When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist [Hardcover]

Chet Raymo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2008

Best-selling author of sixteen books and a long-time writer of the popular column "Science Musings" in the Boston Globe, Chet Raymo invites readers to explore "the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation."

In what he describes as a "late-life credo," renowned science writer Chet Raymo narrates his half-century journey from the traditional Catholicism of his youth to his present perspective as a "Catholic agnostic." As a scientist, Raymo holds to the skepticism that accepts only verifiable answers, but as a "religious naturalist," he never ceases his pursuit of "the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation." Raymo assembles a stunning array of scientists, philosophers, mystics, and poets who help him discover "glimmers of the Absolute in every particular." Whether exploring the connection of the human body to the stars or the meaning of prayer of the heart, these challenging reflections will cause believers and agnostics alike to pause and pay attention.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Raymo (professor emeritus, Stonehill Coll.; Honey from Stone), a former science columnist, is one of the most articulate and subtly elegant contemporary writers on science and spirit. Here, he offers a new kind of spirituality in the light of empirical science, writing candidly of his Catholic upbringing and his current agnosticism, poised "in the portal between knowledge and mystery, between the commonplace and the divine." He draws on sources ranging from Sigrid Undest to Saint-Exupéry to depict a wonder-filled religious naturalism. In an environment characterized by the strident antireligionism of such writers as Christopher Hitchens, Raymo's eloquence should win many readers. Highly recommended. --Graham Christian, Library Journal, October 1, 2008

Chet Raymo's weekly column "Science Musings" appeared in the Boston Globe for 20 years and is now online at Sciencemusings.com. He is Professor Emeritus at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, and author of 12 books including Natural Prayers. In this rigorous and wonder-filled paperback, Raymo describes his "late-life credo," which is a mystical brand of Catholicism. As an elder, he confesses that "faith no longer matters to me so much as attention, wonder, celebration, praise."

In this approach, Raymo takes a cue from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest who loved the natural world and saw it shot through with "the grandeur of God." As a religious naturalist, the author delves into the mystery of the universe and finds "glimmers of the Absolute in every particular." He states that "I don't know" may be science's most important contribution to human civilization. But even though this appreciation of mystery is also the realm of the mystics, the war between science and religion continues. Raymo makes reference to the attacks on religion by what he calls "militant slash-and-burn" atheists. Instead of turning to these God-debunkers or to God-clingers, the author relishes the religious naturalism of the Dominican friar Meister Eckhart.

He concludes that any religion worthy of humankind's future will be ecumenical, ecological, and embrace the scientific story of the world as the most reliable cosmology. He might also have added to the mix the spiritual practice of wonder. When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy beckons us to wonder in the presence of an enchanted universe infused with mystery. --Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, SpiritualityandPractice.com, October, 2008

From the Back Cover

Chet Raymo has enriched and graced our lives with this wonderfulbook, steeped in wisdom, warmth, and clarity. A classic.
Ursula Goodenough
Author of The Sacred Depths of Nature

Piercing, funny, brilliant, transcendent, angry, eloquent. One of the nation's finest naturalists and writers pours out his heart on the roaring prayer of Everything That Is and the idiocy of arguing over labels and possession of that which is beyond our ken but not our celebration and singing, which is what Raymo does with stunning power and passion.
Brian Doyle
Author of The Wet Engine

This is a magnificent book, but not one for the faint of heart. In an age of militant atheists and strident believers, Chet Raymo dares to stand, where mystics and philosophers have always stood, in the place of mystery.
Douglas Burton-Christie, PhD
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

Raymo reminds us that human consciousness is plenty big enough to accommodate both science and a sense of the holy.
Nancy Mairs
Author of A Dynamic God

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 148 pages
• Publisher: Sorin Books (September 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933495138
• ISBN-13: 978-1933495132
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (97 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #91,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars red wheel barrows glazed with rain water, August 28, 2008

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Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist (Hardcover)

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Chet Raymo's newest book, When God Is Gone, Everything is Holy, follows in the tradition of reflective nature writers like Lewis Thomas and, more recently, Ursula Goodenough. Although repetitious in places, perhaps because at least some of the book reproduces previously published essays, the style is for the most part gracefully fluid and even in places poetic. Such skill is only to be expected from an author who quotes and clearly loves poets: Hopkins, Williams, Wordsworth, Whitman, Kazantzakis.

