Reason Faith and
TH E I R RO LE S I N R E L I GI O U S A N D SEC U L A R L IFE
D O N A L D
A .
C R O S B Y
FAITH AND REASON
FAITH AND REASON Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life
DONALD A. CROSBY
State University of New York Press
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany © 2011 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crosby, Donald A. Faith and reason : their roles in religious and secular life / Donald A. Crosby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-3613-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Faith and reason. 2. Religion—Philosophy. 3. Faith. I. Title. BL51..C698 2011 210—dc22
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For my grandchildren Brianna, Jonathan, Kyle, and Savannah Their promise for the future and that of thoughtful young people like them are grounds for reasonable faith in the wellbeing of the earth and its creatures— human and nonhuman alike— in the years to come.
CONTENTS
Preface
ix
ONE
Initial Sketch of a Concept of Faith
1
TWO
Facets of Faith
13
THREE
Faith and Knowledge
37
FOUR
Faith and Scientific Knowledge
61
FIVE
Faith and Morality
79
SIX
Secular Forms of Faith
93
SEVEN
Crises of Faith
107
EIGHT
My Personal Journey of Faith
131
Notes
157
Works Cited
165
Index
171
PREFACE
What is faith? What are its roles in human life? What are some different conceptions of it? How does faith relate to knowledge, reason, and experience? Do faith, on the one hand, and scientific methods and claims to knowledge, on the other, necessarily conflict with one another? Are there such things as secular forms of faith? Are all types of faith obsolete and superstitious in our modern age? What are the relative roles of discursive thought and symbolic expressions in systems of faith? Under what circumstances of thought and life do conversions from one form of faith to another take place? In addressing these and similar questions, this book brings to light and takes issue with a number of serious misconceptions of the nature of faith and its roles in human life. One of these misconceptions is that to have some type of faith is necessarily to be religious, whereas to be secular in one’s outlook is to have rejected and be rid of all forms of faith. Another is that to have faith simply means to lay claim to a system of beliefs. A third misconception is that faith is opposed to knowledge and knowledge to faith, because faith is holding to beliefs with little or no evidence in their support, or even in the face of evidence weighing strongly against those beliefs, whereas knowledge consists of affirmations for which adequate and convincing evidential support has been sought and found. A fourth mistake regarding the nature of faith arises out of these second and third misconceptions. It is the idea that faith and the investigations and findings of the natural sciences are necessarily opposed to one another or can coexist, at best, only in separate compartments completely sealed off from one another. A fifth misunderstanding is that faith is purely emotional in character, having no cognitive relevance or significance, and a sixth is that it can be produced in its entirety by an act of the will. This act of the will usually is regarded as a determination to believe something or other, in keeping with the idea that faith consists solely in the endorsement of a set of beliefs. A seventh misconception is the view that the whole significance and value of faith consist in the motivation faith may provide in at least in some of its forms for people’s moral lives, the cohesiveness of social relations, and the stability of social systems. The final mistake is thinking that doubt is the sinister enemy of faith to be resisted at all costs because a strong personal ix
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faith, once established, must be by its nature something fixed, settled, and unchanging over the course of a person’s life. Some or all of these misconceptions of the nature and roles of faith are commonly and uncritically assumed in our culture, and they cry out for critical reflection and correction. They can seriously distort our ideas about such things as religion, secularity, knowledge, and science. They also can have adverse effects on our interpersonal relationships, on interactions within and among our institutions, and on our political dialogues. In the place of these misinterpretations of faith and for the sake of much needed criticism and correction of them, I offer a characterization and analysis of the twin conceptions of what I call reasonable faith and faithful reason. When properly understood, these two closely related conceptions can help to expose and avoid the misunderstandings of the nature and roles of faith to which I call attention in this book. I develop and defend them with that purpose in mind. But I seek to do more in this book than to expose what I regard as misconceptions of the nature of faith and its roles in human life. My primary purpose is to set forth a positive conception of faith by identifying six interrelated facets or traits of it I consider essential for an adequate understanding of it. I also explore the intimate and indispensable connections of faith with knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular. I examine the relations of faith and morality, showing how they differ from one another but also how they influence and have need of one another. I discuss secular forms of faith in order to demonstrate not only that it is possible but also that it is generally inevitable that a person or system of thought will give expression to some form of faith even when the person or system is avowedly secular and intentionally nonreligious. Faith does not belong, therefore, exclusively to the province of religion. And what may initially look like an encounter of a form of faith with a secular outlook assumed to be a kind of non-faith will, on deeper analysis, need to be acknowledged as an encounter between two different forms of faith. Finally, I discuss four examples of crises or radical changes of faith, in order to exhibit the dynamic character of an actively lived faith and some of the factors that may be involved in fundamental shifts and alterations within a particular form of faith or in a transition from one form of faith to another. I present the fourth example of such crises of faith in the last chapter of this book. In it, I describe some stages of my personal journey from an earlier form of faith to the different path of faith to which I am now committed. All four of these crises of faith exhibit the distinctive contributions of critical reason and ongoing experience to the life of faith, as against the misguided idea that faith and reason, or faith and the evidences of ordinary experience, are somehow opposed to one another or should be kept separate
PREFACE
xi
from one another. Reason and faith are enemies of one another only when faith is viewed as forever fixed and unchanging, and as immune to critical reflection. The crises and their outcomes exhibit, in other words, the concept of reasonable faith, a faith responsive to the critical eye of reason and to what can be learned and needs to be learned from the experiences of everyday life. In other parts of the book, as indicated earlier, I explain and demonstrate the complementary truth that forms of faith and tacit influences of faith are necessarily involved in all processes of reasoning, scientific or otherwise, thus illustrating the concept of faithful reason. I express my great appreciation to William L. Power and Robert E. Innis, as well as to an anonymous reader from State University of New York Press, all three of whom read previous drafts of this book in its entirety, encouraged its publication, and made helpful suggestions for its improvement. My wife Pam, who does her journal editing and her own writing across from me each day on a shared desk, read drafts of each chapter with care and indicated ways in which the chapters could be better organized, more clearly written, and more convincingly argued. I am grateful for her persistence in addressing points of disagreement that often persuaded me that she was entirely right and I was wrong with respect to particular claims, arguments, or matters of organization or style in those earlier drafts. Without her honest love and support, and the stimulation and provocation of our ongoing conversations, it is doubtful that this book could have been written or have reached its present form. I take full responsibility for undeniable deficiencies that remain in what I have written here, but the persons I mention have given invaluable assistance in urging me on, noting ways to improve the content, and helping me to recognize and avoid specific infelicities and inadequacies. I wish also to express my thanks to the courteous, capable, and responsible people at State University of New York Press with whom I have had the keen pleasure of working over the years in the process of bringing this book and other books into print.
ONE
INITIAL SKETCH OF A CONCEPT OF FAITH
I take reason to be deeply structured by faith and I take any faith that is not simply madness to be obliged to be articulate about itself and, so, rational in that sense. —John D. Caputo1
The term faith has many uses in our language. I can speak of having faith that my brother will pick me up each Thursday morning for our regular breakfast together. I can talk of having faith that the salad I am eating for lunch will not make me sick. I can ponder the faith it requires to drive with confidence in a blinding rain—what my dad called a “gully washer”—when the streets are slick and slippery and one can hardly see the traffic lines on their surfaces. But I want to use the word faith in a different sense from these common, everyday uses. The faith I refer to in this book is existential. By existential I mean that faith with this meaning underlies, shapes, and supports the distinctive quality of a person’s existence or life, its fundamental sense of purpose and direction, aim and orientation. To speak of one’s faith in this sense is to speak of the inner core of one’s being, of one’s dispositions, emotions, choices, and actions, as well as one’s most firmly held convictions and beliefs. One’s faith is that mysterious inner strength, resolve, and power that enable one to live in the face of bewilderments, insecurities, frustrations, failures, sorrows, or tragedies, and despite the haunting awareness of an always precarious and uncertain future, with resilient confidence and hope instead of debilitating skepticism and despair. The faith, whether religious or secular, that a person openly professes and the faith that person actually lives, may in some cases be very different. It is one’s lived faith, not just his or her announced faith, that 1
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most interests me here. Such faith is not just a matter of explicit profession or belief, however honestly held or proclaimed. Faith in this existential sense informs one’s most deeply rooted beliefs, helping to give them their particular focus and character, but it is not identical with or reducible to those beliefs. Statements of belief can at best only partially express one’s faith, because there is much about it that lies behind and beyond clear conceptual or verbal formulation. Faith’s fullest, most accurate, and most telling expression is the character of one’s life. Here are some fundamental questions—questions of a deeply existential and not merely theoretical character—that must be dealt with in some manner by all of us. What is the meaning of life? What basic or perhaps even ultimate values should guide the living of our lives? How should we best exercise our capacity for judgment and choice? How should we live in the face of an uncertain future and the inevitability of death? How can we deal with problems of guilt, shame, regret, and despair? What account should we give of the presence of evil in ourselves and in the world, and how should we respond to that presence? What does it mean to be a human being, and what is the place of humans in the world? How can we find inspiring and appropriate models and exemplars for living our lives? Where can we find strength and perseverance to live up to our deepest aspirations and ideals? These questions are difficult and profound, they are perennial and fundamental to human life, and they will not go away. A major contention of this book is that any serious approach to these questions, whether religious or secular, must give a central role to faith when the concept of faith is properly analyzed and understood. One of the book’s tasks, therefore, is to work toward such an analysis and understanding. This task is extremely important despite its evident complexity and difficulty, partly because the nature and roles of faith are so commonly distorted and misconceived, but largely because, when properly understood, faith should be recognized as an indispensable component of thought, feeling, volition, action, and thus the whole of human life. Faith is not, then, the sole preserve or prerogative of religion, nor should it be identified with religion. As important as it is to religious outlooks and ways of life—and it is certainly necessary to do justice to that fact—the scope of faith itself is broader and more encompassing than that of religion. This is one of the basic claims I make, develop, and defend herein. There are many different kinds of existential faith. There are fundamentalist forms of faith and liberal forms of faith. There are religious and secular versions of faith. There are traditional and nontraditional types of faith, and expressions of faith that are more communal and others that are more individualistic. There are types of faith whose bigotry, rigidity, or proneness to violence call for rigorous criticism and objection, and there are forms of faith that are open-minded, charitable, and exemplary. But there are
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3
few if any among us who are totally devoid of some sort of deeply underlying existential faith, because the complete or nearly complete absence of faith is not mere secularism or professed nonreligion, but nihilistic skepticism and despair. Differences between insistently secular outlooks and those of religious outlooks by this interpretation are not so much differences between faith and nonfaith as differences between particular expressions of faith. Furthermore, far from reason’s being necessarily opposed to existential faith, all forms of reason at critical points rely on stances of this faith. We can speak meaningfully, then, of faithful reason. By the same token, all viable and plausible forms of existential faith require the guidance, support, and articulation at significant junctures of reason. So we can speak meaningfully of reasonable faith. Reason and faith should not be seen as standing in sharp separation from one another or as being inimical to one another, despite the fact that both secular and religious people all too frequently view them in this way. Rather, I submit that reason and existential faith should be understood as working constantly together in our lives and in those things we take to be most profound and important in our lives. A passage in the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible enjoins, “Lean not on thine own understanding.”2 There is a sense in which this injunction is profoundly true and another in which it is profoundly false. If it is taken to mean that we should not trust exclusively in our understanding, it is a principle well worth attending to. For there is much about the world that no one understands completely. The world is mysterious in countless aspects and will always remain so. The astounding fact of the world’s sheer existence, its diverse constituents and ever-evolving character, as well as the fact of one’s own conscious, reflective life as a fleeting part of the world, are deeply mysterious. Among the world’s mysteries are the threatening presence and power of destructiveness, hurtfulness, and evil in their various guises, both within us and outside us. But also arrestingly mysterious are the constructive forces of creation, cooperation, and goodness we find to be at work in ourselves, in our societies, and in the world as a whole. Then there is the mystery of the future and of what it may bring in the way of new threats, problems, and perplexities, as well as of unanticipated alterations or even radical changes in personal or societal commitments and beliefs. Moreover, no one person even begins to have complete understanding of specific features of the world that may be better understood by certain other persons. No one scientist, for example, can be the master of all of today’s complex and far-reaching scientific knowledge or fields of scientific inquiry. It is also true that the whole course of any human life and its multifarious beliefs, commitments, and emotions are complex and many-sided, deeply rooted in one’s particular acculturation, habits, and intuitions and in one’s firmly held but largely unconscious assumptions. Hence, the course of a life cannot be reduced in its every detail to clear and distinct rational
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analysis or to an entirely perspicuous set of rational explanations, goals, purposes, or ideals. Nevertheless, we have to find ways to live productively and meaningfully in the world. Fullness of life does not and cannot require fullness of rational understanding of everything in one’s life or in the world in which one lives. If it did, it would be unattainable. On the other hand, it would be reckless indeed to base one’s whole life on beliefs and commitments that deliberately resist or ignore any sort of rational development, articulation, or defense. This would be a recipe for blind credulity, deliberate irrationalism, and dangerous fanaticism. It would be to live a completely arbitrary and unreflective life. In this connection, the familiar Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living rings true. A central point I want to make, then, is that a rationally examined life is perfectly consistent with a life that both involves and requires some kind of faith. We cannot live meaningful lives without faith because faith is a stance of trust, hope, and conviction that undergirds all purposeful life. This stance can be based partly on reason, but it cannot be wholly based on reason. In fact, one’s faith is a source from which a significant amount of one’s reasoning is apt to flow, a source of ultimately significant and deeply embedded and complexly entwined meanings, values, and commitments of various kinds that reason does not so much prove as presuppose. An author who makes this point with compelling force is the physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi in his book Personal Knowledge. Some kind of “fiduciary programme,” Polanyi argues, lies behind all processes of reasoning and all claims to knowledge. In the foreground of our consciousness are the explicit assertions we are able to make about what we believe and why we believe it. But in the more dim and distant background are all of the tacit assumptions, attitudes, feelings, intentions, and outlooks that help to give form and credibility to these explicit assertions but that are themselves relatively inarticulate and unspoken (Polanyi 1962: 264–68 and passim). In this tacit dimension of our outlook and understanding are to be found those fundamental commitments, the basic and generally unquestioned trust, conviction, and assurance, that are vital elements of one’s faith. I will have more to say about Polanyi’s views in a later chapter. What would a sound and healthy existential faith look like? The wellknown interpreter of world religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith has provided us with an instructive statement to this effect: Faith . . . is a quality of human living. At its best, it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service; a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may
