One of my methods of inquiry is to ask my friends about the stuff I'm thinking about. It isn't completely random--I do try to ask people who I think might have something interesting to say on the matter--but it often feels pretty random. I'll be talking to someone about something else, and say, "Hey, do you know anything about << topic>>?" They often don't, but even so the conversation can lead to ideas about how to find someone who does.
I go walking a few times a week with a friend who has a degree in religious studies, and we talk a lot about art, theatre, writing, and music, as well as theology, water system maintenance, and who has the best fire-wood for sale this year.
The question I asked him this week, which I asked Mrs Wonders as well, is: "What is the divine?"
Neither of them had a simple answer, but I got a lot of clarity out of talking to them.
I'm interested in this question because I'm still wondering if I'm justified in identifying what is beyond the reach of the law of non-contradiction with god, and divinity is something people associate with god, to the extent that the dictionary definition of "divine" is "of, from, or like god". Thanks, guys.
Since god—or rather our response to god—has many attributes or aspects, and divinity is spoken about as being something uplifting, exalted, and emotionally powerful, it is clear that it isn't just any aspect of our response to god people are talking about, but something that prompts this specific emotional response.
I think it's existential awe: wonder at the very fact of existence.
I've never felt this, even back in the long-distant believing days of my childhood.
And people talk about feeling something like this in response to nature or art, but I don't think they are. Feeling awe at some particular existent (thing) is not the same as feeling awe at the fact of existence as such.
I live in the midst of nature today, where deer, eagles, chipmunks, ravens, and more are part of my daily round. And I grew up walking through the woods, canoeing, diving, swimming, exploring. I've seen a super-pod of orca pass on all sides of a small boat, whales as near as a few metres and as far as the eye could see, some jumping clear of the water in the distance. I've encountered a group of three female Stellar's sea lions at a hundred feet below the surface, giant figures swooping out of the green murk to stare for a moment at this weird interloper in their domain before disappearing again into the dark, and I've watched eagle rays fly across the Caribbean sands. I've fallen through the air at three thousand feet over Eastern Ontario late on an autumn afternoon, when the setting sun burnishes the scattered lakes and turns them into shining silver pools of liquid light. I've watched the data accumulate slowly, building a spectrum that reveals something no human being has ever known, and stood alone on a high mountain where the air is cold and the sky is pale empty blue and the wind whispers its secrets.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." We all have, which is why this scene is so universally moving:
But in each of these cases whatever wonder or awe we’re feeling is evoked by that specific bit of existence, not existence as such.
This past week Mrs Wonders and I were sailing, and saw orca and otters. They're wonderful creatures, and evoke awe and wonder and delight, but true existential awe could as easily come from experiencing a garbage dump or a grain of sand, because they have the essential feature required: they exist.
This is not to slight the awe and wonder that specific experiences evoke. You'd have to be pretty far gone to think that experiencing a garbage dump is somehow superior to experiencing an orca or an otter. It isn't. It's markedly inferior by an enormous range of standards. The only standard by which it is the same is in its ability--or inability--to evoke existential awe, which is what the divine does, and no particular experience can bring.
An orca evokes orca-awe. A garbage dump evokes dump-disgust. There is nothing essentially existential about our responses to them: the awe or disgust comes from our response to their specific nature, not the fact of existence as such.
The divine is not the same as the sacred. The sacred I get: the data is sacred (yeah, that should be “the data are sacred”, but however much it irks me I’ve given up using “data” as plural: language evolves, and I learn, albeit slowly).
The data is the only way we have of knowing, be it god or anything else, to whatever extent we can. Knowing the world through the data requires the consistent practice of various more-or-less Bayesian disciplines. These are like any other discipline. My friends who practice the disciplines of karate, or tai chi, or the various forms of “the fine art of folding clothes with people still in them” all get exceptionally good at what they do by formal, concentrated, practice, and by studying under people who understand the art better than they do.
