An Instinct for Spiritual Quests: Quiet Religion

John Dewey notes the following in his book A Common Faith: “Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality” (1934, 27). By “ideal end” he is suggesting something of importance to us, something fundamentally worthy of enhancing the human condition. Dewey certainly captures what I have in mind by spiritual quests as they are naturalized and linked to human needs, cognitive capacity, and neural structures; these qualifications are consistent with Dewey’s orientation, along with self-corrective inquiry, nonviolence, and humility.

Spiritual quests are not an aberration or a pathological state. They are, rather, a fundamental human need. Moreover, conversions to “seeing” events in a certain way are at the basis of scientific and other forms of human experience, as well as spiritual quests. The pursuit of knowledge has “conversion-like” experiences associated with it (Bloom 2007; Heelan 1994).

Religious quests are vital human activities and cut across the sciences and humanities. Religious sensibility is one thing; religious tyranny, quite another. Religious sensibility, at its normative best, is humble and pluralistic. The approach that I suggest avoids dismissive positivism and dogmatic theological fundamentalism and replaces them with a pious naturalism.

What underlie spiritual quests are (1) heightened vigilance and some discomfort or unrest about human existence, (2) a search to come to terms with this fact, and (3) the much-appreciated moments of peace and quietude that are necessary for human well-being. What is important is to bring ideas to the lifeblood of experience, to the everyday, to bring the conception of vulnerability and hypothesis-testing inquiry to cover the whole range of human experience, including spiritual inquiry.

Thus, in what follows, I suggest, first, that spiritual quests are fundamental to the human condition and then that certain cognitive categories and a basic instinctive response predispose us to express this human need. Diverse brain regions underlie this basic fact about us. I suggest throughout that though it is difficult, we ought to anchor spiritual inquiry to self-corrective inquiry.

A Predilection for Spiritual Quests

Spiritual quests, like most forms of human inquiry, begin tinged with doubt and self-reflection. Inquiry, as Peirce ([1877] 1992) notes, is to help, in part, to quell doubt, taper it, place it in perspective. In Peirce’s words, “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief; I shall term this struggle inquiry” ([1877] 1992, 114). What emerges is the search for a semblance of satisfaction to ameliorate the irritation.

The first phase of spiritual quests is knotted to appetitive behaviors; search engines permeate the sense experience and the diverse forms of inquiry. The second phase reflects the consummatory behaviors, the sense of accomplishments, achieving goals, securing some sense of satiation. A number of investigators distinguish these two important phases that underlie our experience, namely, the appetitive and consummatory phases of experience (Craig 1918; Dewey [1925] 1989; Tinbergen 1969). I would suggest that this distinction underlies spiritual quests and spiritual inquiry.

Although antitheism of any sort is more than a defensible position amid religious dogmatism (e.g., Dennett 2006; Hume [1757] 1956), there is this basic human need, spiritual quests, that we should acknowledge and link to self- corrective inquiry and humility. The expression of a humble spiritual quest is replete with nonviolence; Gandhi noted that perhaps “if we remain non-violent, hatred will die as everything does, from disuse” (1964, 43).

An important distinction exists between spirituality and religion— spirituality being an important component of the human condition. Most if not all cultures have some forms of what could easily be characterized as religious, spiritual: the many rites that we take for granted, the marvel when we explore a new place (Atran 2002; Boyer 1994; Durkheim 1965; Malinowski 1948; Mead 1964; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004).

Why do we need spiritual inquiry? Because this sense of religion and our spiritual life are about those things that are of “ultimate concern” (Tillich 1967). Some of the meaning of life is in part the bonds we...