God & Ghosts: Peeking Under the Sacred Canopy
By Hollyanna McCollom
“I know people who believe in ghosts, but don’t believe in themselves. It’s kind of sad. Okay. You don’t believe you’ll ever make it as a musician, but last night you saw a translucent caveman.”
Mitch Hedberg
I have always had a reverence for the unknowable. Perhaps I was a budding phenomenologist, but even when I was a child, I felt very strongly that whether we were talking about God, ghosts, or Heaven and Hell, those experiences were personal and intimate to the individual and transitory to experience. According to family legend, when I was nine, I apparently told my parents that I felt it was arrogant for anyone to say they knew for certain what would happen after we die, because “nobody who is dead writes books.” I also said that I didn’t know Paul McCartney had been in a band before Wings; so, I was precocious, but perhaps not a savant. I spent much of my teenage years trying to answer those questions, reading up on various religions, asking a bunch of questions, and anxiously lapping up the opportunity to visit other churches for weddings, communions, bat mitzvahs, and holiday ceremonies. It was a lot to take in and at some point, I said to a Catholic friend of mine that maybe everyone was right. I said this not out of frustration or confusion, but with the most earnest of desires for it to be true. After listening to people describe their faith and practice and after witnessing a number of really beautiful rituals and practices, I wished that somehow, there was a celestial being so profound and complex that they could have created a set of beliefs so diverse that everyone on the planet could find just the thing to make themselves feel right with the universe. While the religious explorations of my youth did not read to me at the time as sociology, I realize now that I was, in fact, observing these experiences and practices in hopes of extracting social meaning. The key point is that I felt then (and even more so now) that the phenomenological approach offers a unique perspective on the study of religion because, if we want to understand people’s faith, we have to be willing to hear the stories of their lives. Society is entirely constructed by humans and faith has shaped more aspects of who we are than we will probably ever be able to determine—from the structure of our government to our laws, and even our perception of the physical and metaphysical world. Our holidays—though increasingly secularized—are often steeped in religious tradition. Those who are not religious tend to adhere to a universal moral imperative to treat others as we would like to be treated. Even the ghost stories we tell around a campfire have roots in folklore and legend, but also in religious practices and texts, as can be seen in accounts of lost souls seeking respite or demons from Hell. If we believe, as Peter Berger has stated in his book The Sacred Canopy, that society is a “world-building enterprise” then we must understand the elements of its construction, for we are all involved in the process of socialization and are therefore dependent upon maintaining the structures that the process creates.
It bears asking then, why should we listen to the stories of those who have experienced phenomena instead of relying on rational thought and scientific reasoning? It is my belief that one of the key elements of phenomenology is that there are so many ways in which phenomena and entities can manifest themselves to us that by understanding those differences, we can better understand our shared experience and the essential structures that make up our conscious minds. Studying religion assists us in the effort of studying the ways we, as humans, construct our world and ideas. When we are studying the sacred, we are studying the things that give life meaning and purpose and we are often simultaneously asking what it is about religion that makes it such an everlasting and significant part of the tapestry that is our society. To answer those questions, we need to understand each other; and to understand each other, we must remain balanced between subjectivity and objectivity. We must search for the “central underlying meaning of the experience and emphasize the intentionality of consciousness where experiences contain both the outward appearance and inward consciousness based on memory, image, and meaning.” Phenomenology is, by nature, a descriptive enterprise. It is an eidetic endeavor and not a factual inquiry, for it is concerned with our perception of our experiences and beliefs rather than the fact of the experiences, because of course there are no absolute facts involved.
When discussing modern religion, it is increasingly easy to see the divide between the secular and the divine. Despite numbers to the contrary, it has long been believed that modern society--as it became more educated and global—would, in turn, become less religious. The secularization thesis speculated that this would lead to the decline of religion as modern technology, culture, and science became guiding forces in society. Max Weber’s concept of entzauberung or “disenchantment” illustrated this change, not as a lack of belief in the “old mysteries”, but rather that appeals to divine authority have lost their luster in favor of practical consideration. This has not, however, led to the demise of faith and religion. Though many have argued that a belief in the divine is antithetical to contemporary thinking, a 2013 Harris Interactive poll suggests that 74% of people still believe in God, 72% believe in miracles, 58% believe in the concept of Hell, 42% believe in ghosts, and 24% believe in reincarnation. When we talk about ghost stories, it is often easy to discount them as folklore and fiction, but for the people who experience these encounters, it is very real. There is a cycle of disbelief at play because the modern way of thinking often emphasizes that if you believe in modern science, you cannot possibly believe in spirits and other metaphysical entities. Accounts of such experiences are often told in hushed tones because they are thought to be signs of a troubled mind. People are often wary about speaking up and publishing accounts of such experiences for fear of their stories being viewed on the same level as the rantings of a “crazy person”. People refuse to speak up or choose to only speak up in such circles where their accounts are widely accepted, and this reticence only contributes to the lack of credible accounts which might lead others to speak up about similar experiences.
