The Fifth Dimension

An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm

John Hick

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780741826
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The case for a bigger, more complete picture of reality in which a fifth, spiritual dimension plays a central role Drawing on mystical and religious traditions ancient and modern, and spiritual thinkers as diverse as Julian of Norwich and Mahatma Gandhi, The Fifth Dimension is John Hick's eloquent argument for a more complete reality, in which a fifth, spiritual dimension plays a central role. Taking into account recent global crises - including the 9/11 attacks and war in Iraq - Hick addresses a variety of timeless issues, from the validity of religious experience to the science versus religion debate. Erudite, provocative and deeply moving, Hick's persuasive narrative will prompt all curious readers to re-examine their own spiritual horizons.

PART I

DRAWING THE PICTURE

1

WHERE WE START TODAY: THE NATURALISTIC ASSUMPTION

We start with the fact that we find ourselves existing – though this does not astonish us because we are so used to it! We have been, so to speak, thrown into existence with a given nature, each with our own unique genetic endowment, and at a time and place which we did not choose. And as we proceed through life, different voices, religious and naturalistic, tell importantly different stories about what kind of beings we are and what kind of universe we are part of.

Naturalistic teachers tell us that reality consists exclusively of the physical universe, including of course human brains, which are physical objects, and their functioning. Humanism, when not just an uncontroversial emphasis on human values but a dogmatic exclusion of the supra-natural, is another name for naturalism. So is materialism, the idea that nothing exists but matter/energy, including again animal brains. According to naturalists, or Humanists, or materialists, our existence as material organisms in a material world constitutes the whole story. They differ among themselves as to whether we have a real degree of free will or are totally determined, with only the illusion of free will. However in practice we can only assume that we have free will. For if someone’s thought, ‘My every thought is totally determined’ is true, that thought itself is not the outcome of a process of free critical thinking but is determined by physical causes. There may well be an element of sub-atomic randomness within this causal process, but this does not affect the logical dilemma: if every thought is either rigidly or randomly determined, we could never be in a state of rationally believing that this is so! For rational believing presupposes a degree of intellectual freedom, the freedom to exercise judgement, and if we are totally determined we have no such freedom.

Naturalistic thinkers also disagree among themselves about whether consciousness is identical with cerebral activity, or is a new emergent factor, different in nature although dependent from moment to moment on the electro-chemical functioning of the brain. But we can pass over this difference at the moment, returning to it in chapter 4.

Naturalism, then, is the belief that reality consists exclusively in the multiple forms of discharging energy that constitute the physical universe. This includes our earth and the human and other forms of life on it, and hence the multitude of human brains and their functioning, which in turn includes the production of thought, language, feeling, emotion, and action. The status of such supposed non-physical realities as God, Brahman, Dharma, Tao, the soul or spirit, is that of ideas in the human mind, so that before there were human mind/brains to create them, they did not in any sense exist. Naturalism is thus equivalent to the qualified materialism which does not deny the existence of mentality, but holds that it is either identical with, or totally dependent from moment to moment upon, the electro-chemical functioning of the brain.

In our western world, beginning around the seventeenth century, the earlier pervasive religious outlook has increasingly been replaced by an equally pervasive naturalistic outlook, and during the twentieth century this replacement has become almost complete. Naturalism has created the ‘consensus reality’ of our culture. It has become so ingrained that we no longer see it, but see everything else through it. The main reason for this is clearly the continuing and most welcome success of the sciences in discovering how the physical world works, and in using this knowledge for our benefit in many fields, not least in medicine. (It is also alarmingly true that our use of highly sophisticated technology is eroding and poisoning the environment and has even put humanity in danger of destroying itself; but although obviously immensely important, this does not affect the present point.)

