Professor of Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein has written several critical works and is currently in the final stages of writing a new book, “Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, and Monsters,” that will be published in September through Columbia University Press. The Argus sat down to discuss her upcoming book, her writing process, and why contemporary science and philosophy look a lot like theology.

The Argus: What research have you been working on?

Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein: I am in the process of editing a book that should come out in September on pantheism. The last book I wrote was an investigation of multiverse cosmologies. My big question in that book was, “How on earth did an infinite number of parallel universes become a respectable scientific hypothesis?” And when I was chasing this down, I found that over and over again the scientists who were most excited by the idea of the infinite number of worlds were convinced because, for them, it constituted an absolute disproof of the existence of the creator. It all goes back to the design argument, which argues that this world is so beautifully harmonious there has to be an intelligent being. But if there are an infinite number of worlds, then there is no need for a creator: worlds could be randomly botched and bungled all the time, and we just happen to be in one that worked out. What’s so hilarious, though, is that in rejecting a creator-God, the multiverse theorists are building all these worlds nobody has seen before. So what I wanted to argue is that it’s a counter-theology. It’s not the old theology, it’s newly constructed mythologies. So I wanted to see what kinds of gods are emerging from them, and as it turns out, the gods are identical to the universe itself. This is the position philosophers call “pantheism.”

At its most basic level, pantheism says that God and the world are the same thing. So I decided to write a book arguing that the most exciting, productive, innovative contemporary natural sciences are effectively pantheist. I wanted to write a conceptual history of pantheism: what is it, where has been, where did it come from, and how is it emerging from the natural sciences? But when I went to write this conceptual history, I found that there is no such thing because all pantheism really is is a nasty word philosophers call one another when they disagree with one another. And they repeatedly call the position absurd, irrational, and monstrous.

For pantheism, spirit and matter are effectively the same thing, as are creator and created, God and world, darkness and light, male and female: all of these raced and sexed differences that map onto the Western metaphysical distinctions between God and world are somehow thrown together and indistinguishable—that’s what’s “monstrous” about pantheism. And so it produces this panic over blurred boundaries and failed distinctions. The threat seems to be that if we let pantheism in the door, rationality goes, the Father-God goes, and everything respectable about philosophy and theology crumbles. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

So this book isn’t an argument for or against pantheism—it’s an attempt to figure out what the position is, and whether it might do any interesting critical work.

A: Would you classify most metaphysical philosophy or philosophy that’s talking about ‘being’ as just another form of theology?

MJR: It depends on what you’re trying to do when you say these things. I think it’s important in an age in which all sorts of factions claim to be nonreligious, secular, anti-theological, whatever it is, to ask: why? What is at stake in insisting that you have nothing to do with religion? It may be the case, but when philosophers insist they have nothing to do with religion and say it over and over again, I begin to wonder what is motivating that disavowal? Often it’s some concern for “truth,” which religion is thought to impede. But if you think alongside Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, that that quest to find truth is a monotheistic imperative in the first place: “There’s one truth out there, go find that truth.” Monotheists call it “God.” Philosophers often call it “Being” or “truth” or “the real.” Scientists call it “objectivity” or “the laws of physics.” I find this an important connection to make, not for the sake of discrediting the philosophy or science as secretly theological, or for the sake of proving the “truth” of any particular viewpoint, but in order to see narrative, metaphor, metaphysics, and ideology at work in the natural and human sciences.

This sort of work feels important to me, first, because it’s exciting to realize that religion is a thing that keeps getting generated. It’s not just something that is confined to the Torah, Talmud, New Testament, Qur’an, or Buddhist sutras. New “scriptures” get written and new mythologies emerge in the unlikeliest places, and one of them is the natural sciences. If you insist these sciences are secular, you don’t get to see those mythologies at work. You don’t get to understand the stories that motivate the discovery of the data that’s then related through stories. So we’re missing all this narrative operation if we don’t look at science this way.

The other reason is that, at this point, the natural sciences have assumed the mantle of Arbiters of Transcendent Truth, which is to say arbiters of what is, and I think it’s important to show there is always ideology at work behind any declaration of what is. So my little part in this effort is to reveal the theological ideologies at work in the purportedly secular sciences. By doing that, you can sort of open roads into the political, sexual, and racial ideologies that theologies have always secured. So again, this isn’t to say that there’s something wrong with science, or that “religion is just as true as science,” or anything like that. It’s just to say that there are always stories, there are always interests, and there are always ideologies motivating any kind of quest for the true or the real, so that we can examine our ways of knowing and ask, do we like these ways of knowing? Do they affirm the values we would like them to affirm? Or should we come up with better ways of creating knowledge?