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happen to oneself at the level of immediate event. Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive; and face others with cheerful charity. (Smith 1987: 12) Smith tends to overstate the stability and imperturbability of faith in this characterization, for one’s faith may be battered by threats, insecurities, uncertainties, challenges, or catastrophes of various kinds in the course of one’s life—sometimes even to the point of causing one to abandon one kind of faith in favor of another. But the faith of which he speaks, whether religious or secular in its form, is obviously well worth having or aspiring toward. Far from being opposed to reason, it commends itself to reason even though, as I argued earlier, it would be a mistake to think of it flowing exclusively from considered argument or explicit reasoning. Existential faith has inchoate but nonetheless extremely powerful experiential, emotional, intuitive, volitional, and active aspects about it that cannot be reduced to reason alone. It is not just a claim to know that something is true; this faith also is an eminently practical process of living in the world, responding to its challenges, and aspiring to grow in one’s capacity to do so. Do we ever act against our faith and thereby betray its ideals and demands? Of course we do, and sometimes with sad or even disastrous consequences for ourselves and for others. We may on those occasions experience profound regret, and yearn for forgiveness and renewal. For some, the principal source of this empowering sense of forgiveness and renewal may be trust in some sort of transcendent and perhaps personal, gracious, and loving being, presence, or power. For others, it may be help or inspiration from a particular person, a circle of friends, a supporting community, or fellow participants in working together for a significant cause, whether secular or religious in character. For others, it may be the healing and rejuvenating powers of nature. For still others, it may be discovering new resources within oneself for living in fuller attunement and accord with the ideals of one’s faith, and finding there the motivation and will to draw on those resources. The release from regret, shame, or guilt and the source of forgiveness and renewal might well be a combination of two or more of these factors. In any event, as the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich insists, existential faith and the ongoing struggles of existential faith are centered acts of the total person, not just of the rational part of the person (Tillich 1958: 4–5). Reason is profoundly involved in sound and healthy faith, but such faith amounts in its fullness and entirety to more than reason. Moreover, faith is not just a matter of belief, as important as belief is to the whole of faith. It would certainly be a travesty to view faith merely as a set of beliefs stubbornly adhered to without or against evidence or reason,
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as it is so often and unfortunately viewed. One’s existential faith underlies and supports one’s whole way of life. It is confidence and commitment of the whole person in all the aspects of the life of that person. It is the generally stable, predictable, regular character of persons as they go about living their lives, relating to other persons, and taking their places in the world. As Smith rightly says, “Faith is a quality of human living.” I would add that it is the most basic quality and character of any trusting, hopeful, and affirming human life. Faith, then, is not just a way of thinking or believing but the font and focus of each person’s most basic and comprehensive commitments and aspirations. Let me suggest an analogy by way of illustrating the difference between mere belief and faith. Suppose that a crowd is at the circus and watching the performance of an expert knife thrower. He places his female assistant up against a large board at the back of a stage and proceeds to throw a series of knives at her. The knives come frighteningly close to the assistant and trace out a pattern around her head and upper body, but none of them injure her. When the performance is concluded, the tense crowd applauds loudly, giving vent to its feelings of amazement and relief. The knife thrower addresses the crowd, “Do you believe that I am accurate and precise in the throwing of knives?” They all vigorously nod their assent. Then he asks a further question: “Would one of you like to take the place of my assistant for another round of knife throwing?” The crowd shrinks back. No one volunteers. The knife thrower has expected this reaction. He raises the second question only in order to reinforce the crowd’s impression of his remarkable prowess and showmanship. The crowd firmly believes in his ability. They have been given convincing evidence of it! But not one of them is willing to stake his or her life on that belief. Such commitment requires a large amount of emotional as well as intellectual confidence, and it calls for a courageous act of will. It draws on deep reservoirs within the self. There is great risk involved, because accidents happen, and a person in the crowd cannot be sure that such an accident would not happen to the knife thrower, perhaps nothing more than a small reflexive twitch in his arm as he hurls his deadly blade. The degree of confidence required to submit one’s own body and physical well-being to the test of the knife thrower’s accuracy is perhaps justified by the rational evidence at hand, but it is certainly not compelled by it. Theologian and social theorist Reinhold Niebuhr makes a related point when he notes that there is “an element of illusion in the [secular but quasi-eschatological] faith of the [Marxist] proletarian” that a truly egalitarian and even classless society can be permanently established by his revolutionary actions in concert with those of his peers. Such an element of possible error or illusion is present in all forms of faith, Niebuhr contends, because they require concerted action and commitment in relation to an
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uncertain future and in the absence of absolutely decisive rational evidence or proof of the attainability of envisioned goals. But resolute confidence and risky action, and not mere contemplation of theoretical statements or beliefs, are required if, for example, perceived and experienced social inequities are to be effectively redressed. “The inertia of society is so stubborn,” Niebuhr observes, “that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case.” The “moral potency” of the proletarian’s protest against the evils of present society is “the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers” (Niebuhr 1960: 221; see also 154, 156, 159). We do not have to share every detail of the Marxist vision and faith to recognize that rationality is not the sole ingredient in an actively committed life of faith. Rationality’s contributions and role are necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, faith as I am endeavoring to describe it here, is not a mere matter of belief or even belief of a particular kind, although it generally will have a content of belief. It is, as I have already pointed out, something markedly existential, something to which one courageously devotes one’s whole life and one’s whole being in the face of the grave uncertainties and ambiguities of the world. It is, again as Tillich affirms, a centered act of the total person. Whatever the style, pattern, or path of a person’s life may be, and whether it is religious or secular, faith of this sort is both profoundly involved and required. It is required to the extent that a person has any modicum of confidence, trust, or hope in his or her manner of life. A person’s reason will typically reflect and help to give form and expression to his or her faith. It will be a significant part of faith, but not the whole of faith. More than reason lies at the heart of faith, and more than reason informs its hope. French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once observed that “[t]he heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Pascal 1941: #277, 95). His assertion could be taken as an endorsement of the idea of a purely emotional conception of faith, devoid of reason or even set against reason. I would reject that conception of faith, as did Pascal. But he was within his rights in reminding us that there is more to faith than reason. Intimations and discernments of the heart or of the deepest recesses of one’s being are also involved. This claim need not mean that reason has no place in the life of faith, only that faith is something more comprehensive and profound than reason. One can have a reasonable faith without one’s faith being reducible to or based on reason alone. To put the point in another way, it is entirely reasonable to recognize the role of faith in confident human life and to see reason as rooted to a significant extent in the whole character, focus, and direction of a life of faith. On the other hand, we should certainly aspire toward a reasonable faith, a faith that is well grounded in experience and reason, well equipped
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to support the whole course of a person’s life, and one that takes careful account of optional paths of life and thought. We should aspire toward a faith that is humble and open-minded not merely assertive, a faith that is devoted throughout life to learning from the outlooks and commitments of others. And we should be ready to acknowledge that no single path of life, no matter how relentlessly thought about and pursued, can exhaust the enormity of mystery and wonder packed into the world. All of our respective paths and forms of faith are like teaspoons dipped into an enormous, inexhaustible ocean of reality and truth. We can live these teaspoons with courage and conviction even while acknowledging their final limitation and inadequacy. This kind of humility is an essential element in a sound, healthy, and reasonable faith. Of course, we can and should also adjudicate consciously and carefully among different kinds of faith. Some are worse and some are much worse than others. Some are more challenging and richly fulfilling than others. Here both our moral and our theoretical reasoning, and the whole of our ongoing experience of ourselves and the world, should be put to vigorous use. It may sound paradoxical to combine deliberate and active critical adjudication among forms of faith with openness and humility about the mysteries and uncertainties to which forms of faith are responses. But it is not a simple matter of either–or. Rather, it is a tension that needs constantly to be recognized and upheld. The phrase I like to use to characterize such an attitude is convictional openness. There is no such thing as faith without convictions. But a dogmatic and close-minded faith affords little possibility of correction, revision, or growth, and it cannot enter into mutually constructive and meaningful dialogue with those whose lives are based on and give expression to other forms of faith. Highly relevant in this regard is Mohandas K. Gandhi’s attitude toward the human search for truth in its various aspects—epistemic, ontological, moral, and existential—and, by implication, toward the different forms of faith that may motivate and guide this search. Joseph Prabhu provides us with this description of Gandhi’s outlook: “We humans with our finite capacities can have access . . . only to relative truth, an assertion Gandhi uses to justify epistemological humility and tolerance. All our perceptions of truth are inevitably partial and therefore claims of cognitive absoluteness are both unwarranted and dangerous.” Probhu adds that for Gandhi, “Given that one’s grasp of the truth is at best partial, it is imperative to see and appreciate the truth in the position of the other and to try and achieve a higher or dialectical reconciliation of conflicting ends” (Prabhu 2008: 166, 168). I heartily endorse these statements, but in doing so I do not mean to claim that anything goes in the realm of faith. I do want to insist that more than one thing goes, because any one stance of faith and the outlooks giving expression to that stance can be, as Gandhi rightly recognizes, only
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partially adequate at best. All such stances are in need of constant criticism and revision. And reason—especially careful, sustained consideration of the reasoning of those with different kinds of faith from one’s own—has a crucial role to play in this regard. There is no viable faith that does not take fully into account the resources of reason, then, and there is no possibility of having a reason that does not reflect and draw in significant ways on some kind of deep-lying faith. This is the two-sidedness of faith and reason. There is a substantial place in every affirming human life for both reasonable faith and faithful reason. I want now to turn our attention a bit more specifically to the topic of faithful reason by looking briefly at the critical role of faith in both our moral outlooks and practices and in the practices and achievements of scientific thought. The discussion here is encapsulated and merely suggestive. I take up these two topics in more depth and detail in subsequent chapters. Our moral outlooks and practices are given impetus, strength, and credibility by our tacit conviction that moral life is worthwhile, that we live in a universe in which it can make a difference, that others will be responsive to our moral ways of living, and that it is possible to live together in such a way as to bring about a morally better world. Thus, we must be convinced that we are genuinely responsible and free and that the universe is amenable to the moral efforts we exert in our freedom. We are not like cogs in a machine, manipulated by forces beyond our control, but creative agents capable of bettering our own lives and contributing to the well-being of others, not only human others but the others of the natural world as a whole. We also must be convinced that the lives of these others are intrinsically valuable and worth our moral effort and respectful regard. I hope you begin to see how much implicit faith is involved in morality thus described, how it reflects a whole way of life and not just a set of intellectual propositions explicitly entertained or rationally defended. The propositions can and should be defended, of course, but they also can and have been attacked, and sometimes with considerable rational and persuasive force. I submit that more than reason is involved in their confident assertion or assumption, and especially in their being put into consistent and lifelong practice. Commitment to them and the active living of them exemplify faithful reason. Scientific outlooks, for their part, also rest on and give expression to sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit testaments of faith. Scientific investigation would make no sense without reliance on the uniformity and order of the universe; the reliability at some critical points of the five senses; the applicability and usefulness of logical and mathematical reasoning; the general reliability of past scientific findings and understandings; the extreme value and importance of devoting one’s life to scientific investigation and seeking to understand fundamental principles, constituents, and laws of
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the world; the honesty and integrity of one’s scientific colleagues; and the hope of making steady and significant progress in scientific understanding. Uncertainties are involved in all of these commitments, even though they are essential to scientific theorizing. In theoretical physics in particular, the element of uncertainty and risk is especially evident. Physicist Lee Smolin comments that theoretical physics of the currently most basic, open-ended, and cutting-edge type simply cannot be done without great risks of being wrong even in one’s most confident assumptions, beliefs, or assertions at any given time (Smolin 2007: xvi). Let me elaborate for just a bit on two particularly telling examples of what I have in mind. One example is from the thought of one of the most widely recognized and respected scientific thinkers of all time, Albert Einstein. The other is from the thought of a Noble Laureate in physics who made profound contributions to subatomic physics. His name is Paul Dirac. Let me take Dirac first, because I want simply to quote a statement of his that gives evidence of his unquestioning confidence in the power of mathematical reasoning not only to unlock the secrets of the world but also to reveal what he believed to be its deep mathematical structure and character. In describing his personal affinity with Erwin Schrödinger, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, Dirac had this to say: Schrödinger and I both had a very strong appreciation of mathematical beauty, and this appreciation . . . dominated all our work. It was a sort of act of faith with us that any equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them. It was like a religion with us. It was a very profitable religion to hold, and can be considered the basis of much of our success. (quoted in Olive 1998: 89; emphasis added) Dirac here acknowledges the central role in his life and thought of faith in the beguiling beauty of mathematics and in its power to provide profound insight into the character and workings of the physical world. His statement thus gives clear expression to what I am calling faithful reason, a reasoning deeply informed by faith. Now one might want to object that the so-called faith of which Dirac speaks is not that at all, but simply a general hypothesis that seems to be well borne out by the history of a mathematically based science and its successes in explaining the world and enabling us to put aspects of the world to solid practical use. But adherents and practitioners of secular and religious faith of whatever sort would be inclined to say something quite similar, namely, that their faith enables them to make sense of their lives and to live with evident confidence and success in the world. We may well regard all forms of faith, secular and religious, scientific and moral, and so on, as deep-lying
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hypotheses that must be put constantly to the test of thought and experience. To regard them as such is to have a healthy view of the legitimate role of faith. A faith that is not open to ongoing confirmation or possible disconfirmation either in whole or in part is a species of faith that should be called seriously into question. This caveat is a central part of what I mean by the phrase reasonable faith. But to get back to the idea of faithful reason, let me cite the example of Albert Einstein. Einstein had such complete and unquestioning faith in absolute causal determinism and in the idea that the universe is utterly law like, mathematically structured, thoroughly rational, and in principle intelligible through and through, that he was never able to accept or even seriously consider the idea that, at the quantum level or elsewhere, there is a significant role for chance and indeterminacy.3 The result was that in his later years he fell into the backwaters of the creative science of his time, insisting throughout his life that the quantum indeterminism that was coming increasingly to be accepted by the scientific community had to be wrong. He also failed to achieve the grand unified theory of the universe that he felt to be possible and that he worked on with relentless, unquenchable faith until his dying day. Einstein felt a deep and abiding reverence for the universe as he conceived it, and no amount of putative empirical evidence was sufficient to convince him to the contrary. In other words, his scientific reasoning was deeply informed by his scientific faith, and his scientific faith merged easily into his religious faith. He was quite honest and upfront in recognizing and announcing this intimate intermingling of the two in his thought and life. Einstein’s favorite philosopher was the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s universe is mathematical, tightly ordered, and deterministic in its every detail, and he spoke of it not only as Nature but also as God. The same is true of Einstein, for whom the wondrous complexity, order, and rationality of the universe showed it for him to be identical with or deeply suffused with the presence and power of God. Einstein’s profoundly compelling religious vision in its connection with his scientific theorizing, a prominent example of what I am calling faithful reason, lay strongly behind his conception of the role and competency of natural science and provided much of the motive and impetus of his scientific achievements. He was happy to assert that this was so (see Crosby 1994b; Jammer 1999). His reason was solidly rooted in and inspired by his existential faith, and his lifelong practice as a scientist gave evidence of this faith. I am arguing that his and Dirac’s faiths are not isolated instances, but that something like such modes of faith—again, religious or secular—permeates all scientific endeavors. The practices and accomplishments of scientists in general illustrate the concept of faithful reason, as do the practices and accomplishments of all who seek to interpret the character
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of and put into practice a moral life. The same is true of other modes of thought and life. Let me summarize what I have been saying about existential faith in this chapter. I have been asserting that it: • Is not just equal to belief or a particular set of beliefs, although it has an important aspect of belief; • Is not opposed to reason but underlies and works in concert with reason; • Is not just emotional but involves and incorporates emotion; • Is not an arbitrary act of the will but requires practical choices and actions; • Can be secular or religious; • Lies at the heart of morality, science, and other significant modes of thought and life; • Gives fundamental shape and direction, purpose and character, to the whole of a person’s life and work; • Is indispensable for all or nearly all forms of human life. Thus, it would be as much of a mistake to impugn or dismiss faith regarded in this existential manner as it would be to impugn or dismiss critical reason. Neither can function without the other. Both are necessarily involved in any kind of affirming, responsible intellectual endeavor, and both are essential to any kind of flourishing, meaningful life. This is the important and far-reaching idea I have sought to emphasize and explain here. I shall develop it further as this book proceeds, and it is the book’s central theme.
