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2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0022-4189/2006/8603-0002$10.00

Wonder and the Religious Sensibility:A Study in Religion and Emotion

Robert Fuller / Bradley University

A few years ago Mark Taylor edited a volume assessing Critical Terms for

Religious Studies. In the volumes second essay, William LaFleur notesthat, twenty years ago, mysticism would have been considered a coreterm for the study of religion. Yet twenty years ago the body rarelysurfaced as a critical concept for understanding religion. Now, how-ever, the situation is reversed: research into psychedelics, the brain,and the chemical components of health and happiness has been im-pressive. . . . The leverage on our minds exerted by our DNA and whathas been called the selfish gene cannot be denied. Studies that rejector ignore such data now seem out-of-date.1 Although mysticism hashardly receded as a prime topic of religious investigation, it is true thatnew questions are being asked about it and that new critical termsstructure those investigations. Among these terms are concepts drawnfrom the study of the bodyits genetic predispositions, its neurochem-

ical functions, and its emotional programs.This article examines how one aspect of the bodyits emotional

programsmight be used as an organizing construct in religious stud-ies. More specifically, I hope to show how experiences of wonder exertleverage on our perception and cognition in ways that encourage thedevelopment of a distinctively religious posture toward life. It is alsomy hope that the psychology of wonder will contribute to recent in-quiries into the relationship between religion and the emotions. Eversince Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion in terms of the feelingof absolute dependence, scholars have argued about the emotionalfoundations of a religious orientation to life. Many historical and the-oretical studies have explored the relationship between religion and

such specific emotions as anger, fear, bliss, love, mourning, and ha-1William LaFleur, Body, inCritical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36.


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tred.2 To the best of my knowledge, this article is the first attempt tofocus attention squarely on the relationship between wonder and ourreligious sensibilities. Indeed, it is one of the first attempts to studythe connection between any specific emotion and religion by drawingon the impressive advances that have been made in emotion researchduring the past few decades in the social and behavioral sciences, phi-losophy, and cultural history.3 As such, it seeks to establish on biolog-ical, psychological, and philosophical grounds that wonder is at leastone principal source of adult spirituality.

wonder in evolutionary-adaptive perspective

It was Charles Darwin who initiated the scientific study of emotion inhis Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872). Darwins over-all answer to the question of why humans have emotions was a func-tional one. He argued that emotional expressionsat least as they ini-tially emerged in our evolutionary historyfacilitate adaptation andsurvival. It is interesting to note in this regard that six of the sevenbasic emotions that Darwin identified (sadness, sulkiness, reflection,disgust, surprise, and shamewith reflection the only apparent excep-tion) are associated with internal states that lead to defensive maneu-

vering. Darwins basic argument was that emotional expressions wereoriginally preserved through the process of natural selection becausethey affect our chances of survival. They mobilize us for action. Theycommunicate information about our intentions. In short, emotions

contribute to our overall biological fitness that can be defined in termsof our ability to survive, to procreate, and to raise offspring to thepoint of biological viability.

Following Darwins lead, both evolutionary biologists and evolution-ary psychologists have emphasized the role of emotions in solving evo-lutionarily recurrent situations. That is, emotions can be regarded assuperordinate programs that direct perception and cognition in waysthat successfully address the adaptive problems specific to the human

2 The best starting point for a consideration of the relationship between religion and emo-tion is John Corrigans appendix titled History, Religion, and Emotion: A Historical Survey,included in his Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2002). See also John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos,Emotion and Religion: A Criticial Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CN: Green-

wood, 2000). A special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR)containsarticles on Ethics and Emotions in South Asian Buddhism. Of particular importance is

Volney Gays summary article, Passionate about Buddhism: Contesting Theories of Emotion,JAAR71 (September 2003): 60514.

3 See my recent book, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality(Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2006).


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species.4 Following this perspective, most evolutionary psychologistsemphasize emotions that lead to withdrawal, avoidance, or other de-fensive strategies. They rarely consider emotions that lead to greateraffiliation or enhanced rapport with the surrounding environment. Acase in point is the most recent comprehensive work in the field of theevolution of human emotions, Robert Plutchiks Emotions and Life: Per-spectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution.5 Drawing on a century of

work in this field, Plutchik reminds us that emotions of all kinds havea cognitive component. Emotions presuppose a (conscious or uncon-scious) cognitive understanding of the average expectable environ-ment. Plutchik explains that emotions arise when certain significantexperiencessuch as some object suddenly and unexpectedly appear-ing in our environmentdisrupt this equilibrium between ordinaryexpectations and new perceptions. The biological purpose of emotionis to induce behaviors that restore harmonious relationship with theenvironment.

Plutchik further explains that contemporary theorists disagree as tohow many primary emotions exist at birth as opposed to the emotionsthat emerge over time as combinations and permutations of these pri-mary emotions. Plutchik notes that virtually all theorists recognize fear,anger, and sadness as primary emotions, and there is near consensusconcerning joy, love, and surprise. Plutchik personally adds both dis-gust and anticipation to his list of primary emotions and then goes onto add such secondary or acquired emotions as ecstasy, adoration,

amazement, pensiveness, distraction, and grief. The fact that neitherPlutchik nor any other evolutionary theorists have suggested wonderas a prototypical emotion tells much about the deeper metaphors thatguide most work in the field (the omission of wonder from Plutchikslist of basic emotions is especially interesting given that on the fron-tispiece of his book he includes the quote science starts with fasci-nation and wonder). It is sufficient, however, to note that wonder

would be grouped not with emotions of avoidance but rather withemotions of enhanced rapport such as joy, amazement, or interest.

