All truth is a shadow except the last
Jan Arriens sees no distinction between the supernatural and the natural
David Boulton inspiringly describes (25 March) how three Quaker groups coming from different angles – including humanists, agnostics and atheists – found common ground at Woodbrooke.
For me, there was just one discordant note, namely the committee being set up by the nontheist group to explore non-supernaturalist ways of being Quaker. Now I know that ‘supernaturalism’ is a particularly red rag to the nontheist bull, but I cannot help wondering why this should be so. What is it that we are to class as ‘supernatural’? I do not myself see any particular distinction between the supernatural and the natural, except that the former is unexplained and can open up wider realms. To me, there is a wealth of incontrovertible evidence of events that we might class as supernatural. I find these both fascinating and comforting. The experiences that can surround death, or precognition and peak experiences, can have great beauty, integrity and meaning.
In my experience, the nontheist tends to dismiss the evidence as either fraudulent or misreported, or alternatively to appeal to coincidence or claim that science will one day have an explanation. The evidence is then not pursued but tends to be treated with condescension. I think this is a profoundly unscientific attitude. Nor is it reasonable to demand laboratory replication for an experience that goes beyond words but is life-changing. These are experiences which, in the words of Isaac Penington (1653), lie in the last few shadows before the truth: ‘All truth is a shadow except the last – yet every Truth is true in its kind. It is substance in its own place, though it be but a shadow in another place, (for it is but a shadow from an intenser substance) and the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance.’
These beautiful and mysterious words go, I believe, to the heart of our Quakerism – for theist and nontheist alike. It is an area of which many a scientist is keenly aware. We keep pushing back the boundaries to find further mysteries beyond. Not just poets and artists but also scientists will talk of drawing inspiration and indeed guidance from the harmony, symmetry, beauty, simplicity and ultimate mystery of the universe. Instead, nontheists, it seems to me, are tilting at (man-made) ‘truths’ falling well short of the shadow that is the last.
Even Richard Dawkins has admitted to a sense of awe, and a ‘mysterious-beyond-present-comprehension physics of the future’. Einstein wrote how science without religion is lame, while religion without science is blind. Without this sense of mystery and openness, humanism to me becomes arid, a world of empty shadows. This theme has been picked up in recent letters in your columns expressing concern about the tendency towards negativity in humanism, which can be ‘largely a mirror image of religious fundamentalism’ (Michael Wright, 25 March). But humanism offers so much more! It already celebrates the extraordinary beauty and depths of the human spirit, and has a deep ethical commitment. Is it so hard for it to embrace the essential mystery of life, the sense of awe, the interconnectedness and the unity of all things – and so to move into the realms of wonder and joy? It is there, I believe, that we find our essential unity as Quakers.