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No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. —Sharon Salzberg1
There is no such thing as a simple faith. All forms of existential faith, religious or secular, are complex and multifaceted. Although it is true that some forms are, by their adherents and by the traditions in which they may stand, brought to fuller, more intricate, and more explicit levels of development than others, none can be said to be simple. In this chapter I indicate and analyze six critical aspects of faith in order not only to show how complex existential faith is but also to exhibit in this way the profoundly important and pervasive role it plays in the whole of human life. The six ingredients of faith I discuss are worldview, trust, devotion, hope, courage, and doubt. Seen together and in light of their relations to one another, they can serve to provide further elucidation for the concept of faith introduced in the previous chapter. I begin with investigation into worldviews and the role they play in the life of faith.
WORLDVIEWS AND FAITH What is a worldview? It is a comprehensive vision, apprehension, or intimation of the whole of things and of the levels of importance and value among things—both human and nonhuman—that is implicit in the outlooks, practices, and patterns of behavior of individuals and groups. Worldviews lie in the background of particular scientific pronouncements, arguments, and activities no less than of religious or philosophical ones, and they are con13
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stitutive elements in moral principles and ideals as well as in legal systems and political institutions. Worldviews find expression in past and present cultures and in current interpretations of the past. They are ingredient in artistic works such as those of architecture, painting, and literature. And they are essential components in all forms of secular and religious faith. I focus here on the role of worldviews in forms of faith. To have faith is to have a deep-lying sense of orientation to and within the world, and a part of that sense is convictions about the nature of the world and one’s place within it. Such convictions are not only descriptive in character but also have a strong normative quality. They not only comprise beliefs about what the world is like but about what it ought to be like, and about society’s and one’s own opportunities and responsibilities to help make it so. Worldviews can be more or less coherent and clear, but none can be completely so because there always will be tension between the internal coherence and clarity of a belief system and the adequacy of that system to encompass and make intelligible a stubbornly complex, elusive, and everchanging world. Moreover, elements of one’s worldview will be rooted in aspects of one’s experience, attitude, and sensibility that lie below the level of clear and conscious awareness, as I point out later in this section and in other parts of this book. The struggle to give conceptual form and clarity to the worldview accompanying one’s faith may be seen as an important part of the life of faith, but having faith is also a way of being, living, and acting in the world, not just of thinking about oneself and the world. Mary Midgley offers a definition of faith that calls attention to the all-important distinction between beliefs associated with a worldview and the faith to which the worldview can give only partial indication or expression: “A faith is not primarily a factual belief, the acceptance of a few extra propositions like ‘God exists’ or ‘there will be a revolution.’ It is rather the sense of having one’s place within a whole greater than oneself, one whose larger aims so enclose one’s own and give them point that sacrifice for it may be entirely proper” (Midgley 1985: 14). We tend to confuse worldviews that are ingredient in faith with the whole nature of faith itself. We are inclined to identify the faith of an individual or group solely with its professions and claims, with its ideas about the nature of reality and about the responsibilities of human beings to what is said to lie at the heart of reality. In other words, we are tempted to identify faith with a determinate set of beliefs. Consequently, we sometimes if not frequently go about describing the faith of individuals, groups, or traditions as only a compendium of beliefs. But as seen in the previous chapter, faith should not be identified with belief. Beliefs are a part of faith but not the whole of faith. Similarly, worldviews can give conceptual content to faith but should not be thought to be the same thing as faith. C. S. Lewis provides a useful metaphor that
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can be applied to thinking about faith. I do not merely see the sun when it rises, he says; by means of it I am enabled to see everything else (Lewis 1980: 140; cited in Keller 2008: 122). Similarly, faith frames everything else in one’s outlook on the world and one’s way of living in the world. One’s worldview is framed by faith and in a fundamental sense gives expression to one’s faith. Here are some familiar examples of aspects of specifically religious worldviews that can be associated with, but should not be thought to be identical with, particular forms of faith. The worldview of the Buddhist is one in which there is no permanence in the world, including a permanence or substantial persistence of the self. The worldview of the Advaita Vedantist is one in which such things as individuality, diversity, and temporal passage are finally unreal, and the sole reality is Brahman. The worldview of the Muslim, Jew, or Christian includes the idea of a personal God who has created the universe and all things in it, and who communicates his will and purpose to human beings by means of definitive special revelations. The worldview of the Hindu who follows the path of bakhti or devotion allows for many avatars or incarnations of deity, whereas that of the Christian allows for only one, and the Muslim and the Jew allow for none, seeing the idea as sacrilege. The evangelical Christian may insist that there can be only one path to salvation, whereas a person living in China has no problem embracing various elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, and a person living in India may be convinced that there are numerous ways to find, worship, or experience the religious ultimate. The range of worldviews that can be associated with particular forms of religious faith is vast, and these are only suggestive examples of this fact. Worldviews are also important aspects of secular forms of faith. Doctrinaire Marxists regard the whole of human history as a saga of unrelenting struggles among economic classes and confidently predict the ultimate victory of an oppressed proletarian and agrarian class, whose members are regarded as the only truly productive persons in society, with the subsequent inauguration of a classless society having no need of governmental restriction and control. This idea of inexorable historical and materialistic or economic forces bringing about an inevitable utopian end—together with the Marxists’ putatively scientific elaborations of and arguments for the idea—express an underlying confidence that we live in a finally just world where the rights of the oppressed will be vindicated and fulfilled and where their oppressors will at last be brought low and reap the consequences of what they have sown. Assurance that human nature can and will be molded by social and historical forces in such a way as to bring about its transformation into something instinctively and entirely just and good also enters into this vision. Marxists reject religion, seeing it as aiding and abetting social injustice and the position of the oppressor classes, rather than as a force
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working for good. Much more than an explicit worldview is involved in this form of faith, although the worldview is an important part of it. Secular humanists, for their part, have a worldview that like the Marxist one denies any role to supernatural forces, realms, or beings. Secular humanists deny that the soul is separable from the body or that there is such a thing as personal immortality. They insist that human beings are responsible for their own destinies and that humans can act freely from their own resources to bring about a more open and just society. They insist that the scientific attitude is a more reliable guide to the good life and a good society than any religious one. They dismiss religion in general as the bastion of outmoded superstitions and irrational, unscientific beliefs. They espouse democracy, education, and the natural sciences, along with human resourcefulness and freedom, as the routes to social, political, and economic betterment in the world. They place their trust in human intelligence and in concerted human effort, rather than in divine guidance and salvation, or in supposedly inexorable forces of history. The faith that finds expression in their worldview is centered on distinctively human purposes and ideals (see Kurtz 1983, esp. ch. 2). But again, there is more depth and detail to their form of faith than is explicitly proclaimed in their worldview. The other facets of faith already mentioned and soon to be discussed also are essential parts of the committed secular humanist’s orientation in the world. We should also again take note of the important fact that not everything about a worldview admits of explicit statement or definitive articulation. Worldviews rest on multiple assumptions, intuitions, hunches, habits, feelings, and socially and culturally conditioned attitudes that are not exposed to the clear light of consciousness but that nevertheless function to give character and shape to the worldview. The overt, distinct beliefs and claims of a worldview shade off into more covert, complexly entwined ones, and finally into the murky depths of the human unconscious. Much is vaguely assumed or felt to be important, valuable, or true, therefore, which does not reside in clear conscious awareness and is not focused on or entertained in the form of clear and distinct propositions or specific arguments. This realization is a key to the vital role played by stories, symbols, images, metaphors, rites, sacraments, and the like in supplementing discursive, purely conceptual language and shedding light, in their own distinctive ways, on the full breadth and depth of worldviews. Louis Dupré makes a crucial point when he observes that “[a] symbolic structure is by its very nature irreplaceable. Definitions of nondiscursive symbols are per se impossible, for the definition leaves out the unspeakable element by which a symbol transcends both itself and all other discourse” (Dupré 1972: 163). Definitions or other attempted prosaic renderings of the symbolic structures that generally play an essential if often insufficiently recognized or appreci-
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ated role in worldviews are indeed impossible. This is so partly because these structures reach down into and probe levels of insight and apprehension that may be intensely felt but that cannot be otherwise elicited, pointed to, or expressed, and partly because worldviews with any semblance of adequacy must be open to depths of experience and encompassing mysteries of the world that are “unspeakable” in the sense of not being reducible to clear literal or conceptual statement. However, these mysteries, that is, the opaque or at best translucent features of the experienced world, can be symbolically evoked in ways that heighten rather than reduce both their mysterious, elusive character and their insistent, irreplaceable relevance as critical dimensions of life in the world. Explicit propositions and arguments as components of worldviews, then, are like the proverbial tip of an iceberg, much of whose massive structure lies concealed in the depths of the sea. Lee Smolin notes of himself and his colleagues in the physical sciences, “if we required proof of everything, we would never believe anything” (Smolin 2007: 300). Similarly, if in order to be explicitly aware of anything, we had to be fully aware of everything, we would be aware of nothing. Awareness rests on a base of extremely complex factors in experience and the mind about which we are not wholly aware. Some of these factors are significant features of our stances of faith. We look at this matter of the tacit underpinnings of explicit beliefs and belief systems in greater detail in the next chapter, as part of our inquiry into the relations of faith and knowledge. The major point to be made here is that worldviews in both their explicit and inexplicit aspects are important components of faith but do not constitute the whole meaning of faith. We turn next to a second principal ingredient of existential faith, the ingredient of trust.