Me, I practice the disciplines of the data: collection, curation, analysis, inference... these are deep and complex topics, and they allow us to know. Nothing else does. That is a sacred thing.
Some experiences bring this even more strongly to the fore: I have on occasion done cadaver studies, and there was one particular case where one of the cadavers was a younger person who had donated their body to science after a fairly short and quite difficult life. They had died when they were about ten years younger than I was when I performed the study, and while every other data set I had from that work came out fine, that particular one just did not work. I was tempted to write it off as a bad case--sometimes things just go wrong--but I felt my responsibility to that person, to what they had given me. I kept pushing the analysis, and did eventually find out what the problem was, which lay in a quite unexpected direction.
While that was a special case, it bolstered my belief that all data is sacred. We should treat all data like that.
The data need our care and protection. It is a characteristic of the sacred that it can be contaminated by contact with the profane. This is not dissimilar to American abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko's attitude toward art, as expressed in John Logan's play RED (most of Rothko's lines in the play are taken from things he actually wrote): "A painting lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It's a risky thing to send one out into the world."
We need to take care of our art. We need to take care of our data. We need to take care of the sacred.
But the data--like art--is also robust. Data has power. When treated with reverence, with care, there is nothing more powerful. There is an element of magic about this, which we only fail to see because the magicians of old were charlatans, and we have come to associate magic with fakery, and so don't see the real thing when it happens right in front of us.
And to be honest, most modern magicians are not very good: they don't treat the data with reverence, they don't treat it with care, they don't hold it as sacred. They profane it.
What is the profane in this context? Informal observation and casual impressions, which lack the formal curation, the “judgement, the arbitration” (as Rothko would say) that is required to create solid foundations for knowledge, to “separate what I like from what I deem worthy, from what has—listen to me now—significance.”
We need more rituals with regard to the data.
We are used to thinking of rituals as meaningless, but in fact the data demand ritual, it demands care, which is a formal process. Ritual is not—or at least should not be—the opposite of "for good reason". We specifically talk about "mindless rituals" because ritual is not in and of itself mindless. Good ritual is mindful, thoughtful, deliberate, and deliberative.
We need rational rituals, and any serious data analysis will have them: look at the data is the first. Simply look at it. Examine it. Study it. You might call this the Ritual of the Summary Statistics or the Calling of the Preliminary Visualization. The Casting of the Sanity Check. Me, I employ the Ancient Rite of the Mark I Eyeball more often than not, even on quite large datasets, scrolling through them, or running serial visualizations of individual events. Getting eyes on.
Beyond the profane is the obscene: fakery. Wilful manipulation. P-hacking. Studies designed to produce the desired result. Most case control studies.
I could and probably should write a book about this, but here I want to just contrast the sacred with the divine.
So that is the sacred. What of the divine?
Again: the divine is existential awe or wonder.
Awe or wonder at any particular thing, natural or artificial, is one thing.
Awe or wonder at the fact of existence is another, and whatever does this is a candidate for the divine.
For reasons I will finally get to next week, god--the beyond--is capable of inspiring those feelings, at least in me, and this provides a positive warrant for identifying god with what is beyond the quantum veil.
But this awe that god inspires is not the simple, existent-specific, awe that the sight of a pod of dolphins racing past in front of your kayak inspires. It is an esoteric awe that's inaccessible without long and consistent practice of the disciplines of the data.
Apparently what I’m trying to do here is to figure out how to make this existential awe, this experience of the divine, more accessible to a broader range of people, and while I don't think I'm precisely succeeding, I'm certainly learning a lot about how to go about it as I fail, and I greatly appreciate the feedback I’ve been getting from my readers along the way. Contra Milton, I’m trying to explain—not justify—the ways of god to man.
Thank you for writing this! Your writing on the divine is clarifying for me. It’s true that anything can spark the sense of existential awe. Maybe it’s actually harder when it’s something which evokes awe for itself like an orca pod because the thing itself is so distracting …maybe pondering a grain of sand - the fact of its existence - if we can approach that with wonder, we’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re talking about.