Various researchers have suggested, for example, that the emotion ofjoy motivates approach and belongingnesstraits shared with the emo-tion of wonder. The emotion of interest, meanwhile, is also closely

4 See Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions, inHandbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, 2nd ed. (New York:Guilford), 91115.

5 Robert Plutchik, Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution(Wash-ington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002).


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linked with wonder in that it motivates attention and thereby promotesgreater awareness of the environment.6

The preeminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published atreatise on the role of wonder in human thought titled Unweaving theRainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. Dawkins accountsfor wonder by noting that it is as if the nervous system is turned atsuccessive hierarchical levels to respond strongly to the unexpected,

weakly or not at all to the expected.7 Dawkinss principal concern,however, is not broadening our understanding of how wonder inten-sifies our response and engagement with the world. Instead he con-cerns himself with discrediting the frequent association of wonder withreligious rather than scientific interpretations of the universe. It is my

thesis, he explains, that the spirit of wonder which led Blake to Chris-tian mysticism, Keats to Arcadian myth and Yeats to Fenians and fairies,is the very same spirit that moves great scientists, a spirit which, if fedback to poets in scientific guise, might inspire still greater poetry.8

Dawkins never quite gets around to telling us what the value of greaterpoetry for human existence might be. Instead, we are told that humanshave an appetite for wonder . . . which real science ought to be feed-ing (rather being fed by superstitions such as religion).9 Thus whileDawkins recognizes the existence of wonder and its role in stimulatingnovel engagements with the environment, he can find no normative

value for the emotion unless it eventuates in scientific rationality.Scott Atrans In God We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

provides another example of how evolutionary theorists interpret emo-tional responses such as wonder. Atran explains that from the stand-point of natural selection, the brains principal task can be describedas that of agency detection. That is, cognitive schema for recogniz-ing and interpreting animate agents may be a crucial part of our evo-lutionary heritage, which primes us to anticipate intention in the un-seen causes of uncertain situations that carry the risk of danger or thepromise of opportunity, such as predators, protectors, and prey.10

Emotional programs such as wonder, then, emerged as part of thebrains inherited tendencies for agency detection in the face of un-

6 Discussion of the emotions of joy and interest can be found in Caroll Izard, The Psychologyof Emotions(New York: Plenum, 1991), or Sylvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 1,Positive Affects(New York: Springer, 1962).

7 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder(NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 264.

8 Ibid., 27.9 Ibid., 114.10 Scott Atran, In God We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2002), 57.


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certainty. Yet Atran, like most evolutionary psychologists, believes thatnatural selection shaped the mind to solve the problems of the huntingand gathering life led by our ancestors. He thus believes that the kindsof thinking typically generated by wonder are nothing more than con-fused or erroneous attempts to detect agency in what are otherwisecausally opaque situations. To the extent that wonder might predisposeus to believe in supernatural agents such as gods, ghosts, or angels, itrepresents a misapplication of neurophysiological mechanisms de-signed to help us avoid dangers in the physical environment.

Despite their narrow philosophical commitments, evolutionary the-orists such as Dawkins and Atran have nonetheless helped lay the foun-dations for a descriptive analysis of wonder. They have drawn attention

to the importance of understanding the role of natural selection inshaping the activities of our brains. They alert us to the fact that ourbrains respond to uncertainty by selectively organizing information insuch a way as to facilitate our biological survival (and the perpetuationof the genes that design these brains). And they have also helpfullyreminded us that the brains most pressing concern is that of discern-ing agency and intention in what are otherwise causally opaque situa-tions. The brain is wired to seek the source of causal agency, purpose,or intentionality of events that vitally impinge on our lives. Where thelikes of Dawkins and Atran err is in their peculiar insistence that theonly proper domain of such agency detection is the immediate phys-ical environment. This is odd in that the fields of evolutionary biology,evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology have in other contexts ac-knowledged the adaptive significance of our brains capacity to engagein abstract thought and to seek connection between various levels ororders of meaning. Our brains coevolved with our cultural experience.Higher-order cognition made cultural life possible even as cultural lifein turn selected brains capable of engaging in abstract, higher-orderthought.

It is surely true that evolution constructed brains designed to solvethe recurrent problems faced by humans in the early phases of ourevolutionary history. This should not, however, blind us to the fact thathumans possess a wide variety of emotional systems and that some ofthese emotional systems promote adaptation in ways that are moreclearly cultural than physical. We need to move beyond typical treat-

ments of emotion as a general category and avail ourselves of the im-pressive array of evidence in support of specific or discrete emotions.

