The interest group on nontheistic Quakerism I facilitated at the aforementioned young adult Quaker conference went rather well – a report may be coming on the Nontheist Friends website. (I posted one to the email list, but would want to edit it down a bit.)
Both the interest group and the conference generally changed something for me, and I find a new sense of commitment to the Quaker experiment.
I first started attending Quaker meetings back in 2002 at North Shore Friends Meeting in Beverly, Mass., and officially became a member a few years later. I’ve been living in the city for two years now, and in the past few weeks finally decided I really really felt right about transferring membership to Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I just sent North Shore a long letter of transfer, which is found under the cut.
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North Shore Friends Meeting
c/o Glenn Urquhart School
74 Hart Street
Beverly, MA, 01915
Dear North Shore Friends,
The past two years since I moved to Cambridge have been a time of significant changes, which I suppose is par for the course in your mid-20s.
I’ve been wrestling with my relationship to Friends, which is why I’ve waited so long to request a transfer of membership, and also why I haven’t visited very much despite my affection for you all. But I believe those struggles are over, and it now feels right to transfer to Friends Meeting at Cambridge, where I’ve been attending.
As I understand New England Yearly Meeting’s formal practice, when a Friend wishes to transfer membership to another meeting, Ministry and Counsel is meant to “ascertain the conditions of the Friend’s religious and temporal affairs,” which I hope will be accomplished by this letter. At the discretion of the business meeting, a certificate of transfer may then be sent to the new meeting.
Temporally I am well. I moved to a coop house in Boston last summer, and I liked the people very much. But the location was a bit removed from most of my daily concerns and interests, so I recently moved back to Cambridge to live with my friends (and Friends) Ben and Will, whom Kristna knows. Work is going well, and I’m slowly paying off college debts. And lately I’ve been falling in love with a girl from Montreal, which is highly exciting.
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The “condition of my religious affairs” requires a bit more explanation.
In my spiritual life, things are mostly good. Working as an assistant to a professor might not sound particularly spiritual, but it has helped me become more grounded in the details of life, instead of just the big picture.
My sense for the social dimension of life – feeling connected to people, understanding their reactions and emotions – has increased by leaps and bounds. But I lapse back into old patterns when I’m not mindful.
I spend a lot of time pondering the balance between self-interest and caring about other people. To some extent, the two are the same. And even when they are not, there are times when it is right to sacrifice, to go beyond your comfort zone. But everything in its season; for most of college I put so much energy into altruistic endeavors that I often felt drained and unhappy, and I’ve come to see this as a poor way to live.
On what feels like a related note, I’ve come to value the sensory and the aesthetic on their own terms, which Friends historically have had trouble with. I thank Martin for his example and pithy words on that account, when I landscape gardened with him several summers ago.
In the realm of ideas, much has changed. When I applied for membership three years ago, I knew that my thoughts on religion were going to keep evolving. But I felt that however they changed, there would still be room for me in the big Quaker tent.
And that’s generally been true. When I walked into my first Quaker meeting six years ago, where Jane Bernhardt gave a wonderful message I cannot clearly remember, I was a sort of moderate evangelical Christian. Next year I was a Christian universalist, and shortly thereafter just a universalist. And by the time I graduated from Gordon, I no longer believed in God. I now look at what I’ve always experienced in meeting in new terms – as a practice of taking heed to “the promptings of love and truth in our hearts,” seeing them as a natural part of being human together in the world. Through all these changes, I’ve sensed some distantness from particular Friends at times, and seen the occasional funny face or rolled eyes, but I’ve never been made to feel actually unwelcome within New England Yearly Meeting.
What was holding me back (or at least, so I thought) was the reverse problem – difficulty tolerating the religiosity of some other Friends. It’s hard to be in close community with people who say things you find absurd or superstitious, and harder still when you don’t feel able to voice your concerns. You can only bite your tongue so much.
