Living Biographies of Great Philosophers (The moment when I stopped believing in God)
Today, early January, 2011, the memory of an experience long past has come back to me. The experience was the moment when I, as a fourteen year old boy, stopped believing in God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. After fifty-four years, an identical edition of the book I was reading at that pivotal moment has come back into my hands. This essay is not so much about arguments for or against a belief in God as about my experience of  recovering an old memory and how my perception of the world has changed since then. The book is "Living Biographies of Great Philosophers" by Henry Thomas and Dana Lee Thomas, with illustrations by Gordon Ross. It was published by Garden City Publishing Co, Garden City, New York, copyright 1941, a year before my birth. The only number which could conceivably be a print date on the back of the title page, the page which also gives the copyright date, is a Roman "CL" just above the statement "Printed in the United States of America". If this is the Roman number for 150, it might suggest 1950, assuming a base of 1800, if there is such a publishing convention, I don't know. However for lack of any reason for making such an assumption, I will assume the book in my hands was printed in 1941, the year of copyright. If so, then the book which arrived in my mail today has survived intact (and I have survived intact) for almost seventy years. Strangely, the book only cost a few dollars thanks to an amazon.com link to a used bookstore. It has the musty smell and yellowing pages of an old book. The hard cover is a faded dark green color with the initials "LB" and a royal crown embossed center front. The outer binding is numbered with a white 920 as in a library. There are two stamps inside the book which confirm it was once in a library. The inside of the hard cover is stamped "PROPERTY OF THE U.S." above a description of the book cut out from the original paper jacket and pasted to the inside. Then the title page is stamped in black ink "ARMY AIR FORCES FLEXIBLE GUNNERY SCHOOL, BUCKINGHAM ARMY AIR FIELD, FORT MYERS, FLORIDA" and an inventory number "1854" is stamped in blue ink in a different font on the bottom margin. There is also a library date-due slip glued inside the back cover which warns that "a fine of 2 CENTS will be charged for each day the Book is kept over time." One other clue to the book's history is the name "Irvin Runkle 1945" hand-written at the top of the blank page facing the front cover. This last entry suggests that it could not have been printed after 1945. The year 1945 could be Irvin Runkle's birth date but more likely indicates the year when he acquired the book. As I carefully leafed the fragile but legible pages, I recognized the illustrations after so many years. The illustration below the Introduction is an oval drawing of an English gentleman wearing a frock coat, sitting under a tree on a hill overlooking a distant pastoral landscape of river, trees and clouds. He is perusing a book propped on his knee. I turned the pages to find the chapter about Spinoza. Each chapter for each of the philosophers has a different illustration, except that the illustration for Spinoza happens to be the same as for the Introduction. I think that when I first read this book, I was not in a hurry and so I would have looked at the illustrations too. The pastoral illustration for Spinoza still seems very familiar to me.  I think I was about 14 then in eighth grade. My family had moved from the family ranch north of Fort Worth back into town to a middle class neighborhood called Arlington Heights. Our isolation on the ranch lasting several of my formative years had accustomed me to solitude without friends to spend time with. Later on I formed some friendships in high school but at this time I was still a solitary boy (although I was not aware of being lonely) and I read books all of the time. I had my own bedroom on the second floor. I would walk home from Stripling Middle School in the sunny, warm Texas afternoons and flop down on my large bed which had a maple bookcase, to continue reading where I last left off about my current interests, mainly the nature of the universe and my place in it. I can't remember now if I would get a snack to eat on getting home from school, probably so. I would get something in the kitchen, then head upstairs to my room and open the windows for light and fresh air. I was bored by my tedious classes in school and eager to get home every afternoon to read books which answered my questions better than the teachers. I would dutifully do all my homework in the evening but I would reserve the best of my free time for reading what I liked. I did not like to sit under a tree with a frock coat like the English gentleman in the illustration, reading a book awkwardly propped on the knee. Instead it felt more natural to stretch out full length on the accommodating bed, sometimes on my stomach, sometimes curled on my side, so that my near-sighted eyes could focus on the page more closely without having to wear my glasses. I still like to read this way whenever I can, face close in to the book without glasses, although no longer stretched out on top of soft beds. Why was I, a 14 year old boy, interested in a book about ancient philosophers instead of boy scouts tying knots? My inquiring mind, a growing distrust of authority and possibly the stirrings of puberty were causing me to question conventional views about