995 that has appeared at times of social crisis ever since.” He considers the implications for the fight against same-sex marriage:

“The Family,” issued as the church began these fights, linked the Mormon theology of salvation rooted in the traditional heterosexual family unit to the civil rights question of gay and lesbian Americans without even acknowledging their existence. Mormon salvation—or exaltation to the Celestial Kingdom—requires that male and female Saints enter into a temple-based marriage and enact, as “The Family” describes, the “divine design” of their respective gender roles. Men are to “preside over their families” while women are “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” Together, they are to fulfill their religious responsibility to reproduce, creating an extensive earthly family that will be joined together eternally in the afterlife.

Same-sex marriage, of course, challenges all of this. While Mormons agree with other opponents of gay marriage that its legalization is “unbiblical” and a threat to the traditional heterosexual family unit, LDS objections also arise from the core of Mormon theology and its particular interconnection of heterosexuality, marriage, and salvation. In short, same-sex marriage threatens the basic foundations of Mormonism.

He also notes that “Mormon acceptance of gay marriage challenges the church’s authority, a core component of LDS belief”:

This is a crisis the LDS Church faced when some of its members became vociferous critics of the church’s efforts against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. The church dealt harshly with those women not because they supported the ERA, church leaders explained, but because they had publically challenged the church president’s prophetic role—a key tenet of Mormonism. Increasing societal support for same-sex marriage suggests another crisis moment for the LDS Church could be coming.

Douthat continues the debate about Church reform sparked by Damon Linker’s recent column, which included NPR caller Trish’s comment that “Catholics do not care about doctrine”:

There are dangers in reading too much into an NPR caller, obviously, but Linker is putting his finger on a real tension within liberal Christianity today — or, if you prefer, a real fork in the road, with one path leading in the direction that he assumed dissenting Catholics wanted to take (which seeks to alter church teaching precisely because it still believes that teaching really matters), and the other leading toward a kind of Emersonian, therapeutic, basically post-ecclesiastical form of faith, in which “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place.

He wrestles with where this discounting of doctrine comes from:

Now some of those would-be reformers would argue that Trish-ism (which as Linker describes it is basically a Catholic version of Sheila-ism, Robert Bellah’s Reagan-era gloss on individualistic spirituality) is what happens, more or less inevitably, when the church’s leaders hollow out their credibility by trying to enforce the unenforceable, and that a church that had evolved with the culture forty years ago would have actually preserved a sense that doctrine actually matters. This argument is problematic, though, because the (mostly Protestant) churches that did evolve along those lines often seem to be churches where Trish-ism is fully enthroned and all talk of traditional doctrine is a dead letter. Hence the appeal of the conservative counter-argument that actually Trish-ism is the fruit of the Catholic hierarchy’s inattention to doctrinal matters, its eagerness to soft-pedal the tough stuff, its attempt to keep everyone on board in an age of division and dissent: “It’s not that dissenting Catholics don’t care what the Church teaches,” Matthew Schmitz writes in a response to Linker’s piece, “it’s that the Church has taught them not to care. To that lesson, they’ve paid close attention.”

But I wonder if this argument doesn’t oversimplify things as well.

Dreher comments:

Even after I left the Catholic Church, I would find myself in the bizarre position of arguing with Catholics, and defending Catholic doctrine. The thing is, it was impossible to find common ground, because a) they knew nothing about doctrine, not even basics, and b) whatever the Church taught didn’t matter to them, because they didn’t see it as binding anyway; and c) they genuinely did not understand why this had anything at all to do with their status as Catholics. The freaky thing, to me, was that this wasn’t a pose; they were as sincere as they could be.

Megan Hustad was raised by overseas Christian missionaries. She describes adapting to life in NYC:

All I wanted was to listen carefully and master correct pronunciations. I wanted to take note of how the beautiful people held forks and chopsticks and admired certain books but never others, not unless they were trying to be funny, and I wanted to exploit the fact that my accent made me sound wealthier than I was and slightly smarter, too. Mainly I sought forgetfulness. For a long time I was happy to have outrun God, because he really wasn’t going to be much help here.

On occasion the subject would come up. My evangelical background. Wow, flushed faces at parties leaned in to ask, what was it like growing up with adults so hooked on fairy tales? My ability to quickly change the subject eventually outstripped my embarrassment, but not before I had internalized every critique of what faith in God now signified in America: intolerance, sanctimony, tut-tutting over Hollywood and the welfare office, a yawning void where curiosity and compassion could be.

But when I felt led to a conversational place wherein I was expected to confirm that everyone who takes part in the rituals of organized religion drags their knuckles on their way to stoning the town slut, I would stop. I couldn’t. That I would have to drop the word “soul” from my vocabulary I hadn’t expected.

