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In 2009, shortly after I separated from the Army, I matriculated into a university to study music. The university possesses an extensive religious studies program with an emphasis on Eastern religions and so I took the opportunity to take some of the classes which were available as electives to music students. For one of the classes—I don’t remember which one it was—I was assigned the book Native Science by the scientist and professor Gregory Cajete, of the Tewa people of what is now New Mexico. I’ll read you a section of the back cover by way of giving you some indication as to its premise:
In Native Science, Gregory Cajete initiates the reader into a timeless tradition of understanding, experiencing, and feeling the natural world. He explores and documents the Indigenous view of reality—delving into art, myth, ceremony, and symbol, as well as the practice of Native science in the physical sphere. He examines the multiple levels of meaning that inform Native astronomy, cosmology, psychology, agriculture, and the healing arts.
Unlike the Western scientific method, Native thinking does not isolate an object or phenomenon in order to understand and work with it, but perceives it in terms of relationship. An understanding of the relationships that bind together natural forces and all forms of life has been fundamental to the ability of Indigenous peoples to live for millennia in spiritual and physical harmony with the land. (Cajete, 2000)
You may recall from earlier episodes that at the time I was leaning in a very strongly rationalist and scientific realist direction. I didn’t take it seriously and I didn’t read more than a few pages. To me, as I believed at the time, science was science and that was that. Anything “[u]nlike the Western scientific method” was not science, end of story. As Cajete himself states, that is the consensus view of many modern people, both scientist and non-scientist, regarding Native (or Indigenous) science (p. 3). Well, I owe Cajete an apology and think that his book is an excellent place to start in this, the third episode in the Satanist Reads the Bible series on science and religion.
First, a quick review of the ground we’ve covered in the previous two episodes. Science—the systematic and methodological process of inquiry into phenomena—while broadly trustworthy, is also limited in its scope and application in ways that are not popularly understood. Science, as it is understood by scientists and philosophers of science and as it is practiced, is capable of making astoundingly accurate predictions, predictions which can be harnessed for all manner of practical and theoretical uses, but it may not be capable of providing us with truth (in an absolute sense), and it is definitively not capable of providing us with values or meaning, which are necessary and important components of human life and experience. Furthermore, while science is often understood as necessarily conflicting with religion, that understanding may not be accurate. While certain conceptions of both science and religion are necessarily in conflict with each other, it’s also possible to have understandings of both that are either not in conflict because they have separate domains, or because they actually inform or even reinforce each other. In this essay I’ll be moving on to my personal perspective on science, religion, and the relationship between them.
Returning now to Cajete’s book Native Science, Cajete does not define what Native science is in exact terms and even goes so far as to state that such would be impossible. Native science, as Cajete explains, is a participatory rather than strictly discursive process; one cannot understand it merely through being told about it but must actually engage with and participate in it (2000, p. 2). That said, for our purposes, Cajete’s conception of Native science can be summed up as inquiry in the broadest possible sense: into the natural world in terms of both its material and spiritual dimensions, into the relationships between entities and between phenomena, and into ourselves—our inner intellectual, spiritual, and artistic being and our relationships with each other and with the natural world; and these various domains of inquiry are in no way partitioned but are rather fully integrated components of a holistic process which encompasses a wide range of processes of “coming-to-know.” In this sense, Native science even fully encompasses Western science (ibid.), at least in principle. Obviously contemporary scientists might have a different view of the matter, much as I did when I first encountered the book.
Returning to Cajete’s book now over a decade after I first encountered it, I find that it reflects a great deal of what I’ve learned about science and philosophy in the intervening years. If I had taken the book seriously in the first place, I might have gotten a huge head start on the paths of learning that got me to this point. As an example, consider that Cajete continually refers to Native science as being primarily concerned with the natural world as a dynamic process or system of interrelated processes rather than as being static or mechanistic, as Western science has done for most of its history. Compare this perspective with that of the branch of modern philosophy known as process philosophy. I’ll read the first paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on the subject for reference:
Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is dynamicity or becoming—if it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically? Are there several varieties of becoming—for instance, the uniform going on of activities versus the coming about of developments? Do all developments have the same way of occurring quite independently of what is coming about? How can we best classify into different kinds of occurrences what is going on and coming about? How can we understand the emergence of apparently novel conditions?