But it seems this has now resolved itself, in an unexpected way. Last month I attended a large Young Adult Friends (YAF) conference at Earlham College in Indiana, focused in large part on dialogue between the various branches of Quakerism. I felt drawn to this gathering partly because I wanted to ensure that the “liberal wing” of liberal Friends, including nontheist Friends, was well-represented, so people would find it harder to avoid the question of whether we’re welcome at the big inter-Quaker parties.
I expected at least some hostility or coldness. But I found none, only love and gently challenging dialogue. And my next surprise was realizing that I no longer felt the same hackles within me about being in community with more theistic Friends (or even hymn-singing pastoral ones). I’m still the same person with the same opinions, but I have a “these people are my tribe” sort of feeling that I haven’t had in a long time. You have disagreements with your family, but they’re still where you belong.
Friends Meeting at Cambridge is large enough that it’s difficult to find the same feeling of closeness you find at a YAF conference, but I trust that will emerge as I continue to get more involved.
I believe at some point I was removed from the mailing list, but I’d like to be put back on, so I can perhaps come to future retreats and picnics up north.
Warmest regards,
Zach
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As a bonus, my favorite photos from the conference:
I happened upon your earlier blog site in seeking an article on Quaker Business Meeting, while attempting to explain organizations without leaders for a course in management. I was interested in your struggle to define a position of “nontheistic” Quakerism. As someone who grew up in Quaker schools and belonged to a Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist church along the way, I have also grappled with such issues. My own current views today are very different, however, in regard to the question of theology. Buddha is purported to have said: “Arguments about the existence of God are at best a distraction”. Buddhism as such is nontheistic. My view is that the question is essentially semantic and self-referential. If “God” is defined as that which does not exist, then “God” does not exist. If “God” is defined as that which does exist, then “God” exists. “God”, however, is merely a pointer to a meaning in a mind, as well as toward some proposition about “reality” that may or may not be “real”. The problem on the existential side, of course, is that “reality” is not solely physical, as well demonstrated by systems science. The simple illustration of this point is embodied in the distinction between “mechanism” and “function” – the former being the action of simple, logic rules that have no particular purpose or meaning (e.g., “entropy”), and the latter being purposive, goal-directed action of an organized system. The key to the latter is that one cannot even understand it without reference to a purpose. Consider that we cannot “explain” vital organs in a body simply by the construction of physical mechanisms starting, say, with quantum phenomena and working our way up. We cannot explain the heart, or lungs, or liver, etc., without reference to their purpose in a system which itself has an organization defined by its own purpose. This curious distinction of mechanism and function is fundamental, in that the latter requires, if not a “mind” for its comprehension, at least some form of purpose-driven “intelligence” for its formulation. I do not claim originality for this insight. I have merely appropriated it into my own thought to attain greater coherence of thought. But, the observation has become part of a larger whole, and the recognition of what “a larger whole” means.
Before being misinterpreted to be arguing for holism – which is a philosophy suggesting that wholes direct systems in some fashion, thus acting as if some sort of imaginary or actual “super beings” much like gods or God, my conclusion is quite different. I neither affirm nor deny God precisely because “God” is merely a label that itself conveys no meaning, and I am only concerned with the meaning, not the label. I am as comfortable affirming God as denying God, but I am not comfortable denying the underlying “reality”. That tends to have different consequences – and consequences are part of what matters. Think of this as similar to Type I and Type II errors: false positives versus false negatives. Try the proposition: what you think makes a difference. If false, what you think makes no difference. If true, what you think makes a difference. In the latter case, thinking that it makes a difference would therefore lead to different consequences than thinking that it doesn’t make a difference. Thinking that suicide doesn’t make a difference has a one-way consequence, and much of life is like that. Whether or not it is true is not actually the question. Whether or not you will be around to change your mind is the real issue. Type I and Type II errors have radically different consequences, and it is the consequences of the error, not their truth, to which we can productively direct our attention.
