One Common Faith

The booklet title One Common Faith , prepared under the supervision of the Baha'i central administrative body (The Universal House of Justice, 2005) has been recommended for group study. The starting point is this:

Ancient sectarian conflicts ... have re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before... A world... is warned that it is in the grip of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable religious antipathies. (page 7)

I want to bring some concepts from science to the discussion, and show how they fit with the theological and sociological arguments that are in the booklet. In some ways, this is a translation, as best I can, at first pass, of the document into "scientific" terms. It will be imperfect and I'm hoping that, with comments from you, dear reader, it can be improved. Hopefully, the discussion will not cause any additional hostility. ("First of all, do no harm!")

To that end, let me state that I'm going to look at some apparently depressing facts, but the end of the story will be optimistic, hopeful, and action oriented. My take on life is that, despite all the gloom and doom, some aspects of the global community have never been better, and, with the use of the web and instant global communications, we have an opportunity to improve the process that no generation in history has ever had before. This by itself is astounding, and means the past cannot be used to predict the future.

Part of the reason for the resurgence of religion is described in the booklet as the "bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself" -- the failure of various efforts whether secular, humanitarian,
social and economic development, modernization, globalization to make good on their promise to improve life for most of us. The promise of "freedom from want [and] fulfilment for the human spirit" has not been met.

I'd note that not only is the gap growing between rich and poor, as has been well document elsewhere, but even within the USA, as I described yesterday, the "economic miracle" seems to be sinking. Gasoline hit $3.59 a gallon in my town yesterday. Housing foreclosures are at record levels. Layoffs abound. Personal savings has gone negative and hit a rate not seen since 1933 in the "Great Depression". Obesity, depression, diabetes, asthma are rising rapidly. And so on while people seem, individually and collectively, numbed into a type of helpless-hopeless passive despair, as I described in "A Patient Dies in Los Angeles" , occasionally breaking out into extreme violence, and resurgences of anger, blame, hate crimes, and racism, individually and collectively. Why isn't this economic model working?


The answer given in One Common Faith, to paraphrase, is that we have "thrown out the baby with the bathwater." Observing the abuses and downside of religious thinking and warfare, our society attempted to break free of those problems by discarding religion and God and adopting a "scientific" and materialistic model where "competition" and "free-markets", it was argued, will produce the best possible social outcomes. Exactly how and why that was supposed to work was vaguely described as "The invisible hand of Adam Smith" or some version of "survival of the fittest", although I can't recall ever seeing a simulation model showing that individual unbridled local self-interest produced the maximum benefit for all and a stable society. (If you know of one, please comment.) And, regardless what any model might show, the actual outcome was described yesterday, and looks more like economic and social ruin than "The Great Society."

On page 12 it is argued that "global integration" has only perpetuated and intensified gross inequities, resulting in

a questioning of all established authority, no longer merely that of religion and morality, but also of government, academia, commerce, the media, and, increasingly, scientific opinion. (p12)

and

Loss of faith in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human experience reinforce one another int he longing they inspire for understanding about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial attachments are surrendered; one unthinkable demands are accepted. (para 16)

Despite the tremendous accomplishments of religiously inspired actions in the past, the question is raised as to why people are not turning to that spiritual literature for guidance today - or, if they are turning to it, not finding relevant guidance.

The problem is, of course, twofold. The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order. Although the received truths of the great faiths remain valid the daily experience of the individual in the twenty-first century is unimaginably removed from the one that he or she would have known in any of those ages when this guidance was revealed. ... In large part therefore, loss of faith in traditional religion has been an inevitable consequence of failure to discover in it the guidance required to live with modernity successfully and with assurance.

A second barrier to a re-emergence of inherited systems of belief as the answer to humanities spiritual yearnings is the effects already mentioned of global integration. Throughout the planet, people raised in a given religious frame of reference find themselves abruptly thrown in close association with others whose beliefs and practices appear at first glance irreconciably different from their own. ...

Each one of what the world regards as independent religions is set in the mould created by its authoritative scripture and its history. As it cannot refashion its system of belief in a manner to derive legitimacy from the authoritative words of its Founder, it likewise cannot adequately answer the multitude of questions posed by social and intellectual evolution. Distressing as this may appear to many, it is no more than an inherent feature of the evolutionary process. ...

The dilemma is both artificial and self-inflicted.
(para 21 and 22)

There are several familiar threads in this section I'd like to


highlight, and bring the experiences of some other fields to bear on. The concepts I'd focus on are these:

1. The idea that "truth" depends on context.
2. The idea that context changes over time.
3. The question of how what should change over time so as to preserve "truth".
4. The question of sliding the respective "truths" of different religious founders across time and comparing them to see how much they agree, after correcting for the distortions produced by context shifts.

