Hearing Harmonies in the Song of the Soul

“You are obviously an intelligent person and apparently a nice one,” my Facebook friend Ari told me. “Thus, from my perspective, you make a good case for why I am skeptical of religion since it seems to have the ability to trump reason.”

If I may be so bold, I told Ari, as to paraphrase your setup for the assumption that I believed in a physical resurrection: You are obviously an intelligent person and apparently a nice one. Thus, from my perspective, you make a good case for why I am skeptical of anti-theism (or ”new atheism,” if you prefer). I find many of its adherents are quick to assume that every religious person shares the same basic theology and worldview. That religious people must muzzle their rational faculties in order to believe. That religion is, by nature, something monolithic and resistant to change. 

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In my experience as a Baha’i, religion is organic and evolutionary. I reminded Ari of something I’d shared with him earlier from a talk given by Abdu’l-Baha: 

Religion is the outer expression of the divine reality. Therefore, it must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. If it be without motion and non-progressive, it is without the divine life; it is dead. The divine institutes are continuously active and evolutionary; therefore, the revelation of them must be progressive and continuous. … The world of thought has been regenerated. Sciences of former ages and philosophies of the past are useless today. Present exigencies demand new methods of solution; world problems are without precedent. Old ideas and modes of thought are fast becoming obsolete. Ancient laws and archaic ethical systems will not meet the requirements of modern conditions …

I’m sure you understand, I told him, that your experience of the world is not the only valid one. I’m asking that you also understand that, just because you don’t see a thing or sense it or see the logic of it or find it in the knowledge about the world that you personally have come across, it doesn’t mean that thing or that experience is impossible or delusional or invalid.

I gave an example from our shared love of music: I hear harmonies. Play a note, and my mind automatically reaches for its third or fifth or seventh or second. Play me a song I’ve never heard, and I will reflexively and instinctively locate and sing the harmonies with the certainty of a Canadian goose heading for Toronto in August. You may be convinced that I must have known and rehearsed it. 

Surprisingly, not all human beings can do this. Believe it or not, I’ve actually had people — some of them musicians — express doubt that I can do it and tell me that the only way to learn harmonies is to either sight-read them from a score or be taught them as a melodic line. Now, you’d think actually hearing the harmonies I produce would convince people I had the capacity to hear them. Not so. They don’t doubt the output, they just don’t believe that the way I was able to produce it is a thing that really happens.

Many human beings — even some who think of themselves as atheists — have a sense of a greater or over-arching intelligence that they share the universe with and that may actually be fundamental to the universe. To riff on Carl Sagan, the elements that make up our bodies are “star stuff.” That is, they are composed of the elements that formed in stars over the course of billions of years of cosmic evolution. Scientists are justifiably excited to have discovered the source of the material from which the human body is made. Some of them have even turned their attention to trying to ferret out the source of the human intellect, the spirit, the soul.

Is the soul something created by the electromagnetic field generated by the synapses of the brain? If so, why are humans so different from other animals? What explains this fundamental, essential power that allows humans to deconstruct the very matrix of the universe and to MacGyver it to suit us? Why does that power exist nowhere in the star stuff of which our bodies are made? Whence the most essential part of the human being — its mind? 

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The writings of the Baha’i Faith contain references to this seeming paradox. When he visited Europe and North America after being released from his imprisonment by the Ottoman Empire, Abdu’l-Baha, eldest son of Baha’u’llah and appointed interpreter of his teachings, gave a number of addresses, speeches, and talks on the subject of what makes us human. The following is from a talk he gave in New York on April 5, 1912:

The phenomenal world is entirely subject to the rule and control of natural law. These myriad suns, satellites and heavenly bodies throughout endless space are all captives of nature. …All phenomenal beings … live within the bounds of natural law, and nature is the ruler of all except man. Man is not the captive of nature, for although according to natural law he is a being of the earth, yet he guides ships over the ocean, flies through the air in airplanes, descends in submarines …  Man has intelligence; nature has not. Man has volition; nature has none. Man has memory; nature is without it. Man has the reasoning faculty; nature is deprived. Man has the perceptive faculty; nature cannot perceive. If we accept the supposition that man is but a part of nature, we are confronted by an illogical statement, for this is equivalent to claiming that a part may be endowed with qualities which are absent in the whole. For man who is a part of nature has perception, intelligence, memory, conscious reflection and susceptibility, while nature itself is quite bereft of them. How is it possible for the part to be possessed of qualities or faculties which are absent in the whole? The truth is that God has given to man certain powers which are supernatural.

To sum this up, Baha’is believe that as our physical selves are a reflection of the material stuff of which the universe is made, our intellectual and spiritual selves reflect a primordial Intellect and Spirit that, as millennia of scripture have tried to tell us, lies at the heart of it all. 

Now, Abdu’l-Baha is not using the word “supernatural” here to mean “magical” or “occult” or even “miraculous.” He is using it in its most basic sense — that human beings, with our unique ability to decode and reverse-engineer the natural powers of other creatures and create machines to allow us to emulate them, have something beyond nature that allows us to manipulate it even at the atomic level. I think perhaps the Christian author and essayist C. S. Lewis, a one-time atheist, put it most succinctly: “I am a soul; I have a body.”