Seibt, 2020
Cajete makes numerous references to philosophy, and in particular phenomenology (another field I would have come to sooner had I taken Cajete seriously), but I’ve found no indication that he’s familiar with process philosophy (if he were, I’m certain he would have cited it, as such would have only strengthened his argument), and yet the similarities between his philosophy of Native science and the Stanford Encylopedia’s description of process philosophy are extensive. It’s worth noting as well that process philosophy is largely based upon the work of Alfred North Whitehead, mentor, friend, and collaborative partner of Bertrand Russell. Their work together has substantially influenced contemporary science and mathematics. With regards to Western science, few can claim to hold Whitehead’s level of expertise.
It’s important to note that Cajete is not presenting new ideas, but rather consolidating and re-presenting ideas that have been a part of human traditions for thousands or tens of thousands of years. I’m not the only one who missed out on something by failing to take Cajete’s ideas seriously; he repeatedly demonstrates how contemporary science and philosophy are only now starting to come around to these ancient concepts. Contemporary ideas—contemporary to the modern West, at least—such as chaos theory, holism, structuralism, emergentism, and perspectivism are all present in Cajete’s account, and present as well in the various ancient myths that he narrates in the course of the book. It seems, then, that the entire modern world missed out on something by dismissing these ideas as primitive and unworthy of inclusion in our epistemological methods. The loss of much of this knowledge through history’s various genocides of indigenous peoples is, in this light, a tragedy exceeded only by the concomitant suffering and loss of life.
Cajete’s Native science has as much to tell us about religion as it does about modern Western science. For Cajete and for many of the indigenous peoples of the world, the entire universe is in process. Everything is in constant flux: the material world, our lives within it, and even the divine itself are all shifting, changing, evolving. I’ve implied over the course of these essays that, as modern Western science is unable to provide us with values and meaning, we should look for these things elsewhere, and that religion is a perfectly viable source. Critics of this viewpoint might direct me to the Biblical Book of Numbers by way of refutation. In Numbers chapter 31, Israel goes to war against the nation of Midian. Moses issues instructions to the Israelite army as to how they are to deal with prisoners of war: “‘…[K]ill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves’” (Numbers 31:17-18). Numbers is an anthropologically important book. It is the record of the history of a people and that people’s relationship with other nations and with the divine. However, as a guide to morality, I consider it to be wholly abrogated by later understandings. I would no more look to Numbers when seeking moral guidance than I would look to Ptolemaic astronomy when seeking guidance on how to launch a rocket into orbit. Under any sort of Biblical literalism, Numbers must be taken at face value: God’s moral endorsement of mass rape as a weapon of war. If we take the stance of the New Atheists and reject the Bible as having any value, this passage is a particularly egregious example of the problems of Biblical morality, indicating to us that we may just as well burn the whole thing. But if we look to the Bible holistically, as a matter of historical process, as Cajete would suggest, then we find that the passage regains a semblance of value. It is a matter of historical record that humans have used and continue to use rape as a weapon of war. Under a holistic account, we can read Numbers 31:17-18 alongside verses such as Matthew 7:12 (“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets”) and understand the process which led us from one to the other over the course of several thousand years. Similarly, Ptolemaic astronomy is presently, in itself, essentially worthless to us, but it still has value when we use it to understand the process that got us from that viewpoint to our present worldview.