Taken to a more general level, this is why science methodologically has so much power, yet philosophically establishes nothing it claims to be true. Science is concerned with validity, not truth, save in a strictly logical sense, insofar as science is constructed as a method of disproof, not proof. One conjectures an hypothesis, and then tests its null hypothesis to establish not that the hypothesis is true, but that the truth of the hypothesis cannot be rejected, because that falsity of the null hypothesis has been demonstrated by whatever means of testing was employed – a subtle, but powerful, difference in meaning that enables us to work our way through life as a fundamentally indeterminate process.
This fundamental indeterminacy is where my “breakthrough” occurred. Ilya Prigogine got the Nobel Prize for his work on “dissipative” structures or systems, essentially showing that time is a one-way arrow, or irreversible, because of entropy. Again, a subtle, but important, distinction. Most people think that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, implies that the Universe is ultimately headed to increasing randomness, decay, and entropic death, or at least some close approximation thereof. Prigogine said, in simplest terms, that we cannot predict the future, we can only pursue it. The argument is obviously more complex, but the point he made is that entropy means that past events do not tell us what must happen in the future – the end is not implicit in the beginning – the Alpha is not the Omega – and thus there must be something that “organizes” the path forward. We can have and pursue a purpose, but are not assured either success or failure; otherwise, the future would be determinate. This fundamental indeterminacy thus precludes either result as certain.
Prigogine used that argument to basically make the case that mind has an essential function and purpose in the Universe. It does not perform as any conventional God of certainty, or a God that pulls the “strings” (or “superstrings”, as it were) to assure the outcomes of some Master Plan. Rather, whatever is going on is an ongoing process of choice and decision that decides the path forward by the interaction of creativity, intelligence, and constraint.
Prigogine’s insights were applied by Karl Pribram to his holonomic brain theory. There are others with their own version, but the key to understanding any similar ideas links to Fourier’s discovery of the Fourier Transform as a mathematics of entropy, which then was applied by Shannon to information theory, using negative entropy to define information. That in turn was applied to holography, magnetic resonance interferometry, and much else. Basically, the same mathematics applies from virtual particles and vacuum energy to cognitive systems, holograms, the Big Bang and the cosmos.
Another subtle aspect of this, however, is that every “bit” of this “whole” has its own potential for free will, memory, intelligence, creativity, and action. von Neumann showed how cellular automata could work, and how binary logic would be constructed in computational systems that can do anything we imagine. Holograms show how the “information” of each part is dissipated in the whole. Brain research is showing how neurons operate to propagate electrical impulses propagate down dendrites into wave forms that have quantum behaviors in synapses (literally the empty spaces between neurons). The information from those quantum events then form local dissipative systems (whether or not making the brain itself into one large hologram). The key here is that the parts make the whole, not the whole makes the parts, and this “bottom-up” “self-booting” reality then gives us a profoundly different way to think about existence.
The “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game starts with virtual particles that can assemble simple rules (ala Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science”) to build a whole, and complex, universe populated with emergent systems locally organized and constructed with capacity for learning, goal-pursuit, and potential code reproduction, to then seek sustainability at every level of existence, while attempting to maintain the existence of the universe itself. Yet, there is no certainty anywhere, nor any central control and direction – neither the determinism of those whose faith is in matter or in miracles is thus necessary to explain our world. Yet both have important messages for us.
Science gives us a robust method of disproof. Religion reminds us that the choices we make do matter (even if the attribution to God is misplaced). Mathematics shows us that moral history can be recapitulated in the simple logic of games with or without conscious awareness. Physics shows us that awareness is in fact possible by means of dissipative systems and structures, and that complexity can therefore be conscious, intentional, and purposive in directing the action of the thought and behavior of systems that are organized by means of local cooperation and interaction.
The point of this brief discussion is not to make a case for or against any particular belief, but to make the case that belief itself is not entirely arbitrary – regardless of whether or not true. False beliefs still produce real results, and those results can be, or become, good or ill based on the consequences, which remain subject to further choice in future action.
Anyhow, I thought you might find these thoughts of interest.
I do, Ric – thank you. Did you write all that just for this comment? Wow.
It’ll take me awhile to digest all this, but when I do I’ll drop you a line.