This is a response to Jim Wilson’s account to his spiritual journey related in ‘From Yahweh to Papatuanuku: My Long Road Home’. His is a far richer and more interesting story than mine.

I’d summarise myself as child of the Enlightenment or – perhaps more accurately– the eighth-plus grandchild of the Enlightenment. I also describe myself as secular Christian, parallel to a secular Jew, having grown up and evolved in a Christian context, but giving little attention to its religious aspects and rituals.

Religion hardly featured in the family in which I grew up. We never went to church on a Sunday. Dad said he was a ‘carathumpian’ (they eat carrots on Thursdays). It is said that when he was born he was christened in an Anglican church (his mother was a nominal Anglican), but the paternal side of the family kidnapped him and had him re-christened in a Catholic church (his father having been brought up in a Catholic family but was probably lapsed – he died before I was born). When the family got Dad back, he was re-re-christened (i.e. a third time) an Anglican, just in case. Dad response to these sectarian disputes was ‘a plague on all your houses’.

My mother had been active in a liberal and socially active Anglican church before she was married but appears to have given up after, probably because of Dad. She would talk to me as a child about religious issues but from memory it was nothing deep. (She also got marginally mixed up with Jehovah’s Witnesses via a friend, but I don’t think she was a literal fundamentalist, often giving to me naturalistic explanations for biblical events which many would judge as miracles.)

The closest I got to religion was in high school assembly. I enjoyed singing the hymns and adored the readings for the King James Bible – a literature I have loved all my life.

Reflecting I get close to the spiritual in music and text. Add in mathematics – which was a major part of my high school and subsequent life – and you may have the entirety of my spirituality, or at least its aesthetic side.

I majored at university in applied mathematics with its intimate relationship to physics and then went on to do an economics degree. I still think of myself as primarily as a scientist. Decades later I realised that my economics is heavily influenced by the modelling of applied mathematics; it is actually a very much harder branch of applied maths. I am a social scientist.

If there was a strand of religious development until this point it is now reduced to rambling threads in an active life. A topic approach may be more helpful.

I have never belonged to a church. I respect the social role of a religious community and of ritual. But it is just not me. The closest to my belonging to a church has been St Andrews on The Terrace; it is also the closest to where I have lived for forty-odd years. I got to know John Murray who was university chaplain when I was a student, and met up again with him when he was minister at Knox in Christchurch. He lived on the same street as I did in Wellington and involved me in St Andrews (where he was minister) by asking me to join the committee of the St Andrew’s Trust for the Study of Religion and Society (SATRS), where I hooked up with Lloyd Geering. John did not have much theological impact on me but Lloyd did, as did Robin Lane who became assistant minister. (Anglican minister Richard Randerson is another minister with whom I have had a bit to do – our children went to the same school.)

Lloyd and Robin encouraged me to study the development of the Jewish and Christian religions which has been fascinating exercise for a scientist, because the only serious evidence are texts. I have been to numerous lectures including by overseas visitors and have about a metre and a half of religious books in my bedroom. There are a few about other religions – Chinese and Buddhism (I recall a lecture by Don Culpit in which he almost convinced me that Jesus was influenced by Buddhism; I have since realised that he was also greatly influenced by Greek philosophy).

The shelf contains nothing on Hinduism, although Jim Wilson says I should give it more attention. I dismissed the religion because of its pantheon of gods, as I have done with the religion of the ancient Greeks (although I know a lot of its mythology as you would expect of anybody with a background in Western civilisation – they are good stories). I was never taken by the Trinity either; were I a Christian I would be a Unitarian.

Occasionally I lectured for SATRS. If there was a theological dimension in them it was based on Catholic social teaching. Rerum Novarum, introduced to me by former Labour MP Ted Keating. It is a fascinating encyclical because in 1891 Catholics were struggling with the rise of industrial society; Protestantism largely evolved with industrialisation and asking them about it is like asking fish about water. The bulk of Catholic theology evolved in a rural society, so it had to adapt to the Great Transformation.

My parents were mildly anti-Catholic in the way that Protestants tend to be in those days. (Dad’s second baptism seems to have washed over him.) But toleration was their watchword – we had Catholic families on both sides of our house. My greater objection is to a hierarchical church especially one that gets between me and my conscience (or, if you wish, God). I am always uncomfortable in a Catholic Church because of its ornate religious decoration.

I took one (valued) year of philosophy at university under a much-loved George Hughes, who was also an Anglican minister. I have read much erratically since. My shelves of philosophy books would exceed my religious ones. Aside from scientific, social and political philosophers, those that have most influenced me are Socrates (before Plato misrepresented him) and Popper – for I am an inveterate sceptic – together with Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Buber and Rawls. (I confess that in few cases I have read all their main works.)

I am not a religious mystic but accept there are mysteries about the universe. Eddington said ‘Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine – but it is also stranger than we can imagine’; that was before quantum mechanics was fully underway. (I’d have preferred him to have said ‘weirder’.) Here is how I cope with some of the mysteries.

