What's Your Blick?

"What's Your Blick? God or Science?" is the title of a recent book review in Washington Post Book World. The book in question: Michael Novak's No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Reviewer Jacques Berlinerblau described the book as a riposte to the New Atheism of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, all of whom have recent bestsellers disparaging religion and belief in God. Novak, says the "unrepentant Jewish atheist" Berlinerblau, is a Catholic theologian who would like to have a "heart-to-heart chat with these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

According to Berlinerblau,

To help frame the debate, Novak invokes the idea of a "blick," a "way of viewing reality that is not usually overturned by one or more pieces of countervailing evidence." Coined in about 1950 by the British philosopher R.M. Hare (who spelled it "blik"), the term refers to a mental filter through which people sift information, admitting some things as facts and rejecting others. To simplify somewhat, atheists and theists process information about the cosmos in radically different ways.

I'll take that "blick" idea a bit further. According to the late psychologist Carl Jung (see Quest for the Self, Part 2), human consciousness has at least five (and perhaps seven) stages of development:

1. A stage in early infancy when the conscious mind as such has yet to develop, and we experience a "participation mystique" where we have no idea we are separate from the rest of the world.
   
2. Then we learn to differentiate external persons and objects from ourselves — and right off we begin projecting the potencies of our inner unconscious mind outward upon them. A primitive sort of religious sense evolves, where the powerful archetypes, projected outward, seem to animate objects in the environment. Every tree is a god.
   
3. Later, we start projecting our inner archetypes out upon upon abstract entities, such as our notion of God in Heaven. Now it is the One God who has the numinous power of all the archetypes.
   
4. The next, fourth stage of conscious development is characterized by a seeming end to the proclivity to project the energy of our inner archetypes out onto persons and things, whether they be concrete and specific (Stage 2) or abstract and general (Stage 3). This is the stage atheists embody.
   
5. Next, in Stage 5, the "modern man's" anomie, meaninglessness, and lack of spiritual center, typical of Stage 4, gives way to an ability to take the once-hidden potencies of the unconscious mind — the archetypes — and bring them under direct mental scrutiny and into conscious acceptance.
6. In Stage 6 (see Quest for the Self, Part 3), the boundary between inside-the-mind and and outside-the-mind begins to crumble. This is a stage reached by mystics. The apparently inner structures which Jung called archetypes are seen to correspond, after all, to structures of being in the outer, nonpsychic world.
7. Finally, Stage 7 consciousness has come full circle, back to the "participation mystique" of infancy in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment. The difference is that originally we did not understand the inner-outer distinction in the first place, while now we are fully conscious of having overcome it.
   

Few people get beyond Stage 4, and modern people who have strong religious beliefs remain at Stage 3. While Jung described these seven stages as coming in the indicated sequence, and he seemed to think later stages superior to earlier stages, I find it more useful to think of the stages as stations on a circular railroad line, none of which is privileged over any other.

Some people, as we know, get off the train at the third station. They are religious believers.

Other people, atheists, disembark at the fourth stop. (Many of them were seemingly asleep when the train let off passengers at Station 3.)

When and if someone stays on the train for the entire journey and disembarks only at Station 7, he has in effect arrived back where he started — but making the trip has elevated what was originally strictly unconscious in him, as the "participation mystique," to the level of full consciousness.


Now, add to that model the following: each stage from 2 through 4 involves an increasingly insistent act of repudiation:

• Stage 2 repudiates the (pre-conscious) notion from Stage 1 that "all is one."
• Stage 3 repudiates the idea that what are really our inner archetypes, projected outward, control the outside world — if we are in harmony with the gods, things go our way.
• Stage 4 repudiates the notion that the same kind of thinking applies validly, but only to God Above, whom we can't see.
  

Then the final three stages involve successive reintroductions of the powers and relationships that were formerly repudiated:

• Stage 5 reintroduces the inner powers (the archetypes) at the level of conscious belief.
  
• Stage 6 re-links these powers with external potencies.
  
• Stage 7 returns us to a (now-conscious) "all is one" awareness.
  

In this model, there are not two blicks, but seven.

Admittedly, only blicks 3 and 4 apply to most modern adults. Blick 5 is the one Jung advocated, in which adults, usually in the second half of their life spans, follow a path of "individuation" toward a goal of "Self-realization."

(The Self is the archetype-of-archetypes, the "image of God" in the soul. Self-realization involves paying attention to the symbols the archetypes propel into our dreams and fantasies, rituals and myths — symbols which link up with things treated by traditional religious believers as facts. Moses' burning bush is a fact to a traditional theist, a symbol to a Jungian.)

Perhaps the New Atheists and the champions of traditional religion could stop shouting at each other if they recognized that theirs are only two of the seven possible blicks!