Joseph LeDoux summarizes this research by explaining that there isno one emotional center in the brain. Instead, the various classes of


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emotions are mediated by separate neural systems that have evolvedfor different reasons. If we are interested in understanding the variousphenomena that we use the term emotion to refer to, we have tofocus on specific classes of emotions.11

The study of separate or discrete emotions has opened up new in-sight into the adaptive functions performed by emotional systems thatdo not motivate the kinds of defensive maneuvering inadvertently em-phasized by so many evolutionary researchers. For example, John Haidtproposed that evolution favored what he calls certain moral emotionsthat are linked to the interests or welfare of the social group to whicha person belongs.12 He points out that there is extensive evidence tosuggest that such emotions as disgust, contempt, shame, embarrass-

ment, and guilt promote the long-term interests of a social group byinducing both loyalty and conformity to group activities. He furtherobserves that fellow researchers have inexplicably overlooked won-derpossibly because it is an emotional response that promotes pas-sive, receptive modes of attention in the presence of something un-expected rather than fight or flight responses. Yet, Haidt argues,

wonder mobilizes physiological, perceptual, and cognitive changes thatenlarge the field of peripheral vision and open our attention to a

wider field of stimuli than we would ordinarily attend to. Experiencesof certain kinds of beauty and perfection seem to open our heartsand minds to other persons in our social group. As Haidt explains,awe and wonder make people stop, admire, and open their hearts and

minds. It may be for this reason that awe is so often discussed in areligious context as the proper and desirable response to the presenceof God.13

In addition to wonders function as a moral emotion, we also needto recognize the distinct effects that wonder has in mobilizing veryspecific changes in our perceptual and cognitive activities. The highlyregarded psychologist Carroll Izard suggests that wonder is closely as-sociated with the emotions of both joy and interest. Certain environ-mental stimuli elicit heightened interest that motivates explorationand learning, and guarantees the persons engagement in the environ-ment. Survival and adaptation require such engagement. Interest . . .

11Joseph LeDoux,The Emotional Brain(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 16.12

Jonathan Haidt, The Moral Emotion, in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J.Davidson, Klaus Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003),85270. Haidt specifically mentions theaffinity between hiswork andthe treatmentof emotionin Nico Frijda, The Emotions(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

13 Haidt, Moral Emotion, 863.


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is the only emotion that can sustain long-term constructive or creativeendeavors.14 Wonder, because it also seems to be accompanied bymany of the same emotional functions of joy, is also capable of gen-erating such long-term engagement with the surrounding world. Won-der imbues the world with an alluring quality, fostering increased open-ness and receptivity rather than immediate utilitarian action. And, asshall be explained more fully in the next section, wonder diverts at-tention away from the immediate physical environment to a consider-ation of higher-order levels of thought. Wonder leads not to utilitarianmanipulation of specific parts of our environment but rather to fairlypassive contemplation of how the parts of life fit into some larger

whole. This includes the consideration of causal principles that are not

out there in any way detectable by our physical senses. In otherwords, wonder is associated with the brains adapative task of agencydetection but does so by seeking the intentionality of the whole thatlies behind the observable parts.

Wonder, then, is closely allied with other emotions that arise in theperception of something novel, unexpected, or inexplicable. Wonder,too, sets us in search of causality, agency, intentionality, and purposeamidst these unexpected features of our environment. Yet wonder dif-fers from the emotions ordinarily studied by evolutionary theorists fortwo reasons. First, wonder is an emotion linked with approach andaffiliation rather than avoidance. Wonder motivates attention and mo-tivates a quest for increased connection and belongingness with the

putative source of unexpected displays of life, beauty, or truth. Wonderis thus somewhat rare among the emotions in its functional capacityto motivate persons to venture outward into increased rapport with theenvironment. Second, wonder awakens our mental capacity for ab-stract, higher-order thought. Indeed, wonder seems to direct our cog-nitive activities to identify causality, agency, and purpose in ways thatare not directly connected with our biological survival. This, of course,is not to suggest that wonder does not thereby greatly increase hu-manitys chances for obtaining other kinds of satisfaction and fulfill-ment.

This last feature of wonderits capacity to deactivate temporarilyour utilitarian striving and to open up a sense of our participation ina more general order of lifeis crucial to our understanding of its

central role in our adaptation to the wider physical, interpersonal, andmoral environments we inhabit. Wonder is thus at the core of what

14 Carroll Izard and Brian Ackerman, Motivational, Organizational, and Regulatory Func-tions of Discrete Emotions, in Lewis and Haviland-Jones, Handbook of Emotions, 257.


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Don Browning termed the receptive mode of human functioning inhis The Moral Context of Pastoral Care. The human capacities for agencyand mastery are certainly critical to our speciess adaptive strength. Yet,

when unchecked, they lead us to construct worldviews that are imper-vious and blind to the realities of the larger environment in which welive. According to Browning, only through enhanced receptivity can webreak out of this constructed world in to some kind of larger vision.15

Wonder, because of its peculiar ability to elicit sustained attention andreceptivity, thus serves the adaptive purposes that Browning describesas the capacity to get us in touch with the unitary and relational as-pects of reality. It gives us a vision of our relatedness to the world, toother human beings, and to God.16

wonder and accommodation to the larger environment

The capacity for wonder emerged part and parcel with humanitys ge-netically encoded response to unexpected features of the environment.

Whereas other emotional responses to uncertainty prompt us to iden-tify agency or intentionality within the immediate environment, won-der instead prompts us to consider how our experience disclosesagency or intentionality at a more general level of existence. What ispeculiar to the emotion of wonder is that rather than leading to im-mediate defensive action, it leads to contemplation of why things areas they are. As such, wonder is the ontogenetic basis for the develop-

ment of thinking that goes beyond the constraints of the immediatephysical environment. It stimulates our efforts to contemplate evermore general orders of existence such that we might conceptualize firstprinciples of causality, intentionality, and meaning. The human capac-ity for such thought appears intimately linked with the coevolution ofhumanitys larger cerebral cortex and cultural mode of existence. In-deed, the motivational functions performed by wonder can be tracedto the development of some of humanitys highest cultural achieve-ments. Not the least among these cultural achievements is the emer-gence of both metaphysical and moral reflection.