Raymo defends what he calls religious naturalism, and sometimes calls himself a Catholic agnostic. He long ago dropped the personal theism in which he was raised, but his life-long immersion in science has convinced him that nature is far greater than the human mind will ever encompass, and that the incredible beauty and complexity and mystery of the cosmos properly elicits from us responses of wonderment, reverence, gratitude, and celebration. The 100 trillion neuronal connections in the human brain; the genetically determined flight of a humming bird; the infinite spaces of a starry night that can exhilarate and terrify: these kind of phenomena, explored by science, rather than dusty and arcane tales of miracles, are the stuff of Raymo's religion.

Throughout the book runs a constant encouragement for us to cultivate simple awareness of the realness of things, an awareness of what poet Hopkins called the "inscape." In one of his most enigmatic and yet revelatory poems--one quoted by Raymo--William Carlos Williams reminds us of the basic truth that "so much depends" on our being able to really "see" the simple things of life like red wheel barrows glazed with rain water. An alert attentiveness is a good habit for the empirical scientist to cultivate, but it's also a human habit that re-connects us to the world. And as Raymo reminds us, "religion" means "re-connection."

A gentle, wise series of reflections. Recommended, especially as a cleansing alternative to the screechy atheist-theist wrangle currently going on.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine contribution to the science-religion debate, August 26, 2008

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Jim - See all my reviews
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This review is from: When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist (Hardcover)

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Some of the material in the 13 chapters of When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy was adapted from essays that originally appeared in Notre Dame Magazine, and the 1st chapter is adapted from an essay that originally appeared in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (misspelled in Raymo's book as "Spritus"). When God Is Gone is a short book at 148 pages, but it is packed with pithy insights into what it means to apprehend the world in a way that reveals mystery and sacredness without supernaturalism.

While many readers of When God Is Gone will no doubt reject Raymo's rejection of supernaturalism, they may appreciate that Raymo's tone, unlike that of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, is neither condescending nor "militantly atheistic" (as Raymo describes Dawkins).

Is it possible to be religious (or spiritual) without believing in a personal creator God? Is it possible to be a "Catholic agnostic"? Is it possible to believe that no such things as immaterial souls exist and that "[w]e are, for better or worse, thinking meat" without losing the very humanity that enables one to experience life as sacred? And as Raymo asks, "If petitionary prayer is ineffectual, is there any sense in which an agnostic might pray?" I think Raymo shows that a worldview informed by science is perfectly compatible with a worldview that is imbued with a robust sense of holiness.

In his endorsement of When God Is Gone, professional skeptic Michael Shermer calls Raymo's book "remarkably thoughtful and balanced," and indeed it is. Raymo remarks that Dawkins and Harris "go at religion like B-movie slashers armed with Ockham's razor, and by the time they are finished there is not much left but the gory shreds of miracles and superstitions. ... Something is amiss with their militant, slash and burn atheism." Raymo manages to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Along the way, Raymo touches on the philosophical problems of free will vs. determinism and the mind-body problem, and he favorably cites Meera Nanda and her scholarly book Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, the late Francis Crick, Catholic priest Thomas Berry, biologist Ursula Goodenough (author of the excellent Sacred Depths of Nature), E.O. Wilson (author of Consilience), the late philosopher Willard V.O. Quine, and Nikos Kazantzakis (author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ). In the chapter on Ockham's razor (the principle that "entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity," or as Raymo says, we should not "look to miracles or the paranormal when a natural explanation will suffice"), Raymo unfavorably mentions Larry Dossey, (author of Healing Prayer), paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake, and Deepak Chopra, whose names he includes on a short list of "New Age gurus and peddlers of the paranormal."