TRUST AND FAITH The story about the knife thrower in the previous chapter illustrates a fundamental difference between mere belief and faith, namely, that believing that something is true is different from being willing to stake one’s life on its alleged truth. I can firmly believe in the accuracy and precision of the knife wielder’s art without being willing to take the risk of entrusting my life to it. As the Epistle of James in the New Testament points out, “Even the devils believe—and shudder.”2 But they remain devils. That is to say, they refuse to place their trust in God and to commit their lives to God despite their unquestioning belief in God’s existence and supreme power. This belief is indeed a trait of their worldview even though they set themselves against God. The devils’ evil dispositions and actions are based not in lack of knowledge or weakness of belief but in sheer willfulness and
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hardness of heart. Their trust lies elsewhere. Their belief does not give rise to trust in God. In other words, the devils believe in God but do not have faith in God’s purposes or ways of acting in the world. The God part of their worldview is subordinated to other parts of it that for them have more alluring force and effect, so far as the actual course of their lives is concerned. By the same token, to say, for example, that someone lacks faith in inevitable historical progress, the innate goodness of human beings, a triune God, Vishnu, Tao, or sunyata is at least partly to say that someone fails to place trust in such things. It is not just that one fails to believe in them or have them as part of one’s worldview, although that may also be true. The sorely beleaguered Job in the book bearing his name in the Hebrew Bible cries out in agony, making reference to God, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!”3 He is not asserting here that he believes in God’s existence, although the belief is implicit in his statement. Much more importantly, he is stating his unshakable trust in God’s ultimate justice, a trust that he declares will stay firmly with him even if God were to put him to death. Job persists in his demand for an audience with God, not because he doubts God’s justice but simply because he yearns better to understand it. His trust in God is unwavering throughout the book despite his horrible sufferings and deprivations. This trust is a critical part of his faith, and Job is a classic example of a person of staunch, unyielding faith even in the face of horrible misery and threatening despair. There is much that he finds he cannot understand about the ways of God, and at the end of the book God reminds him that it would be impossible for him, a mere human being, to understand fully the policies and decisions of an overpowering, stupendous, majestic deity who has created the vast world and everything in it and who must continually preside over and govern its every aspect, down to its tiniest details. Job learns not to rely on his understanding in every matter but to continue to trust a God who knows what he is doing in all his ways, a God whose justice is steady and real even though at times inevitably beyond human comprehension. Not all forms of faith will incorporate Job’s type of trust, of course, but it is characteristic of faith that it will have an indispensable element of trust. Trust can also fail, and with its failure particular forms of faith can die. One such failure of trust, and with it the death of a faith, is described in Arthur Koestler’s essay in a book containing six essays by former enthusiastic supporters of Soviet Communism and entitled The God That Failed: A Confession. In the book, which was widely read in the 1950s and is still in print today (Crossman 2001, first published in 1949), Koestler wrote of his increasing disillusionment with the Communistic social and political program in which he had once placed ardent trust. His trust was finally shattered beyond repair by the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, which allied the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany on Aug. 23, 1939, and endorsed sepa-
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rate spheres of influence together with the carving up of smaller countries between the two nations. Koestler gave seven years of his life to actively committed participation in a movement whose leaders finally violated his earnest trust in them and in their cause by repeatedly using flagrantly unjust means, claiming the necessity of these proximal means for achieving distant goals; by engaging in systematic lying; by holding rigged show trials and imposing sentences of exile or execution to rid themselves of rivals or suspected enemies; and by sending friends and acquaintances of Koestler himself on trumped-up charges to forced labor camps in Arctic Siberia. With his collapse of trust, Koestler’s once forceful and compelling faith in the ideals, pronouncements, and sociopolitical programs of Soviet Communism was brought to an abrupt end. In the absence of such trust, his formerly intense faith in Communism’s revolutionary promise became impossible. Koestler’s faith in “the God that failed” was secular, not religious, but trust was every bit as essential to it as was trust to the faith of Job. The role of trust in the life of faith tells us something extremely important about the nature of faith. It is obviously unwise to put one’s trust in something that that is undependable and thus undeserving of that trust. But this is especially so when we are talking about the trust that functions, in the context of faith seen as an act of one’s whole being, to provide guidance and direction for the entire course of one’s life. This kind of trust must be constantly assessed and tested for its adequacy lest it fail to provide the bedrock support required for a life that is equipped to search and aspire for what is of true worth and value; that grows, strengthens, and flourishes within itself; that can cope with the exigencies, threats, and uncertainties of mortal existence; and that is constantly driven to find effective ways to contribute from its distinctive resources to the well-being of others. To put the point in its starkest form, reliable trust within the life of faith can be that only when it is informed by an appropriate amount of healthy distrust. Unthinking, uncritical, immoveable trust is not only radically inadequate as a recipe for life; it can also be dangerous to one’s own well-being and to that of others affected by one’s outlook and actions. The quiet assurance and certitude of one’s faith and of the important factor of trust within one’s faith should be tempered, then, by an element of persistent, guarded questioning and uncertainty. This realization suggests the need to understand the crucial role of existential doubt in meaningful faith, a topic to which we return later in this chapter. But I now discuss devotion as a third component of existential faith.
DEVOTION AND FAITH In his Confessions fourth- and fifth-century theologian Augustine, bishop of Hippo, speaks of his faith in the God of the Christian religion by using
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what has become a famous metaphor, that of the natural weight or tendency of a thing. The body by its own weight strives towards its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to his own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are urged by their own weight, they seek their own places. . . . When out of order, they are restless; restored to order, they are at rest. My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne. We are inflamed, by Thy Gift we are kindled, and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly and go forwards. We ascend Thy ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly with thy fire, and we go; because we go upwards to the peace of Jerusalem. (Augustine 1961, Bk. XIII, p. 233) This beautiful passage shows clearly that the faith of a human being is not just the possession of a worldview or the living out of some kind of pervasive trust. It also is a matter of deep and abiding devotion to that in which one fervently believes and to which one gives one’s trust. It is possible to trust something to which one is not devoted. One can trust and give due attention to the law of gravity while skiing down a steep slope or climbing a risky part of the mountains without being devoted to that law. One can trust a partner in business but not be devoted to that person. One can trust a reporter’s story in a newspaper without being devoted to either the story or the reporter. Devotion adds to trust an aspect of intense reverence, heartfelt commitment, glad acquiescence, and consuming desire directed toward that in which one places one’s trust. Sharon Salzberg’s statement contained in the epigraph to this chapter calls attention to the fact that faith, in times of crisis, can not only empower us to persist in trusting but also in loving the object of our faith. In Augustine’s case his faithful devotion was the weight or tendency of his entire being, centered firmly and with joyous abandon on God. His weight was his love. And his life gave eloquent testimony to that fact. Do we simply choose our faith and devote ourselves to it by an act of the will? Or are we drawn to it emotionally, and does it consist primarily in complexes of feeling? Or, again, do we just reason ourselves to the faith that will best suit, challenge, and inspire us? In truth, all of these three factors are involved because faith is an act of the whole personality, not just of some particular part of it. Each of the three factors has intricate reciprocal relations to the others. Norwegian social and political theorist Jon Elster notes that “[j]ust as the emotions arise from beliefs, they also influence them in turn” and that the urgency of our emotions can sometimes decisively affect the character of our actions (Elster 2009: 43). The devotion aspect of faith
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is especially strongly informed by emotion as the affective connotations of the term devotion clearly imply. I am devoted to something when I love it intensely, am willing to sacrifice greatly for its sake, and am committed to it heart and soul. What we consider to be beliefs warranted by reason are not only closely connected with our emotions, especially at the deepest levels of our being, but both also have important influences on our choices and actions. The consequences of choices and actions, in their turn, can greatly influence subsequent beliefs and emotions. These observations are true in general, but they are true especially of existential faith, which is rooted in and brings to focused expression a person’s entire being. There also is a sense in which we are already grasped and engaged by that in which we place our faith and thus our devotion, even as we begin to reflect and meditate on our faith and consider how we shall choose and act in accordance with it. We do not so much create our faith, especially in its initial stages, as discover it and thereafter work at refashioning or refining it. The journey of faith is thus an ongoing journey of self-discovery as well as a journey of seeking how best to understand the world and to adjust our lives to it. Our emotions and affections are involved deeply in this process, and our reason can serve to give ongoing clarity, coherence, and direction to that which commands our faith and devotion. Our will is engaged as we respond to the requirements of our faith, because that to which we are devoted elicits fervent response, and this response can place stringent and far-reaching demands on the decisions we make in the course of our lives. Faith should not be regarded, however, as something static or fixed at any point in one’s life, and would be a grave mistake to recommend such a notion of faith to those who are in the early years of their lives. I strongly endorse Don Cupitt’s insistence that faith should “be seen as a continual quest rather than as a guaranteed deposit in our present possession” (Cupitt 1988: 80). We must strive to be thoughtful, critical, and even sometimes ruthlessly skeptical about that in which we have faith and about the beliefs, emotions, and decisions involved in our faith, because no form of faith, however well grounded or well conceived, can be completely adequate. The issues involved in faith and confronting faith are too elusive and profound for that to be possible. Furthermore, not all forms of faith are equally adequate, some are patently inadequate, and some can be radically destructive. Responsible lives of faith should therefore endeavor to sustain a constant tension between tenacity and tentativeness, conviction and openness. The devotion of faith, however ardent and unstinting it may be, must be accompanied by a healthy amount of honest and deliberate circumspection. I made a similar point earlier in this chapter and shall return to it again when I discuss more fully the role of doubt as a necessary ingredient of viable faith. But let me turn now to the fourth aspect of faith, that of hope.
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HOPE AND FAITH A poignant but fascinating story from Ancient Greece that children in the West are likely to learn about in their schools or at their mothers’ (or fathers’) knees is the story of Pandora’s jar. Pandora was given a large, chockfull jar by the gods, who would not tell her what was in it and forbade her to open it. However, her curiosity soon got the best of her, and she pried the lid from the jar. Out flew all kinds of disasters and evils, afflictions and sorrows, toils and miseries. These spread quickly throughout the world. Only one thing was left within the jar, and that was hope. Pandora hastily jammed the lid back on the jar and thus kept the hope inside. Pandora and her irresistible curiosity as well as the manifold evils she released were the creations of Zeus. They were intended as a punishment for the sins of Prometheus, who had given fire to humans without Zeus’s permission and who had also craftily arranged matters so that the gods received only the bright fat and bones of sacrifices on the altar, not the good meat, which could then be consumed by human beings.4 It is significant that despite his visiting terrible and revengeful ills upon humankind, Zeus also had mercy on them and gave humans grounds for hope in the midst of their tribulations. Such hope is the power of saving, restoring, and rejuvenating faith in the face of destructive and ever threatening contingencies and evils within oneself and in the world. The place of hope in ancient Greek religious faith is shown forth by the story of Pandora and her jar. This story is similar in some ways to the story of Noah and the flood in the Hebrew Bible. While wiping out most of the world in a vast and devastating flood, and thus inflicting on humans the full measure of his wrath for their failure to be obedient to him, God saved Noah, Noah’s family, and representatives of the other creatures of earth, and fixed a rainbow in the sky as the symbol of his promise never to flood the earth in this way again.5 The rainbow is thus a symbol of humankind’s hope for the future and of its confidence in God’s enduring love and protection in the future. Its symbolism is similar to that of the one remaining thing in Pandora’s jar. These two stories illustrate how fundamental hope is as part of the texture of faith. To lose all hope is to lose the will to live. To have existential faith is to be possessed of life-giving hope. We may tend to think of hope as being oriented exclusively toward the future. But it also has important connections with the past and present, as we shall see. Let us first take note of a few examples of hope for the future as a major component of faith. As I indicated earlier, convinced Marxists will devote their lives to striving, working, and hoping for a worldwide proletarian revolution, a final withering away of the state, and achievement of the classless society. Many Jews ardently hope and prepare themselves and their communities for the advent of the Messiah and for the final setting
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right of the evils and injustices of the world, particularly as these pertain to oppressions of the Jewish people throughout history. Many Christians have a similar keen hope for the second coming of Christ, and Shiite Muslims await with fervent anticipation the return of the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam. Adherents of the three religious traditions mentioned here will typically be comforted and girded by hope not only for the ultimate redemption of the world as a whole but also for their resurrection as individual persons into newness of life and blissful closeness to God beyond the grave. They will endeavor in this life to live in accordance with these earnestly hoped for outcomes. Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had a starkly realistic and dark view of covert machinations of egoistic power, hypocrisy, and conflict in human societies and institutions, but he was nevertheless sustained in his hope for social and institutional betterment by his resolute faith in the sovereign lordship of God over human history. In Moral Man and Immoral Society he writes, Religion is always a citadel of hope, which is built on the edge of despair. Men are inclined to view both individual and social moral facts with complacency, until they view them from some absolute perspective. But the same absolutism which drives them to despair, rejuvenates their hope. In the imagination of the truly religious man the God, who condemns history, will yet redeem history. (Niebuhr 1960: 62) Postmodernist Roman Catholic theologian John D. Caputo speaks in a similar vein when he explains that what he calls a “spectral hermeneutics” turns one’s face to the future and haunts one with “possibilities harbored in events—by the fragile ‘perhaps’ in things—which promise a new life, a new being, a new creation.” He goes on to say that for those who share in this kind of faith, amor fati is replaced by “amor venturi, a love or affirmation of what is to come . . .” (Caputo 2007: 51). This last statement shows a close connection between hope and devotion. One loves that in which one places one’s deepest hopes, and one’s deepest hopes are centered on what one intensely loves. Elsewhere, Caputo observes that “[l]iterature and theology are places where we dream of what is coming, where we pray and weep for something that eye has not yet beheld nor ear heard, where we venture upon the plane of what does not exist and wonder indeed why not.” He proposes that we regard the “name of God as the name of an event that is greater than anything that exists” (Caputo 2007: 56). The name of God is thus at least in significant part the name of hope, and hope is for Caputo an essential if not the most essential feature of a postmodern form of faith in God. The God
