Welcome: Wonder and Faith

I had wanted to title my blog "Pious Agnostic," but I see that a couple of people on the Internet have beaten me to the use of that title. One writer uses the term to describe Jack Miles, who wrote God: A Biography. I would be happy to be in the company of Jack Miles.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the essence of a religious person is "awe, wonder, and radical amazement." "Wonder" is what one does with one's "higher incomprehension." I would like to cultivate the attitude that Heschel points to. I think that "wonder," as Heschel describes it, is the very opposite of "faith" as people commonly use the term in contemporary America. People use the word "faith" to describe a system of reducing ultimate reality to a relatively small number of comprehensible statements. But Heschel says that "wonder" is "the state of maladjustment to words and notions." People want to have a faith that is true in that it describes the way things really are. But for Heschel, faith/wonder is the recognition that our statements and conceptions can never contain reality. Growth in faith is growth in the knowledge of the approximateness, inadequacy, and falseness of my own beliefs. Skepticism is not the opposite of faith, and it is not a cynical reduction of reality. It is a dynamic refusal to consider the provisional to be the ultimate.

In a later entry I would like to consider the term "Atheist" and figure out if I am one. I prefer the term "Agnostic." However, I would like to close with a famous quote from the philosopher George Santayana and he uses the term "Atheism."

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests." (George Santayana)

I think that Santayana’s "true piety towards the universe" is an expression of Heschel’s sense of "Wonder" and is a more wholesome religious impulse than what is commonly called "Faith."