On Hume’s question of cause, George Hughes taught me it as a methodological imperative; one just takes it that there are causal processes. If the sun did not to get up in the morning, one would wonder what caused that.

(I remain uneasy about quantum mechanics. I did its first wave only when I was at university. Even that was troubling. I have been less able to get my head around the second wave – not sure anybody has. Richard Feynman said, ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t’; more briefly – ‘shut up and calculate’. I am haunted by Schrodinger’s cat, who may challenge Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle.)

I take a similar imperative approach to free will. I simply assume that we have it or that we should operate on the assumption that we have it.

On the question of God, the issue seems to me to what we mean by ‘god’. What is evident is that meaning has changed though the ages. Once god was meant to explain everything we didn’t understand. Today we understand many more things, such is the progress of science, and so for most of us any role of god has been rolled back. (I read an account of the Hebrew bible which pointed out that as the text progresses through time, Yahweh’s role in the matters of mankind diminishes.)

Is there a place for God today?

Earlier, I may have demeaned the importance of Karl Popper in my thinking when I said he was a major source of my methodological scepticism. He has been much more important than that, not only providing an account of how we engage with the world as scientists but providing an even wider perspective. In particular, he splits our world into two (actually three, but the third world of ideas is not necessary for this discussion). There is an objective world which is accessible – at least in principle – to scientific procedures, and subjective world which is not.

That makes Popper – and me – a dualist who holds the view that mental phenomena are, at least in certain respects, not physical phenomena and that the mind and the body are distinct and separable from one another.

I’m comfortable with that distinction. The sceptic says that I may be wrong, that one day scientists will be able to access our minds in the way they can day access out bodies. Probably not in my lifetime, probably never. We’ve struggled too long with the mind-body problem and made so little progress that it seems unlikely we will ever solve it. (Caveat here. If we ever get our heads around quantum mechanics, we may be able to tackle the issue in currently inconceivable ways – Eddington notwithstanding.)

This approach poses the following problem. How do I know that your, or anyone’s, consciousness is similar to mine? I cannot verify that it is with any scientific method – a definition of dualism. Yet I believe the proposition is true just as I believe in causality and free will. As far as I am concerned, you have a consciousness similar to mine.

That leads me to Martin Buber’s position. (There are some philosophical steps I am jumping over here.) There is an interaction between myself and (potentially) any other person which is not totally accessible to scientists. That interaction is summarised by ‘I-Thou’ (Ich-Du), a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an I-Thou relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

So for me God is there in the ‘between’ of a relationship. It is a conclusion not dissimilar to Jesus’s ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among you’. Were there no consciousness, there would be no God (I do not rule out other animals having consciousness to a degree).

(As an aside, or perhaps not, I cannot write without a reader in mind. Indeed, my writing voice changes depending on the reader. Perhaps my writing is an example of the ‘between’. I could never have written this piece without having read Jim Wilson’s book – Jim being the reader I have in mind here.)

Resolving this puzzle, if only partially, does not have much effect on my spiritual life. I remain an agnostic functioning on the basis that if there is a God, he or she (if God may be personified) will accept I have been behaving as if there is one, despite my doubts.

(I found affirming the core scene in the C.S. Lewis Narnia story, The Silver Chair. As a rule, the Narnia series portrays Sunday School religion, but at a critical point in this story, the marshwiggle Puddleglum, then underground, is told there is no Narnia above. He responds: ‘I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia’. Existentialism for children.)

This leads to my last great philosophical challenge. What is the basis of ethics? I don’t mean what should be one’s morality. I am comfortable with Kant’s categorical imperative ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, itself a successor to Jesus’s golden rule: ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ (There are similar injunctions in other religions.)

I can see such injunctions are related to Buber’s I-Thou, but only dimly. WhatI am unclear about, is where such moral statements exist in the order of coherent thought – what is the underlying ethical methodology. They are obviously not a part of science’s objective world, so that puts them into the subjective world, I think. Popper was a deeply moral thinker, but I have never found an account of how his personal morality fits into his world vision. That is true for the other philosophers I have studied. Ethics just is.

Obviously religion and morality are deeply intertwined, but you can have morals without being religious in the normal meaning of the term – Socrates and some Chinese philosophers are examples. So while historically religion was a vehicle for promoting morality – I’m afraid not always, in my opinion, the right morality for sometimes it was far too judgmental on and restrictive about the human condition – it is not evident to me that religion is necessary for morality. Perhaps spirituality is.

There I must leave the puzzle of ethics. Perhaps I shall make more progress with it in the rest of my life; more than I expect to make with quantum mechanics.

As I began this as a response to Jim Wilson’s memoir. It sets out my thinking on these issues more explicitly than I have ever written before, thereby exposing the gaps in it and encouraging me to think more.