Heart and Soul

Richard Dawkins fascinates and infuriates people in roughly equal proportions; undoubtedly a great scientist, he has an unshakeable belief that only the rules and logic of science, as he understands them, can be used to explain all phenomena.  By such rules he accuses those of religious faith of trusting in myth and misconceptions, perpetuated in dogma.  I’ve always been suspicious of people who are so convinced of the rightness of their own position that they seem blind to any other perspective.  After all, the essence of science is enquiry and constant upgrading of earlier ideas.  Fundamentalism in any form disturbs me.

Some years ago I heard an American cleric (actually trained as a physicist) state, “The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.”  That is wonderfully insightful, and to me most helpful.

Long before that, when I was 19, I heard a ten-year-old make a statement every bit as profound.  I was doing a gap year teaching at a boy’s boarding preparatory school.  I was keen, but completely untrained; the boys were lively, well brought-up and imaginative – a mixture potent with endless possibilities!  One Friday afternoon I was so exhausted I had to turn to the class and ask what they wanted to do.  “Let’s discuss space travel,” said one.  I agreed (anything to get me out of a jam!) and a lively discussion followed.  Then one boy said, “What would people look like on another planet?”

There was silence but then one boy jumped up and said, “It’s easy, sir.  They would look just like us.”  The rest of the class scorned his simplicity and amidst their laughter the young Timothy (son of strict Jewish parents) burst into tears.  “Why would they look like us?” I asked gently, hoping that Timothy could regain his dignity.  “It’s easy, sir; in the Old Testament it says ‘God made man in his own image’ and so if we look like God, so would they!”

I can’t speak for the boys but as far as I’m concerned I will never forget that comment.  Richard Dawkins describes life as “a statistical improbability on a colossal scale,” and explains that science “offers the privilege of understanding before you die why you were ever born in the first place.”  In one sense Dawkins is right but such a limited view of life simply leaves an individual as a mere observer of all the drama and tragedy of life.  The young Timothy’s explanation still challenges me every day to see in the people around me “a spark of the divine.”  If I think there is a reason for me to be me, then I have to realise that there has to be a reason for them, to be them.  This is my way of recognising that there has to be more of a meaning to life than a “statistical improbability on a colossal scale”.

See Parts 2 and 9 of the Briefing Paper and Action 10.

Also see Chapters Eight and Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated.

This article is tagged: life, meaning, richard dawkins.