Reason and Emotion in Religion
What is the true touchstone of truth?

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship ofthe New River Valley, June 15, 2003,by Reverend Paul Boothby, Interim minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley.

Somewhere in the boxes I have packed, I have a brown baseball cap with a little design on the front of it in the shape of a fish, similar to the symbol for Christianity, but with a subtle difference. The fish on my hat has legs and is holding a wrench. And on the inside of the fish instead of saying “Jesus” it says, “evolve.” I used to wear it on occasion, but not if I thought I’d be in a crowd that might find it offensive. Then one day I wore the hat and someone looked at it real careful and said, “you know there are top scientists coming out now saying that Darwin’s theory is impossible.” I held my tongue; I wasn’t prepared to get into it at that moment.

But later I got to wondering, how was it that an otherwise reasonable person could seriously believe that evolution is impossible? I have heard some of these self-proclaimed scientists on the radio promoting the idea that the truth of our genesis lies only in the book of Genesis. They call it “Creation Science.” But it’s not science, because they are not using the process of science, which relies on physical rather than anecdotal evidence to find truth. They study the scriptures, to find evidence to disprove evolution. Whatever they find to reinforce their ideas they latch onto as proof positive that they are somehow right. There is reason involved in their process, but they maintain very narrow parameters within which they are willing to practice reason in the pursuit of truth.

The Creationists seem to have an emotional need to believe that the bible is unambiguously factual, and that anything that contradicts the bible is inherently false. “Fossils were put in the ground to test our faith,” they say. Their rationalizations build a wall around their world view. They dismiss the evidence of a broader context of science because the evidence undermines their emotional need for the world to make sense.

And I don’t blame them one bit. Because that’s what we all really want. At the bottom of it, we want to have the world make sense so that we can live our lives with confidence and make decisions we feel good about.

And so it is that Reason and Emotion are intimately intertwined in our religious life.

For me, I feel a terrible emotional and intellectual dissonance with the idea that religious documents from 3000 years ago hold the final word on how we and this world came into being. It just doesn’t make sense to me; it feels false.

That is my belief, but for all of us, the final touchstone of truth is how it feels, how it resonates with our experience and our worldview. You may say, “but what about the repeatability of empirical evidence of science; isn’t that irrefutably the bedrock of truth?” Absolutely, if you believe it to be so.

We have to remember that science is a process for gathering information, and the knowledge gained through that process is an approximation of the real world. It’s like finding the true location of a star based on all the observations from different astronomers in different places. There are inevitable variations in these observations, but taken together as a pattern, they point to what we can reasonably predict is the actual location of the star. All science is like that. There is always a degree of uncertainty.

The same can be said of religion. Religious traditions are all collections of insight about the nature of reality, which also reflect approximations of the real world.

In either case, it is how we experience a proposition emotionally that determines whether we believe it to be true or not. Truth is a neurochemical reaction in the brain. This is what we are learning from the research of neuroscience.

In the brain our senses feed information from the outside world through the various processing lobes and then through the amigdula. The job of this part of our brain is to connect to the limbic system, which controls our emotions. If data from the outside, either visual, auditory or whatever, does not have some kind of resonance with our beliefs about reality then it will register as emotionally dissonant and thus false or inaccurate.

Dr. Ramachandran, a leader in this field, has examined patients who had suffered brain injuries, that cut off that connection to the amigdula. The result of their injury is that when the patient is in the presence of something familiar, even of his own mother, he acknowledges that though she may look, sound and behave like his mother, he does not believe it is his mother, but an impostor. He doesn’t believe it because the evidence from his senses and his intellect is blocked from the amigdula by his injuries and does not register with his limbic system. Though the evidence before him is compelling, it doesn’t feel true.

Why would the brain be set up that way? Isn’t the intellect purely rational? Don’t we just know right from wrong because of the evidence of our eyes?