everything. It bothered me considerably, for example, that dinosaurs which existed for millions of years according to scientific fossil evidence, were not even mentioned in the Bible, supposedly the Word of God. I was trying to figure things out for myself. I was not close to my moody and taciturn father. He had recently given me a humiliating whipping with a thick leather strap for daring to light matches in a dark closet, entranced by the dance of the blossoming flames. Our family did not hold discussions about religion or philosophy or politics or anything controversial at all, and I did not have any older brothers or friends to talk to. All I had were books, like Ebeneezer Scrooge abandoned by family and friends on school vacations,. In my books I found examples of admirable men to imitate as role models. This particular book about the Great Philosophers especially interested me because it contained biographical material in addition to a general overview of philosophy. Linking a person with a philosophical position made the subject come to life. There is a saying in biology that "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" which means that the development of a fetus repeats previous stages of evolution. It describes, for example, how a human fetus momentarily grows a tail or gills. This saying applies to me in the sense that I was provisionally adopting various philosophical views from world history to reach a satisfactory present understanding. When reading about the great philosophers and their lives, I would imagine myself being them and seeing the world as they saw it. When I finally worked my way up to the chapter about Spinoza after Descartes, I discovered that Spinoza was a likable person whom I could admire. He was like me in some ways. He was something of a loner. He was estranged from his father who did not understand him. He was not large or fat. He was not assertive, well known or very popular. He was not out to make changes in the world like Martin Luther. He was quietly independent, earning his living by his own hands grinding lenses, not accepting offers of support from wealthy patrons or accepting compromising positions of influence in return for flattering the powers that be. He was also not dogmatic about the nature of God. This mild quality of non-assertiveness strongly appealed to me when I learned about Buddhism later (however this particular book did not go further east than Greece as very little was known about Buddhism in my generation). My mind was very receptive to new ideas. Almost any spark could have triggered the big question that was slowly welling up into consciousness as I lay there on the bed mulling over this thought: Is there really a God, and if so, would He be angry with me if I (provisionally) stopped believing in Him? I think I may have located the exact line in the book where this question surged into sharp focus for me.  It was answered in a flash. At that critical moment, I suddenly realized that by merely asking the question, my belief had vanished instantly. I put the book down light-headed and went out for a walk, feeling like what had just happened was not provisional but rather something permanent that could not be reversed. Later on I learned the word epiphany. This was an epiphany. On page 123, following an exposition of Spinoza's gentle pantheism as a belief that the whole world is the body of God, that God is not OUTSIDE the world as Descartes in the previous chapter believed, but IS the world itself, I came across this cautionary note by the author: "But we must be careful, in speaking of God, not to ascribe to Him a human form or human emotions. God is not a capricious overseer with a long beard who sits in heaven and who is swayed by our prayers to help us or by the prayers of our enemies to injure us." This little phrase was all it took to trigger a total collapse of fourteen years of indoctrinated beliefs. I have never had any other revelation like this which divided the past from the future so irrevocably. If time does not run out too soon in my remaining years, I wonder if the accounts of satori regarding the experience of enlightenment might foretell a similar wonderful inner transformation. Since that pivotal moment my thinking has remained steady.  I do not see the world with fresh eyes any more. Almost nothing that happens really surprises me (with the possible exception of credible reports suggestive of reincarnation, or recent conjectures that rings of echoes in the cosmic background may suggest other universes existing before the Big Bang. I have never regained a belief in a personal God since then or even in the impersonal, pantheistic God of Spinoza, but at least over time I have come around to taking an agnostic position, accepting the possibility that there may be other unseen realms of this universe beyond my perception, even guardian angels, shining devas, heavens and hierarchies of gods. Like humans, the gods in the lower heavens may be unaware of the gods above them. A Lord of a lower heaven may believe He is the sole Lord of Creation and not remember when He was born. However this kind of speculation does not intrigue me nearly as much as in those former days when I was grappling with the worrisome problem about the age of the dinosaurs. I wish that I could have known my grandfather, newspaper editor Oscar Willis Hennings, who might have counseled me then about such matters which I had to experience for myself. Jonathan Willis Jarvis, Pullman WA 1/8/2011 Home Page (jwleaf.org)