In the aforementioned chapter, Raymo comments on each of the twelve reasons Dossey offers to explain why scientists reject what Dossey et al consider evidence for the healing power of prayer (and in this context Raymo specifically addresses "remote prayer-based healing" without denying that prayerful states of mind can have healing effects on the body). What Raymo says about Dossey's dozen reasons of why scientists are skeptical also applies generally, Raymo says, "to other New Age pseudosciences and to the claims of supernaturalistic religion." Dossey's list is reminiscent of comments I've heard by people who subscribe to beliefs in paranormal phenomena and who seem to think that science as it is commonly practiced today is basically scientism, scientism being a term of abuse that refers to the belief that science can answer all the questions that matter. I imagine that some of Raymo's comments on the items in Dossey's list will come in handy when I have such discussions in the future. (E.g., Dossey's 12th reason why scientists may not accept what Dossey at al consider evidence of remote prayer-based healing is that "Careers and financial investments are at stake." Raymo acknowledges that this is the case, but asks the reader to "bear in mind that it also applies to the Larry Dosseys and Deepak Chopras, and other purveyors of books and lectures advocating alternative healing therapies.")

Raymo's agnosticism reminds me of the agnosticism of Stephen Batchelor (author of Buddhism Without Beliefs). Both use the term "agnosticism" in the sense defined by originator of the term, Thomas Henry Huxley, to refer to a method rather than a creed, and to awareness of one's own ignorance. "In matters of the intellect," Raymo quotes Huxley, "do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated nor demonstrable."

When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy is a fine contribution to the ongoing discussion on the relation between science and religion. My only complaint is that the book lacks an index.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Religion without God. But Why?, September 11, 2008

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Q-fever "john" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist (Hardcover)

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The first couple of chapters were slow-going for me, especially when he was discussing the works of artists, authors, and poets. I'm sure Gerard Manley Hopkins was talented and highly regarded but I just wasn't getting into it. The book later improves as he begins to describe how one can be an unbeliever yet deeply "religious". He beautifully expresses the awe, reverence, and humility he feels "in the face of a mystery that transcends empirical knowing...." (p 104). Unfortunately, he does this repetitively, quoting the same authors and using the same examples chapter after chapter. But he does drive home what it means to be a "religious naturalist" and its rich pedigree. In the end, I was left with a better understanding of religious naturalism, but what I missed was "why". Sure, now I can see that someone *could* be religious but not believe in god, but to what end? By Raymos' own account, although he stopped believing in god he still *felt* religious. It's as though he replaced one object of worship with something else (well, *everything* else). He rationalizes his position by stating that humans have an evolutionary need to "celebrate the unfathomable mystery of creation". But why cling to *any* part of our "tribal inheritance". Because we feel as though we need to? Whether our desire to be religious stems from early childhood indoctrination, evolution, or both, I say let's forsake the entirety of the "worship culture" of our forbears. Why? Because I think that there is an inherent danger in finding *anything* holy or sacred. History has shown that what people see as sacred they also see as immutable. This is antithetical to science. Science, its conclusions as well as the very method itself, is tentative and constantly open to refinement, alteration, even abandonment (should the data call for it). Things "holy" are not. Furthermore, using the language of praise distorts and confuses the study and appreciation of nature. Why appropriate this "god-language" when other terms are clearer? In religious naturalism, deep contemplation or "paying attention" becomes "prayer". But does it clarify or confuse? One can be deeply moved by the grandeur of the natural world but applying terms like "religious", "holy", and "prayer" to these emotions will only conflate them with the more traditional supernaturalism these terms normally refer to. In a time when religion is hijacking the language of science to gain credibility (see "intelligent design"), we should not only steer clear of ambiguous language to describe our naturalist position but, if anything, should redouble our efforts to distance ourselves from that language and use clear, unambiguous terminology. There is no reason to re-name the very valid emotions of awe and wonder with terms like "holy reverence" etc, and there may indeed be harm in it.