I got my hands on a copy of Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? courtesy of our local library and have been enjoying it very much.
In the introduction alone Ward takes on several myths about the study of religion that tend to be propagated by its cultured despisers:
1. “Religion” is a univocal term. Ward points out the obvious (but frequently overlooked or elided) fact that the term “religion” covers a broad array of phenomena and it’s by no means easy to identify a core of belief or practice common to everything we would identify as a religion. “Is Communism a religion? Or football? Or Scientology? How do we know what a religion is?” (p. 8). And this makes it extremely difficult to say that “religion” as such is good or bad:
There are obviously many different sorts of things that we can call ‘religion’. Since religions have existed as far back as we can trace the history of the human race, and in almost every society we know about, there are going to be as many different religions as there are human cultures. They are going to exhibit all the variety and all the various stages of development of the cultures in which they exist. That is going to make it virtually impossible to say that religion, as such, at every stage of its development and in all its varieties, is dangerous. (pp. 9-10)
2. The true nature of religion is given by its earliest examples. Early anthropological studies of religion that first took up the attempt to explain religion as a natural phenomenon made two questionable assumptions. The first was that religious beliefs were false and thus to be explained entirely in naturalistic terms. The second was that so-called primitive religion showed the “essence” of religion and that all more developed religions were ultimately reducible to this essence. Religion, the story goes, began when people attributed personalistic characteristics to the natural objects around them, giving rise to animism, the earliest form of religion. Gradually, however, these spirits were combined into a single spirit and monotheism was born. These beliefs were rooted in early humans’ attempts to make sense of and exert control over their environment. But now that we have science these beliefs have been revealed as superstitious and irrelevant.
The problem with this view, says Ward, is that there is very little evidence to support it. We simply don’t have access to the religious beliefs of early human beings, nor do we know in what order they developed. “It seems more like pure speculation without any evidence at all — a story that might appeal to us, given certain general beliefs about the universe and a generally materialist philosophical outlook” (p. 13).
3. Early people took their religious beliefs “literally.” We commonly assume that people in the past took their religious beliefs literally and only gradually do they start to think of them as symbols or metaphors. Sometimes atheists accuse more “sophisticated” religious believers of not really being religious since they recognize the role of myth, symbolism, and metaphor in religion. The implication is that real sincere religious belief means literalism.
But Ward calls into question this assumption. For starters, we simply have very little evidence about the content of the religious beliefs of “primitive” people. “We simply have no way of knowing how they interpreted their religious ideas. The truth is that we know virtually nothing about the first origins of religious belief” (p. 13). Again, the assumption that the evolution of belief starts from literalism and gradually moves to symbolism and metaphor is more a philosophical dogma than the result of empirical investigation. In fact, Ward suggests, it may well be that literalism is the late comer on the scene:
If humans have evolved, then it will be true that at some stage, many tens of thousands of years ago, human thought would have been less developed than it is now. But does that mean it would have been more literal? Perhaps literalness is a late development, and the idea that artefacts should literally be like what they represent — or even the idea of ‘literalness’ itself — is a concept that only developed when humans began to think scientifically or analytically. (p. 15)
Ward cites anthropological investigations in India where worshipers are puzzled by questions about whether the gods are “real” or whether the images “really” represent them. And linguists have long recognized that virtually all human language is metaphorical to some degree. A purely literal language about anything, much less about the divine, may well be impossible for us. “Metaphorical thinking is deeply rooted in the human mind. It may be the case that very early human thinking was more metaphorical than literal in nature” (p. 15).
4. It is inauthentic for religion to develop. This myth can take religious or anti-religious forms. The atheist may point to later, more sophisticated forms of religion as not reflecting the “real” nature of the faith. This is often an attempt to catch the “moderate” believer on the horns of a dilemma: either you’re a fundamentalist or you’re not a genuine believer. Ironically, the same argument can be made by fundamentalists of all stripes; the “faith once delivered” is taken to be a set of timeless truths that can never change, and any re-thinking of previous expressions of the faith is tantamount to apostasy.
Ward’s contention is that one of the positive fruits of the scientific study of religion has been the realization that religions do develop and that later forms aren’t necessarily inauthentic expressions of the faith. Since religious ideas are ways of trying to give expression to a reality that is “beyond all images” they naturally become more or less effective over time. That doesn’t mean they have no basis in objective reality, but that they can never perfectly depict it and are therefore subject to critique and revision. “Once we escape the delusion that [religion’s] earliest stage provides its real essence, we will be able to see that it is a continually developing set of diverse traditions” (p. 20).
5. Religious belief is primarily aimed at explanation. One common atheistic argument, related to a particular story about how religion developed, assumes that religious belief is primarily about explaining why things happen, a kind of proto-science. But once science with its superior explanatory power comes along, the “God hypothesis” is rendered unnecessary.