The modern view of science that I described in the first essay in this series is largely the result of the philosophical and cultural movement which we refer to as the Enlightenment, which arose from the work of early modern philosophers such as René Descartes and John Locke and early modern scientists such as Isaac Newton, which found its fulfillment in 18th century Europe, and which held reason (as opposed to faith or emotion) as the highest human faculty. In many ways, modernity and the Enlightenment are synonymous, and its values—progress, technology, capitalism, individualism, and globalization—are precisely those which carried us into the horrors of the 20th century and those which continue in the contemporary world. I can point to a seemingly endless array of individual technologies, products, processes, and institutions that are products of the Enlightenment and which have measurably improved my life and human life in general. This podcast itself is in many ways a product of the Enlightenment. And yet, on the balance, when we look at the total picture of our lives as individuals and as societies in the modern world, we feel, at best, that something is lacking. At worst, we feel that modern life is badly broken, often unbearably so.
We’re certainly not the first to feel this way. In addition to the numerous indigenous peoples who have suffered immeasurably under modernity, the Enlightenment saw its own internal critics emerge in the latter half of the 19th century. Karl Marx questioned whether giving up our lives to bureaucratic processes actually resulted in a better quality of life for anyone but the elite; Friedrick Nietzsche asked whether we had abdicated our fundamental human nature in giving up the dogma of Christianity for the dogma of reason; Max Weber observed that the rationalization of our institutions had detached them from the traditions of meaning which allowed them to serve us instead of the other way around; Sigmund Freud showed us that our control and mastery of the natural world and of ourselves was in fact an illusion and that, for all of our affectations, we remain little more than children subject to the irrational whims of our subconscious minds. There are others as well, and from our perspective here in 2021, their predictions are eerily prescient.
A less direct but no less important critic of the Enlightenment was the late 19th and early 20th century American philosopher William James, whom I’ve covered extensively on the show before, primarily in the episode “Foundations of Satanism: William James and Satanic Pantheism.” James was himself one of the founders of the social science of psychology, but felt that reason was inadequate for giving a complete account of the world with regards to human experience. For our purposes today, what is important is the concept which James refers to as the reality of the unseen.
Let us remind ourselves of the reason why we need science in the first place if we’re to understand or utilize the workings of the natural world: we are not purely rational beings and are liable to fool ourselves if we don’t use some sort of reliable and rational methodology to systematically sort out what’s what. If humans were by nature scientific, we would have no need of science as a discrete category; it would simply be our natural way of interfacing with the world. But in fact our experience of the world consists substantially of nonrational and nonscientific (though not necessarily irrational or unscientific) concepts which are more real to us than the substrate material reality to which these concepts are applied.
I’m going to demonstrate this by telling you a story, and I’m going to do so in a very particular way, restricting myself to bare physical description with a minimum of what we might call conceptual import.
There is a hollow cube of mud and wood, ten feet on each side. A rectangle about six feet tall is cut out of one of the vertical surfaces, and set into the opening is an assembly of wood planks which is attached to the surrounding surface on one side with metal braces that allow the assembly to swing inward. In the center of the area is a large wooden board supported about three feet off the ground by vertical supports at each corner. On the surface of the board is an assortment of various collections of organic compounds, such as the muscle fibers of animals which have been chemically transformed through the application of heat, seed-bearing structures from flowering plants, and spheroid objects which have been formed from a chemical process involving powdered grains and microscopic fungi and then chemically transformed through heat. Four humans are arranged around the board on smaller platforms, two of them about half the size of the other two. At any given time, one of the humans is using its mouth and throat to make noises, and the faces of the other three are most often pointed towards whichever one is making the noises. Then the assembly of wooden planks which covers the opening into the enclosed space swings inward and a fifth human steps into the space. This human is about the same size as the other large humans in the space and is holding an object consisting of a wooden cylinder wrapped in twine about six inches long, from which protrudes a length of steel that narrows to a point. This point is pointed towards the largest of the humans already in the space, who stands up. None of the humans move for the next thirty seconds. Then the human who had stood up lifts one of the spheroid objects that had been made from grain off the board an extends it toward the human who had just entered. This human opens its hand and the wood and steel object falls from it onto the surface under their feet. A drop of clear fluid extrudes from the corner of one of this human’s eyes and descends down along its nose before falling from its chin.
