On the Duty Against Speculation

by Harold W. Wood, Jr.

If Pantheism means anything, it means that we find the source of our spiritual inspiration from the natural world, not in supernatural ideas or possibilities. This doesn't mean that we are always hard-headed realists, denying absolutely anything that might have a "spiritual" context, or which may be mysterious and intriguing. We must indeed have enough humility to recognize that we humans have yet to know very much about the Universe, even though we are learning more all the time.

The saddest thing about people growing up in most religions today is that "belief" has become the central organizing principle of religion. I assert that "belief" is not really the crux of true religion; instead it is the substitute foisted upon us by "churches." A church is defined by its belief, its ideology, and so in fact, by necessity, is virtually any other organization. But people are beings who wonder, who explore, who feel and celebrate; we shouldn't identify ourselves by our "beliefs" because then we lock ourselves into a prison of our own making that prevents us from growing. Yes, we always want to know what the "mission" of any non-profit organization is; why is it that they exist. We want to know what the Democrats believe, what the Republicans believe, what the ACLU believes and what the Catholic Church believes and what the Mormons believe and so on. But people should be open to learning, which requires changing beliefs. Our beliefs should be tentative, hesitant, held only to the point they serve us, and then dropped when they become out-dated, obsolete, or superseded by new and better ideas or facts.

Yet, if we had true humility in the face of a gigantic universe, we would take a basically skeptical view. But not a strait-jacket of skepticism; for we find much in the universe to inspire wonder and joy. Since Pantheism finds Deity in the Universe itself rather than in supernatural beings, it is what we learn about the Universe that is most important. And in our day, the scientific method is one of the best, if not the exclusive, methods for enlarging our understanding about the universe. In the scientific method, what we know about the Universe is not a matter of belief, but of wonder. If confronted with a hypothesis, the scientific response is skepticism. The hypothesis is tested, the evidence weighed, efforts are made to duplicate any results through using the experimental method, and then, only after a rigorous process of testing, is the hypothesis elevated to a matter of theory. If the theory lasts long enough, it might even eventually be considered 'scientific fact' -- although any scientist worth her salt will be the first to say that what is "fact" today may be discovered to be at least incomplete tomorrow.

One example is in geology. Most scientists laughed at the idea of "continental drift," but now plate tectonics is the conventional wisdom. The evidence for it is compelling, even overwhelming, and the mechanism is making what seemed impossible completely plausible. It is doubtful that the theory of plate tectonics will ever be rejected from what we now know about basic geology, but it will assuredly be fine-tuned and modified over the coming years.

I'm not a scientist, but it always seemed best to me, after I heard the story of the initial rejection and eventual acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics, to treat proposed ideas with a bit of skepticism, yet try to be willing to abandon old beliefs when new information makes it necessary to do so. I want to hear some evidence for anything before choosing to "believe" it. And even after I decide to believe something, I keep a small amount of skepticism in reserve in case new knowledge greatly modifies what we know. I have found this approach to be quite satisfying, because indeed, as discoveries in even the last decade reveal, we are learning astonishing new things about the Universe all the time. Wonder and awe and increased by scientific understanding, not reduced by it! For example, the "big bang" theory appears to cosmologists to be more than a theory at this time; the evidence for it is overwhelming. We know within a few billion years when it occurred, and yet we don't know exactly what caused it or how. But we are learning more and more about the results of that Big Bang, and finding the "smoking gun" for it, and cosmology is based on a lot more than imaginary ideas.

So why, then, should people just take someone's simplistic assertion about something and grab onto it as the gospel truth? I am continually amazed, for example, about the crazy and wild assertions you can read in any grocery-store magazine rack, whether it's astrology, star gossip, or alleged alien visitations. And while some of the most crazy and wild assertions seem to be promoted by fringe religious groups, even otherwise intelligent people seem to be willing to accept any story someone wants to give to them, without asking for any evidence at all.

A big group of these otherwise intelligent people are called philosophers. It seems to me that much of philosophy is simply the invention of syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. which evolve into tomes which make assertions based on the philosopher's notions, without taking into account any scientific understanding of reality. The words used often have no referent to anything tangible, and so are capable of differing interpretations by anyone listening to the philosopher's diatribes.

I prefer to hear the philosophy of the wind in the pines, or the frog song along the stream, or the skylark's trill. These are philosophies I can understand, however abstract they are to human ears.

But the philosopher's stock and trade is speculation. Take the following question, which has sometimes been posed to me as the Secretary of the Universal Pantheist Society:

Do you believe there is anything beyond the universe, which appears to be limited to the concepts of matter, energy and time?

My reaction to such a question is, wrong question! Irrelevant!

Who cares what I believe about what might be beyond the universe which we now understand only in the sense of matter, energy and time? And who cares what you believe about it either? In fact, why should anyone care what any human being's answer is to such a question, given the limitations of human understanding?