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of this faith is not an ontological being. It is “not the name of the most real thing but of what is most real in things,” namely, their hopeful prospect of radical newness of life, of universal justice, forgiveness, and peace. This prospect is not automatic but calls for acceptance of a significant burden of responsibility on our part (Caputo 2007: 65–66). We participate in this prospect or ever unfolding and beckoning “event” and can be inspired and enriched by it. What Caputo terms the event is deeply mysterious and not just something of our own human creation or imagining. He speaks of it as “undeconstructible” and as a “dynamis that pulses through things . . . urging them, soliciting them, to be what they can be, and it is in that sense what is most real about them” (Caputo 2007: 56, 65). God thus named and conceived suggests the kind of transcendence and absoluteness of perspective over present historical conditions and limitations of which Niebuhr, in his characteristic fashion, also speaks. Secular humanists, for their part, may work to realize their hope for the triumph of democracy and individual rights and freedoms throughout the world, for bringing scientific knowledge and awareness to the fore, and for ridding the world of the scourge of religious superstition and religiously motivated bigotry and violence. Those who follow the Buddhist path of life will hope for an ever-deepening and authentic realization of their Buddha nature as they devote themselves to Buddhist instruction, teaching, discipline, and practice. As two final examples, consider first the new convert to a religious tradition who has formerly been locked into a crippling addiction or other destructive pattern of life and who is now exhilarated by the hope of experiencing a radical, ongoing reformation of outlook, practice, and character. Or picture as a contrasting example the person who has recently been won over to a secular outlook and form of faith and is now gripped by an intense hope for deliverance from a formerly debilitating, guilt-ridden, and unfulfilling religious commitment and for entry into an affirming, liberating way of thinking, feeling, and living. In all these cases, hope is a central part of faith, whether that faith be religious or secular, and whether it be the faith of a new convert or that of the seasoned traveler on a particular path of life. The hope of which we are speaking and which is an aspect of faith is not only the hope for particular goals that lie in the future. It is a posture, a stance, a quality of one’s whole life. And its orientation is toward one’s whole future, not just a particular part of the future. It is a positive, expectant, resilient attitude that gives assurance of being able to take in stride whatever the future may bring—its disappointments, threats, and sorrows as well as its contentments, joys, and accomplishments. It is a hope that is marked by patience, is grateful for small steps toward large goals, exhibits fortitude in the face of obstacles and setbacks, and is willing to work with others and with
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the assistance and guidance of others toward these goals. Those who possess it do not give up easily and are not easily discouraged throughout their lives. The strength and stamina of hope are part of the meaning of faith. Hope has connections with the past and present, as well as with the future. This is partly because, as an aspect of faith, it is a trait of the whole person as that person continues to live out of the past, into the present, and on into the future. But it also is because hope is a quality of one’s present life, giving energy and strength to the present as one faces out toward the future. And hope relates to the past because the aspirations, experiences, and accomplishments of one’s past can build up what philosopher Patrick Shade calls “habits of hope” that become part of one’s established character as one encounters new opportunities and challenges for hope in the course of living. Those who are habituated to hope, Shade asserts, do not just have isolated hopes but can be characterized as having “hopefulness” as a pervasive trait of character (Shade 2001: 20–22, 135–36). One’s faith helps to give focus, direction, context, and empowerment for one’s hope (or hopefulness) and thereby equips one to live with confidence despite the hazards and uncertainties of the future. One’s faith also strengthens one to persist in hope despite setbacks and failures in the past and to find ways to learn from and deal constructively with those setbacks and failures. The lifelong development of habits of hope is a significant part of what it means to have an ever-evolving faith. A final thing about hope is its necessary element of uncertainty. There is no guarantee that either one’s particular hopes or one’s stance of hopefulness always will be vindicated. One’s hopes can be dashed and one’s hopefulness severely tested by the vicissitudes of life and its sometimes sudden setbacks, frustrations, and disappointments. Shade makes a significant distinction between hopefulness and optimism: The key to optimism is the belief that goodness will triumph, that things will work out for the best. . . . A hopeful person is uncertain that goodness will prevail but nevertheless commits to investing in its cause. Consequently, hopefulness is best identified not with optimism but with meliorism. . . . [H]opefulness differs from optimism in having risk and involvement at its heart; goodness may win the day if we act on behalf of its cause. (Shade 2001: 139–40) Hopefulness, then, is a melioristic posture that frankly acknowledges the risks of facing toward an uncertain future that may set formidable obstacles in the way of one’s fondest aspirations and most determined efforts. But with hope, and the faith that grounds and supports it, one can continue to work with assurance if not certainty for a better future for oneself, for one’s
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family, friends, and community, and for the larger world of which one is a part. One can do so in concerted action with those who share one’s visions and hopes for the future. This mention of “visions” alerts us to the fact that one’s hopes are typically set forth in or at least implicitly contained within one’s worldview. I also noted above, when describing an aspect of Caputo’s postmodern theology, the close relation between hope as a part of one’s faith and devotion as another part of it. Hope is not merely venturesome. It is, in his words, amor venturi, the devoted love of what one hopes most ardently for and ventures to experience and accomplish under the stimulus of that love. The aspect of trust in the life of faith is also reflected in one’s hope because hopefulness means among other things a stance of receptive, open-hearted trust in the future and in the promise of being able to work effectively toward a better future for oneself and others. With these four interrelated aspects of existential faith in mind, let us now consider a fifth crucial aspect, that of courage.
COURAGE AND FAITH I want to revert once more to the story of the knife thrower in Chapter 1. I commented earlier in this chapter on the critical importance of having trust in the knife thrower’s skill if one were to volunteer to be the next test of that skill. I used this example to illustrate the role of trust in existential faith. But it also is apparent from this example that much courage would be required if one were to endanger one’s life in this way, and the same is true of venturing out upon a life of faith. We may tend to underestimate how much courage is required even for a seemingly ordinary kind of life because we underestimate the formidable threats to meaning, stability, and assurance that must be confronted by the faith that undergirds a person’s life. Every form of faith is risky and uncertain in high degree, and thus must incorporate a considerable amount of courage. This is so for a number of reasons. The first of these reasons is that faith places demands on one’s life, the demands of a lifetime of commitment to and dogged pursuit of specific values, goals, and ideals. Faith not only is an impetus to searching contemplation but also to resolute action. A complacent, too easily satisfied and too easily lived faith is hardly sufficient to sustain one throughout one’s life. Daniel Dombrowski points out that it is in our nature as so-called higher animals that we “can be discontented in various ways,” in contrast with the more settled natures of less complex beings such as a scallops, earthworms, or snails (Dombrowski 2004: 158). As humans, we hunger for meaning, and this hunger is for something rich and deeply satisfying, for a mode of life that puts us to the test and calls for strenuous effort and response. But to stake our lives on any particular course of life out of all the other courses that might have been embarked on and to rise to the persistent challenges and demands of that course of life require courage.
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I recently visited the restoration, on a high hill in my city of Tallahassee, Florida, of the Mission San Luis. This mission, one of many scattered across northern Florida, was established in the year 1656 by Spanish Franciscan friars in order to Christianize the Apalachee Native Americans and bring them within the orbit of Spanish governance and control. By 1675, more than fourteen-hundred Spaniards and Apalachees lived under the jurisdiction of the mission. It lasted until 1704, when it was burned and evacuated by the Spanish and the Apalachees as hostile British-led troops advanced toward it. Some of the buildings of the mission have been rebuilt on the basis of archeological evidence. One of these is the building in which the friars themselves lived. Each friar had a tiny cell in which to study, meditate, and sleep. The cell had a dirt floor, a rustic wash stand, and a rather rugged-looking bed. The sight of these cells helped to make me aware of the tremendous sacrifice these friars made in traveling across the ocean to an alien and relatively undeveloped land, encountering a strange people speaking an unknown tongue, and finding ways to work with them in order to set up over time a flourishing, self-sustaining village life. There must have been many hurdles and frustrations, uncertainties and risks to be overcome. There must have been poignant times of yearning for the familiar things of home. There must have been feelings of doubt, misgiving, and outright fear. And yet the friars stayed in the land to which they had come and were obedient to what they regarded as the demands of their faith. We may be hesitant to subscribe to these demands, because the friars were committed to usurping an indigenous culture and way of life, replacing them or fundamentally altering them with externally imposed European ideas and practices. But we cannot deny the courage of the friars or fail to acknowledge the indispensable role of that courage in their lives of faith. A responsible life of faith involves not only persistence and stability of commitment in response to the demands of faith. It also requires resilience and flexibility, and ability to adapt to changing circumstances in one’s environment and to changes within one’s self. This requirement is a second reason for affirming a close association between courage and faith. There is much about the world that is precarious and uncertain. We do not know what the future may bring. It may confront us with unanticipated losses, sorrows, disappointments, anxieties, disasters, conundrums, and the like that sorely test the strength of our faith. Salzberg, speaking from the context of her commitment over many years to Buddhist principles and meditational practices, makes this point well. Faith enables us, despite our fear, to get as close as possible to the truth of the present moment, so that we can offer our hearts fully to it, with integrity. We might (and often must) hope and plan and arrange and try, but faith enables us to be fully engaged while
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FAITH AND REASON also realizing that we are not in control, and that no strategy can ever put us in control, of the unfolding of events. Faith gives us a willingness to engage life, which means the unknown, and not to shrink back from it. (Salzberg 2002: 87–88)
Courage clearly is required, then, for us to face up with faith to an uncertain future, not knowing in advance what shocks or deprivations it may introduce into our lives or what severe questions it may raise about the adequacy of our faith. It is not only the precarious and changeable character of the world that calls for courage. Courage also is needed for dealing with the inevitable changes within oneself that are brought about as one develops and matures throughout one’s life. These changes also pose their own kinds of risk and uncertainty. What one was formerly at ease with and confident about may now be called seriously into question. New experiences, new events, new ways of thinking, and new possibilities for action have intervened, and one is uncertain about how to proceed. What was formerly felt to be adequate in one’s faith is now seen to be in need of revision and change, and sometimes to a radical degree. One must accept the risk of such changes without being able to know with certainty what the outcomes of those changes will be. Will one’s faith be strengthened? Will it be put severely to the test? Will fundamental alterations in the character of one’s faith be required? Courage is needed in order for one to undertake such changes. Things that are untested and new must be taken aboard; some formerly comforting, assuring, and perhaps deeply meaningful old things must be jettisoned and left behind as one sets sail into the future. The voyage of faith may also sometimes require one to chart new courses and to steer toward new destinations. The courage of resilience and adaptability, and of allowing the character of one’s faith to absorb seemingly needed changes despite the risks and uncertainties of such changes, are demanded if faith is to give adequate support to one’s whole self and one’s whole life. There is a kind of “leap,” then, in the life of faith, a venturing into the future without full knowledge of what the future may bring either in the unfolding of external events or in the course of one’s own life. The need for this leap is especially evident when significant changes in one’s self or one’s environment make evident an urgent need for alterations and adjustments in important aspects of one’s convictions and commitments. Charles Taylor suggests that we speak of the requisite leap of faith as “anticipatory confidence.” This is a good suggestion and provides us with a useful alternative term for what I am calling the courage of faith. Taylor writes regarding forms of faith that, although experience may increase our confidence in them, “we never move to a point beyond all anticipation, beyond all hunches, to the
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kind of certainty that we may enjoy in certain narrower questions . . .” (Taylor 2007: 550–51). His statement brings to our attention the risk and even peril implicit in the act of faith. Facing up to this risk and peril requires a stance of not only steadfast but also resilient and adaptive courage. A third reason for regarding courage as an essential part of faith is recognition of the need for courage in coping with what is obdurate and cannot be changed in the human condition, what is an inevitable concomitant of the finitude and limits of that condition. Paul Tillich does an inestimable service in developing this theme in his book The Courage to Be. He identifies three basic types of anxiety that must be confronted and dealt with in every human life, and he insists that the three are ontological in character, as opposed to types of anxiety he characterizes as pathological. In speaking of the former as ontological, Tillich means that they are inseparable from the human condition and cannot be annulled or removed, in contrast with pathological anxieties which, as kinds of sickness or disease, are in principle capable of being cured (Tillich 1952: 39–57, 64–70). The three types of ontological anxiety are marks of human finitude. One of them is the anxiety of guilt. There is no escape from the threat of guilt because we are finite and will at least sometimes misuse our freedom and commit evil, make mistakes and miscalculations in our moral life, or respond inappropriately to the complexity, demands, or conflicts of good in moral situations. Guilt can even bring in its train the dark threat of self-loathing and loss of the sense of ability to be a moral person or to do the right things. The second form of anxiety is the threat of fate and of one’s own impending death. There is no way in which finite beings can be in complete control of the future or know with certainty what the future will bring. And unless we commit suicide, there is no way in which we can know how or when we shall die. I talked about the uncertainty of the future above, when discussing the second reason that faith requires courage. Tillich’s third form of ontological anxiety turns on the threat of aimlessness, of failure to find purpose and meaning in one’s life, and of possible ultimate despair. The courage to be is the ability to take these anxieties honestly and fully into account without being overcome or destroyed by them. I am urging, as does Tillich, that such courage is a manifestation of faith and is rooted in faith. The specific form of faith Tillich champions is faith in what he calls the “God above God” or the power of being-itself, the power that sustains us in the face of the three fundamental threats of nonbeing I have indicated. He calls this form of faith “absolute faith” and defines it as “the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself.” He asserts that “[t]he courage to be is an expression of faith and what ‘faith’ means must be understood through the courage to be” (Tillich 1952: 186, 171–72). The desperate need for this courage, in view of the inevitability of these three types of anxiety and their
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profound threats to one’s overall confidence and powers of self-affirmation, points in turn to the central place of faith in human life. A final reason for the intimate relation between courage and faith is the fact that the life of faith is a life of experiment and adventure, with an ever-present risk for possible failure. A particular form of faith may fail in whole or in part, and one must be able to take the risk for this failure and to be constantly open to and prepared for what can be learned from its possibility. I discussed earlier Arthur Koestler’s devastating experience of loss of faith, recounted in his essay in the book The God that Failed. But loss of faith need not be a total loss. We sometimes learn more from our failures than from our successes. A little child learns to walk partly by frequently falling and accepting the risk for falling. When as adults we learn to fall and perhaps even to question some of our deepest convictions, we may, as Phillip Simmons observes, “find victory in the falling itself, in learning how to live fully, consciously in the presence of mystery. When we learn to fall we learn to accept the vulnerability that is our human endowment, the cost of walking upright on the earth” (Simmons 2003: 11). The acceptance of vulnerability of which Simmons speaks calls out resoundingly for courage. It is the courage of readiness to experience possible failures in important features of one’s faith, if not the wholesale loss of one’s faith—a loss that puts one in need of a new and untried form of faith. I discuss at length three striking examples of this kind of experience in Chapter 7 and illustrate it with my own journey of faith in Chapter 8. The requirement for such readiness becomes obvious when we contemplate the unfathomable complexity and mysteriousness of the world and of one’s life in the world. Krista Tippett speaks of “[t]he anthropology of faith—its insistence that critical aspects of life are unquantifiable, unsolvable, flawed, and nevertheless blessed . . .” (Tippett 2008: 92). One must live despite the mystery and uncertainty of these critical aspects of life, and the faith involved in one’s living must be able to accept the possibility of getting things wrong, of not having found the form of faith or aspects of faith best suited to equip one to interpret and cope with life’s intractable mysteries. One cannot have a meaningful life of adventure and experiment without the risk for failure. The life of faith for finite beings such as we are offers much needed assurance and guidance, but it cannot offer absolute, unchangeable certitude. The risk-taking of faith requires the risk-taking of courage. My talk of the risk and uncertainty of life and of the faith that lies at the basis of one’s life points us not only in the direction of courage as an essential part of faith but also toward the role of doubt as the sixth vital ingredient in faith. In the next section I present reasons for concluding that resolute doubt and firm faith belong necessarily together, a contention that may at first blush seem counterintuitive if not contradictory. The
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assumption that faith and doubt must stand in stark opposition to one another is, in my judgment, wholly unwarranted. It is a widely held but generally unexamined assumption that betrays a serious misunderstanding of the nature of faith.
