Magical Thinking?
Is the hope for a prophetic descent, the nuzul Isa, merely wishful thinking? It is not just the religious that indulge in magical thinking, the atheists also do, all humans do. For Muslims and Christians, and to a lesser extent for the Jews, the biggest magical leap is belief in the afterlife. The promise of immortality is spiritually seductive. Beyond that, the additional smaller leaps – such as the belief that multiple Prophets were sent down to earth, and that a specific Prophet did not die and will descend again – do not require much more acceptance of the magical.
Atheists engage in plenty of magical thinking, even when they claim to be fully rational, and do so in ways that they are often unaware of. These are “shadow beliefs – those inkling of the numinous that we deny – and beliefs that we don’t even recognize as magical. These habits of mind guide us through the world every day.”1 For non-believers, the motivation for magical thinking comes from a fear of death and a consequent desire for immortality. This results in a quest for symbolic immortality, either by contributing to an ideology that is larger and more enduring than us, or heroic acts that allows ourselves to live on beyond our bodily death. One scholar says modern western society “no matter how scientific or secular that it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other… in this sense everything man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of becoming fictitious and fallible.”2
In the past half century, the industrialized world has transitioned to a consumption-driven economy. We believe if we work hard and catch the right breaks, we can live fun-filled and fulfilling lives. Hollywood and its eastern cousins cue us to pursue dreamy lives, psychologists tell us we can lean-in to achieve anything we desire if we sway positive, corporate climbers champion the ‘work hard and play hard’ mantra, we aspire to lives of adventure since ‘you only live once’, and our curated social circle celebrates our materialistic advances. This too involves magical thinking, since all this production and consumption delivers pleasures that are temporary. They are not sustainable due to hedonic adjustment, a tendency to lose our appreciation for the familiar and ratchet up our dreams and desires another notch. Expectations often run ahead of what is realistically attainable, so disappointment eventually kicks in, often leading us back to square one. A cultural critic notes, “mass culture is a Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking.”3
Time, the Ultimate Enigma
What time is it? When will Isa/Jesus ﷺ come down to guide us? How long will he live when he does come? What age will his body be when he arrives? In what language will he speak to us? His native Aramaic or modern Arabic or? If his nemesis, a one-eyed Dajjal, is lying in wait in this world on some isolated island, as Traditional Islam posits, how can he defy biology to have remained alive for 1,400 years? These are questions of timing, and the duration of time, and more. Our senses and our intuition ordain a linear and uniform passage of time, marked by a uniform and linear measurement scale marked off in seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. However, some references to time in the Quran are non-linear and cryptic. How should we reconcile these confusing notions of time?
Physicists believe our ordinary sense of time, called clock time, is an illusion. They believe there is no single clock. A clock at ocean level runs minutely slower than one on a mountain top, since the former is slowed by the mass of earth. Which one is correct? So time and space coexist as a blended spacetime, as proposed by Einstein. If that is not confusing enough, add gravity to the mix. It wraps or curves spacetime. Is all this an academic discussion that need not concern us? It does matter if we want our mind to reach out beyond our anthropocentric selves, which is exactly what spiritual traditions call for. “Not only does time stretch, flex and flip, but such behavior affects our daily lives…. The pace of time depends on local conditions of velocity and gravity, and even the order of events — which event came first — is not a universal truth.”4
To the physicists who study matter at a sub-atomic (quantum) scale, the order of time is an enigma, and it may be beyond our earthly comprehension. If our view of time is hazy, how can we distinguish between past and future? “The difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It’s a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted…. All this undermines the very basis of our usual way of understanding time. It provokes incredulity, just as much as the discovery of the movement of the Earth did. But just as with the movement of the Earth, the evidence is overwhelming.”5 What about the present? There isn’t really one. “There is no single time: there is a different duration for every trajectory; and time passes at different rhythms according to place and according to speed. it is not directional: the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world; its orientation is merely a contingent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details…. The notion of the ‘present’ does not work: in the vast universe there is nothing that we can reasonably call the ‘present’.”6 We live now, in the present, but exactly does now mean? “Now — that enigmatic and ephemeral moment that changes its meaning every instant — has confounded priests, philosophers and physicists, and with good reason… As long as the meaning of now eludes us, further advances in the understanding of time — the key aspect of reality — will continue to be stalled.”7