The role of wonder in generating modes of cognitive activity re-quired for moral and metaphysical thought can first be detected inearly childhood with the appearance of childrens why questions. The

work of Jean Piaget is thus relevant to our descriptive analysis of theorigin and function of wonder in individual human life. Piagets goal

15 Don Browning, The Moral Context of Pastoral Care(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 85.16 Ibid., 87.


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was to elaborate a broadly biological explanation of knowledge. Be-cause he viewed knowledge as a form of adaptation continuous withorganic adaptation, he set about studying the cognitive developmentof children as they adapted to ever-expanding environmental perplex-ities.17 He closely observed children, particularly his own children, asthey learned to make sense of the world about them. Of particularinterest to Piaget was the sequential process through which childrencome to understand such things as causality, the relationship betweenparts and wholes, and the relationship between change and constancy.He eventually identified three distinct phases in the normal course ofcognitive development: the sensorimotor phase (roughly, ages 02),during which infants relate to the world largely through reflexes and

acquired motor habits; the phase of concrete operations (roughly,ages 211), during which young children learn to organize experienceinto fairly static configurations; and the phase of formal operations(beginning after age 12), when teens gradually learn to construct hy-pothetical models of reality that allow them to consider and compareideas and thereby achieve a measure of mental control or directionover their lives. Subsequent researchers have challenged Piagets ar-gument concerning the universality of these phases and his relativeneglect of the role that environmental conditions play in the way thatchildren learn to construct their reality. Nonetheless, Piagets essentialparadigms have generated the bulk of what we know today about cog-nitive development and provide a helpful context for understanding

how the emotional experience of wonder contributes to acquisition ofspecific kinds of cognitive skills.18

Piaget studied the way that children tried to solve various problemsthat arose while interacting with their natural and social environments.Each new problem disrupted the equilibrium that had previously ex-isted between children and their world, thereby motivating them to

17 There are many fine introductions to the work of Jean Piaget. One of the most succinctis the summary provided in Henry MaiersThree Theories of Child Development(NewYork: Harper& Row, 1969). Readers might also wish to consult Richard Evanss Jean Piaget: The Man andHis Ideas(New York: Dutton, 1973), or Mary Ann Spencer Pulaskis Understanding Piaget(New

York: Harper & Row, 1971). Helpful assessments of Piagets long-term impact on develop-mental psychology can be found in David Elkind and John Flavell, Studies in Cognitive Devel-opment: Essays in Honor of Jean Piaget(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

18 In celebration of the centennial anniversary of Jean Piagets birth, Psychological Science

published a collection of articles assessing his legacy to the field of cognitive psychology. SeePsychological Science7 (July 1996): 191225. That same year, Orlando Lourenco and ArmandoMachado published In Defense of Piagets Theory: A Reply to Ten Common Criticisms,Psychological Review103 ( January 1996): 14364. Patricia Miller also provides a helpful overviewof the current status of Piagets contributions to the field inTheories of Developmental Psychology,4th ed. (New York: Freeman, 2001).


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acquire new cognitive understandings that would once again allowthem to interact successfully with their surroundings. Piaget was thusinterpreting cognitive development as a form of biological adaptation.He found it useful to explain this ongoing process of adaptation bydrawing attention to the two alternating ways that we relate to our

world: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation represents ourefforts to incorporate new experiences into the existing stock of ideas

with which we fashion our goal-seeking behavior. When new experi-ence cant be assimilated into existing cognitive schema, accommoda-tion occurs. Accommodation refers to changes the individual makes toadjust to the environment. Accommodation signifies the way we modifyour previous cognitive structures to include those new features of the

environment learned through new or unexpected perceptions.New experience often disturbs the equilibrium that formerly existed

between a growing childs cognitive structures and the surroundingworld. Cognitive development occurs as persons struggle to resolve thisdisequilibrium through some combination of assimilation or accom-modation. The emotions of surprise, curiosity, and wonder are thuscritical to the overall course of cognitive development. All three emo-tions originate as reactions to unexpected events, mobilizing efforts tochange cognitive structures in ways that will ensure our overall well-being. Surprise is the most general of these orienting responses andmay easily combine with curiosity or wonder. William Charlesworthpoints out that Piagets entire model of cognitive development hingesaround the central role played by the emotion of surprise. Charles-

worth explains that the emotion of surprise is a complex orientingresponse that has an instigatory effect on attentional and curiositybehaviors needed if unexpected stimuli are to become part of andhelp reshape existing cognitive schemata.19 Surprise reactions to un-expected stimuli have a general arousal effect. Surprise mobilizes se-lective attention to the environment and thereby alters our manner ofattending to, and processing, sensory information. The emotion of sur-prise thus ensures that the organism behaves in such a way as to pro-duce new knowledge about problematic properties of the environment:Under normal environmental conditions surprise reaction andsubsequent attentional and curiosity behaviors are very hard to sup-press, and that for this reason they seem to be good candidates for themechanisms that insure that most individuals make the progressionfrom sensorimotor intelligence to formal thought.20

19William Charlesworth, The Role of Surprise in Cognitive Development, in Elkind andFlavell,Studies in Cognitive Development, 257314.

