Either / And
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In The Double Refuge I explore the relationship between doubt and belief. I argue that the two are not only interdependent — one helps to define the other — but are also a refuge for each other.
Most of the time life flows and we flow with it. We find meaning in the things we do, the people we love, and the things we hold dear. Yet sometimes we can’t find intrinsic value in the world we live in. We admit to ourselves that we don’t see a way through. We see that we’re a very small spark in a great fiery universe. We don’t know if this universe is controlled by some Plan, whether the Plan is to allow chaos, or whether Chaos is the dominant Force. Everything is clouded in night.
And then the night breaks into the dawn, and we see things differently. It’s not some psychotic break between one or the other, but rather a movement from doubting to belief in something Good, in something Greater than this mess that we often get ourselves into.
Doubt allows us refuge from dogma and fixity, yet belief in something Good allows us freedom from endless exploration and from the darker corners of doubt. In this sense belief is a second refuge, when the endless exploration of agnosticism is either too tiring or too vexing. This second refuge isn’t a place we need to believe in and to live in all the time. We’re creatures of the moment and in some moments we doubt. But it’s a place we can live in all the time if we want to, because agnosticism doesn’t care if you remain in doubt or in you grab onto the Mystery of a spiritual dimension.
The Double Refuge is about the relation between doubt and belief, and about how one can go from one to the other without worrying about it. According to this way of thinking, 🔺we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into dogma when we believe, and 🔺 we don’t need to worry that we’re slipping into a grim naturalism or positivism when we doubt. To be an agnostic allows you to go either way, toward the atheist or the theist.
As far as I know, there isn’t a philosophy which focuses on, and encourages, the free flow between doubt and belief. So I refer to it as the double refuge.
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Key to this double refuge is the philosophy of agnosticism, which lies between belief and disbelief. It’s an attitude toward life that doesn’t shy away from doubt. Agnostics accept their doubts, which makes it easy for them to be skeptical, yet they also doubt their doubts, which opens a path to belief.
For agnostics, doubt isn’t a form of inviolable truth. It’s more a method, in parallel with the scientific method or an open-minded mysticism. It’s less a way of life than a way of going with life’s flow, less an explanation and more an exploration of what’s true.
The 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam approaches the skeptical side of agnosticism when he writes, “I will divorce reason and religion, / And take to wife the daughter of the vine.” Like Khayyam, the agnostic distances himself from being married to any one idea or system, whether in the realm of religion or reason. The agnostic prefers to drink the wine of life to the dregs and to be intoxicated by the world that lies before us. He doesn’t want to be slowed down or stifled by conventions, by pre-determined ideas, or by fixed categories of thinking or belief. If he were trapped in a metaphoric marriage to religion and reason, the agnostic would opt for a momentary separation rather than a divorce. A suspension rather than a rupture. And instead of marrying the daughter of the vine, he’d spend some time with her, get drunk with her friends, and ask if Sister Moon was free Friday night.
While Khayyam distances himself from the doctrines of religion and reason, he gets ever-closer to what I think of as their essence: exploration, curiosity, wonder, and connection. He rejects the grand cosmic scheme of religion, yet he articulates cosmic harmony in a mystical way: instead of explaining how the diurnal cycle is divided in parts, he writes of “this battered Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day.” He says that we are “the puppets and the firmament is the puppet-master,” and he soberly notes that “For a time we acted on this stage,” and then “one by one” we went back “into the box of oblivion.” And while he professes to reject reason, in real life he was an expert in cubic geometry and solar calculation. Even in his poetry he has the realistic mind of the naturalist, who looks at the world and doesn’t superimpose on it some other world: “This reason which seeks the way of bliss / Says again and again to you, / ‘Seize this moment which is yours: You are not that herb which is cut down only to flourish anew.’”
Khayyam’s point isn’t that ideas and systems are dangerous in themselves; as scientist and poet he took full advantage of them. His point is that we shouldn’t be captive to fixed systems and categories of thinking. We shouldn’t be captive to the nice distinction, at least not while life is all around us to be lived:
When Khayyam says he’ll divorce religion and reason he’s making a poetic point about living for the moment, entering the current of life rather than losing ourselves in the arid fixities of dogma. Likewise, when agnostics take religion and reason to task, they don’t aim to dispense with either. They aim to shake them up, to re-configure them, and to question their separation. More than anything, they aim to reconnect with experience and with a sense of freedom and wonder, which can get lost if we stick too doggedly to a single conclusion about the meaning of life.
It’s this free and open attiutude which makes it possible for agnostics 🔺 to doubt as much as they want yet also 🔺 to believe as much as they want.
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On the next page I supply a brief overview of The Double Refuge. Then in 🍏 Core Beliefs I give an overview of the main tenets of agnosticism. In 🍏 Argentinian Wine I return to the battered Caravanserai of 🍏 Either / Or, that is, to the daughter of the vine, and to how she might view the circling heavens above.
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Next: 🍏 Overview