Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Religious scholar Huston Smith talks about Christianity and why religion matters today
Why did you decide to write a book on Christianity?
I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.
Now I'm winding down, and I wanted to write one last book on religion. I wanted it to be mine! That's why I wrote it, to honor my own heritage.
The subtitle of your book is "Restoring the Great Tradition." What is the great tradition and why is it important?
By the great tradition I mean the first millennium of Christianity, before all the schisms that splintered the faith. This great tradition is like the trunk of the tree. All Christians, whatever branch they are -- Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and so on -- can agree on this version because those were branches that came out of the trunk.
So you're trying to find common ground between those branches. At the same time, you're pretty critical of both fundamentalist Christians and liberal Christians.
As I say in the book, we are hamstrung between the fundamentalists on the one hand, who are locked into a dogmatic literalism that fails to put Scripture into context, and on the other side, the liberals, who have conceded too much ground to secularism and the scientific method. So I'm a plague on both their houses.
And the scientific method, as you see it, has led to the spread of secularism. Some people might not consider that a problem. Why do you think it is?
When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.
This has yielded many great things -- washing machines, microwaves, a significantly longer life expectancy, to name a few. But those discoveries were so good that we overlooked something. We thought the scientific method was giving us omnicompetence (an understanding of all things). It isn't.
We are physical beings, but we also have a spirit. Science relies on our physical senses, mostly our vision, for its discoveries. But there are some things that our physical senses do not detect. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet the world of our thoughts and feelings is the primary world in which we live.
One of the many hot-button issues dividing scientists and religious people is the debate over evolution and so-called intelligent design. What's your take on this controversy?
Julius Caesar isn't known as a great philosopher, but he said one thing that was right on. He said, "People believe what they want to believe." And I think to a very large extent that is true. People in the media want to believe that science has all the answers about how we got here. It doesn't. I want to believe in science, too, but I also want to believe in religion. I think both have something to contribute on this subject.
What does each have to contribute, in your view?
Science has given us the fossil record, which shows that it took three and a half billion years for life to evolve to our level. The writer George Will -- I don't agree with his politics, but he said something that was right on. He said that six-day creationism is not only nonsense -- it's nonsense on stilts!
However, you are never going to explain in a laboratory what it is we call the divine spark, which every religion has described. You will never get a sense of our divinity, of the image of God. These things cannot be explained by natural selection or chance mutations. For that you need to turn to religion.
Click here to read the rest of the article.
David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate
Permalink