We might like to think so. The system of our brain for determining truth and falsehood has survived in its current form because it creates a mindscape that approximates reality closely enough for us to survive. If the system didn’t work well, we wouldn’t be here. This organic structure has helped us create an understanding of the world, so we can do very creative things and survive as simple primates and as complex societies. It has also led to religious and cultural diversity. Even though we all start with very similar potentialities, the demands of environment and biology call forth and nurture different strengths, and therefore shape the local culture in such a way as to ensure survival in that location. The widely varying conditions that humans find around the globe help to explain the tremendous differences in culture and religion. In modern society, things are so complex and we are so mobile that we encounter even more diversity of religious outlook. Religion is all about what feels true to us about human nature and the cosmic order. When you ask folks why they join a particular religion, over and over the predominant sentiment is one of a feeling of coming home. A religious system that resonates with our own world view will feel right and feel like home, even if that feeling comes from being intellectually stimulated. We seek out this feeling of being at home because all biological systems prefer homeostasis, we prefer to have the universe flow neatly into our expectations. Life doesn’t like a lot of change.

That’s part of the problem of modernism, because modernism implies a process of ongoing change. That’s great for technology and medicine, but it rubs against one of our basic human needs for stability. Which is a partial explanation for the rise in fundamentalism around the world. Fundamentalism in all forms is a rejection of modernism. Accelerated change has been imposed on a world that has not developed the cultural world-view that can accommodate that change. If you do things to my world that undermine all that I know to be good and true and right, you damn well better believe that I’m going to resist you, you multinational capitalist imperialists.

Emotion can override rational thinking because if the brain feels that something essential is threatened, the “fight or flight” response kicks in and tries to protect whatever is threatened. As much as we depend on rational thought to make our way through the world, it is the realm of feelings and emotion that must be ultimately satisfied. We take on beliefs because they ring true and the way they shape our lives and our consciousness. Since they are so deeply linked with the emotional system of the brain it is no surprise that we defend our worldview with such emotional zeal. Our beliefs feel true, whether they are or not. It is because of how they ring true in our limbic system that we take them on as our map of reality.

So, if truth is just what feels true, how do we live with confidence if everything is relying on our limbic system? Is nothing rational?

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that, in regard to the law, the touchstone of truth is not tradition, precedent, politics or any other single source of guidance. He said it is the cumulative effect of all of these in the mind of the jurist. In short, it is experience that is the final arbiter of justice. That is why the law is inherently limited, because the experiential wisdom of every generation is limited. But, he says, experience is more reliable than any other single source.

Your experience, (the cumulative knowledge of tradition, experimentation, trial and error, the intuitions of your heart) is the most reliable touchstone of truth. No other single source outside of your experience is a better guide through life. Your experiences and knowledge are like the multitude of measurements of the location of a star. They all shed light on some portion of ultimate reality, and taken as a pattern they point in the right direction.

What then is the role of religion? Religion is supposed to help us open up to that target experience and to articulate what we believe. Unfortunately, religion can sometimes get in the way of religious experience. Institutions and traditions can block creative impulses, which might otherwise hold potential for self-realization. We in the Unitarian Universalist church try to provide impetus and encouragement, guidance and support without getting in the way.

I think it is fair to say that one of the things that UUs hold in common is the way we believe, the way we hold our faith. We don’t hold the same beliefs about everything and we have different ways of worshipping, but we do share an assumption that we don’t know everything. We give our lives fully to our beliefs, but we recognize the inherent limitations of human understanding, and that new truths are revealed throughout our lives. We recognize a larger context of reality that any one person or any one community can only ever hope to know a portion of. This is why we promote the acceptance of diversity. We know that other people can live other truths. We have confidence in the process of dialog between people who share differing viewpoints as a way to get to deeper understandings of reality.

Each of us is looking for the center of the divine target, like astronomers looking for a star. When we come together in open, honest, loving dialog we can see more of the larger pattern of human perception and find our way closer to the center.

And this is where evolution overlaps with religion. I see evolution as a metaphor:evolution is not just a theory about how we got here; it is a rational model for being in dialog with the ever-changing landscape of our understanding.

To me, that just feels right.

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