PATTERNED TUMULT

Ralph Burhoe

I knew Ralph Burhoe just a tiny bit, because of being in the same place at the same time.  (Meadville/Lombard, 1978-82)  I don’t think he’d recognize me.  He was an old, vague man who had been working at the same problem most of his life: how to reconcile science and religion.  He was one of the early recipients of the Templeton Prize, the result of the approach he took which appealed to the judges, educated gentry.  But his journal, Zygon, appealed mostly to the mathematical types of philosophers, like those constantly wrestling with “process theology” which was supposed to reconcile Christianity with Bertrand Russell’s physics.  The biggest problem was that there was no Jesus in it.  Jesus was a man of "felt concepts."  (Like Pope Francis I.)

Being a man of his times (b. 1911), Burhoe thought of religion and science as two different disciplines, wanted them to be equal and reconcilable, but he was too early for the French philosophers to get at him and demand justification for dividing up the world in that colonial empire way -- science on this side (math heavy, proof demanding, fact based, and so on) and religion on that side, looking suspiciously Anglican for all the claim to be universal.  He never saw the present and on-going rejiggering of the boundaries of disciplines, new ones coming into being even as old ones folded into something else and disappeared.   

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

Our whole outlook on religion in particular is dependent on the vocabulary and concepts of Burhoe’s times: b.1911.  It was just after the Edwardian times, but  then pitched into the wrenching destruction of WWI, the starvation of the Thirties, and again an apocalyptic war.  Burhoe’s ashes are in the crypt under the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, kitty-corner from the “Old Meadville Building.”  He was committed to that place because it embodied the same combination of institutional religion and institutional science.  Von Ogden Vogt built a replica of a European cathedral but with an internal frieze of the industrial age: steam ships, locomotives, propeller airplanes.  A niche is occupied by a sculpture of Joseph Priestly, the man who identified oxygen.  It was thought to be the final form of the “modern.”

From 1957 to 1961 I was at Northwestern and loved to watch the Seabury-Western Theological Seminary students sweep in and out with their capes billowing around them.  I just missed Alan Watts (b.1915) who took his Master’s there. (With results very different from Burhoe.)  But I hit NU lucky.  I can’t even remember the name of the Comparative Religion professor, but he announced that would teach each religion as though he were trying to convert us.  Girls occasionally ran weeping up the aisles, suddenly having had their cocoons torn open, but I was thrilled and very glad ever since, since that is the real schism in the world today, the one between the Eastern Matrix and the Western Matrix as explained in this piece from NPR.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/07/13/329759036/science-vs-religion-beyond-the-western-traditions

The quarrels among Abrahamic siblings are bitter and violent, but only a schism between institutions, not world assumptions.  Luckily, for the most part the East/West world views are so different that they don’t confront.  But their institutions do.

By the time I was in Hyde Park ’78-82, we were all struggling to learn two things: how to use a computer and what the hell those French deconstructionists were going on about.  After I left, the church had to pull down the steeple on the bell tower.  It was deteriorated enough to be dangerous and the congregation was too small to pay to rebuild it.  You can play the symbolism several different ways.

Foucault

Today when I try to talk to people about religion, even those who study it for a living or who are well-informed scientists, it’s as though they haven’t lived through the last decade.  None of the paradigm-shifting neurological research, none of the clever and revealing psych games (capable of relieving phantom pain in a missing arm through the use of a mirror).  None of the radical re-framing of what my friend calls “the Frankfurt Schule” (Derrida, Foucault, DeLeuzeGuattari)  None of the raised consciousness about what used to be called The Third World, or about the underculture where the drugs, traffickers, and international corporate blood-suckers operate.

There’s a general blindness about what happens in schools these days; how insurance, pharma, and hospital management conspire and entwine to make us sicker and “broker.” Thinkers obsess over little things and are blind to the obvious, because they are busy being rational about categories and arguments framed in the 19^th century.  With their professors’ approval, of course.

Chernobyl

What if we started from scratch, or as close as humans can come to

zero-based relig . . . (erm), spiri  . . .(erm) , scie . . . (erm) -- what word about one’s inner guidance and fuel system is not already loaded with assumptions?  Institutionalized religions (empires) are easily in conflict when not simply predatory (evangelical).  Spirituality wanders off into fantasy, supernatural stuff.  Science is an evidence-based institution as contrasted with a conviction-based institution, which means that the two can wrestle with each other if they are not grounded in human experience.

I’ve looked at the Latinate categorizations about belief systems:  The nature of the Theos might be depicted in human terms as something more like quantum physics or Hallmark -- the sentimental suggest “love” or “compassion.”).  A-theism (denying all the Theism terms while not necessarily offering alternatives).  Pantheism (God in everything, thus “pan”).  Panentheism (If you take everything away and something is left, that must be “God”).

Yesterday I came upon this new word:  “panontic.”  “pan” + ontology which is the study of existence.  (Not “panoptic” which is everything you can see. And not ontogeny, which is about how things come into being -- genesis, genetics)  It appears that Tom Gruber (b. 1959) thinks about this.  His short definition is  “an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.”  More at:  http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

Tom Gruber

Gruber works in the field of AI, Artificial Intelligence.  (I have to explain because around here AI means Artificial Insemination.  You could insert a joke here.)  But it would be excellent if what passes for natural intelligence paid more attention to these terms.  (That’s not a joke.)  “A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualization: the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them (Genesereth and Nilsson, 1987) . A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose. Every knowledge base, knowledge-based system, or knowledge-level agent is committed to some conceptualization, explicitly or implicitly.

“An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an Ontology is a systematic account of Existence. For AI systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. This set of objects, and the describable relationships among them, are reflected in the representational vocabulary with which a knowledge-based program represents knowledge.”

Change Ringers

I think that I will define religion for my “Bone Chalice” thinking as

“PATTERNED TUMULT,” drawing meaning from the world through experience.  I was thinking about the carillon at Seabury, which played known hymnal music, in contrast to another church nearer where I lived, that on Saturdays practiced “ringing changes.”  People standing in a circle, each with his or her own pattern for pulling a bell rope, which resulted in patterned tumult.

http://www.sonicwonders.org/churh-bells-england/