Now, say that you yourself were in the room when all of this took place. However accurately I may have just described the scene in physical terms, you would likely read my account and find that it does almost nothing to capture your actual experience of it. I could describe the scene again with an arbitrary amount of physical detail, filling thousands of pages with such things as the exact neurochemical states of the brains of each of the characters at each moment of the narrative, and I still expect that those aspects of narrative in general which are most important and relevant to you are missing. The conceptual elements of the narrative, which I’ve meticulously attempted to avoid (an impossible task as language is inherently conceptual)—conceptual elements like the fact that the wood and metal object is (probably) a knife and that knives are tools but can also be weapons which pose threats—are wholly invisible to any physical examination, no matter how thorough.
I posed an earlier version of this narrative to the Satanist Reads the Bible Discord channel asking for interpretations and got much the response I expected: despite the absence of conceptual detail in the narrative, my patrons were able to read conceptual interpretations into the narrative with little difficulty and with a high degree of consistency. Several brought up the question of what some of the objects described “really were.” Was it really a knife? Or maybe perhaps a small umbrella? Or something else? What is latent in this question not so much the matter of what the object is in terms of its physical composition, but what it is to us as humans, a question which is involved with the object’s form but which also extends beyond it.
This is the reality of the unseen of which William James writes. In his own words, “The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims… in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just” (1982, p. 56). For this reason, science, however powerful within its domain, is inadequate to fully encompass human experience. Whether we need religion in particular to address this reality of the unseen is arguable and not a question I’m going to be addressing in these essays, but I am arguing that religion is at least a potential avenue for addressing questions and aspects of our reality that fall outside the scope of science.
I actually didn’t have any specific underlying story in mind when I wrote the experimental narrative from earlier in this piece, but what if I returned to it and gave you the following additional piece of information: the parent has forgiven their child. Is this something that could possibly be true? Can it ever be true that someone has forgiven someone else when this does not correspond to any objective material relationship? Truth, in the broadest sense, is a human understanding of the universe which corresponds with its actual state of affairs. This state of affairs is an objective reality independent of us—erase the Earth from existence and things in the rest of the universe would still be a certain way and not some other way, but truth is inextricably bound up with who and what we are, which includes both our physical reality as material beings in a material universe, as well as the reality of the unseen of which William James wrote.
I mentioned earlier, and have mentioned in other essays, that I distinguish the arational and nonscientific from the irrational and unscientific. This distinction is examined in detail in the paper “What Is a Scientific World View, and How Does It Bear on the Interplay of Science and Religion?” (2006) by biologist Matthew Orr. Orr distinguishes between three types of worldviews: scientific, unscientific, and nonscientific. Scientific views are those views which are falsifiable and which have not been falsified. For example, that the human species is the result of a process of evolution by natural selection is a scientific worldview. Unscientific views are those views which are falsifiable and which have been falsified, such as the view that the Earth is between six and ten thousand years old. Nonscientific views are nonfalsifiable. Orr gives the example of “most of ethics;” we could also include belief in the existence of God. Orr’s paper advocates for what he refers to as the scientific worldview, which consists of both scientific and nonscientific beliefs and no unscientific beliefs. I mentioned in the first essay that the 5th tenet of the Satanic Temple is “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs” (Tenets, n.d.). Orr’s framework bears directly on how I believe that tenet should be interpreted and establishes the criteria under which I endorse it. It bears as well on the matter of science and religion in general. The argument of scientism-endorsing atheists that religious beliefs cannot be a part of a scientific worldview could only be valid if it were also true that we should hold neither unscientific nor nonscientific beliefs, but as I’ve demonstrated, not only are nonscientific beliefs an unavoidable part of the human experience, they indeed constitute the lion’s share of that experience. It remains the case, however, that certain religious beliefs are necessarily abrogated by our present scientific understanding of the world, such as it is. The Earth is far older than ten thousand years and the various species of the world were not saved from a global flood by a guy with a giant boat. In my opinion, any religion that can’t endure without such beliefs isn’t worth much anyway.
