When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin returned to Earth in 1961, after the first manned spaceflight, Soviet leaders claimed he said: "I went up to space, but I didn't encounter God."
Venturing into similar territory, superstar atheist Sam Harris rocked cyberspace during a recent Triggernometry YouTube appearance in which he discussed Donald Trump, faith elements in "wokeness" and the flocks of Americans who insist on believing in heaven.
Political Twitter screamed when he said there was "a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. … Absolutely, but I think it was warranted."
But comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster pushed back, asking if Harris was justifying moral relativism. Perhaps today's truth wars, the Triggernometry team suggested, were linked to a famous G.K. Chesterton quip: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."
During the ensuing discussion, Harris offered another viral sound bite: "Where is heaven, exactly, given that we have multiple telescopes up there beaming back tens of billions of years' worth of information?" Yet millions of Americans still embrace the supernatural claims of an ancient faith, including that Jesus will return to "raise the living and the dead."
"You'd be surprised at the number of percent of sober, non-Bible-thumping people who would say 'yes' to that question," he said. "They might be Christian, they might be, listen, 'I love the Bible. It gives me a great moral framework. It gives my kids a great moral framework. This is the tradition I'm identified with. This is all super important to me' – but that's kind of as far as it goes. Right? Like, I'm not going to make magical claims about flying saviors who are literally going to come down from … heaven."
While the Twitter masses raged, the French-Canadian iconographer and writer Jonathan Pageau recorded a video essay on his YouTube channel about why materialists and religious believers keep debating the meaning of terms such as "heaven" and "earth."
This is a core biblical topic, since the first verse of Genesis states: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Thus, the Harris heaven sound bite led Pageau to tweet: "Woah, this is one of the most embarrassing things that I have heard in a while."
After all, even the most fervent materialist can learn to "step back into an ancient cosmology" and grasp that "these categories – heaven and earth – are universal, they are in every culture," said Pageau, who is best known for his online dialogues with author Jordan Peterson, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto.
Concepts of the "visible" and "invisible" are central to religious discussions of "light," "wind," "breath," "spirit," "purpose," "beauty," "art" and "speech," as well as images of believers making spiritual quests via ladders, trees or mountains. Humans experience the world with their senses, and these perceptions lead to spiritual questions, insights and truths, said Pageau.
Consider, for example, Dante's use of planets in "The Divine Comedy" as a symbolic pathway to encountering God. "You can think: 'Oh, my goodness. What a silly way of thinking.' Right? To take Sam's position, did the satellites up there – did they get in the way of Dante? Did he knock himself on the satellites while he was going up the spheres?"
The Bible describes angels with wings, and God is often depicted in physical terms – having feet, arms and hands, as well as a heart and mind. But no one is claiming that "God is a big physical being in the sky that has these attributes," said Pageau.
"I will admit that in a world of satellites and a world of spaceships, quasars and whatever, this can be difficult. … Jesus is not hanging up there in the atmosphere. He's not having to watch out for the satellites that are coming by – you know – maybe chatting with people at the space station," the iconographer explained.
"God is, obviously, not a king sitting on a throne in the atmosphere throwing lightning bolts. But understanding what a king is might be one of the best ways … to understand how the authority of God works. …
Understanding what heaven is is the best way to understand the manner in which the invisible moves the visible."
Terry Mattingly leads GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tenn. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.
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