The rise and eventual dominance of the scientific point of view was in fact more than an intellectual revolution. The decades from about 1840 to about 1890 in Britain, during which science gained social respectability and then establishment status, saw ‘the rise of the professional and the decline of the gentleman’.¹⁴ There was a gradual shift in the class and power structure of the country. Indeed, the ‘warfare between science and theology’ was in part a ‘professional territorial dispute’.¹⁵ T.H. Huxley was a key figure in this development, starting as an outsider rejected by both church and state, and ending as President of the Royal Society, a Privy Counsellor, and internationally respected as one of ‘the great and the good’.

To see how the naturalistic assumption colours our experience I must anticipate the analysis of awareness in chapter 5. The central point is that experience always involves the interpretive activity of the mind. The impacts upon us of our environment are interpreted by means of our operative conceptual system, so that the same impacts may be pre-consciously processed through different sets of concepts to create different conscious experiences. But in the case of events that can be experienced either naturalistically or religiously, the latter is precluded by the dominant faith of our culture. And when philosophizing about the history of religions a naturalistic interpretation is likewise routinely accepted as self-evidently more plausible than a religious one.

Thus for example, when we hear someone speak of a moment when they had a strong sense, or feeling, of God as an unseen, all-enveloping, benign presence, the naturalistic assumption automatically rejects this as illusory and points to psychological mechanisms that might have produced it. It is firmly assumed that there is no reality beyond the physical (including, once again, the functioning of human brains), so that the religious person’s sense of a divine presence can only be some kind of self-delusion. That the presence of a transcendent reality might be mediated to us by means of our own innate psychological structure is not even considered as a serious possibility.

So in the west today religious faith is on the defensive in the public mind. This is a reversal of roles. A couple of hundred years ago it was the naturalistic thinker who had to show the dogmatic religious believer that the universe is ambiguous and does not have to be understood religiously, whereas today it is the other way round. It is now the religious person who has to show the dogmatic naturalistic humanist that the universe does not have to be understood as solely purposeless matter. The reality is that the universe is to us at present ambiguous as between religious and naturalistic interpretations. There can in principle be both complete and consistent naturalistic and also complete and consistent religious accounts of it, each including an account of the other.

Clearly this ambiguity does not establish religion. What it does is to leave the door to it open. As we shall see later, it is not reasoning but religious experience that takes anyone through that door. But at the moment I want to rebut the naturalistic humanist’s claim that religion can be ruled out as incompatible with modern scientific knowledge.

The universe of which we are part continually challenges us to further thought by its elusive ambiguity. This emerges when we look at some of the arguments currently being debated for and against a religious interpretation of life and the universe.

To begin with the sciences of anthropology and psychology, there are several well known naturalistic theories of the origin of religion. Some anthropologists – the major figure here being Emile Durkheim – hold that religion came about to build and preserve social cohesion.¹⁶ In his study of Australian aborigines he developed the theory that the gods of primal societies were symbols of society itself, for ‘a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over them’¹⁷; and he generalized this to cover religion in all its forms. For Karl Marx religion is ‘the opium of the people’,¹⁸ giving them comfort in a heartless world, and used as a means of social control by capitalists over their workers; and for some psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud being the major figure here, religion is a universal obsessional neurosis consisting in regressive wish fulfilment for an ideal father figure.¹⁹ Of course there have been detailed developments and elaborations of each of these theories since their founding fathers. Another popular theory is that religion is an antidote to a natural but generally suppressed fear of death, as in Philip Larkin’s lines about the churches, ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die’.²⁰

There is an element of truth in each of these theories, but no one of them by itself nor all of them added together constitute the whole truth. It is worth noting, first, that these reductionist theories have all been produced by western thinkers with a monotheistic – or rather anti-monotheistic – presupposition. They think of religion as belief in a God or gods and they show no awareness of the non-theistic forms of religion. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism and some forms of Hinduism, do not think of the ultimate reality as an infinite Person. But even remaining within the theistic circle, these theories are inadequate to the historical complexities. It is true, as Durkheim holds, that religion is a social phenomenon, but it is equally true that the great originating moments of the post-axial world faiths have come through remarkable individuals – the Buddha, Mahavira, ‘Abraham’,²¹ Moses, Jesus, Paul, Muhammad, Nanak, Bahá’u’lláh ... or through a series of outstanding sages or prophets. Again, it is true that in terrifying moments people readily seek emotional shelter in the thought of a loving and protecting deity. But it is equally true that the prophetic element in religion has confronted innumerable individuals in their personal and communal lives with profound moral challenges as well as a welcome refuge. So the full picture is more complex than these theories recognize.