A: What’s your writing process like?

MJR: I tend to read as much as I can stomach. I read a ton, and everything I read that makes reference to other materials that it seems like I should read, I go grab those and get as many sources as humanly possible, take absurd numbers of notes, and at some point it will start to feel like I’m asking the sources to say something they won’t say. And I start getting frustrated. I say, “Why doesn’t anybody say this?” And at that point, I’m like, “Oh! If they’re not saying what I’m looking for, it means I have something to say! Fantastic.” And then so I switch into some kind of writing mode, and I tend then, obsessively, to outline and organize. I am an intensely linear person—“this goes first, this goes next, this goes next”—so I try to get it all in order, try to wrangle it all into some kind of little cosmos. And then, when I have a sense of where I’m going to start and where I’m going to end and some idea of how I’m going to get there, only then do I let myself write anything at all. So we’re talking about months, years, I don’t know, it takes a really long time before I sit down and write. And then when I sit down to write, I’ve got my absurd outline. It’s like the kind of outline they tell you not to write in middle school, which is to say it basically says everything the full draft will say, organized by A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s. 

And then with that absurd, don’t-write-it-in-middle-school outline next to me, I think sit down with a notebook and a pen and I write the thing by hand, because I don’t know how to write on a computer because I think I don’t know how to think outside of my own handwriting. When I’m writing, I feel like I’m thinking, and there’s something about the slowness of it that feels like a better pace for writing for me than typing. So I start writing that way and then type it up, print it out, revise a million times, that kind of stuff. And then certainly during the writing process, I invariably get to the point where I’m like, “I am now saying things I do not understand.” And at that point I have to put it down and grab a bunch more sources. But yeah, I still absurdly write things by hand. Anything longer than an email, really, I write by hand.

A: And so it seems like you approach these disciplines from a historical and cultural studies perspective. Do you also subscribe to any of these philosophies? 

MJR: I lack somehow that impulse to take a philosopher outside of his world—and it’s often HIS world—and ask whether the truth that emerges from that little universe corresponds to some truth out there in the universe, which is part of the reason that I like to read science in the way that I do, as itself creating a little cosmos within which things are true. There are certainly visions of the universe that I find more ethically sustainable than others, and I think that’s as close as I get to “believing” in them. There are some that I find more productive, more sustainable, more beautiful than others, but that’s not the same thing as looking to them for truth.

A: Does your research inform the classes that you teach?

MJR: I’ll be teaching a class on the multiverse stuff in the fall—some of the stuff that made it into the book and some of the stuff that didn’t make it into the book—and I will, at some point in the next few semesters, teach another pantheism course. So, yes, absolutely, the research informs what I do in the classroom, but more interestingly, the classroom often informs what I do in the research. I’ll be teaching a class that I teach all the time and some batch of students will suddenly be all excited about, say, four particular sources. And I’ll be like, “Those sources? Why those sources?” And I’ll try to put them together in my head and think, “Huh, okay,” and start building a syllabus around them. Those impromptu courses often provide the basis of a new research project. And so in the acknowledgments page, particularly for this most recent book, I thanked the pantheism class that I taught. I even listed the names of all the students because they were just amazing! And they were so in it. And from the beginning, I was like, “I’m not totally sure what we’re doing here.” And they were like, “Us either, but it’s so cool!” Some scholars, I think, would love to be relieved of the burden of having to teach because they’re wonderful writers who would love as much time as possible. I think I would get lonely, and, for me at least, ideas get generated in conversation and I’m lucky enough to have absurdly intelligent and fun and interested students who help draw those ideas out of me. So it gives me something to write about, which is great.

A: Now that you’re done, do you feel relieved of it or do you want to start your next project now?

MJR: I think I’d like to follow the trail of the way that atheism gets positioned with respect to race in the Western philosophical tradition. During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, in German philosophical tradition, in particular, people who were accused of atheism tended to be non-white, non-Christian people. And then those accusations sort of shift, so that by the time you get to, say, the late-20th and early-21st century, atheism in the Western tradition becomes a positive term of self-identification for white, male, post-Christian scientists and philosophers—to mark them off from racialized, “irrational” religious people. So a funny racial transaction is taking place by means of the category of atheism and I’d like to track a little bit of that. That’s all I can really say, so far, about what’s next.

A: What are you reading now?

MJR: Student papers. Theses. And “Llama, Llama, Red Pajama.”

 

Noah Seltzer can be reached at nseltzer@wesleyan.edu.