When I was 15, it occurred to me that all life-forms, including humans, were doing no more than surviving, in order to procreate, so as to perpetuate life indefinitely and meaninglessly.
It was quite a disturbing thought and only gradually did I learn to appreciate life’s subtle truth.
For truth is not just simplistic reasoning, let alone the accumulation of facts.
While reason and fact are clearly important aspects of truth, without feeling and meaning, they leave us empty of truly human experience.
Recent psychological research reveals that different neural networks for perceiving reality are used for analytical thinking and for religious faith.
According to Professor Tony Jack, of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, who led the study, acquiring religious faith involves suspending analytical thinking, but simultaneously, it enables “greater social and emotional insight”. (The Independent, March 24, 2016).
The research also evidenced that people with religious faith have greater empathy than atheists, who typically lack empathy. But empathy is surely something everyone needs.
Despite, for some, identity politics now upstaging conventional views, modern society is increasingly rationalistic and fact-based, often rewarding those values to the exclusion of broader experience. But humanity has evolved to live most successfully by imagination, intuition and empathy, as well as logical reasoning.
For, by interweaving threads of thought and feeling, we create a meaningful experience of greater awareness, resolve and depth.
Friendship, empathy, generosity, learning about others, growing through life’s challenges, humour, creativity, appreciation of beauty, nature and stillness, and openness to explore the profound mystery at the heart of existence; these are experiences that involve both thought and feeling, making life meaningful.
Opening the heart to imagine, to hope, to trust and to love, while still being able to reason, is surely not to limit life’s significance, but rather, to inspire it.
Anthony Hare, from Wokingham Friends, writing on behalf of Churches Together in Wokingham