20 Ibid., 308.


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Piaget was also aware that curiosity, like surprise, motivates cognitivegrowth. He frequently observed how curiosity propels children to in-teract proactively with their environment. Piaget often used the meta-phor of little scientists to capture the way that curiosity drives chil-dren to investigate and create in the context of their interactions withthe world. His point was that curiosity is rewarding in its own right.Curiosity draws children into sustained rapport with their environ-ment. Curiosity motivates children not just to register experience pas-sively but also to organize and interpret such experience. Of specialsignificance is the fact that curiosity motivates sustained investigationof the relationship between ideas and experience. Curiosity thereforehelps individuals refine their conceptions of the world to correspond

more closely with the actual facts of experience.Piagets research focused primarily on the developmental acquisition

of domain-specific knowledge rather than the ability to think in waysthat stretch beyond domains. Thus Piaget, and cognitive psychologistsin general, extol the role of curiosity in fostering the assimilation ofenvironmental patterns into our working stock of behavioral strategiesbut inadvertently denigrates cognitive activities that seek to make con-nections between different kinds of things or to put things together inhigher-order ways.21 And these, of course, are the cognitive activitiesmost directly stimulated by wonder. Fortunately, the total context ofPiagets work provides conceptual tools for understanding the devel-opmental link between the emotion of wonder and our capacity formetaphysical thought. In The Language and Thought of the Child, Piaget

noted that the emergence of why questions in early childhood islinked with a capacity to think about the existence of an imperceptiblereality behind the apparent perceptible world. That is, Piaget drewattention to the fact that children are naturally curious about the pur-poses, intentionality, or teleology of things. It is the natural tendencyof children to infer the existence of a reality that in some way liesbeyond or behind observed realityand it is this more general senseof reality that enables them to unite objects together or to interprettheir purpose or meaning.

This is an important observation. Children seek not only to under-stand local causal mechanisms but also to understand them in termsof some broader or larger context of meaning. This begins fairly early

in childhood when children ponder time before they were born, what21 See the excellent discussion of Piaget and the world of possibilities in Paul Harris, On

Not Falling Down to Earth: Childrens Metaphysical Thinking, in Imagining the Impossible:Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children, ed. Karl Rosengren, Carl Johnson, andPaul Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15778.


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life was like in the age of dinosaurs, or what life will be like when theygrow up.22 All such cognitive operations require the construction oflarger contexts based on nonactual, fictional, and metaphysical possi-bilities of the past, present, or future. This process extends much fur-ther in late childhood and early adolescence when we first observe themovement from what Piaget labeled concrete operations to formaloperational thought. Formal operations depend on the adolescentsability to entertain abstract, possible constructions of reality that thenguide hypethetico-deductive reasoning whereby multiple strategies canbe entertained and compared. Thus, as Piaget notes, the adolescentdiffers from the child by becoming an individual who thinks beyondthe present and forms theories about everything, delighting especially

in considerations of that which is not.23

The highest levels of reason-ing require the construction of a hypothetical model of existence, astructured whole that can be used to assess the meaning or value ofthe observed particulars of existence. As Piaget notes, at this importantstage reality becomes secondary to possiblity.24 The existence ofhigher-order conceptions of reality frees us from sheer necessity andbrute survival to consider what our existential and ethical response tolife might optimally be.

My point here is that just as curiosity propels children to sustain theirinquiries into the workings of physical reality, wonder is a prime in-gredient in the emergence of higher-order conceptions of existence.

Wonder disrupts equilibrium and prompts us to accommodate to themost general order of thinking possiblean order from which wemight contemplate the intrinsic cause or intentionality of things. Atleast potentially, neither children nor adults have any problem distin-guishing between the actual and the possible. The difficulty lies insteadin discerning the boundaries of the possible.25 We lack means of em-pirically testing our conceptions of the possible. For this reason wetypically rely on our own sense of plausibility and, of course, on themythic and theological traditions of our community. Beginning withPiaget, developmental psychologists have implicitly denigrated suchcognitive processes owing to their frequent connection with theologi-

22 See Carl Johnson, Putting Different Things Together: The Development of MetaphysicalThinking, in Rosengren et al., Imagining the Impossible, 179211, and Paul Harris, On NotFalling Down to Earth.

23Jean Piaget,The Psychology of Intelligence(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), 148.24Jean Piaget and B. Inhelder, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence,

cited in Henry Maier, Three Theories of Child Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),149.

25 See the excellent discussion of this issue in Johnson, Putting Different Things Together,200.


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greater whole that connects and imparts meaning to otherwise separateobjects. Wonder elicits sustained accommodation to the widest possiblerange of human experience even as it triggers the construction of cog-nitive categories that make it possible to seek what Aristotle describedas final rather than efficient or material causes that affect our

well-being.Another link between wonder and metaphysics can be found in the

work of Howard Gardner. Gardner has gained a popular following inrecent years by pursuing the notion of multiple intelligences (i.e.,examining not how smart a person is but rather discovering how thatperson is smart). In his attempt to examine what we might mean bythe concept of spiritual intelligence, Gardner proposes that it has to

do with the capacity to engage cosmic questions such as Who are we?Why do we exist? or What is the meaning of love? In brief, hedefines spiritual intelligence as the capacity to locate oneself with re-spect to the cosmos that extends beyond what we can perceive directly,to the mystery of our own existence.29 Gardners definition of spiritualintelligence thus coheres with this articles basic argument concerningour human capacity to construct a conception of the general order ofexistence that, in turn, enables us to assign meaning and value to theparticulars of our life. What is more important, however, is that Gard-ner confesses to not being religious himself. Yet he goes on to statethat, when he encounters especially moving works of music, I losetrack of mundane concerns, alter my perception of space and time,and occasionally, feel in touch with issues of cosmic import.30 In brief,

Gardner is moved by particularly beautiful music to the emotion ofwonderan emotion that arrests his active will and opens him to thecontemplation of a more general order from which such beauty flows.Such experiences, Gardner observes, evoke a felt sense of having beenenriched, ennobled, and humbled. Gardner is perhaps on to some-thing here. For wonder is not only responsible for triggering efforts toconstruct higher-level conceptions of existence, but researchers haveshown that it also exists in a family of emotions that motivate explo-ration, creativity, and lively engagement in the environment.