Oliver Burkeman expands on Damon Linker’s reading of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.  He calls Hart’s work “the one theology book all atheists really should read”:

God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with. … Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.

But too often, instead of being grappled with, this argument gets dismissed as irrelevant. Sure, critics argue, it might be intriguing, but only a handful of smartypants intellectual religious people take it seriously. The vast majority of ordinary folk believe in the other sort of God.

As Hart points out, there are two problems with this dismissal.

First, you’d actually need to prove the point with survey data about what people believe. But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.

Isaac Chotiner is less convinced that Hart’s book poses a serious challenge to atheist thought:

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, and the amount of time I have spent with deeply religious people (Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims) is relatively limited. But I have talked somewhat extensively with people in each of these religions and not a single one of them has ever described his or her belief in God in anything like these terms. As Jerry Coyne puts it in response to Linker, “Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.” (Ideas such as answered prayers, or the parting of the seas, don’t really mesh with what Linker is laying out.)

But let’s say Linker is right and many people do believe in this type of God. He still seems to be conceding that less “transcendent” beliefs in God don’t make much sense, or at least that atheists who confront these beliefs are not confronting a strong case for God. This is a giant concession.

Linker fires back at Chotiner and Coyne:

The charges against me (and Hart, whose book neither Chotiner nor Coyne has read) boil down to two: Practically no one holds the view of God that I sketched in my review, and even if they did, that view is nonsensical. The core of my response is simply to say that the classical theism that Hart elaborates in his book and that I cursorily laid out in my review is far more widely held than Chotiner and Coyne appear to believe. It is found, in varying forms, in the work of Christian (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), Jewish (Maimonides), and Muslim (Avicenna) theologians, as well as numerous Hindu and Sikh sages. All of these sundry thinkers, and many others, describe a God who is (in Hart’s words) “the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all would exist.” Chotiner and Coyne are free, of course, to follow A.J. Ayer and other strict logical positivists in saying that such language is meaningless mumbo jumbo. But they should understand that in taking that tack they are going easy on themselves in the way that people always do when they dismiss their opponents rather than engage with them.

Coyne rejoins the debate:

[I]t’s obvious that the bulk of harm committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral system. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn “witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholics with guilt about masturbation and divorce.

The vast majority of believers don’t even read theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by Sophisticated Theologians™. So is it our duty as atheists to refute those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent instead the harm done by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s both fun and intellectually profitable to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided beforehand must be true. Theology is the only academic discipline where people get paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them. Certainly it’s more useful for atheists to point out to “average” believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that is precisely what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.

Background on Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard:

Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret. Much against Heloise’s will, Abelard insisted on marriage to soothe her enraged uncle Fulbert, and spirited their child off to his sister’s farm in Brittany. The pair married secretly at dawn, then went their separate ways. A resentful Heloise denied all rumours of the marriage, so Abelard, to protect her from Fulbert’s wrath, clothed her in a nun’s habit and hid her away at Argenteuil, the convent where she had been raised. This proved to be the last straw for Fulbert, whose hired thugs surprised Abelard in his sleep and ‘cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong’. For want of a better option, the eunuch philosopher turned monk, while Heloise became a nun in earnest, prefacing her vows with a public lament.

The couple believed in “what philosophers call the ethics of pure intention: it is not the real or even the foreseeable consequences of an act that make it good or evil, but solely the intent of the agent”:

Since only God can discern intentions, however, that position complicates any attempt to render moral judgments. While many thinkers have adopted mitigated versions of the premise, Heloise was ruthless in its principled application. Thus she judged her exemplary religious life worthless in the eyes of God because she had done everything for Abelard’s sake, nothing for God’s. On the other hand, she held her love affair morally blameless because she had loved Abelard purely for himself, without regard to material advantage. Every inch the stylist, she shocks and thrills readers with the deliciously hyperbolic way she conveys that boast: ‘if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would seem to me dearer and more honourable to be called not his empress but your whore.’ Not mistress or girlfriend, but whore – Heloise used the coarsest Latin words she could find (meretrix, scortum) to make her point. What is more, she went on to argue that the real prostitution is marriage itself, since women enter it for property and money rather than love. Such sentiments would have been radical even in the 18th century, let alone the 12th.

(Image of 14th-century depiction of Abelard and Heloise via Wikimedia Commons)

Some good pushback from readers on this one:

The ideas that Dawkins put forward in the linked article are not new to him; he discussed them as early as 2005, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale (a superb read by the way, with next to no God-bashing). In what way is Dawkins being essentialist? Sure, there is a vast spectrum of religious beliefs and practices out there. What we call “Christianity” or “Islam” varies greatly depending on time, location, and social circumstances. But from this vast range of beliefs, commonalities can be drawn and subjected to criticism. This is not “treating all religions as the same essential thing.” The argument that:

(1) We cannot know whether the universe was created by a god of some sort, and
(2) Even if we did know that, we have no way to determine what this god wants or expects from us (if anything)

… can be used to counter any theist argument from this spectrum of beliefs.

