A Running Soul In the Heartland

Discovering Religion

When it came time to begin my formal education, my parents enrolled me in the parish grade school, which was run by the Ursuline order of nuns. I began each school day with Mass, and was drilled each school day in Catholic dogma while being taught the standard array of other subjects. At the appropriate age in the lower grades, I prepared for and participated in the ritual of First Communion, after which the church allowed me to partake of the Eucharist during the Mass. At the appropriate age in the upper grades, I prepared for and participated in the sacrament of Confirmation, theoretically confirming the choice of religion made for me by my parents at my birth.

By the end of grade school, the church's idea was that I had chosen to be a Catholic, but the reality is that I hadn't been able to make a fully informed choice. I hadn't been exposed to any religious ideas outside of Catholicism. I was becoming uncomfortable with my religion, because too much of it didn't seem logical. Whenever I questioned a required belief of the church, I was told to have faith. A Catholic must believe that the church knows spiritual truth. I had trouble understanding all of this. And Catholicism couldn't make sense of the world around me.

I went to a parochial high school affiliated with the Society of Jesus, a progressive religious order popularly known as the Jesuits. The faculty and staff of the school constantly taught us to think and question, not just about academic subjects, but about life and our places in the community. Besides preparing us for college, they were preparing us to be "men for others", according to the official school slogan. And I did think and question. With their encouragement, I thought about the fact that many of the core beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church didn't make sense, and questioned the authority of the church to force upon me its religious dogma. I made the effort to understand the arguments that supported church positions, but found those arguments to be weak and shallow. I realized that ultimately, the church didn't want its followers to think and question, it wanted them to have faith. It wanted them to believe. By the time I graduated from high school, I was unsure whether I was still going to be a Catholic. While I was in college, I dropped out of my parish, but because spirituality was still important to me and I wanted to be part of some religious community, I became involved in the Catholic student community at the university. I graduated very uncertain about where my spiritual journey was going to take me.

Asking Hard Questions

Douglas Adams is best known as a writer of science fiction comedy, particularly the novels and broadcasts in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. But Douglas was a deep thinker, and wrote about the impact of science on society, culture, and religion. The following excerpts came from a magazine interview.

"As a teenager, I was a committed Christian. It was in my background. I used to work for the school chapel, in fact. Then one day when I was about eighteen, I was walking down the street when I heard a street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened, it began to be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense, and that I had better have a bit of a think about it. I've put that a bit glibly. When I say I realized he was talking nonsense, what I mean is this. In the years I've spent learning history, physics, Latin, math, I'd learned (the hard way) something about standards of argument, standards of proof, standards of logic, etc. In fact, we had just been learning how to spot the different types of logical fallacy, and it suddenly became apparent to me that these standards simply didn't seem apply in religious matters. In religious education, we were asked to listen respectfully to arguments that, if they had been put forward in support of a view of, say, why the Corn Laws came to be abolished when they were, would have been laughed at as silly and childish and, in terms of logic and proof, just plain wrong."

"Why was this? Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, neverless, those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subjected to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of historians, and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well-supported in logic and argument than others.

So, I was already familiar with, and (I'm afraid) accepting of, the view that you couldn't apply the logic of physics to religion, that they were dealing with different types of 'truth'. (I now think this is baloney, but to continue ...) What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretive and opinionated as history. In fact, they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn't stand up to it."