DOUBT AND FAITH The doubt under consideration here is existential doubt. Properly understood, it is a necessary component of existential faith. Such doubt is awareness of the inadequacy of any stance of faith to do full and final justice to what is of ultimate importance, value, and meaning for oneself or in the world. Doubt as a part of faith is inescapable for finite beings such as we are; hence, there is a necessary tension between existential certitude and existential doubt. We humans are but tiny parts of an incredibly vast universe, stretching over unimaginable regions of space and eons of time. This universe does not focus exclusively on us and our particular problems and concerns. As previously indicated, our faith enables us to find a place for ourselves in the universe and to find orientation and direction within it. It does so with conviction and assurance enough to light our path and give us strength and purpose to live. But by its very nature no version of faith can do so with absolute certainty. Plenty of room and justification are left for an attitude of ongoing questioning, not for just intellectual questioning—although that too is important—but for intense wondering and being healthily inquisitive and concerned about the adequacy of one’s particular form of faith to be the basis for the framing and living of one’s entire life. Existential doubt also is natural and appropriate as we confront the different forms of faith of other people, communities, cultures, traditions, and times. Not only can such confrontations make us more fully aware that ours is but one of many possible stances of faith, each with its own commanding insights and strengths, these encounters also can make us receptive to what the faiths of others can reveal about what possibly is inadequate or lacking in one’s own faith, and what might be in need of rectification, expansion, or improvement. Healthy misgivings about the complete sufficiency of one’s faith also can alert one to the possibility that other faiths can usefully complement one’s own, adding from their own particular perspectives important and plausible alternative ways of orienting oneself and one’s communities and cultures in the world. All of us humans are presumably struggling with our respective faiths to learn how better to understand and live the central values and truths of our existence in the face of the stubborn obstacles that stand in the way of our struggles. Behind our many differences lie our common humanity and the inescapable commonalities and limitations of our finite human condition. We can learn a great deal from one another and even can be
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mutually transformed by the process of sharing our different paths, each positively questioning and thereby conceivably challenging and enriching the faith of the other. John B. Cobb, in his book Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Cobb 1982), offers an intriguing example of the possibilities of this kind of mutual transformation. Cobb presents a convincing and detailed case for how Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity can be brought into dialogue with one another and be shown to offer complementary lessons and strengths in relation to one another. He shows how lacunae in the one can be filled by observations and insights of the other, and how each can retain its distinctive character but with newly acquired augmentations and gains. Were there no feelings of doubt, uncertainty, or inadequacy on the part of proponents of particular forms of faith, there would be little felt need for such shared inquiry, and each form of faith might thereby lose much that could be acquired from it. Understood in this way, doubt is an essential aspect of a faith that is keenly aware of its limitations, of its ongoing need for stimulus, growth, and change, and thus of the value and importance of being open to what can be learned from the faith of others. I spoke earlier of the importance of and need for symbolic expressions of one’s faith in addition to whatever literal statements one might be able to make about it. This point, as I intend now to show, relates critically to the role of doubt in the life of faith. Symbolic expressions employ suggestiveness, allusiveness, and indirection to probe the depths of what is meaningful and important in one’s faith. A part, but only a part, of a faith’s fullness of meaning can be rendered into literal beliefs or proposals for belief. The latter require supplementation with symbols and are often themselves interpretations of important symbols. The symbolic aspects of one’s faith can include analogies, metaphors, myths, stories, songs, parables, koans, sacraments, rituals, and the like. Symbols and symbolic practices may speak with focused power and capture, convey, or point to significant aspects or dimensions of one’s faith. They can help to bring into forceful expression the five facets of faith already discussed. And they can do so with penetrating insight and awareness not possible with literal means of expression or practice. A telling metaphor, for example, will provide a kind of insight or immediate awareness that a literal expression does not. We can speak of “thinking outside the box,” to cite a commonplace example, or of having to “sink or swim,” and it becomes instantly apparent what is meant. Similarly, India was once characterized as “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire.6 A good metaphor gives concrete embodiment and specificity to something whose literal expression may be less adequate or communicative because it tends to be too prolix or abstract. In a nomadic, sheep-herding society to imagine, as in the twenty-third Psalm, one’s God as a shepherd
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whose rod and staff will protect one in the presence of evil may well be more accurate and truthful as an expression of one’s faith than to think of God in abstract terms borrowed from Greek philosophy. Similarly, to speak prosaically of one’s God as loving and forgiving is one thing. The parable of the prodigal son in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament conveys the meaning of that assertion not so much by way of further elaboration or description as by showing with the concreteness, vividness, and evocative power of a gripping story what divine love and forgiveness amount to, in a down-to-earth, everyday manner. The symbolic force of koans accompanied by the guidance of an astute Zen Master has the power to jolt discovery, insight, and awareness in a way that straightforward doctrines or descriptions cannot. In fact, for Zen Buddhists, the latter are to be distrusted as mere surface ideas that cannot substitute for and often inhibit the profound experiences that the koans are more likely to awaken and invoke. Koans can do so partly because they bring to the surface and call into question deep-lying assumptions of which one was previously unaware and that stand in the way of genuine growth and understanding. Symbols of faith are vitally necessary, then, in addition to literal statements regarding the content and character of one’s faith. Effective symbols can bring people together in communities of faith with shared ways of giving expressive embodiments to the central meanings of their faith. Such symbols help immeasurably to give strength and purpose to those living within such communities. Philosopher and theologian Robert Neville calls our attention both to the complex levels of meaning and the vital communal role of religious symbols when he remarks that “[r]eligious symbols, or rather the concrete habits of thought, feeling, and behavior shaped by religious symbols, stack up in a person in many layers and interweaving connections. By analogy they do the same thing in communities” (Neville 2009: 106). What he says about religious symbols applies to symbols of faith in general. And what philosopher Susanne K. Langer asserts about artistic symbols such as those represented by painting, sculpture, poetry, and music, applies as well to paradigmatic symbols of faith, or at least to large numbers of them. “Artistic symbols . . . are untranslatable; their sense is bound to the particular form which it has taken.” They cannot be disassembled and fully analyzed or interpreted in specific statements of discursive language because their artistic import is borne by the symbols as a whole. “To understand the ‘idea’ in a work of art is . . . more like having a new experience than like entertaining a new proposition. . . .” Thus the adequacy of a work of art “must be judged on our experience of its revelations,” and “[t]he worst enemy of artistic judgment is literal judgment” (Langer 1961: 220, 222–23). All of this is not to say that more literal, discursive, and descriptive language has no place in giving expression to one’s own faith or that of
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communities. It is only to insist on the essential role that is also played by imaginative symbols in the language of faith. The truth of deeply meaningful whole symbols is not the same thing as the truth of particular prosaic statements. The two can have important relations to one another, but neither can be collapsed into or serve the same purposes as the other. However, even at their best, the key symbols of faith, whether envisioned or enacted, only partly can convey the full import of that to which they point. It is important that we not confuse the symbols themselves with that to which they allude. Adequate symbols of faith, or at least ones that are adequately regarded and used, speak not only with focused power and with meanings powerfully expressed and contained within themselves but also in ways suited to remind us of their final limitation and inadequacy. They contain, as Tillich puts the matter, an element of their own self-negation or self-transcendence (Tillich 1958: 97).7 What has all of this to do with doubt? Doubt in the life of faith is in significant measure frank recognition of the limitations of even the most cherished symbols of one’s faith, a recognition that drives one to search for ever richer, more compelling, more insightful, more deeply probing symbols, and always to be on guard against overestimating the power of any set of symbols to do justice to the central discernments, meanings, and demands of a given form of faith. Doubt is a healthy part of faith to the extent that it enables proponents and practitioners of particular forms of faith to see through and beyond the symbols to the elusive depth, intricacy, wholeness, and centeredness of what the symbols are meant to convey. Dombrowski rightly reminds us that powerful imaginative symbols expand rationality and do not just transcend it (Dombrowski 2004: 77). But it also is important to note the extent to which basic symbols of faith also have a self-transcending quality in their relations to the profound meanings they seek to express and evoke. Is it possible not to have faith as I have described it here? I can answer this question by noting two things. The first is that existential faith in all its forms involves positive self-affirmation and affirmation of the world in which one lives. The second is that human lives can manifest not only different forms of faith but also different degrees of faith. If one despairs of one’s own life and cannot find some way in which to affirm the world but, on the contrary, can only negate them, that is, deny in a wholesale manner any semblance of their meaning, purpose, and value, then one could be said to lack faith. There also can be degrees of affirmation contrasting with degrees of denial, so that we can say of some not that they lack faith entirely but that their faith is weak rather than strong, tending toward a degree of negation that threatens their possession of faith. To be in the grip of deep despair is to have experienced the erosion of faith, perhaps to the point of its extinction or near extinction. One may still have a worldview, but it is a dark and negative one, not a positive, affirming one. One suffers from a
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profound and lamentable absence of the trust, devotion, hope, and courage that characterize faith. One’s existential doubts have come to eclipse other aspects of existential faith. In this chapter I examined six critical aspects of faith and explored some of the interrelations of those six aspects. I have emphasized that the faith under discussion is existential and thus more than a conceptual worldview or set of beliefs, although it includes beliefs. I have stressed the indispensable role of nonliteral, nondiscursive, self-transcending symbolic expressions in the complex life of faith. I have noted the necessary tension between resolute trust and devotion, on the one hand, and a sustained posture of critical questioning and doubt and of constant openness to the mysteries of oneself and the world, on the other. I have insisted that an adequate and fully meaningful faith is not something completely fixed or settled at any point in one’s life but rather should be regarded as a matter of persistent inquiry, experimentation, and adventure, and of receptive dialogue and interaction with the convictions and commitments of others. I have examined relations of hope and courage as well as of doubt and courage. Let us keep these six interrelated features of faith in mind as we turn our attention in the next chapter to important connections of faith with the search for knowledge and with claims to knowledge.
THREE
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
[W]e can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any particular piece of knowledge. —Michael Polany1
In this chapter I inquire in more detail into the intimate relations of existential faith and knowledge. I take strong issue here, as I have in previous chapters, with the view that faith and knowledge should be viewed as incompatible with or opposed to one another. In that view, to possess knowledge is by implication to have dispensed with faith or any need for faith, and to profess faith is implicitly to admit to an absence of knowledge or even to celebrate this absence in favor of a claimed superiority of faith to knowledge. I argue instead that the two are mutually dependent. Faith has an essential knowledge aspect, and knowledge has an essential faith aspect. We must forthrightly acknowledge and analyze this interdependence of faith and knowledge if we want properly to understand the character of either one. I press this notion with special vigor when I discuss, in the next chapter, the indispensable role of faith in scientific investigations and in claims to scientific knowledge. It is important that I do so because scientific findings and modes of inquiry are often wrongly assumed to stand in sharp contrast with, if not in blatant contradiction to, approaches, attitudes, and outlooks of faith. In this chapter, I first reflect on the knowledge aspect of faith itself. Then I concentrate on the essential role of faith in claims to knowledge in general.
