defining “religion”

Well, there’s William James’s very broad and inviting definition: “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Of this expansive definition it may be said that religion is vastly more pervasive than even we Bible Belt residents imagined.

Or you could go with Ambrose Bierce, again: RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. [Companion to FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel]

And then there’s Dan Dennett’s counter-definition, “profoundly at odds with that of William James,” according to which religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” By this definition, “a religion without God(s) is like a vertebrate without a backbone.”

So why does it matter, this question of nomenclature?

Our course is “Atheism and Spirituality,” not “Atheism and Religion.” My observation is that most atheists have deliberately opted out of religion, and typically resent being lumped with the faith-based. (John Dewey tried to reclaim religious experience as a generic and non-sectarian quality of life in A Common Faith, with limited success.)

Most atheists also think of themselves as something more and other than crass materialists who find nothing real but “matter and the void.” So it matters because we want to know what “spiritual” residue might remain for atheists, humanists, naturalists, Brights (etc.) to claim, after they’ve renounced “religion .” But first we need to know what religion means, so we’ll know if atheists (et al) can safely renounce it.

Also of interest in today’s A&S reading: Billy Graham’s pal Charles Templeton‘s “Farewell to God” and to Billy’s rigid faith. “You don’t dare stop thinking about the most important question in life. It’s intellectual suicide.” Templeton poses many questions. “Is it not likely that you are a Christian [Muslim, Jew, Hindu…] because your parents were before you?” is a good one.

And Dawkins. Giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow, especially a tenured teacher. Perhaps immodestly, but understandably, he quotes his great late fan Douglas Adams: evolution, as explicated by Dawkins, was to Adams “a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise to all the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made religious experience seem silly beside it.” And he quotes Dennett: “the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing [God] to make a lesser thing [humanity] is the trickle-down theory of creation. It’s no more impressive than its economic counterpart, when you really look at it.

Dawkins doesn’t simply disagree with theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins, he is “astonished” by their willingness to depict a lazy do-nothing under-achieving God (“deus otiosus”) whose work is all executed by natural selection.  Nice work if you can get it. (But Dawkins has still got kind words for Ken Miller, who so impressed the Judge in Dover, who claims to have found “Darwin’s God,” and who was one of the featured talking heads in the acclaimed PBS “Evolution” docu-drama.)

Dawkins doesn’t get the appeal of mystery for its own sake. As noted last time, he’s not got a “talent” for religion. “One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” He also cites Michael Shermer’s rejection of “gap” criticism. Every time you discover a new fossil you also create another gap? Sounds a lot like Zeno, not really so  paradoxical after all.

But more to the point, “we could easily have no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution… would be overwhelmingly strong.” Irreducible complexity in its inanity, as Judge Jones ruled, pales by comparison.

Victor Stenger says there’s “something rather than nothing” just because the laws of nature decreed it, so we may as well stop asking about the pre-Big Bang universe. Does that answer that? I’m not yet convinced.

So, back to the question we started with. Not for the first time I find myself leaning against William James on this topic. It would be a tremendous aid to clarity if we could agree to mean by religion a God-centered worldview (there could still be a range of views about what that meant exactly), and let the “merely” spiritual go Godless. What do you think? [NOTE TO A&S STUDENTS: That’s our question of the day, or one of them. Remind me to pass the sheet around.]

exorcists

A nice barely-planned symmetry: we begin the second half of our semester in A&S with  Carl Sagan, who also began the first.

In Demon-haunted world the “elegant and witty” exobiologist again implores us to light a candle and neither curse nor fear the darkness. Cursing and fearing are inveterate bad habits of our species, going back to St. Paul’s “high places” and beyond. How delightfully, wickedly ironic, that “demon” means “knowledge”… and that women have so frequently been demonized in our sexually repressed, male-dominated society. And, how appalling that more than half of Americans tell pollsters they “believe” in the Devil’s existence. They should read the Devil’s Dictionary: FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

In the Gifford lectures that became Varieties of Scientific Experience we’re reminded it’s very easy to call people who believe in a different kind of god atheists, and in fact anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do. Sagan brings the same perspective to bear in sifting the differences among Abrahamic believers as he does when comparing ours to the gaze of an extra-terrestrial. The fundamental differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are trivial compared to their similarities.But those trivial differences, comic though they are (as with the naive Western view of God as an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard) have been deadly. Maybe it’s time to give Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God a hearing.

Sagan: Certainly it is insufficient to say “I believe in that sort of god because that’s what I was told when I was young”… We cannot depend entirely upon what people say. We have to look at the evidence, or else admit that we’re just not interested in trying to defend rational beliefs.

There are a few arguments Rebecca Goldstein missed here. The argument from atomic combinations and the argument from the suspension of the world fail, but they try.

Is Sagan being impertinent when he asks why God wouldn’t have engraved the Ten Commandments (say) on the Moon?

Also in today’s reading: an excerpt from John Updike’s Roger’s Version (Updike was a theist, btw), J.L. Mackie’s Miracle of Theism, Michael Shermer’s “Genesis Revisited,” A.J. Ayer’s weird oxygen-deprivation account of “what I saw when I was dead” (not God), and Dan Dennett’s more sensible (and grateful) reflections on his own near-death experience in “Thank Goodness!”

[NOTE to A&S students: the syllabus got ahead of itself. For Thursday read thru the next Dennett piece, “A Working Definition of Religion”]