OK, I hear you retort, the reason people care about this is because -- what good is a religion unless it can provide an answer to such questions?

Well, I say that when you ask a question like this you, you are avoiding what really matters and are instead entering the realm of speculation. If you want to speculate, write a novel. Surely imagination and fancy have a place in the human world, but let's leave it where it belongs, in the realm of fiction and myth and story, something for entertainment, something to perhaps inspire us to higher ideals, or to a greater love of beauty. Mythology is not something anyone in their right mind would expect to apply to the real world, although fantasy and story are perfectly agreeable human activities when kept in their place. I refuse to imagine that there "might be" "astral planes" and then organize my life around what either I or someone else might speculate about them (yet this is precisely the strange philosophy/religion called Encankar). Why bother with astral planes when the glorious sun is soaring overhead everyday, and the night sky is filled with wonderful galaxies and planets and stars? Why bother with astral projection when I can see God by climbing the mountains, strolling through flowery meadows, or sitting by a lake or stream to see rippling water and dragonflies flit about?

My religion is Pantheism. For me, Pantheism is more an attitude than an exhaustive, monolithic belief-system. For me, it's a type of "Nature-soaked Realism-based-spirituality" that offers more than either modern science or traditional religion in learning how to live in the Universe. In fact, I really don't want to adopt any "monolithic belief-system." If science in the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that beliefs change as knowledge changes. So let's keep our beliefs tentative, and be willing to adopt new ones upon achieving new knowledge.

Different Pantheists have a lot of different beliefs about a lot of different philosophical ideas. What we have in common is an acceptance of the earth as sacred and the universe as divine. And that's all we need, because it is that which is important. Anything else is mere speculation, time wasted on what "might be" or "could be" but just as easily "might not be." Let's instead focus on what the Universe is telling us. What the Universe is telling us now is provided through the mediums of matter, energy, and time. Anything else is by its nature sheer speculation at this point. Perhaps someday there will be the discovery of some fourth medium, but since we today have no current evidence for it, there is no point in speculating about it.

Let me reiterate that I am not arguing against the value of poetry, fiction, fables, mythology, or imagination. Fiction is a method of learning itself, through the imagination, to invoke our spirit and our emotions. I'm an advocate of fantasy and imagination. (See book review in this issue!) But these need to be kept in their place. The problem is, from astrology to Zorastranism, people are too willing to accept fiction as fact, instead of celebrating the real as something infinitely wonderful without any supernatural explanations! Give me a waterfall to look at, or a bear in the woods, or a wildflower, and I'll give you something I believe in. Give me a speculation about whether there is astral plane that beings from alternate universes can glide upon, and I'll tell you that the meadow larks' glide is infinitely more interesting!

We need to learn that when a question calls for speculation, it is something that is not only outside the realm of science, but outside the realm of proper philosophy as well. Philosophy is, or should be, the pursuit of wisdom, not the misguided attempt to arrive at causes and laws underlying reality derived merely from intellectual thinking. (Yes, the dictionary provides both of these as definitions, but the second definition seems to me utterly futile, since at this point in time those kinds of questions are more properly addressed by science instead.) Reality can be best understood through what Carl Sagan called the marriage of skepticism and wonder -- ie. the scientific method. Non-reality can be invented, imagined, played with, and even celebrated, but it belongs in the place of story and myth. We all enjoy a good story from time to time, and we can learn something from them, but the world of Nature provides so much more inherently interesting things than the supernatural.

Living a worthwhile life means we shouldn't spend it in idle speculation. The world is so full of fascinating, wonderful things, with our knowledge increasing all the time, that it makes no sense to sit in a dark room thinking up imaginary explanations for things, when out there in the meadows and the woods and skies the sun is shining -- the galaxies spinning, the birds are singing, and the moles are running underfoot!

Pantheists believe in the real -- in the tangible and intangible things we can see, touch, hear, feel, exercising our emotional capacities as well as our intellectual and physical capacities. We should focus on those things as Pantheists. We should do what we can in pursuing scientific answers to such questions (the way of knowledge), or through religious devotion - which may include the realm of story and myth, properly understood as such - to the wonder and mystery of the universe (the way of devotion), or to protecting the earth's biosphere (the way of works), rather than spending time in idle speculation.

Harold W. Wood, Jr. is the editor of Pantheist Vision and a co-founder of the Universal Pantheist Society.

Source: "On the Duty Against Speculation" by Harold W. Wood, Jr.
Pantheist Vision (Vol. 20, No. 3, Autumn Equinox, 1999)

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For more information about Pantheism, or questions about this website please contact Harold Wood at ups@pantheist.net Pantheism \Pan"the*ism\, n. [Pan- + theism.]: Any doctrine, philosophy, or religious practice that holds universe [cosmos], taken or conceived of as the totality of forces and/or matter, is synonymous with the theological principle of God.

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