However the deposit from the naturalistic accounts, given the pervasive preference within our western culture for naturalistic explanations in general, is the very common view of religion as fundamentally wishful thinking: we would like to believe that there is a loving omnipotent Being who can answer our prayers for help, and the churches rely on this, putting on a great show of authority, presenting the idea in vivid images and mysteriously profound dogmas, reinforced by colourful liturgies and powerful hierarchies which in the past people accepted uncritically. But today doubt has undermined that once immensely impressive structure. Science now makes a much stronger claim to authority, and through the eyes of the sciences – many people assume – the universe is nothing more than a vast, frigid emptiness, thinly contaminated with chemicals. The idea that it was created to be the home for humanity and that an all-powerful God controls it for our benefit, intervening miraculously from time to time, as recounted in such scriptures as the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and the Qur’an, is no longer credible.

The irony of all this for me, as for very many other religious people today, is that we also do not think of the ultimate reality as a limitlessly powerful supernatural Person who intervenes at will in human affairs. However it is not science but religion that steers us away from that image. If there were such an all-powerful intervening being, I would not think him, or her, worthy of worship. As to why, suppose there is a car crash in the road outside, three of the people in it being killed but one surviving unhurt. If that one, believing in a miraculously intervening deity, then thanks God for saving her life, she is forgetting that if God decided to save her, God must have decided at the same time not to save the other three. But if God could at will save everyone from all harm, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? This would be a cruelly arbitrary God, and the only people who could reasonably worship such a Being would be the chosen few whom he/she protects. To me this would be more like a devil than an all-loving and omnipotent God.

The big picture that I shall recommend is significantly different. We are living simultaneously within two environments, the physical world and, interpenetrating and also transcending this, a supra-natural environment, a fifth dimension of reality, in which as spiritual beings we are also living. We shall come in chapter 4 to some indications of this fifth dimension.

But first we should look at another area of the current debate which is today under intensive discussion.

2

NATURALISM AS BAD NEWS FOR THE MANY

HARD AND SOFT NATURALISM

Taking the naturalistic and religious positions generically, the basic difference as far as our human interests are concerned is that a naturalistic interpretation of the universe, if true, is very bad news for humanity as a whole, whilst a religious interpretation, if true, is (with exceptions to be noted presently) very good news for humanity as a whole. I am not proposing the obviously fallacious argument that therefore the religious interpretation must be true. I am concerned at the moment only to point out a dire implication of naturalism, because although this is obvious enough when pointed out, many naturalists do not seem to be, and indeed do not seem to want to be, aware of it.

It is however frankly acknowledged by the more realistic and hard-headed naturalistic thinkers. Thus Bertrand Russell, in a famous early essay whose message he reaffirmed much later in his life, wrote:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.²²

But cannot naturalistic thinkers reasonably take a much shorter view in which there are good grounds for a positive outlook on life? Can they not point to human love and goodness; the warmth of human community in family and society; the joys of artistic creation and the enjoyment of beauty; awe, wonder, excitement in response to art, literature and the natural world; the search for truth in the sciences and philosophy; the physical enjoyments of sex, food, sports, entertainment? The list could continue indefinitely.

