The Religious Personality

What makes you religious? 

Are you religious when you believe in God? 

Does keeping Shabbat make you religious? 

Or is it refraining from eating lobster out of fear of cosmic retribution that makes you religious? 

I have come to the conclusion that no performable action, or even any singular theological belief, can make one religious. Religiosity is an emotional state which defines ones personality. Religiosity may lead to adopting an observant lifestyle, especially within a Jewish context, but it is not a prerequisite. Human beings are full of both internal and external contradictions. These contradictions are what define us. I am who I am today because of them.

Indeed, there is a growing consciousness among some in the Modern Orthodox community that embrace the disconnect between religiosity and observance as a positive thing. For these Orthoprax Jews, not being religious does not hinder them for being a part of the Orthodox community and from observing the minutiae of Halakhah. Of course, that is just an extreme case of what I am talking about. However, I am willing to wager that many of us know people who are only observant because of either how they were raised, or because they're just used to it by now. It's not genuine religiosity that motivates their actions, it's simply habitual. Unfortunately, this is a more widespread phenomenon than we would like to admit. But this is not what I wish to discuss now.

If one could brainstorm a personality that represents the antithesis of the religious personality, what would it be? The scientific personality, perhaps? The relationship between the religious and scientific personalities is exactly what I would like to analyze.

First, let us define our terminology. For my intents and purposes, I shall define a religious personality as one whom, in the face of the absence of empirical evidence for the existence of anything metaphysical or beyond our Universe, assumes as axiomatic that our existence is a grand mystery. The religious personality is never existentially satisfied by empirical knowledge, no matter how intriguing or correct our observations may be, because strictly empirical statements do not bring us any closer to understanding the why of our being. 

The scientific personality, on the other hand, is widely perceived as the exact opposite. For him, only empirical statements are meaningful. The philosophical embodiment of this approach to epistemology was championed by the grand British empiricist David Hume. However, as I shall endeavor to explain, I believe that the proper perspective is a bit more complicated. 

Before I continue, I invite you to join me in a thought experiment. First sit still and ponder your surroundings. Then, imagine your senses beginning to fail. First, your eyesight goes. Everything is black now. Then, your hearing goes, and now it's dark and silent. Next, you lose the ability to feel anything and everything at all. You have no way of knowing where you are in space, or anything about your surroundings. We presume to know so much about our own existence, but the denial of our senses takes everything away from us. Reality as we know it ceases to be meaningful in a context without sensory input. We are creatures of experience. 

This is the brilliant realization that the empiricists came to. This is why science is said to be methodologically empirical. Without question, solidly grounded empirical statements about the Universe constitute the most true knowledge a human being can ever have hope of learning. But philosophers have realized that our reliance on our experience for empirical science is also a double edged sword. 

Imagine now a gigantic concert hall with thousands of people in the arena watching the symphony play. Intuitively, we would all agree that something objective is going on in the concert hall on this evening, and that it generally relates to the playing of music. However, does this mean that my experience of this concert (which has objectively occurred, in some sense) will be equivalent to your experience of the very same concert? Indeed, we know that it won't be. The very same senses that let us garner experiential (read: empirical) knowledge of the world are the very same which communicate the sensory input subjectively interpreted by our minds. 

Philosophers of science are well aware of the subjectivity of human experience and therefore, when defining what constitutes science, factor this in. Therefore, philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper and others, understand that the central problem in defining science is determining what differentiates science from non-science. For Popper, this means the potential falsifiability of any given premise. For others, it means potential falsifiability and perhaps verifiability as well. Either way, my point is that even scientific statements, while striving to be absolutely empirical, are forced to take into account the subjectivity of the human experience. One could argue that uncertainty is the defining axiom of the human being. 

With all of this in mind, I believe we can now see the commonalities shared between the religious and scientific personalities. Both have faith in the objectivity of the Universe. The religious person is concerned with the metaphysical implications of existence (the whys) while the scientific person is concerned with the physical implications of existence (the hows). Both assume as axiomatic that the Truth is out there, but both also admit that the subjective human experience makes it impossible to know that Truth wholly. 

I believe this is exactly what Einstein meant when he wrote the following beautiful paragraph: 

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Now that's a statement of true genius.