Among the most foundational of my beliefs is that the world is fundamentally and essentially sacred, by which I mean worthy of a particular awe and reverence which we have historically expressed and conceptualized through the medium of religion. The universe is vast beyond reckoning, possibly infinite in extent, deeply mysterious in its nature and origins, and filled with wonders at every level of scale from quarks to galactic supercluster complexes hundreds of millions of light years across. It generates us and all other life—indeed, it is not something distinct from us; we are the universe—and it structures and interpenetrates our human lives at the most fundamental level. Just as much as science, the ultimate source of religion is the cosmos itself. The unseen reality of our lives seems to emerge from and precipitate out of the physical world just as consciousness emerges from bundles of neurons. In this sense, we might see science itself as a religious activity, a means of answering ultimate questions and answering ultimate concerns, at least in part. But recall that the picture of the universe offered to us by Cajete and by much of contemporary science, philosophy, and religion is that of a universe in continual process. What is it that drives this process?
The motions of the planets in the solar system that drives the processes of the days and the seasons results from the tension between the conflicting forces of the gravity of the sun and the momentum of the celestial objects. Without the former, everything would fly out into space, and without the latter, everything would fall into the sun. Everything in the universe exists in a balanced state of tension between opposing forces. This is something we can examine in a physicalist context, such as the tension between pressure and gravity that drives the nuclear forces of the sun, preventing it from exploding out into space or collapsing into a black hole; it’s something we can examine in a biological context, such as the tension between intake of oxygen and removal of carbon dioxide that drives our breath; and it’s something we can examine in a religious context, such as the tension between the God who is called by the Tetragrammaton and Satan the Accuser, which we can use as a symbolic framework for understanding the progress of our moral and spiritual development as humans.
Recall that, under the quantum mechanical model of the universe, photons—the fundamental particles of light—behave differently depending on the manner in which they are being observed, appearings as point particles in some cases and as waves in others. Well, what’s really going on here? Are photons really point particles or are they really waves? A google search for optical illusions presents us with an assortment of examples of this sort of phenomenon within a different context. Is it really a rabbit looking to the right or really a duck looking to the left? Is it really a young woman looking away or really an old woman looking towards us? Is it really a vase or really two people talking? In my story, was it really a knife or really an umbrella? Was it really a family gathering or was it really some sort of cultic initiation? Of course these questions have no answers. What optical illusions really are are patterns of light and darkness; what my story really was was a series of words; what they are to us is a matter in which there are irreconcilable contradictions which may be simultaneously true. I do not mean to suggest that there are ever contradictory states of affairs, that the world is ever simultaneously one way and also simultaneously a different way, but we do not experience the world as bare states of affairs, and the reality which we experience does and must encompass contradictions.
I believe that this insight into the inherently contradictory nature of our experiential reality is key to an understanding of both the universe and ourselves. Story and narrative are inextricably bound to our human nature. What was the last story you heard, saw, or read that was not propelled by some underlying conflict? And speaking of narrative, it’s impossible for me to read the Garden of Eden narrative in the second and third chapters of Genesis and see that as any sort of ideal, precisely because there is no conflict, no contradiction, no tension. And while that’s obvious enough for me as a Satanist, I struggle to understand how even Christians can look to it as being a desirable scenario. After Adam and Eve had eaten from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:22, NRSV). Christians will cite the tragedy of our having learned of evil without mentioning that our learning of good resulted as well; even God must have seen this as an acceptable tradeoff or They, knowing how things would turn out, would not have bothered with the whole mess in the first place. Those who feel transformed, even to the extent of describing themselves as having been reborn, by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the love of God which compelled that sacrifice, should always keep in mind that none of that would have been possible had it not been for Satan.