This may be a powerful argument against, say, 18th-century deism, but it’s not particularly convincing as an argument against religious belief as such. It’s not at all obvious that religious people either today, or historically, believe in God primarily as some kind of explanatory hypothesis. For instance, it’s been a commonplace of biblical scholarship for some time that the ancient Israelites first became aware of Yahweh through the powerful experience of deliverance from Egypt and only later did his role as universal creator become apparent to them. They didn’t propose the existence of God as a hypothesis to explain creation; rather through their awareness of his power and loving-kindness it became obvious that he must also be the Lord of all creation.
As Ward says, “if we look at present religious beliefs, they are not only, or even mainly, used to explain why things happen. They are used to console, inspire and motivate, but not to explain” (p. 17):
It looks as if the roots of religious belief do not lie in attempts to explain why things happen. If we ask intelligent modern believers where the roots of their belief lie, many different sorts of answers would be given, but rarely that their beliefs explain why things happen. One answer, and I think it is a very important one, would refer to experiences of a transcendent power and value, of greater significance and moral power than anything human. The metaphors of religious speech — metaphors of ‘dazzling darkness’ or ‘personal presence’ — are inadequate attempts to express such experiences of transcendence. Why should it ever have been different? For all we know, early religion could have originated in experiences of a transcendent spiritual reality, especially in the vivid experiences, sometimes in dreams and visions, of shamans or holy men and women. (pp. 17-18)
I’m sure Ward wouldn’t deny that religious belief can sometimes play the role of explanation, but more often than not this isn’t to explain particular phenomena, but to offer more “global” sorts of explanations. For instance, Leibniz’s question Why is there something rather than nothing? may not demand the existence of a god, but it can point to or suggest it. Likewise, the question Why the universe has the particular order it does, one that seems “fine-tuned” to give rise to intelligent personal life. The existence of a personal God can make sense of these global phenomena that appear to be beyond the reach of scientific explanation.
Ward’s point in discussing these myths is that any study of religion that proposes to evaluate whether it is on the whole and all things considered a good or bad thing needs to look at it in all its complexity and as it is actually lived. Too often critics of “religion” are attacking what is essentially a straw man or an ideological construct.
Early in my blogging career (on Verbum Ipsum, my Blogspot predecessor to ATR) I, perhaps with delusions of grandeur, wrote a five-part series called “The Atonement and the Problem of Evil” (the series is archived here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V). My reason for writing it was a hunch that the problem of evil is best addressed not just by trying to answer the question “Why is there so much evil in the world?” but also by talking about what God is doing about the evil in the world. Theodicy should not be separated from soteriology, in other words.
I think it holds up fairly well, but in retrospect I see that I neglected an important topic, the problem of animal suffering. Many thinkers including C.S. Lewis and one of my old teachers, philosopher (and atheist) William Rowe see the problem of animal suffering as one of the most difficult problems for any theodicy. This is because none of the standard responses to human suffering seem available for dealing with non-human suffering. Animals can’t be morally improved by suffering, nor can they be said to deserve their suffering as punishment for sin. It can’t even be chalked up to a necessary consequence of free will, since we don’t think animals have free will, at least not in sense used by traditional “free will” theodicies. In short, much animal suffering seems to be severe, gratuitous, and without redeeming features of any sort. The question, then is whether we have reason to believe that God is a) concerned about animal suffering and b) is going to do something about it.
I think we do have reasons to believe that God is concerned about animal suffering and will do something about it based on the kind of God that we believe he has revealed himself as. All Christians agree that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal the character of God. This character is one of self-giving love that enters into solidarity with us by sharing our human condition. And this love is exemplified on the Cross as nowhere else: Jesus “loved his own to the end” (Jn. 13.1). But does this have any relevance for animal suffering? In his Animal Theology Andrew Linzey suggests that the Cross shows us not only God’s solidarity with human suffering, but God’s solidarity with the suffering of all sentient creatures. “If it is true that God is the Creator and sustainer of the whole world of life, then it is inconceivable that God is not also a co-sufferer in the world of non-human creatures as well” (p. 50).
If God has entered into solidarity and made a new covenant not only with all human beings, but with “all flesh,” then it might not be too much of a stretch to think that God will raise all flesh, all sentient creatures, to newness of life. If Jesus is the firstfruits of a new creation, why shouldn’t we follow the Bible in anticipating that this will include more than human beings? This seems a more promising approach to theodicy than one that tries to write off animal suffering as necessary to the greater good of the whole. If “not even a sparrow falls” without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge, can we consign billions of sentient creatures to exclusion from his Kingdom?