29 Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed(New York: Basic, 1999), 54.30 Ibid., 65. This passage is in many ways similar to Robert Kegans personal reflection that

great works of art prompt him to consider how alive they seemed, how they traveled beyond

their canvas to something somehow true, whether natural or abstract. This, I suggest, is yetanother psychologists way of stating how the perception of particular instances of beauty,life, or power elicit wonder and the attempt to locate the causal source of such beauty, life,or power at a more general order of existence. SeeRobert Kegan, TheEvolving Self(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 25.


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wonder and the evocation of an unseen order

The emotion of wonder excites the human cognitive system to seek thecausal source of extraordinary phenomena at a more general level ofexistence. As such, wonder stimulates the formation of abstract con-ceptions of life and thus often gives rise to metaphysical thinking. Thiscapacity for metaphysical reflection originates in childrens natural cu-riosity about the realm of possibility; that is, curiosity about what liesbehind or beyond sensory reality. Some researchers have treated thistendency in children as simply a fantastical error on the way to modesof thought that maximize their capacity for utilitarian manipulation oftheir environments. But, viewed from another perspective, childrenscuriosity and wonder represent the beginning of a capacity to makehigher-order connections between observed things and their relation-ship to larger contexts.

The most salient feature of wonder is its evocation of the existenceof something more, some ultimate presence or causal agency thatmight account for otherwise inexplicable phenomena. We might re-mind ourselves of William Jamess remark early in The Varieties of Reli-gious Experience, where he noted that if asked to characterize the lifeof religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one mightsay that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and thatour supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.31

Wonder, I contend, is one of the principal human experiences thatlead to belief in an unseen order. Wonder, by prompting us to consider

the agency and purpose of an unseen order, renders our life quitedifferent than we would be without it. As James explains, not just ourreligious attitudes but all of our attitudes are created in response tothe objects of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist,

whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may bepresent to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. Ineither case they elicit from us a reaction. 32

What is peculiar to wonder is that although it originates as an emo-tion in response to novel or unexpected stimuli, it engages a cognitivesystem prone to granting ontological reality to an order of existencethat somehow lies behind, beyond, or at a more general level of exis-tence. It is, as James continues, as if there were in the human con-sciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a percep-tion of what we may call something there, . . . a sense of present

31William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1985), 51.

32 Ibid.


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reality more diffused and general than that which our special sensesyield.33

Many who have been drawn to the field of religion and psycholog-ical studies over the years have tacitly hoped that psychology mightauthoritatively establish the perceptual mechanisms whereby humansdo in fact perceive this unseen order of things. And indeed it may. Butall that the psychology of wonder can presently establish is the factthat certain unexpected phenomena, particularly vivid instances ofbeauty or vitality, regularly give us a sense of the objective presence ofsomething more, something that somehow exists behind or above theobserved order of things. Wonder sets us in search of causal agency,intentionality, purpose, and meaning. But wonder differs from curios-

ity proper in that it expands our thinking to include categories thatdeal with the realm of possibility. Whether any one such possibilityexists really or only to our thought, it will certainly elicit from us areaction unlike those stemming from conceptual categories connectedonly with the actual.

What can be positively asserted about such hypothetical orders ofexistence is not very clear. All too often, experiences of wonder haveencouraged sheer credulity concerning such putative causal agenciesas gods, goddesses, and sundry varieties of supernatural spirits. As

James observed, such is the ontological imagination, and such is theconvincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are re-alized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucina-tion.34 Active experimentation is all but impossible with the hypothet-

ical general orders of experience to which wonder gives rise. Nor dowe have the same kind of direct environmental feedback to help usadjudicate between competing cognitive constructions as we do when

we restrict ourselves to sensory objects only. But this is not to say thatmetaphysical thought is a quaint but useless misdirection of a cognitivesystem that was actually designed for more immediate, adaptively use-ful, epistemic purposes.35 The ability to imagine the possible is the seedof humanitys greatest accomplishments (e.g., the conception of uni-

versal human rights, visions of social justice, convictions of the intrinsicworth of future generations and the ecological claims they put on us).Among other things, this capacity to envision a general order of exis-tence makes it possible for us to envision our world as a universe rather

than a pluriverse. It also makes it possible to consider the possible33 Ibid., 55, 59.34 Ibid., 66.35 See the excellent discussion of this point in Paul Harris, On Not Falling Down to Earth,

158.


