The Death of Mystery?

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

-Albert Einstein

There is a shell-game going on and it isn’t pretty.

That hoary old bogeyman of philosophy, Aleister Crowley, once suggested that his exploration of occult and visionary states involved “the methods of science, the aim of religion.” It’s an interesting idea which is a bit analogous to the scientific method, though admittedly more subjective: try these methods and find out whether they work or not. The “methods” in question involve, at the very least, the manipulation of consciousness and will.

Lately, the often-useful and sometimes dreadful tool known as science has been making a stand as a philosophy, something referred to as Scientism. Authors like Richard Dawkins are, in a peculiar and limited way, analyzing religion through the lens of science. Or are they? Sometimes this critique is little more than an interdisciplinary bait-and-switch. Myth is dismissed after being scrutinized as history. Hearsay miracles are dismissed for their scientific irreproducibility. For the most part, “religion” is typified by the most violent and cantankerous extremists and fundamentalists. It’s as if one set out to critique science and considered only the hydrogen bomb, daisy-cutter missiles, mustard gas, napalm, Agent Orange, pollution, Chernobyl and the neutron bomb which kills people but leaves property standing. Surely this would be recognized as a straw man argument, a selective consideration of the achievements of science. But if not, think of the vast millions of bodies that could be laid at the foot of scientific discovery where it is arguably uncoupled from ethics. In a similar way, religion is selectively considered for its failures, for its political actions and for the insubstantial nature of the wilder claims of world scripture.

Largely absent from the ostensible critique is an element of religion which has actually been considered by science: religious experience. And while religious experience has been analyzed and compared with temporal lobe epilepsy, that is just one among many possible causes. And the factors that catalyze alleged religious experience are legion, if you will pardon the expression. Fasting, meditation, sex, drugs, visionary plants & fungi, music, dancing, pain and sensory deprivation can all be on the list of practices/ factors that induce what William James, the father of modern psychology, referred to as “the varieties of religious experience.” James enjoyed his own seemingly transcendental experience of the divine through experimentation with laughing gas; the methods of science, the aim of religion. But scientists like the late Dr. John Lilly, who pioneered studies in both altered states of consciousness and human/ dolphin communications, have been castigated by the scientific community for violating the objective nature of scientific experiment by becoming their own test subjects. And here is the Catch-22 of the matter, our need for another tool which is like the scientific method yet allows for subjective assessment of the content of such experiences. Failing that, the scientific study of religious experience bogs down at the limits of the tool of science: while neurophysiology can be examined, the content and importance of religious experience is beyond the purview of science. For Scientism, this isn’t a problem. Scientism presumes the veracity of the most dysfunctional model as a way of dismissing the subject. Consider the once-popular “psychotomimetic” model of psychedelic drug effects, the idea that visionary experience mimics psychosis. Consider the draconian difficulty of legitimately studying psychedelics in the United States, despite the fact that both LSD and MDMA have been successfully employed in psychotherapy. For Scientism, which not being science is free to indulge in speculative value judgments, these phenomena can be dismissed without further study as psychosis and hallucination. One wonders when science will presume to challenge the existence of love and pass sentence on its subjective bliss and exaltation.

Before we succumb to the religion of Scientism, with its untested assumptions and beliefs about what will or won’t be proven in the future, perhaps we should employ an interdisciplinary approach to not only religion but to ostensible transcendental experiences. This would include scientific methodology where appropriate: in understanding the neurophysiology and somatic mechanisms of ecstatic and religious experience. But it would also include literary criticism, mythology (not in its popularized denigrated sense), subjective experiment and praxis, psychology, ethnobotany, psychoacoustics, and statistical analysis.

Ultimately, we must look for the return of mystery, like believers waiting for a resurrection. As much as Scientism would presume to what we may one day know, it may be more important at this juncture to remind ourselves of the vastness of what we don’t know and in some cases perhaps cannot know. As humbling as the experience may be, our ignorance is unimaginable and we owe respect to what remains to be seen or known, mystery. There will always be an eagerness to dogmatically accept the death of mystery in order to relax in faux certainty. And as admittedly useful and revolutionary as science has been, one need only consider the succession of new scientific models replacing old to see that we are still far from fabled certainty in so many areas. New hypotheses are being studied with regard to issues as fundamental as time or the Big Bang.

If we seek Mystery in its oldest historical guise, we will find the old Mystery Religions with their secretive initiations which, an increasing body of evidence suggests, offered psychedelic potions as sacraments. Little more than a few hundred years ago, what we now recognize as science was inextricably intertwined with magic. For example, we know now that Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy as he did regarding what we would now call science. While the Enlightenment summarily banished the occult and welcomed a world assured of knowledge discovered through modern science, we are left wondering what might have occurred if science had remained coupled with ethics and mystery. Even the oft-mischaracterized Luddites simply desired scientific progress that would be conjoined with quality of life, something that seems quite reasonable in light of our world filled with poisonous by-products and weapons of mass destruction. We have learned how to kill with obscene efficiency but in too many areas we haven’t learned to live or to maximize pleasure and ecstatic experience. Yet progress, which often seems hideously regressive with hindsight, marches on like some capricious god, conferring incredible benefits on one hand and ever-greater means of mass-murder on the other. Dogmatic certainty is not the monopoly of the religious fundamentalists, nor does it seem that we can logically look to science for answers that may be not only subjective but deeply personal, requiring more than just one tool. As much as Scientism would suggest otherwise, Mystery lives and continues to generate enigmatic surprises. In doing so, it should confer a deep sense of humility on any thinking person. And wrangling with Mystery and its meaning or lack thereof will continue to be an interdisciplinary effort that can only be carried out by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of tools like scientific methodology.