People who choose to go public with accounts of religious experiences are often met with skepticism (at the very least). Back in the 90s, a book called Embraced by the Light came out. It was an account of a near-death experience written by Betty Eadie. The book was a New York Times bestseller and Eadie was featured on morning talk shows and news programs talking about her experience. Eadie also faced a huge backlash for some of her accounts, particularly from some denominations of the Christian church who found her story at odds with their own beliefs and responded with anger and vitriol. Eadie’s suggestions of a pre-life existence and a plurality of Gods as well as her interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve ruffled feathers and had some people calling to have her book banned. Some critics went so far as to compare her thoughts to the force from Star Wars and to call her a heretic. What was so surprising to watch is how hurt people seemed to be, not only by Eadie’s beliefs but also by the platform that her willingness to be outspoken had granted her. In their minds, Christianity was under attack; and in turn, so were they. It didn’t matter that they might never meet Eadie. The presence of her experience was threatening to them, so they could not view it from a phenomenological perspective. They simply could not analyze her account and consider it as evidence in a longer question of social meaning.
What of those experiences, though? While it could be said that we can only really know what we experience ourselves, those experiences are very real for the individual in question and there is value in explaining the social meaning of those experiences to ourselves and each other. We may not be able to decide on the truth of a matter, but we can collect accounts and stories from those who have experienced divine moments (be they profound or small) and we can then try to set aside our prejudices and personal feelings to analyze those statements in search of meaning. There is little value in trying to answer the question of scientific fact when it comes to the paranormal because the truth of the matter is that we cannot say for certain that a thing is not true simply because we can’t prove that it is. We must instead base our insight into the intricate structures—the how and the what--of the experience without, in the process, decreasing the substance of that information to the subjective and abstract highlights of that experience. As Dr. Christopher Bader points out in his book Paranormal America, no survey could be conducted that would prove the existence of God, nor would any amount of research provide us with a glimpse of Heaven; we can only address the effects that having such beliefs has on the believers themselves. There is a great value in understanding the social dynamics around the idea of and belief in God that does not require answering any divine truths.
This brings me back to the question of religion and science being adversarial concepts. The theory of evolution is hotly contested and there are many (from either side) who claim that you cannot believe in Darwin’s teachings and also believe that God created the universe. Indeed, some believers have risen to fight the cause arguing that their beliefs are under attack. The subject came up recently in the Ohio legislature when the Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act passed the house and moved on to the senate. The bill received press because critics argued that it allowed students to claim religious beliefs as an exemption for being incorrect in science class, but in reality, the bill is meant to allow for religious expression in class and on homework assignments and prevent students from being rewarded or penalized for religious beliefs. The fervor surrounding the bill is an example of how sensitive the issue still is for people on both sides of the debate. However, despite the somewhat vague language the bill uses, there is merit in its intention. It seems to me that the authors of the bill intend for there to be discourse and for people who have different beliefs to be able to hold and consider those beliefs however they see fit. It is akin to the dialogue model as suggested in Ian Barbour’s typologies in that it suggests that dialogue may arise from the presuppositions, methods, and concepts that are shared between both science and religion. Considering this, I would suggest that phenomenology is—at least in part—harmonious with scientific realism. It is the process of looking, discovering, and understanding rather than speculating and making assumptions.
If phenomenology focuses on researching phenomena, then it should not be confused with inquiries into the anthropology, history, or theology behind religion. We are looking to unlock the human experience and understand how those experiences were constructed—and in turn what they mean for all of us. The object of the research is to uncover the variation of experiences. The world around us is a construction, and since it is all a construction, it matters how it was constructed. It matters who views it and how they are viewing it. We can look back and understand that we were wrong about how we constructed things before, like the geocentric theory or the theory of secularization, but even learning how and why we were wrong has meaning. Phenomenology is reductive in that we can focus our inquires on the experiences and their absolute source—the person experiencing them. The essence therein is to take seriously the beliefs, practices, and experiences of the people involved because it’s not just about learning about our own individual experiences of “world-being”, but also about gaining insight into the things that make us humans such distinctly religious beings.