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existence of intrinsic meanings and values. Perhaps the major differ-ence between humanity and other species is precisely the exuberantexcess of the possibilities we entertain. Our whole existence is differ-entiated from other species in our fantastic quests for the biologicallysuperfluous, the more than actual. Paraphrasing William James, if weshould allow the pursuit of scientific materialism to pare down ourconstruction of possible orders of existence to only the immediatelyexpedient, we will thwart the development of the intellect itself.36

It is thus one thing to acknowledge that experiences of wonder stim-ulate certain kinds of religious sensibilities. It is quite another thingto try to assess the overall value that wonder-driven thought or feelinghave for the pursuit of human well-being. We might sketch one possi-

ble approach to this task by heeding Jamess suggestion that such judg-ments should be based on our own immediate feeling primarily; andsecondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations toour moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. Immediateluminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulnessare the only available criteria.37 The task of such judgments is to gaugethe extent to which the sensibilities elicited by wonder enhanceorconstrainhumanitys pursuit of the widest possible range of objectiveand subjective satisfactions.

That wonder, if even for the briefest time, expands our range ofsubjective richness is alone warrant for considering it among human-itys most sublime emotions. Its value to human life can be justified onthis criterion alone. Experiences of wonder arrest our active will. They

make possible the quiet contemplation of a grander scheme of life thatstrikes us as responsible for lifes beauty, order, and vitality. Wonderthereby evokes the subjective sense that we have established harmoni-ous relationship with the widest possible range of human experience.

Wonder is thus accompanied by joy and by feelings of expansiveness.Our lives seem to open up to new possibilities. Experiences of wonderopen up the realm of possibility, making us feel continuous withsources of beauty, order, and vitality unexpected in a purely rationalapproach to life. All of this makes for experiences of immediate lu-minousness. There can be no question but that they have an imme-diate subjective feel that strikes us as rewarding in their own right

without further need for outside evaluation.The premise of this investigation is that there is no such thing as

emotion-free religiosity. Our brains and nervous systems are wired in

36 See William James, Reflex Action and Theism, in hisThe Will to Believe(New York: Dover,1956), 13132.

37James,Varieties, 23.


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such a way that we always bring vital needs and interests to our eval-uation of, and response to, the surrounding environment. There is nosuch thing as emotion-free cognitionreligious or otherwise. It is thusnot a question of whether emotions influence our religious thinking,but rather a matter of which emotions most strongly mobilize the sub-programs that collectively constitute our perception and cognition.

Wonder can also be justified for its philosophical reasonableness.True, most biological and psychological researchers equate wonder-driven cognition with mistaken notions about cause and effect. RichardDawkins surely speaks for many when he argues that we have an ap-petite for wonderan appetite that real science, not religion, oughtto be feeding. This would also be true of most developmental psy-

chologists, who assume that the cognitive forms associated with expe-riences of wonder will gradually be discarded in the movement towardadult rationality. Yet, viewed from another perspective, wonder can beseen as one of the emotional sources of humanitys highest cognitiveachievements. Cognitive development also requires the construction ofrealms of possibility. Much of adult life requires our ability to formu-late conceptions of more general orders of life in terms of which spe-cific events or behaviors can be assigned meaning and value. Indeed,the highest conceptions of justice, dignity, and worth all require highlydeveloped notions of a general order of existence that in some fun-damental way lies beyond the observed parts of life. The importantpoint here is that philosophical claims accompanying wonder must beassessed according to standards derived from enhanced accommoda-tion tonot assimilation ofthe wider environments we inhabit.

We must, however, acknowledge that wonder-driven cognition is rifewith magical qualities. This is, of course, problematic from some phil-osophical perspectives. When assessed according to the criterion ofenhanced assimilation, magical thinking appears to be an immatureand irrational cognitive orientation to the world. That is, magicalthinking thwarts the assimilation of experience into a developing rep-ertoire of working conceptions of the world. Yet, cognitive psycholo-gists have recognized that magical thinking is potentially valuable whenconsidered from the standpoint of enhanced accommodation to ex-perience.38 Magical thinking involves a blurring of the usual boundarybetween the inner self and the external world. This allows persons to

38 See the excellent discussion of this point in Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, TheMakingsof the Magical Mind: The Nature and Function of Sympathetic Magical Thinking, in Ro-sengren et al., Imagining the Impossible, 134. See also Karl Rosengren and Anne Hickling,Metamorphosis and Magic: The Development of Childrens Thinking about Possible Eventsand Plausible Mechanisms, in Rosengren et al., Imagining the Impossible, 7598.


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feel a basic symmetry between their inner life (i.e., thoughts and de-sires) and the surrounding world. Wonder, and the magical blurringof distinct boundaries it sometimes occasions, thus promotes certainmental dispositions conducive to psychological well-being: a sense ofseamless continuity with the world, felt participation in a larger whole,relatedness to things of meaning, having a sense of control over life,and basic trust that the universe is responsive to our needs and desires.Magical thinking has some adaptive qualities. While it is not philo-sophically reasonable to live permanently in a world with such blurredboundaries, it is nonetheless quite reasonable to strive for a life thatperiodically benefits from the affiliative nature of wondrous experi-ence.

It appears, then, that even the elements of fantasy and illusion towhich wonder often leads have some element of philosophical reason-ableness. But this is not to say that abiding in wonder alone is anappropriate existential response to the ultimate context of experience.