THE KNOWLEDGE ASPECT OF FAITH I spoke earlier about the critical importance of nonliteral imaginative symbols as expressions of faith. And I stressed the idea that these symbols 37
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cannot simply be reduced to or translated into propositions or proposals for belief. The symbols convey the outlooks, attitudes, insights, and convictions of faith in their own special, indispensable manner. The knowledge these symbolic structures provide is not that of straightforward propositions or claims but that of suggestive images, paradoxes, stories, rituals, and the like. The peculiar power they have and the distinctive kind of understanding they make possible are well stated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his description of the effect of Shakespeare’s plays. Smith writes that in these plays Shakespeare expressed what he knew not in propositions but in poetic dramas of great power and potential effectiveness. . . . Almost no significant question can be asked about Shakespeare or his plays in terms of what he believed. It is of considerable moment, however, to ask what he saw; what insights his poetry can help us to have; how our understanding of life can be enhanced by our understanding of his understanding of it. (Smith 1987: 148; emphasis added)2 The symbol systems and stratagems of faith evoke something like this level of understanding, and a penetrating, meaningful faith has great need of them as potent means of expression. At their best, they are able to awaken depths of insight and awareness that cannot be plumbed by literal statements. In their own right and in their own manner, they are stimulants to knowledge and pointers to truth. But it is knowledge and truth of a particular sort, a sort that has existential quality and transformative power. In his book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as a Religious Quest, Thomas R. Dunlap calls attention to the fact that “environmentalists adopted symbols of [their] faith ranging from icons to areas.” They “put up posters with Ansel Adams’s view of Yosemite Valley or Eliot Porter’s pictures of Glen Canyon in the same way that ethnic Catholics put statues of the Virgin on the front lawn—as declarations of faith and reminders of what was important.” Dunlap also writes that “[t]he first pictures of earth from outer space became icons of the unity of life, and calls for international environmental protection relied on that view of earth as a fragile ark of life” (Dunlap 2005: 140, 142). The work of devoted environmentalists, as Dunlap stresses throughout his book, is undergirded by faith. Their faith may take the form of religious naturalism, for example, which regards nature itself as the ultimate source of value and meaning.3 It may be an aspect of a more traditional form of religious faith such as that of Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.4 Or it may be secular in its character. Like all types of faith, the faith stances of environmentalists exhibit a keenly felt need for iconic or symbolic expressions of their central commitments and convictions.
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The symbols and symbol systems of forms of faith are not set in stone. They can be revised, re-envisioned, or replaced. New symbols may be brought forward as new experiences, attitudes, and outlooks develop with changing times. These new symbols may supplement the old ones, be brought into creative tension with them, or simply displace them. In his book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, Burton L. Mack focuses on “Q,” a now lost “sayings gospel,” the clue to which is the material common to the gospels of Matthew and Luke that is not contained in the earliest gospel narrative, that of Mark.5 He argues that Q reflects the beliefs and practices of a community of people living before any of the narrative gospels were written. The earliest version of this material does not portray Jesus as the Christ or Messiah and does not contain such notions as his virgin birth, his transfiguration, his crucifixion as sacrifice for the sins of the world, his resurrection from the dead, his ascension into heaven, or his apocalyptic predictions of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and return to earth for final judgment. All of these ideas were introduced later, Mack contends, and they represent a symbol system and mythology foreign to that of those who first compiled Q. In the epilogue to his book, Mack suggests that present day Christians might see Q as a challenge to the mythology that has been so long identified with Christianity and that they might set for themselves the task of “actively sorting through the rich archives of myths, teachings, and attitudes that have defined their religion” in the past, “trying to locate the symbols that may constructively address the problems of our time” (Mack 1994: 254). For Mack, in other words, it is time for Christianity to re-examine its traditional symbols in light of the implicit critique of these symbols contained in Q, and in light of the clear light shed by Q on the fact that these are not the only possible symbols for expressing basic modes of Christian identity and awareness. In fact, he suggests, many of them may have outlived their relevance and usefulness. The lesson for us here is that the symbols of a given type of faith are not forever fixed or sacrosanct. They can over one span of time be established, grow, and develop, and they can over another be called into question, lose their original expressive power, and die. We also saw earlier, moreover, that one of the facets of faith is worldview, a compendium or system of comprehensive beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. And at least some of these beliefs may be set forth in explicit statements that are meant to be understood literally. These statements complement the symbols of faith with claims about the strictly intellectual or conceptual contents of faith. Not only do such beliefs provide important supplements to the symbolic languages of faith, they also can be regarded as a means of exploring and explicating—to the extent possible for literal language—their meanings as rendered in propositions or proposals for belief. As I indicated earlier, the symbols generally fall short of
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adequate expression of depths and dimensions of faith that, for all of their potential power, the symbols can finally only suggest or to which they can in many cases only faintly allude. Propositional explications of these symbols fall short, in their turn, of doing full justice to the provocative power and rich import of the symbols. But the propositions can do an important service as interpretations of at least part of the meaning of faith’s symbolic expressions. Literal statements of belief can both supplement and explicate the symbols of faith, then, and these statements represent the extent to which forms of faith include and have need of claims to knowledge that can be rendered in propositional form. Faith is not a mere matter of belief, but it has a significant content of belief. It is important that the content of belief commend itself at least in some significant degree to the rational mind, even though there is more to faith than can be captured or encompassed by rational thought. Smith emphasizes this point when he comments that any given form of “[f]aith will hardly flourish so long as belief with regard to it continues to flounder” (Smith 1987: 128). As a centered act of the whole person, faith cannot bypass the rational part of the person. It must be able to integrate that part of life with other parts of life. In doing so, it cannot rely on imaginative symbols alone. Statements of belief and continuing earnest pursuit of reasons and evidences that can give convincing support to these statements are part of the texture of faith. They are a warp tightly interwoven with the woof of other expressions of faith that resist reduction to literal statements or rational defenses of such statements. Proponents of Christian faith throughout their history, for example, have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the task of setting forth carefully thought-out propositional expressions and elaborations of their faith and to insisting on their essential role as standards of Christian fidelity and commitment. They also have been intent on showing how Christian conceptions, creeds, and doctrines can be defended on the basis of reason and experience available not only to those within their circle of faith but to those outside it as well. In this way, they have sought to give rational and empirical support to their beliefs, both for the sake of their own edification and in order to convince others outside their circle of faith of the truth of these beliefs. Many examples lay ready at hand, but a familiar and particularly striking example is the voluminous writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian. Couching his work in the philosophy of Aristotle that had been made newly available to Christians in the West, Aquinas developed detailed philosophical articulations and defenses of central precepts of Christian faith. They are set forth as claims to knowledge to be weighed and evaluated as such, and not just as in-house confessions of faith. Even though Aquinas’ arguments may not have the same convincing force in our more scientific time as they did for
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many thoughtful people in his, one cannot help but admire their systematic character and logical rigor. Philosophy of religion is one of the courses I have taught regularly in my academic career, and it is focused mainly on beliefs set forth by religious thinkers and on arguments and counter-arguments related to those beliefs. Smith rightly reminds us, however, that not all forms of faith place the heavy emphasis on doctrinal correctness and systematic development of doctrinal claims as adherents of the Christian faith have tended to do.6 Forms of faith such as Judaism and Islam have tended to place their greatest emphasis on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, that is, on correctness of practice rather than correctness of belief. And Shinto priests and practitioners, according to Smith, have not constructed “formal theories about what they were doing,” nor did “intellectuals among them . . . seek to order their exuberant myths into rational coherence” (Smith 1987: 14–15). Still, all forms of faith are also in part forms of putative knowledge, giving implicit or explicit expression to distinctive views of the world and to the place, prospects, and responsibilities of humans in the world. This alleged knowledge may in some cases be conveyed more typically by symbolic expressions and ritual practices, or by practical duties and tasks, than by clear-cut literal statements of belief, but claims to knowledge are nevertheless contained there either covertly or overtly, to be contemplated, responded to, and appraised. And it is not at all inappropriate to react to these claims with a critical eye. A form of faith unwilling in principle to venture any literal claims to truth or to expose any such claims to critical scrutiny would run the risk for either not being taken seriously or for being dismissed out of hand by thoughtful persons who insist on putting their cognitive capacities to work in the realm of faith. Symbolic expressions are admittedly important for faith but they do not suffice when they fail to be complemented with specific beliefs that admit of literal statement and critical discrimination. Richard Dawkins, a biologist who critically dismisses all religion but focuses especially on theistic religion, is entitled to insist that at least some of the major conceptual content of Christian faith, for example, should be formulated in a literal manner and be made open to thoroughgoing discussion, examination, and criticism by natural scientists and others. Liberal Christians in particular, he contends, should not be allowed to hide behind a smoke screen of insistence that the language of their religion is entirely symbolical, that no literal assertions are involved or required, and hence that there can be no conflicts with statements of truth such as those made in the natural sciences (Dawkins 2008: esp. 275–76). He is entirely correct in this contention, for to accept such a view would be to misconstrue the nature of faith under discussion here. Faith and knowledge, therefore, are not inimical to one another. Faith includes both symbolic avenues to knowledge and understanding and propo-
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sitional claims to truth, with accompanying rational arguments and evidences in support of those claims. Religious and secular forms of faith purport, among other things, to be ways of knowing that can reliably guide our living in the world. Their symbolizations of truth and their statements of truth can and should be brought under the scrutiny of inquiring minds, including the minds of those who happen to be adherents of the particular forms of faith in question. We are reminded again, then, of the crucial role of questioning and doubt in an active life of faith. Now that we have looked at the place of knowledge or claims to knowledge in faith, we can next examine some ways in which faith enters into claims to knowledge in general.