Obviously any kind of post-mortem existence for animals raises some difficult questions since we don’t really know what kind of “selves” animals have, especially the lower ones. Then again, there are some difficult questions about post-mortem human existence and I don’t know that we can draw a bright line between human beings and other animls such that only the former are capable of surviving death. Whatever else we know it seems virtually certain that animals have some degree of “subjectivity” which could, in principle, be resurrected or re-embodied in some way.
If Christians are right that God created the world and called it good and that he entered into that creation in a unique and miraculous way, then I think we can reasonably suppose that God has purposes for his creation that extend beyond his purposes for human beings. Clearly we occupy a pivotal position in those purposes if Christian teaching is to be believed, but we don’t exhaust them. Did God create the natural world and billions of living creatures merely to discard them? Just as we believe that our bodies will, in some way that we can’t really imagine, be raised, I think we can hopefully affirm that our animal kin will be raised to share, in a way appropriate to their natures, in the life of the Blessed Trinity.
Only in Berkeley would you get a debate between Christopher Hitchens who thinks that all religion is evil and Chris Hedges who merely thinks that all “religious orthodoxy” is evil billed as a debate over the merits of religion. Hitchens seems to like soft targets; I’d like to see him debate a serious orthodox Christian thinker: Stanley Hauerwas, maybe? I have a feeling the cantankerous Texan could hold his own against Hitch.
No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves.
In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson and Tolkien about the importance of myth and how Christianity is the “true myth.”
In October he writes to his good friend Arthur Greeves:
What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary […]. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amound to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened… (pp. 288-9)
Lewis picks up on this distinction between the thing itself and the doctrines about it later in Mere Christianity where, in his chapter on Redemption, he emphasizes that the theories about the Atonement are not the objects of belief, but the event itself:
Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. […] A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (pp. 54-56)
What I find intriguing here is Lewis’s insistence that the “true myth” itself can “work on us” without our having an explicit theory about how it works. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. Many (perhaps most?) Christians throughout history have no doubt enjoyed Christ’s benefits without having much in the way of an explicit theory of Atonement. Maybe it’s a legacy of intellectualistic Protestantism to put so much emphasis on holding the correct doctrine. More sacramental forms of Christianity have always believed that the benefits of Christ’s work come to us in tangible (edible!) forms, not just through understanding.
Of course, there’s a danger in reducing Christianity to a kind of “magic;” there must, we think, be some cognitive element. An interesting question is raised here about people who are severely mentally handicapped and may have little or no grasp of doctrine. Surely we don’t think that precludes them from being beneficiaries of Christ’s work? But, leaving aside these hard cases, it does seem that an understanding of the “how” might not be completely “separable” from the “what.” There might be understandings of the Atonement, for instance, that are so wrong-headed that they preclude a decent grasp on what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do for us. And it’s not clear to me at least that believing that “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself” doesn’t entail some further beliefs about how this works. “Narrative” and “story” have become important notions in some recent theology, but is first-order narrative sufficient without some second-order doctrinal reflection?
A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters:
To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952:
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.
To Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959:
To me the curious thing is that neither in own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question [of the inspiration of the Bible] in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone — both first class as literature — is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain…
…That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.
In lieu of our weekly community group/Bible study, we attended the Solemn Mass for the Feast of the Ascension last night. Lovely as usual. The guest preacher was the Rev. Charles Hefling, a professor of theology at BC and editor of the Anglican Theological Review.
Fr. Hefling asked: why did Jesus leave? I have to admit this isn’t a question that really ever occurred to me, but it’s a darn good one. As part of an answer he quoted a line from Rowan Williams to the effect that, since Jesus is “the Way” he had to “get out of the way.” This is a clever way of saying that Jesus opened the door to our union and fellowship with God by reconciling us to God, but we now have to go through that door by treading the path he trod.
But this is only part of the answer because, Fr. Hefling pointed out, we can’t follow this way, at least not by ourselves. Following the way of the cross, the way of self-giving (and forgiving) love, doesn’t come naturally to us. This is why God sends the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God with us; the Spirit is God within us, empowering and enabling us to follow Jesus.
Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for.
I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or bad is a pretty muddled one. In addition to the probably insoluble matter of deciding what exactly counts as a religion, there’s no religion-less society to act as a control group in determing whether the influence of religion has been on the whole good or bad. And beyond that it’s very difficult to see how you would weigh the moral improvements against the moral defects that are arguably attibutable to a particular religion. Was the Inquisition worth the outlawing of infanticide? and so on. Plus there’s the issue of casuality: how do we know what’s attributable to religion? For instance, several scholars, including secular ones, have made the case that modern science arose in the West in part precisely because of the Christian worldview. The idea of a God who creates a universe that displays a rational order served as an impetus to discovering that order. But such a hypothesis hardly admits of definitive proof one way or the other.
A Thinking Reed 