Suggested summer readings share in quests for knowledge

It’s time for summer reading again, and along with my usual “trash fiction” thrillers, I’m mostly looking forward to some serious perusal of several new acquisitions to my external brain, i.e., my library.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop” promises to carry on his study into the nature of self and “I.”

Also on tap: biologist Edward O. Wilson’s “Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge,” which I’ve been seriously amiss in getting to until now, and Michael Shermer’s “Science Friction,” a look into the perils and pitfalls of conducting science.

The introductions and beginning chapters to these three have left little pinging noises in my brain, which seem to be vibrating against the most recent works by Richard Dawkins and James P. Carse, among others.

Dawkins’ opening of “The God Delusion,” his 2006 best-seller, is titled “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer,” which owes to this quote by Einstein: “I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

Wilson echoes this sentiment early on in “Consilience.” The first chapter deals with his early disillusionment from biblical inerrancy, upon the discovery of evolution.

He writes, “Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. … Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.”

Carse’s “The Religious Case Against Belief” is, to my mind, an instant classic. In it, he furthers the idea of a kind of “higher ignorance” (borrowed from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart), a type of not knowing that he sees as the beginning of wisdom.

He juxtaposes this against the absolutism of a collection of rigid belief systems posing as religion. This, he says, is not religion, “but a hasty caricature of it.”

Belief, he writes, “thrives on conflict, depends on the clarity and restricting power of its surrounding boundaries, has a one-dimensional understanding of authority … and builds on a severe form of self-rejection.”

Carse closes his introduction with this wonderful thought: “The challenge is not to make religion intelligible but to use knowledge religiously.”

Finally, to Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop.” A brief way in, he begins a rumination called “On Souls and Their Sizes,” saying:

“I believe that a human soul – and, by the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious connotations, but here not having any – comes slowly into being over the course of years of development.”

Hmmm … an atheist writing an extended meditation on the “soul.” One might almost say that his is a kind of religious quest, although not in the traditional sense.

Indeed, I mention these particular books precisely because they share a deep spirit of inquiry – a spirited spirit, if you will – following evidence to conclusions that true believers dismiss through what Carse calls “willful ignorance.”

He explains, “It is a paradoxical condition in which we are aware that there is something we do not know, but choose not to know it.”

It is because these thinkers are willing to inquire into what they do not know – to reach the very limits of knowledge in their respective fields while always aware of their higher ignorance – that their work does perhaps represent “a somewhat new kind of religion.”

Just call it a religion of knowledge, not belief.