Wonder, without the balancing emotion of curiosity, will eventuallylead to unproductive relationships with the world. As Piaget discov-ered, curiosity too arises amidst unexpected perceptions. Curiosity,however, turns our perception and cognition toward the ever-smallerparts that make up the totality of experience. Curiosity leads to thefine-tuning and adjustment of ideas so that they better correspond withthings as they are independent of our desires and wishes. It is theemotion of curiosity, not wonder, that puts us into working touch withreality and ensures the development of productive relationships withthe world over the long run. Abiding in wonder alone, therefore, isnever an appropriate philosophical response to life. Without being bal-anced by curiosity, wonder runs the risk of leading us only to fantasyand illusion. This, of course, is so often the case with religion. Whenreligion eschews intellectual curiosity, it loses its connection with em-pirical data and lived human experience. Adaptive strategies based on

wonder alone are at considerable risk of steering humans away fromthe broadest range of experience. The basic danger of religion is thatit reifies what possibly exists. Severed from curiosity, wonder-drivenreligiosity runs the risk of tunnel vision. Unbalanced by curiosity, won-der all too often severs us from productive relations with the surround-ing world even as it seeks to accommodate us to a nonexistent illusion.

This leads us to one last issue concerning the philosophical reason-ableness of wonder-driven cognition. While it is true that wonder-driven thought carries considerable philosophical risk, so too doesthought that is wholly devoid of wonder. This is particularly true ofsystems of thought that are overtly religious or theological in nature


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yet lack any element of wonder. Wonder imparts a noetic quality tocognition. It also invests the object of consciousness with intrinsic

value, leading us to seek closer, more harmonious relationship to thisobject of consciousness. For these reasons, wonder gives religiousthought a leading or heuristic qualitya quality that can arguably sep-arate mature from immature forms of religious thinking. 39 Wonder in-stills fascination with its object yet recognizes that this object in somefundamental way eludes literal designation. Wonder has a tendency to

ward off literalism in religious thought (as well as the authoritarianismthat so often accompanies literalism). This is a particularly importantpoint, because, as Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie Carlson have found,some religious groups actively suppress the kind of cognitive openness

generated by wonder.40

Many conservative religious communities sup-press nonlinear thought because it violates their clear bifurcation ofthe secular and sacred. This gap separating us from the sacred, theymaintain, cannot be bridged from the human sideleaving us depen-dent on the mediating functions performed for us through scripturalor ecclesiastical authority. Assuming that mature spirituality ought toenliven rather than deaden the human intellect, some degree of won-der is indispensable to philosophically reasonable religious thought.

And, finally, a life shaped by wonder exhibits moral sensibilities quitedifferent from those exhibited by lives relatively devoid of this emo-tion. Wonder elicits our prolonged engagement with life, our sustaineddesire to connect with the ultimate meanings and purposes of the sur-rounding world. Thus, when assessed for its overall moral helpfulness,

wonder leads to forms of empathy and selfless concern quite differentthan would arise in a life shaped solely by the active will. It was ethicaltheorist Martha Nussbaum who most forcefully argued that wonder isthe emotion that most clearly enables humans to move beyond self-interest to recognize and respond to others in their own right. Wonder,she writes, is the emotion that responds to the pull of the object, andone might say that in it the subject is maximally aware of the value of

39 The personality theorist, Gordon Allport, argued that mature religious thought must havea heuristic quality. His point was that fixed religious ideas breed intolerance and evencombativeness. Mature religiosity, he argued, views beliefs not as a closed system of truthsbut as hypotheses toward richer relationships with life. In his view, a heuristic faith has anopen, eager, and fresh quality. See Gordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion(New York:Macmillan, 1950). Readers might also wish to consider what role wonder plays in a persons

transition from forms of religious thinking that James Fowler labels conventional faith towhat he labels universalizing faith. See James Fowler,Stages of Faith: The Psychology of HumanDevelopment and the Quest for Meaning(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).

40 Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie Carlson, The Influence of Religious Beliefs on ParentalAttitudes about Childrens Fantasy Behavior, in Rosengren et al., Imagining the Impossible,24768.


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the object, and only minimally aware, if at all, of its relationship to herown plans. That is why it is likely to issue in contemplation, ratherthan in any other sort of action toward the object.41

Insofar as persons remain bound by ego-centered perspectives of theworld, their ethical orientation is largely eudaemonistic (i.e., gearedtoward personal well-being as regulated by rational calculations of self-interest). Yet, wonder, as noneudaemonistic as an emotion can be,helps move distant objects within the circle of a persons scheme ofends . . . seeing others as part of ones own circle of concern. 42 Nuss-baum thus contends that no emotion matches wonder in its capacityto evoke true empathy or compassion. The very existence of living be-ings who appear to us as an ultimate limit to our own egoism awakens

wonder at the way in which others embody the ultimate source of alllife and vitality. As Nussbaum observes, wonder at the complex livingthing itself is what mobilizes our compassion and empathy. Wonderredraws our world of concern, establishing true mutuality with a widersphere of life.

This descriptive analysis of wonder has thus marshaled considerableevidence to suggest that wonder plays an important role in shaping areligious sensibility toward life. Moreover, the religious sensibilityshaped by wonder squares well with the pragmatic criteria we mightreasonably use to assess the value of spiritual postures toward life: im-mediate luminousness, important elements of philosophical reason-ableness, and moral helpfulness. The psychology of wonder has noth-ing to say about the veridical existence of the unseen order to which

wonder attests. But it goes a long way toward demonstrating that a lifeshaped by wonder evidences the very existential and cognitive sensi-bilities that would seem indispensable to humanitys search for reli-gious meaning.

41 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2001), 54.

42 Ibid., 55.

Wonder Religion Emotion Fuller

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