At a human scale (of classical or Newtonian mechanics), it only makes sense to live life forward, but apparently not so at a sub-atomic scale (of quantum mechanics). Electrons can move back in time. “Backward time motion has become one of the standard tools of physics, one that many physicists use every day… Even ‘simple’ calculations, such as the bouncing of one electron off another involves particles (typically photons) moving backward in time.”8 One physicist suggested that the way to understand this strange phenomenon was to imagine that “in some distant past, the backward-moving electron scattered forward in time again. Then we would have two electrons coexisting that were actually the same particle. Maybe all electrons are connected in this way; there is only one electron, bouncing backward and forward in time.” To underscore the strangeness of this idea, one physicist jokes maybe someone will invent a religion based on it. “Your soul, when you die, move backwards in time, scatters and becomes a forward-moving soul, a different person. This happens many times. Maybe there is, indeed, only one soul in the universe.”9
If physicists can’t make clear distinctions between the past and present in their theoretical models of the universe, if time is non-linear, if some particles can move backward in time, if time is really an illusion, then how can critics of religion dismiss the idea of a prophesied future event, such as the second coming of Isa/Jesus ﷺ? This is not to make a huge leap from the strangeness of mathematical physics to plausible future human events, but to say that even the best analytic minds can hold counterintuitive beliefs for which there is no sensory proof yet. This analytic ambiguity can be both frustrating and illuminating, depending on whether you are pro-science.
In the absence of a prophet to guide us in the present, i.e. while we live in the ahl al fatra, we can only attain a blurred understanding of the true meaning of the Quran – hence BioIslam’s preference for shifting the focus up to a higher level of abstraction, by way of extracting Latent Principles and rolling them further up into Inside Pillars.
Alchemy of Happiness
Once we adventure beyond dogma, there is no certainty about the past, and we certainly don’t know which future will arrive… yet everyone deserves a slice of happiness in the present. Given the extent of poverty and misery in the world today, should we rely more on natural reason or supernatural beliefs to bring joy, or at least comfort, to those who have been denied it? To a BioMuslim the answer is to creatively combine supernatural axioms and the scientific achievements, since they are not mutually exclusive. If the objective is material progress alone, science is better positioned to deliver. But if the objective is the amorphous concept of happiness, a combination of science and spirituality might be most effective for the most people in the long run.
A pro-science person is innately skeptical, yet hopeful of the problem-solving ability of science, and that attitude is the key to progress in the natural world. Although scientists project certainty, they acknowledge science is contingent, valid only until disproved by a new evidence-based theory. Yet, it is grounded in reason and evidence, and disallows leaps of logic. However, with any religion, we engage in some magical thinking by embracing core certainties with a simple leap of faith. If we value intellectual honesty, a pre-requisite for seeking truth, we must acknowledge that despite our best efforts to extract guidance from the Quran and some post-Quranic material, we might still be left with uncertainty about how to interpret Islam (or any other revealed religion).
How then should we gain comfort with the uncertainties of supernatural claims, such as the five axioms of BioIslam, or the miracles attributed to various Prophets through the ages? Or the numerous specific claims about what exactly occurred during the first century of revelation? Traditional scholars (of both Islam and Christianity) imposed certainty by canonizing certain books, but this is a flawed approach that results in a complexity problem, which is at the root of the Big Five problems we face.
The spiritual challenge BioMuslims face in our ahl al fatra is to not abandon belief in God/Allah ﷻ, and the promise of a rich afterlife, while accepting the underlying uncertainty that is inevitably felt when functioning with a pro-science or analytic mindset. This balancing act is much easier to accomplish when looking ahead to the return of a divine messenger who will bring clarity and comfort to our messy world.