The answer is ‘yes of course’ – all these things are real and of immense value. But, we have to ask, to whom are they available? And the answer is that too much of this realm of good experiences is available only to those who have been lucky in the lottery of life. For those who are fortunately situated, experiencing a sufficient level of material prosperity in a stable society, with adequate nutrition and medical care and the level of health usually associated with these, and who can enjoy the fruits of a fairly good education and a fairly rich cultural milieu, it can truly be said that life can be, should be, and (with too many tragic exceptions) is predominantly good. Of course even the fortunate go through bad episodes – illnesses, setbacks, broken relationships, bereavements, and so on. But, for the fortunate, these occur within the context of a predominantly contented life. It is the lack of that context that makes these afflictions unbearable to others. And so the optimistic aspect of a naturalistic worldview rings true to those who have been fortunate, but not to those who have been unfortunate in the circumstances of their birth and environment. Humanists or naturalists can only be regarded as realistic when they are ready to acknowledge this.

More about this in a moment. But as well as straightforward naturalistic humanists, there are also today religious thinkers who teach a spiritually positive outlook which is likewise only an option for a fortunate minority. They urge the non- or anti-realist view that such terms as God, Brahman, Dharmakaya, eternal life, do not refer to realities but express only our own hopes, fears or aspirations. Thus the theologian Don Cupitt holds that God is a personalized expression of our human ideal of love and goodness, and that in so far as we live out the requirements of this ideal, our life becomes instrinsically valuable and hence positively satisfying. So this form of naturalism is life-affirming – in Nietzsche’s phrase, a joyful wisdom. The philosopher D.Z. Phillips holds that it is possible from a religious point of view to accept the tragedies and horrors of life with serenity and resignation as the mysterious providence of a loving God, even though there is in fact no such being! The implication of this more religious form of naturalism is just as pessimistic as that of secular naturalism. And it is just as rare for its proponents to recognize this. Don Cupitt, for example, in his recent Mysticism After Modernity, is unable to face this implication of his position. He says, ‘[Hick] describes open non-realism as being elitist and unkind to all those humble folk who need to believe in a posthumous compensation for the wretchedness of this life.’²³ But the point that I had made (and make again here) is simply that naturalism, if true, is very bad news for humanity as a whole. Cupitt ignores this. His message is elitist in that it can only make sense to the fortunate among us. I do not suggest that such a message is therefore false; an elitist philosophy could be the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION: THE BIG PICTURE
• PART I DRAWING THE PICTURE
• 1. WHERE WE START TODAY: THE NATURALISTIC ASSUMPTION
• 2. NATURALISM AS BAD NEWS FOR THE MANY
• 3. THE BIG BANG AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE UNIVERSE
• 4. WINDOWS ON THE TRANSCENDENT
• 5. THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING
• 6. TURNING THE CRITICAL REALIST KEY
• PART II THE MEANING OF LIFE
• 7. THE RELIGIOUS MEANING OF LIFE
• 8. COSMIC OPTIMISM IN THE EAST
• 9. AND IN THE WEST
• PART III THE GODS AND ABSOLUTES AS MANIFESTATIONS OF THE REAL
• 10. THE REAL EXPERIENCED AS GOD
• 11. THE REAL EXPERIENCED AS THE ABSOLUTE
• PART IV RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND MYSTICISM
• 12. ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• 13. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
• 14. VISIONS – A CASE STUDY OF JULIAN OF NORWICH
• 15. LADY JULIAN’S FRUITFUL HERESIES
• 16. UNITIVE MYSTICISM: LITERAL UNITY
• 17. UNITIVE MYSTICISM: METAPHORICAL UNITY
• 18. THE DARK SIDE
• 19. THE CRITERION
• PART V THE SAINTS COME MARCHING IN
• 20. ONE LIVING SAINT IS WORTH TEN DEAD ONES
• 21. GANDHI: A CASE STUDY
• 22. THE POLITICS OF TRUTH
• 23. GANDHI’S TRUTH FOR US TODAY
• 24. AN ACTIVIST AND A CONTEMPLATIVE
• PART VI TIME PRESENT AND TIME FUTURE
• 25. WHAT WE DON’T NEED TO KNOW
• 26. LIVING WITHIN A TRUE MYTH
• 27. DEATH AND BEYOND
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX