Adam Gopnik — Practicing Doubt, Redrawing Faith | The On Being Project

But I think in our time, those of us who grow up in doubt, who accept scientific skepticism as a foundational part of our worldview, also are drawn again and again to kinds of faith, to spiritual practice.

“Modern people are drawn to faith while practicing doubt, just as our ancestors professed doubt even as they practiced faith.”

I decided to finally interview Adam in 2015, when I read the foreword he wrote to a book called The Good Book , in which an array of intellectual and literary figures reflect on the Bible. Adam Gopnik sums up a core irony of our secular age in this way: “Our ancestors acknowledged doubt while practicing faith. We moderns are drawn to faith while pr... See more

And the weird thing about it is that I realized then that understanding modern art really was like a religion, inasmuch as it was a practice before it was a dogma: that you could never really get it by understanding the way one picture had changed another, how Cubism had created Expressionism, which created Surrealism, and so on; that it was a prac... See more

But it affects my own feelings about the universe, because I think it’s demonstrative of the possibility that you can be completely committed to a rational, if you like, material explanation of existence, of why — how we got here, without being committed to a reductive account of our own experience. You can believe that there’s a completely rationa... See more

what religion brings us is not a dogma but a practice. That’s the rich thing it brings us. That’s the significant thing that it brings us, and that the idea of having a spiritual practice is one that’s completely compatible with the idea of being extremely skeptical of dogma; that those two things are not at war. They may be in tension, the way so ... See more

So just as the assertion of God doesn’t give you a value system, the denial of God does not give you a value system, either.

Those systems are things we have to make for ourselves. And we make them, as we’ve been talking all this time, usually by addressing the old ones. We’re not capable of making everything up for ourselves. So we go back to ethic... See more

why are we here? Why do we live? Sounds like a ridiculous question, but he had an instant answer for it. He said, “We’re here to give praise.” We’re here to give praise. All of our religious teaching and all of our spiritual experience can be summed up in that conception: we’re on earth to give praise.