what the [bleep] do we know?

Note the brutal dismemberment
of the Greek alphabet.

With my parents’ house all to myself a few weeks ago, I spent the evening playing with Sky and watching documentaries. One of these—“What the bleep do we know?”—is, to put it in a nutshell, centered on quantum mysticism: New Age ideals seeking validation by plucking science as if out of a hat. The overwhelming majority of physicists and scientists shake their heads at such mysticism, calling it pseudoscience and the like. It’s the secularized, hip-hop version of what we evangelicals have been doing for the last several decades with the whole “Creation Science” and “Answers in Genesis” shenanigans: taking bits of science from here and over there, reinterpreting it through our own prefabricated set of lens, and then marketing it off as proof that we’re right. But, as an aside, let’s not be too hard on people who do this, because everyone does this all the time with matters of personal belief, be they religious or otherwise; some are just more forthcoming about it.

The documentary started off well enough, touching the surface of quantum mechanics by delving into the ideas of multiple universes and the appearance and disappearance of electrons between such universes. That’s all fine and well, but not far into the movie things got a little weird, and somehow the narrator found it to be no difficult step to go from quantum physics to orchestrating reality not around the physical laws as we know them but by our conscious thought, and from there on to changing our lives in such a way that there’s no need for antidepressant medicine, and somehow along the way we find we can channel the 35,000 year-old Lemurian warrior Ramtha (the three writers are members of a cult focused around such a figure, so it’s not surprising they wiggled that in there). Despite the brutal twisting of facts, the manipulation of scientific experiments, and the blatant logical fallacies (such as “Because we know we’re right, everyone else must be wrong, because we have the truth.”), not to mention the absolute absurdity of the whole “Ramtha” ordeal, this film’s become increasingly popular and can be watched streaming from Netflix.

The film calls traditional monotheistic religions outmoded and “backwards”, and that the entire way of looking at the idea of God throughout human history is archaic and needs to be replaced with a different concept of God, a more uniform and all-encompassing form of God, of which we are a part. A grievous error, the film said, is to assume that God is distinct and apart from us. Thus what we have here is just more New Age thinking, a pantheism located at the subatomic level of all things. As an interesting aside, pantheism (and its counterpart panentheism) have been making a steady comeback in the recent years, and most adherents scorn the triumvirate of monotheistic religions. Interestingly, however, the very premise of pantheism falls apart under the weight of reality, and thus pantheism seems to become popular and then fizzle out for a while in historical and undulating currents. Monotheism, however, works far better with reality, and thus the major world religions remain monotheistic. By incorporating quantum science (or, rather, their version of it) into the equation, New Age “quantum mysticists” can escape one of pantheism’s biggest problems (reality) by subjugating reality not to the material world but to the conscious and existential world, which (according to them) holds the universe together (and even, in a sense, guides it).

This independent documentary went from being a no-namer to an international phenomenon, and the question is, “Why?” The documentary’s fallen under heavy criticism all across the board, not least because of the swathes of inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and pseudoscience littering the film. With glaringly obvious discrepancies and logical fallacies, how has the film become so popular, even to the point of being cornerstones in peoples’ spiritual vaults? Human beings are, quite particularly, religious. It’s in the fabric of who we are, and you can’t get around that. As much as the world might seem to be a battleground between faith and skepticism, between those who believe in a higher power and those who do not, and while it may seem that traditional religion is fading away, two things ought to be noted.

1. In the modern world, the decline of traditional religion isn’t something that can so easily be charted. While traditional institutionalized religion has certainly declined significantly in different times and places, those very religions continue albeit in altered form, sometimes even growing in manners not easily charted. This isn’t surprising, since religion itself is continually evolving in both theology and praxis. At the same time, stereotyping the modern world as a whole in such a fashion doesn’t do justice to the fact that in many places in the western world, traditional religion is on the upswing. In second and third world countries, traditional religion hasn’t been declining but swelling. While the western world is embroiled in the debate about (and even against) religion, the rest of the world continues to grow more and more religious.
2. Even when traditional religions—or religion in general—is rejected, there’s no vacuum left in its place. Everyone is religious in the sense that we need an overarching story, a grand meta-narrative, a worldview. Most religions come stocked with all of these, and this definitely lends to their popularity. But those without any real religion must fill in the gaps, must construct reality in such a way to answer the pertinent questions. Bearing in mind that worldviews and beliefs are not the same thing, it’d be good to point out that atheism, agnosticism, and anti-theism, while being beliefs, are often incorporated into over-arching narratives that, while not being religious in the “theistic” sense, nevertheless do what religion has done and continues to do: answer the big questions. Those who mock the idea of God must answer the same questions as the backwoods-church fundamentalist, and all worldviews—regardless their disposition towards a Higher Power—provide both answers to the questions and a framework by which one can and should order and operate his life.