A Satanist is one who finds spiritual meaning in the conflict and contradiction inherent to our experience of the universe, who sees the macrocosmic reality of this reflected in the microcosm within themselves, who sees their role as an adversary and accuser as something—perhaps for lack of a better term or perhaps this is the best way of describing it—as something God-ordained. This perspective is something upon which we can and should reflect from as many different angles as possible. The stories of Genesis and of Job have taken on certain interpretations and connotations in the millennia since they were written; the intentions of their authors have been lost to time but there are aspects of those narratives which resonate with me with particular strength. Their inclusion cannot be reconciled with the consensus views and there is no procedure for determining which one is the “real” or “correct” interpretation. My own interpretation of the Bible is based on what I have come to call Principium Luciferi, the Luciferian Principle, which identifies Satan with the first light of creation, the light by which the divine comes to know itself, lucifer being Latin for “light-bearing.”
How is it, in the broadest sense, that we come to know anything? In science, we set experiments against our hypotheses, aiming to falsify them. In art, we set light against shadow. In story, we set antagonists against protagonists. Philosophers test their intuitions through thought experiments. In architecture, the force of gravity both stabilizes structures and threatens their collapse. Sculptors use their chisels to carve away the extraneous stone. We come to know our reality not by passively accepting it but by actively confronting it. Hegemonic religion has subsumed its inherent conflicts into a moral struggle between good and evil. The Accuser of the ancient Hebrews, one of God’s retinue and a member of the divine court who served as a kind of divine prosecutor, became a means for the early Christians to (in a very literal sense) demonize their enemies (Pagels, 1995). But opposition and conflict do not necessarily entail antagonism or evil; as scholar Neil Forsyth states in his literary examination of Satan in his book The Old Enemy, “If the path is bad, an obstruction is good” (quoted in Pagels, 1995, p. 40). I find spiritual meaning in my opposition to dogma, hegemony, and nihilism, and however much the elite who are empowered by such things might disagree, that does not make me an evil person.
In the last episode I explained the fourfold framework of theologian John F. Haught which lays out the possible relationships between science and religion: the conflict model, under which science and religion are irreconcilably opposed; the contrast model, in which they do not conflict because they occupy non-overlapping domains of discourse; the contact model, in which they reinforce and support one another; and the confirmation model, in which they are necessary to each other. In that episode, I endorsed the contact model, but here I’ll propose a fifth, which I’ll refer to as the Cajete model, in part because his work serves as an inspiration for this idea and in part because it fits nicely with Haught’s alliterative naming scheme. The Cajete model is a deterritorialization of science and religion, a deconstruction of the boundaries between the two, an acknowledgement that they’re not really separate domains of discourse at all but rather different modalities of what Cajete calls “coming-to-know.” This doesn’t mean that we let theologians teach science courses or give scientists interpretive authority over sacred texts, only that we appreciate these distinctions as being artificial social constructions, one among the myriad social constructs in our lives that serve us perfectly well so long as we keep in mind that they are indeed constructs and not part of the objective natural order.
After all, our experience of the universe is holistic. We are not, at any given time, having a scientific experience of the universe, as well as a spiritual experience of the universe which is strictly partitioned off from the simultaneous scientific experience. Looking up to the star Arcturus and knowing—as a result of our scientific investigations—that its light has been travelling for almost 37 years across the void of space to finally excite the rods and cones in my retinas is an unambiguously spiritual experience; there is no point at which my scientific understanding of the universe stops and my spiritual understanding begins. It is one and the same understanding, one and the same truth.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Cajete, G. (2000). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence (1st ed). Clear Light Publishers.
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Orr, M. (2006). What Is a Scientific World View, and How Does It Bear on the Interplay of Science and Religion? Zygon®, 41(2), 435–444. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2005.00748.x
Pagels, E. H. (1995). The origin of Satan (1st ed). Random House.
Seibt, J. (2020). Process Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/process-philosophy/
Tenets. (n.d.). The Satanic Temple. Retrieved March 5, 2020, from https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/tenets