Another reader:

I don’t believe Dawkins has ever applied essentialism to religion. He may not have expressed this clearly in every sound bite (who has?) but it’s completely consistent with his overall philosophy and the philosophy of most atheists I know.

Several years ago there was a bizarre report that Dawkins was converting to Deism.

It turned out to be related to an interview in which he said you could make a reasonable argument for a Deist god. Most atheists likely agreed with his position: you can make a far stronger case for a Deist god than an old-earth Christian god, and a stronger case for an old-earth Christian god than a young-earth creationist one. The odd part was that people apparently thought Dawkins was incapable of making this distinction. So they took his seemingly astounding acknowledgment that a good argument could be made for Deism as evidence he was embracing Deism.

Another:

In Dawkins’ 1996 book Climbing Mount Improbable, he writes:

If a species is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists’ legalistic conventions still force them to lump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore the creationists’ claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has no implications about the real world – only implications about zoologists’ naming conventions. (page 96, italics his)

Similar quotes can be found in his other books. Of course, the idea of the evolutionary species (which extends the species concept through time) is integral to cladistics, or modern taxonomy. Evolution demands that throughout history, there have been millions of transitions between species and therefore millions of intermediate forms. This is seen today in many species /such as the geographically very widespread so-called “ring” species in which the members living at the extremes may not even be able to mate with each other but ultimately do so through all the intermediates.

So let’s not treat this new Dawkins article as a change of mind on his part; it just isn’t so.

Cocktails infused with tobacco are becoming as trendy as they are risky:

South American shamans drank simplistic tobacco teas during rituals and for its supposedly magical qualities, according to Iain Gately’s Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. However, the author notes that overindulging in these teas could “induce vomiting, paralysis and, occasionally, death.” That may have been due to the nicotine, which can be lethal in high doses. … The problem with tobacco-infused drinks, according to Stan Glantz, a leading researcher on the health effects of tobacco at the University of California-San Francisco, is that you simply have no way of knowing how much nicotine you’re getting. “It’s impossible to know what the dosage is since these guys are making this stuff themselves,” Glantz tells The Salt. “Don’t forget that nicotine was used as insecticide. So this is like putting pesticides – hazardous substances — into drinks.”

Nick Laird spells it out:

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn’t simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it’s not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

It’s also perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse—to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there’s the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.

On a similar note, Canada’s new Poet Laureate, Michel Pleau, describes in a recent interview what he’d like to achieve over his two-year term:

You speak about poetry as being fundamental to what makes us human.

Poetry has existed since the beginning of humanity. Our ancestors gathered around the fire and tried to communicate with mysteries bigger than themselves. That’s still what we do with poetry. We write with the hope there’s someone at the other end of our poem.

But you also think poets are the object of too many clichés.

When you see poets, it’s in places like the Just for Laughs Festival. They’re caricatures and they’re always a bit ridiculous – you know, a guy with a beret on his head and a scarf around his neck who says inane things in rhyme. It makes people laugh. But poetry is deeper than that.

You want to change that image?

Yes. My goal would be to make people feel that maybe they love poetry more than they imagine. Our relationship to poetry is often a bit academic. Sometimes it’s linked to bad memories from having to learn poems by heart and reciting them in school. People often don’t realize they’re surrounded by poetry. At the very least, it’s in the songs they listen to. I often say that lovers’ words – when they whisper them to one another in the ear – are an expression of poetry in our daily lives.

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The winsome English poet Stevie Smith (1902-1971) is most famous for the poem we’re posting today and for her legion of admirers—among them Robert Lowell (“On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice”) and Sylvia Plath (“I am a desperate Stevie Smith addict”). She was a great chider, as anyone call tell from her poem “To an American Publisher”:

You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.
You liked it so much that’s the reason?  Read it again then.

In a review of her Collected Poems, published in 1975, Seamus Heaney captured the quality of “these odd syncopated melancholy poems” describing how “her gift was to create a peculiar emotional weather between the words, a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled” citing the poem below as a supreme example. New Directions has a brand new Best Poems: Stevie Smith, richly illustrated with her own drawings, from which we’ll be selecting poems today and in the days ahead.

“Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead.
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Update from a reader:

Another reason I renewed: “Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:”

(From Best Poems: Stevie Smith © Stevie Smith 1937, 1972 and © New Direction Publishing Corporation 1988, 2014. Reprinted with kind permission of New Directions)