Point being, religion itself is integral to the human experience, and it cannot be simply tossed out the window. If it’s rejected, it must be replaced. It seems, then, that our “religious intuition”—the necessity to be part of something bigger, to be wedged into an overarching story—isn’t some evolutionary handicap as has been suggested, something that can be discarded in light of Logic and Reason. Paradoxically, in our desire to strangle religion with logic and reason, the end result has been logic and reason becoming a new religion. Logic and reason become slaves to just another way of looking at the world. It’s inescapable: we need answers, we need to know what’s going on around us, we need to know where we fit in, and we need to know just what the hell we’re “supposed to do” (if anything).

And that, I think, is why this documentary has become so popular. It gives answers, and the best kind of answers: the ones we like. Often, what we believe has more to do with what we want to believe than what we’ve actually come to believe through our own rational abilities. When faced with two opposing viewpoints, our gut instinct is to latch onto the one that resonates with us, the one we prefer; and if we are the stubborn and arrogant sort not to be wavered by conflicting arguments, and if we’re not the type to try and think through what we believe to ascertain its reliability, then we will defend our beliefs just like a politician running his campaign: we’ll lie, we’ll twist facts, we’ll discolor and condemn our opponents, and we’ll become so blind in our lust to be right that we can’t for a moment begin to reasonably evaluate not only our beliefs but the beliefs of others. We prefer easy answers, and when these answers are easy and simple enough, we latch onto them like leeches, drawing sustenance and durability from their portraits of the world.

We need religion. We need a grid-work through which we can perceive the world and operate within it. If, for whatever reason, we discard what we have available to us now, then we’ll need to fill that space up with something else. When it comes to finding a framework for life, there’s a lot of options out there, a mixed-bag and melting-pot of worldviews, philosophies, and religions. If none of these will do, then we’ve got to find something else. In our western world that’s been condemning traditional and organized religion for decades, those who have abandoned religion have to find something else to fill the void, and I think that’s why there’s been a swell in the different worldviews (not to mention religions) that have become resplendent within Western culture.

It’s naïve to picture our current cultural climate as so static and black-and-white that it’s one worldview pitted against another, but yet this is often how we Christians picture it: there’s “us” and there’s “them”. It’s not just Christians; it’s the same on the other side of the picture. The reality isn’t some Great Divide tearing the nation apart; no, our world is far more akin to the Greco-Roman Empire in the days of Caesar Augustus: a melting-pot of worldviews, philosophies, and religions. Everyone has one; not all are thought out, not all are even cognitively acknowledged, most are more like chaotic seas than placid, pristine lakes; nevertheless, everyone has a guiding framework for the way they operate in the world. Some—like those embraced by religious people, especially those of the monotheistic religions—are forward and obvious; others are more subtle, working deep inside our minds without a whisper they our actions and decisions. The way we view the world is constantly changing, even if our overarching meta-narrative remains significantly unhindered; we’re constantly tweaking and updating our worldviews as we accumulate more information through the interpretation of our knowledge and experiences. Sometimes there are dramatic shifts in our worldviews, and these can happen suddenly and without warning, or steadily over a long period of time. These are, in the technical sense, “conversions” (changing from one worldview to another), and oftentimes we don’t know we’ve undergone a conversion ‘till after the fact. While many people go throughout their lives without ever really considering the way they look at the world as a whole and questioning—in a healthy way—its validity, many people do get to the point where it becomes apparent that a new framework must be written. After rejecting one’s former worldview, as I said before, one must replace it with something else.

A few months ago at Barnes & Noble I came across a bestselling handbook to creating your own religion. I skimmed through it and found a brief step-by-step bulleted list on how to do just that, and it included many good points (such as studying up on contemporary religions and visiting various places of worship, such as temples, churches, synagogues, etc.), but the ultimate point of such exploration wasn’t to ascertain truth but, simply, to figure out what you like and dislike so that you can incorporate the likes into a single batch, do a little tidying up here-and-there, and voila! you’ve got your own religion by which to organize your life. The problem with this (if it isn’t obvious) is that the desire for truth is trumped by one’s peripheral desires. The question about how one should organize and conduct his or her life goes from being one about ascertaining reality appropriately and living in accordance with it (or “Find the truth, and follow it wherever it goes”) to one about how to best perceive reality so that reality is conducive to our own wants and desires.

The quest for truth is far more difficult and daunting, with no destination promised on the horizon; the latter is easy, and even fun. But when we’re looking for those things religion is supposed to answer—the answers to riddles about human life, human meaning, human purpose, and our place in the cosmos—the pursuit becomes, in a sense, invalidated if we’re going to choose a guiding framework for our lives based solely on what we want. Sure, we may develop some sort of coherent framework; but we’ll be unable to answer the question, “Is it true?” When we shape and mold reality around a frame of our own fabrication, the result isn’t truth but a portrait of what we wish truth to be. It tells us more about our hearts and minds than it does about the way the world works. The questions it answers are those about our desires, intentions, and motivations rather than the questions about meaning and purpose, the questions about where we are in history and where we’re going. If you wish to mock those who embrace monotheistic religions as people clinging to tribal and archaic relics to cope with a harsh world, then you’d better have something better to offer than just your own version of what it looks like to cope. Knock the monotheistic religions all you want, but there’s a reason they’re still around while the hilltop shrines of Ba’al and those like him are just archaeological guilty pleasures.