Eclipsing Belief: Life as Science

If there's a worse place to see a lunar eclipse than here in New York City, then I'd like to hear about it. This picture couldn't even be salvaged by Photoshop; it's from after the eclipse had passed totality. Perhaps the most remarkable picture was the one I didn't take: of the sky with no moon in it, just as darkness was falling here and I would have expected to see her in her familiar place, hovering over Ocean Parkway at the south end of Prospect Park.

The astronomers have smilingly encouraged us to enjoy the lunar eclipses this year (there's another one in August), though they add that there is no scientific value in viewing them.

I would beg to suggest to these folks that they may be betraying a rather narrow view of what science is. Perhaps there is no astronomical value in viewing the eclipse, but astronomy is not the end of science.

One of the reasons why we Americans are so estranged in our experience and awareness of such things as math and science is that specialists like those astronomers make them such distant and parochial affairs, only accessible by the elite who have degrees and posts at prestigious observatories or universities. This attitude is, of course, a refutation of what science is all about, of everything that made the work of everyone from Pythagoras to Brian Greene possible.

Science, properly appreciated (and, I think, understood), is about lived experience—the ongoing encounter with life and the testing of knowledge in the crucible of wonder. A scientific approach to life proceeds from the suspension of belief (and its opposite), so as to allow experience to become the teacher. If Einstein had worked from the firm ground of a belief system—be it Newtonian mechanics or intelligent design—then he would not have had the inner freedom to start the revolution in perception and understanding that he in fact began. Any scientist with a mind closed to possibility and a heart drained of feeling is no longer a scientist, but rather something on the level of a corporate clerk or a government spokesman. Click the graphic at right and watch the story of Wally Wallington, who didn't seem to understand that he's not supposed to be a scientist.


Therefore, I would encourage you not to let anyone tell you that there is no scientific value in watching a lunar eclipse, or anything else, for that matter. If you are testing your own encounter with it, then every experience has scientific value. Predict how you will respond, how you will feel; test your objective knowledge of the facts and their meaning. It wouldn't hurt to apply a similar approach to your work, your relationships, your politics—even your spiritual practice.

When we do, we tend to discover that the poet's perception of Nature is just as valid as the scientist's: they are different lyrics to the same song. As we mentioned on Friday, there is really no need to worry about who will be the ruler or leader—the brain or the heart; intuition or reason. When you are in accord with yourself, without the muddy screen of belief between you and your lived experience, then the correct leader will step forward from within to meet each encounter. The light always finds its way through, even amid a seeming and temporary darkness.
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Site Notes: February was another record-breaking month for DR for visitor traffic. Thanks as always to you all for showing an interest in us. This week, we'll begin with the return of Terry McKenna for some unusual reflections on the season of Lent (!); then we'll be attempting to find some clarity on what's really going on in Iraq and the Mideast. And for Geek Wednesday, we'll be offering some help for writers and other artists. So spend some time with us if you can, and always remember—have fun at work; make everyone wonder what you're up to.

Friday Reflection: Camus and the Beauty of Nonbelief

Many of us have seen our lives changed or shaped by a book or other work of art—an encounter that takes you to a place that had never existed for you, or that you had always been told was not accessible to you. For me, Albert Camus' The Plague, which I think I first read at the age of 13, was such an experience. I can remember reading it over the course of a week, finishing that last memorable paragraph, and then turning back to page 1 to start over. The characters of Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou stayed within me for a long time, and perhaps have never left.

Our banner quote this week is from a small speech that Camus delivered in 1948 for an audience of Dominican monks who had asked him to speak about "what unbelievers expect from Christians." Here is that selection in its larger context:

I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians...Hence I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

Camus was, as far as I can tell from his writing, a fairly gracious fellow. The journalism of today, with its shrill air of self-promotive combativeness, would make him as ill as it does you or me. The enduring beauty of his fiction is its lack of sharp lines and divisive shades of character. Something within us responds as readily and even poignantly to "The Stranger" as it does to the noble Dr. Rieux. In our world of today, where crimes of hatred are gaining the force of global and national movements; when the torture and murder of innocents is lightly and even smilingly debated by TV pundits; and where any form of non-belief in the prevailing and accepted groupthink is tantamount to treason and devilry, a voice like that of Albert Camus takes a deeper resonance for those of us who will pause to listen.

His stories, essays, and lectures arise from the understanding that crime or evil does not form in a vacuum; the criminal is not an isolated freak disconnected from his society, his community, or even his government. Camus refused to accept the malicious projections that were cast upon him, and that have been cast onto any who have turned away from the easy solutions that belief and group affiliation offer. He understood, as others before and after him have understood, that the discarding of belief is perhaps the most courageous and progressive step that the human mind and will can make. He offered this understanding not as a new form of belief, but as a practical inner exploration toward reaching a point of human unity. Here is more of what he had to tell those Dominican monks a few years after the end of World War II:

Christians and Communists will tell me that their optimism is based on a longer range, that it is superior to all the rest, and that God or history, according to the individual, is the satisfying end-product of their dialectic. I can indulge in the same reasoning. If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man. And not in the name of a humanism that always seemed to me to fall short, but in the name of an ignorance that tries to negate nothing.

This means that the words 'pessimism' and 'optimism' need to be clearly defined and that, until we can do so, we must pay attention to what unites us rather than to what separates us.

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Albert Camus, from "What Unbelievers Expect From Christians". I found these selections in a 1990 anthology called The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan.