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Building Your Own Theology: Personal Credo Ann Cook During most of my adult life I considered myself an existentialist in the Albert Camus mode. I see no evidence of a manipulative deity and certainly not of a personal, loving one. The injustice and suffering common in the world precludes that possibility. As the poet Archibald
MacLeish demonstrated so well in the drama J.B,, either God is not all-powerful and so cannot prevent suffering, or he is not just, and therefore he is not God. I think human beings themselves give their lives meaning and purpose. We can organize a just society if we have the will. We each can lead an ethical life because we have empathy for others and because the group as a whole benefits. For me, the greatest satisfaction comes from love,
just as the world’s theologians predict. My purpose in life has been shaped by a commitment, rewarded many times over, to husband and children. The constructive service of teaching the young has also given me purpose, as well as the latter day creative outlet of writing books. I do not think we human beings are special creatures that are endowed by a creator with special privileges, but that we can develop a religious or spiritual philosophy for ourselves. This effort involves trying to understand the fundamental mystery of life. Although I look to science
as the best hope for explaining life and our world, I also have come to believe that human beings, and by extension, other forms of life, are not mere machines, even if they are the result of eons of on-going evolutionary processes. The miracles trotted out to “prove” various religions pale before the all en-compassing miracle: the fact that the universe and life exists. That we are here at all inspires greater awe that any religious supposition. Whether the universe is infinite and eternal or not, the power
that created it is not one we can comprehend. Scientific materialism can explain only a minute portion of the reality that exists everywhere, all the time. Although it teaches that human beings are part of the natural world and operate according to its laws, it cannot yet explain our sense of self, our consciousness, or our deepest emotions. The love we have for husbands and wives, children and parents, transcends the imperatives of
biology. The reality of quantum mechanics, the concepts of string and brane theory, and the search for dark matter make clear that physicists are only beginning to understand the environment we live in. The death of my husband a year and a half ago brought home to me the need to define my own spiritual beliefs. Listening to his last hollow-sounding words, lovingly directed to me, and watching him die, made me believe that the energy or entity I knew as my husband was real and
distinct. It seemed to transcend the brain mass that was being flooded with blood and pushed to one side, and to transcend the body that was already half paralyzed. I did not believe I witnessed the sputtering out of a robot’s last electrical impulse, or the final flicker of neurons in tissue. Something more profound and
lasting had left the body I knew. My search has led me to a creed that Edward Ericson calls “religious humanism,” a materialistic conception of the universe that retains “ a recognition of human consciousness as a distinct attribute of existence.” I can never be certain, but I have come to believe that our individual consciousness consists of discrete energy that is continually transformed, like so much in our known world, and that perhaps this life is only one of its manifestations. The wise playwright Thorton Wilder expressed this idea in Our Town when his alter ego, the stage manager, says, “There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.” And Thomas Wolfe writes a scene in his magnificent novel Look Homeward, Angel, about the death of a beloved brother, Ben. “We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and life after death,” he
writes, “but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? (word count (689)
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