I focus on those because those are actually the core issues that are pondered and completely solved in the entirely "scientific" area of "General Relativity" - which is the study, basically, of how to make measurements and think and operate in a world in which context (space-time) and content (matter and energy) interact bidirectionally and affect each other, producing many "fictitious forces" that are artifacts of the accidental details of each careful observer's reference frame in which they are inextricably and invisibly embedded. (See my earlier post on Context versus Content, Silos and the Electronic Health Record. )

In other words, I'm saying that the concepts necessary to understand what is happening to religious truth over time have already been developed in science, but never been brought to bear on the problem in theology.

This is not surprising, because the concepts have an aura of "complexity" that "only Einstein" would be able to understand, because they are so "alien and unfamiliar".

Well, I've scouted out that territory, taken a good, solid graduate-level course in General Relativity, solved those equations, and can report back that this material is not at all that scary if you hide the math in the calculator and just use the results.

Furthermore, it is not at all "alien." In fact, we are born being comfortable with these ideas -- such as the fact that, in general, the volume of a liquid depends on its shape -- and then, as Piaget showed, we have these beaten out of us by "education" and finally "learn" that volume doesn't depend on shape, and that the tall, skinny glass of juice has the same amount as the short, wide glass it was just poured from. The problem is that, THEN, when these students reach grad school, trying to teach them that volume does, in fact, in general, depend on shape except on small, cold, rocky places like the Earth, they find the idea that was native and "came with the unit" to now be "unthinkable."

I have to wrap this up for the day and will continue working my way through "One Common Faith" in the next few days, tying it into the related scientific concepts that help understand it.

Let me close by at least pointing out that the idea that things change shape as they are slid through space or time is captured in the concept from General Relativity (or Hilbert Space mathematics) called "parallel displacement" or "vector transplantation."

In "curved" spaces, which are common on cosmological scales, the way things change as you slide them across space and time can be exactly computed, and therefore it can be "backed out" of the equations and corrected for. Seemingly inconsistent observations, such as two observers each seeing the other's clock run more slowly than their own" can be completely explained, predicted, and corrected for, revealing the beauty of an underlying, absolute reality, the perception of which was distorted by each observer's invisibly distorted reference frame,
and the attempt to measure straight lines with curved rulers.

Fascinatingly, the key concept comes down to what paths light travels, or "geodesics", as light's path pretty much defines "straight." That should be of particular interest to Baha'is, as the word itself means "light of God."

What is really fascinating is to imagine taking all the great religious prophets of time, assuming that they are all saying the same thing (plus noise in the reporting), and computing whether a single consistent curvature of space-time could be applied to bring them all into perfect alignment. Or, if not perfectly aligned, the "transported versions" of them could be tweaked slightly to fit the shared truth great grand estimate, then the process reversed and the "tweaks" transported back to the original context, and assessed to see if those would in fact be legitimate and acceptable small changes in concept of the source religious doctrine or not.

I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but the very fact that science does say that such a thing is conceptually possible is really important to grasp - that there are techniques to figure out what properties transport over time as "constants" and which ones transport over time as "invariants" and which as "covariants" and what properties will be preserved regardless and which ones will appear to change, due to the change in context.

If we don't even use that basic level of mathematics to compare two religions it's hard to know how we expect to tell whether, at the core, they agree with each other or not. We will be overwhelmed with accidental changes due to reference frame changes that look like they matter, but that, in the final analysis, add up to exactly zero difference.

It's time to cross-breed these scientific and religious issues. Quoting from my old textbook,
Introduction to General Relativity (Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965), on page 16,

In order to make these general and rather abstract considerations more specific, we shall have to develop an elegant notation and proper mathematical tools which are provided by the theory of tensor analysis. The basic problem of tensor analysis is the determination of those constructs and concepts which are independent of the accidental choice of the coordinate system employed.

This, in my mind, is exactly the same problem that is involved in showing that all the world's major religions have, at their core, exactly the same constructs and concepts, underneath the apparent differences due to the "accidental choice" of reference frame in which those constructs had to be expressed at that time and place by the religion's Founder.

Science and Religion are on the same quest, trying to look through the surface complexity and noise, and see the constant Beauty behind and under it all. Science is starting at local details and working upwards, Religion is working at the global scale and working downwards, and, when they meet in the middle, if we've done our sums correctly, the two large pieces should mesh perfectly and the larger picture be revealed.

How neat is that!

Tomorrow (I hope) I'll expand on the phrase quoted above "The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order" and explore what the current evidence in public health and social epidiology teach us about changing concepts of the nature of "an individual" and why we need a larger concept to explain the very solid biomedical data from the majority of studies that show that "connectivity" of an individual to society is the major predictor of biomedical outcomes - disease, poverty, death, heart-attacks, obesity, violence, suicide - you name it. This whole area of very robust and solid scientific data from public health forces us to change the way we think about what it means to be a "person" and "an individual" in "society."

See: The hierarchy of life
and Key Findings from Public Health
for more information on what the data actually show about how "separate" we are from each other.

Photos of the "same" Earth from various viewpoints and times are from NASA.