THE FAITH ASPECT OF KNOWLEDGE IN GENERAL I define knowledge as justified belief. This definition raises the question of what counts as justification of belief. The answer to this question will vary depending on the kind of belief involved. For example, a belief about the character or existence of an object of sensation will differ from a belief about the truth or falsity of a mathematical formula or theorem. In similar fashion, the claims that this is a work of art or that this is a moral situation, or that this work of art is of exceptional aesthetic value or that this moral choice of all the available ones in a particular situation is the right one, express other kinds of belief. Different kinds of justification for such varying beliefs will be required. A claim based on sensate experience might be tested by its repeatability at other places and times, by its concurrence with the experiences of others, or by its consistency with related sensate experiences. A theorem in mathematics might be tested by its derivability from a specified set of axioms, by its fruitfulness in suggesting further theorems, or by the solution of a mathematical problem it makes possible. In the case of scientific claims, both appeals to sensation and appeals to mathematical reasoning might be needed. Appreciation for the elegance or beauty of a scientific theory couched in rigorous mathematical form might also be a factor in determination of the truth of the theory. A religious claim might make appeal to its putative bearing on the transformation of life or on some other fundamental aspect of religious experience. Aesthetic and moral claims, for their part, will be defended on the basis of still different kinds of considerations and criteria. But all cases of justification or attempted justification involve at bottom more than explicit reasons. They require what Michael Polanyi refers to as “fiduciary” acts which are often tacit or unspoken and which “cannot be analysed in non-committal terms” (Polanyi 1962: 204). The sum total of these fiduciary commitments is what makes it possible to live with confidence and hope in the world, and to find meaning and truth within oneself and in the world. The tacit commitments in particular underlie and
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provide the framework for particular claims to knowledge and truth, and for attempted justifications of these claims. Together, they constitute the heart of what I am calling “faithful reason.” Without such tacit commitments, knowledge would be impossible. In other words, the explicit lies upon a broad bed of the inexplicit. And the inexplicit dimensions rest ultimately on the stance of faith, reflecting the quality and character of the whole person who makes and seeks to justify claims to truth as well as that person’s encompassing outlook on and orientation to the world. When we make a claim to truth, we are typically endeavoring to speak of something that lies beyond ourselves, but we are also implicitly expressing our personal responsibility for the claim. After all, it is we who are making the claim and seeking that hold on an aspect of reality external to ourselves. Thus, as Polanyi points out, “Every factual statement embodies some measure of responsible judgment as the personal pole of the commitment in which it is affirmed.” He also observes that “into every act of knowing there enters a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and this coefficient is no mere imperfection, but a necessary component all knowledge” (Polanyi 1962: 312). He insists, moreover, that in this “intellectual daring,” personal commitment, or confident self-reliance “lies our ultimate power for keeping our heads in the face of a changing world. It makes us feel at home in a universe presenting us with a succession of unprecedented situations” and enables us even to find joy in the task of responding “to novelty by reinterpreting our accepted knowledge” (Polanyi 1962: 317). Polanyi’s descriptions point to important aspects of what I am calling existential faith. In the final analysis, one does not just subscribe, albeit unconsciously, to the inexplicit dimensions of thought and outlook that make explicit thought and expression possible on a given occasion and that together help to give fundamental shape to one’s self-conception and view of the world. One dwells within these dimensions; in them one lives, and moves, and has one’s being. “Our believing,” as Polanyi observes, “is conditioned at its source by our belonging” (Polanyi 1962: 322).7 What, then, are some of the inexplicit dimensions of thought and commitment that so profoundly influence our explicit claims and justifications? And how do these dimensions relate to the role of faith in claims to knowledge? The dimensions include the following: 1. Our instinctive attitudes and capabilities, shared with animals that lack language; 2. Our acquired habits and skills; 3. The encompassing influences of our language and of our cultural settings and inheritances;
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This list and my discussion of it that follows are strongly influenced by Polanyi’s illuminating analysis of what he calls “personal knowledge.” Let us look briefly at these factors and see how together they relate to the concept of faith being developed in this book. Before doing so, however, it is important that I take note of the fact that I am assuming a conception of what might be called cognitive confidence as I discuss the six factors. The kind of tacit cognitive confidence operative within and required by these various domains of knowledge often melds imperceptibly into existential faith. It does so subtly, making it difficult in many cases and impossible in some clearly to distinguish what is cognitive confidence and what is existential faith. I submit that cognitive confidence, in the broad ways in which I analyze it in this section, is a significant part but only a part of existential faith, informing it in a variety of ways—and especially in its worldview and the claims to truth contained in or implicit within that worldview. It is also the case, however, that existential faith and its accompanying comprehensive worldview enter significantly into the kinds of cognitive confidence that figure tacitly in claims to knowledge in all domains. The image we need to capture these insights is not that of sharp and crystal-clear distinctions between cognitive confidence and existential faith. It is rather that of constant and persistent interweaving, an interweaving so tight as to make it necessarily unclear in many particular cases where the one leaves off and the other begins. I do the best I can to distinguish the two as the discussion proceeds but beg the reader to take into account the interfusions at many points and in many ways of cognitive confidence and existential faith. 1. We tend sometimes to forget that we are animals and that many of our capabilities are shared with other animals. Nonhuman animals do not possess language, but without it they show themselves to be extremely resourceful in their strategies for adapting themselves to their environments, resolving problems by finding means to accomplish desired ends, protecting themselves and their progeny, and living flourishing lives. The differences between us and other animals are significant and far-reaching, largely due to our possession of language and other highly developed modes of symbolization, but they are differences of degree, not of kind. Our animal nature must be recognized and not ignored or simply taken for granted when we
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analyze components of our searches for knowledge of the world and our claims to truth about the world. We rely instinctively on our five senses to enable us to navigate in our environments, for example, and our actions can be intuitively motivated by feelings of pleasure and pain. We crave food, drink, and shelter. We have memories and anticipations, and we crucially depend on predictable regularities of the world. We desire not only to live but to live as well as possible. We have reflexes that help to alert us and protect us in situations of danger but are activated before we become conscious of those situations. We have capabilities of learning from experience that do not require language, as shown in early and essentially automatic stages of human development such as learning to discriminate among faces and to crawl and walk. We have inborn sexual proclivities and discriminations that motivate and guide us in the selection of mates. We have maternal and paternal feelings toward our children and seek naturally to nurture and protect them. We instinctively solve many of the minor problems of everyday life with ease and without need for conscious thought. These and other such attitudes and capabilities, shared with other animals, are operative below the threshold of focused, clear-cut consciousness. They are important aspects of what we are as human beings, and they contribute to our fund of assumed knowledge in countless ways. Our trust in them and in the accomplishments and modes of awareness they make possible is usually unspoken, but it is resolute and strong. It is a kind of animal faith8 that cannot help but deeply structure and inform whatever may be our felt and reasoned claims to knowledge and modes of orientation in the world. Although it is true that philosophers and others may at times subject aspects of such animal faith to critical scrutiny, it is difficult if not impossible to do so without assuming what is being made the object of such criticism. For example, eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, a resolute skeptic about the reliability of our sensate experiences and the probabilistic and other judgments based on them as avenues to knowledge of the world, had finally to conclude that he could not live his philosophy. In daily life he had no recourse but to take for granted what in his philosophy he sought systematically to deny. Not only was that the case. Hume also had tacitly to depend on such things as memory, anticipation, repetition, custom, his own enduring self—and thus some kind of temporal and causal continuity and internal relatedness—as bases of his philosophical reasoning about the human self and the world even though his skeptical conclusions showed, at least to him, that what he depended upon is without justification. In other words, Hume could not escape the demands of his own persistently underlying and tacitly assumed animal faith. He could not help relying on
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what he explicitly denied, thus exposing his philosophy to the charge of being a thoroughgoing reductio ad absurdum. He was left with no dependable rational way of distinguishing truth from falsity, and no way of even mounting a successful or consistent defense of his skeptical views.9 Such is the price of trying to impugn, on the basis of skeptical reasoning, essential ingredients of animal faith. Reliable reasoning must rest on and presuppose such faith. It can explicate animal faith but cannot without circularity disprove its reliability. Instead of setting animal faith in stark opposition to reason, Hume should have acknowledged the intimate relation between the two. The problem with his skeptical philosophy is not that he was required finally to rely on animal faith for the living of his life; it lies in pervasive and avoidable inconsistencies in the reasoning that led him to brand central features of animal faith as devoid of empirical support and rational justification. 2. Our acquired habits and skills also operate, for the most part, without our conscious awareness or attention. A typist or pianist does not consciously think of each finger movement as it strikes the keyboard or keys. An accomplished skier does not attend consciously to such things as “skis together, weight forward and on the downhill leg, face downhill, keep arms out in front, plant the pole when turning,” and so forth. Once having learned how to balance oneself on a bicycle or unicycle, one rides these vehicles intuitively and with ease. Skilled early aviators learned how to fly “by the seat of their pants” and to feel at one with the airplane. All of the factors required for such skills are, once learned, automatic. They result from dedicated practice and the building up of habits that are no longer consciously attended to or entertained. In the foreground of one’s consciousness is the end to which the skill is directed, not the habituated means required for attaining that end. In fact, to divert attention from the end to the means would greatly inhibit the skill. Imagine having to deliberate consciously and at each successive moment about every single aspect of driving a car. Learned habits and skills free us to focus on the major tasks at hand. Of course some people are much better at teaching or acquiring a particular skill than others. A person may have a skill but have difficulty teaching it, because so much of it has to do with abilities whose operations lie deeply within the teacher and beyond his or her ability to clarify or explain. The maker of a fine musical instrument may be able to pass on the skill of creating it only to those who already possess the latent talent for such a skill, and neither the maker nor the pupil is able to explain precisely in words what the skill involves or how it is acquired. One student may grasp a complicated problem in mathematics easily while another has to struggle with it at length, perhaps never quite understanding it. Some people learn new languages with a rapidity and fluency that astonishes those not so gifted.
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Not even the most elemental skills admit of translation into explicit rules, and rare, elaborate, highly sophisticated skills are much less capable of such translation. Practitioners of such skills have the knowledge required for the skill, but only a small part of that knowledge or know-how is explicit even to them, nor does the knowledge admit of being rendered into propositions or directions that can adequately communicate or impart the skill. Much of the character and outlook of persons is constituted by their innumerable acquired skills and their routine practices of such skills, but the implicit trust in those skills may be only rarely, if ever, brought to the forefront of consciousness. Whatever explicit claims to knowledge persons may want to make will be greatly influenced by the totality of ingrained habits and skills they have acquired. When I as a philosopher, for example, write a paper on a philosophical topic, all the conceptual and argumentative skills developed over long years of teaching and writing are brought to bear on that topic. I take for granted and do not focus consciously upon a range of assumptions and approaches, a realm of discourse, and a tacit background of accumulated convictions that may initially appear strange and elusive to a person not trained in philosophy. I am made aware of how strange and elusive these things may be to those not trained in them when I endeavor to teach students being introduced to philosophy for the first time. The students’ questions and responses, and the answers they venture to give on essay tests and assigned papers, remind me of how far they have yet to go in developing skills that for me as a professional philosopher long ago became instinctive and lie in the complex but tacit background of my centered conscious reasoning. This background deeply affects not only what I am as a philosopher but also what I am as a person. It affects the whole quality and tenor of my life. The character of my life, influenced as it is by the acquired habits and skills of a philosopher (along with many other factors) also has a reciprocal effect on what I am inclined to assert, defend, and believe. Polanyi states the matter in this way: “There is present a personal component, inarticulate and passionate, which declares our standards of values, drives us to fulfill them and judges our performance by these self-set standards.” My personal faith and the pervasive values and commitments it embodies play a significant role in my claims to knowledge. What I claim to know independently of myself is strongly influenced by and evaluated in terms of what I am as a person. I indwell “like a garment of . . . [my] own skin” the “vision of reality” I draw upon to articulate and discover what lies beyond me. The “paradoxical structure” of the interpenetration of the subjective searcher and his or her “self-set standards,” on the one hand, and the objective reality searched for or described, on the other, is unavoidable. It constitutes what Polanyi calls personal knowledge, as over against a conception of so-called objective knowledge thought to lie wholly
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beyond or outside any necessary relatedness to the person laying claim to it (Polanyi 1962: 195, 64). This notion is made especially evident when I enter into a debate with another philosopher. That philosopher may bring to the debate deep-lying assumptions, predilections, approaches, habits, and skills that I do not share. I am made aware of these differences in the course of the debate, and this awareness may then extend not only to aspects of the other philosopher’s tacit background of which I am made aware in the present debate, but also to the unspoken background of my own arguments and claims. I am now made conscious of what was before unconscious—assumptions, values, commitments, standards, strategies, and so on that frame and give content to my conscious beliefs and to my explicit statements and arguments relating to those beliefs. My partner in the debate may have the same kind of awakening self-realization. And at some level, aspects of our respective faiths, as I have described the nature of faith earlier, may begin to come to the surface. Our disagreements may turn out to be not just disagreements about particular explicit beliefs but about different stances of faith. These stances may be either mainly religious or secular in character, but they are by now largely habitual and engrained in us. As habits of thought and life, they lurk below our claims to truth and are rarely attended to when we make the claims. But on some occasions, such as in the context of a debate I am now describing, the crucial role of these habits may become evident. Not all debates will probe so deeply, of course, but some of them do, and some of what before was inexplicit now becomes explicit. This is a great advance, because it can get at the heart of an issue and clarify its nature for those concerned. Once having done so, the two faiths themselves can be made the focus of inquiry in a search for mutual understanding. If the discussion is kept on a reasonable and open-minded plane, much can be learned by the debaters about the characters of and alternatives to their respective stances of faith. Such an experience may even have a mutually transforming effect, enriching and deepening the two forms of faith. At the very least, the experience can reveal how disagreement on particular claims to knowledge and reasons offered in support of those claims may point beyond themselves to entrenched and covert differences of faith, and to how the latter exert weighty influence on the former. Alternatively, the two debaters may find that they share many aspects of their respective postures of faith and that they can build out from that consensus to examine the extent to which their different claims and arguments can be reconciled with or adjudicated on the basis of what was earlier tacitly assumed but is now brought more clearly into view. The debaters recognize more distinctly than before how habits of faith can influence habits of reasoning and how fundamental commitments can influence claims to truth just as, over time, important aspects
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of such claims may influence the character and shape of the fundamental commitments. Commitment and cognition cannot be separated; they exist in reciprocal relation. 3. The languages we speak and the cultural inheritances within which we stand are also major influences on our claims to truth. They are influences so basic and pervasive in our outlooks, commitments, and lives that we are usually not explicitly aware of them. They not only affect our specific claims to knowledge and justifications of those claims in fundamental if largely imperceptible ways. They also exert powerful influence on our most deep-seated visions of reality, truth, and value and on convictions about our personal roles and responsibilities connected with these visions. We indwell our language and culture just as we indwell our animal natures and our acquired habits and skills, and our language and culture contribute immeasurably to what we are, continue to become, and seek to become as persons. They therefore contribute to the stances of faith that give central structure and direction to our lives. The stances of faith partly reflective of these influences, in their turn, are crucial but usually tacit components of our particular claims to knowledge. So language, culture, knowledge, and faith are mutually entwined. Our claims and justifications do not stand alone but are enmeshed in other factors lying behind the scenes, including the factor of our personal faith, whatever that may be. I do not argue that language and culture entrap us. They do not constitute the entirety of our world, nor do they finally determine all of our beliefs. But they do provide the necessary context within which we develop our claims to knowledge. And much of that context influences us unawares. Necessity, however, is not sufficiency. Despite the fact that we are tacitly committed to both our language and culture as we go about developing our personal worldviews and stances of faith, we also have room for independence of thought and action. Each person shapes language and culture in different ways as he or she develops a perspective upon the world and norms and purposes for living in the world. Some persons do so more than others, and geniuses in various fields—poetry, science, and philosophy, for example—do so in markedly provocative and innovative ways. But all remain tacitly influenced and constrained, as well as being given opportunity for selfdevelopment and self-expression, by their linguistic and cultural contexts. These contexts provide raw materials for creativity and innovation, and they nurture and sustain us throughout our lives. Most of the implicit commitments, outlooks, and values built into our languages and cultures remain transparent to and unacknowledged by us even as we go about molding and shaping them by putting them constantly to use. We repose implicit day-to-day trust in them, and at the deepest level they help to inform and to give character to our personal faith and thus to the overall quality of our lives. That faith, so structured and informed, then acts as the deep-lying
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background against which we frame our particular beliefs, modes of justification, and claims to knowledge. When made fully and personally our own, faith can also be a platform for critically evaluating aspects of our language and culture and for freeing us from being so bound to them that we fail to think for ourselves or to appraise claims to truth in an independent manner. It can give us courage in doing so and the kind of trust in ourselves and in the resources available to us for us to venture to do so. It can impart to us an overarching attitude of hope. Our faith can also help to provide the courage, trust, resourcefulness, and hope needed in order to work with others of like commitment and mind to challenge established conventions and claims and the practices that may rise out of them. Thus, faith can be a basis for independence of thought and action that at least partially transcends the normal constraints of language and culture, enabling us to put both of them to use in novel, creative ways. Our implicit trust in language and culture is made especially evident to us when we come into contact with persons of a different language and culture. That trust can be shaken by such encounters, and experiencing them can tempt us to retreat into a heavily defended castle of what we instinctively assume as inhabitants of our own language and culture. But these encounters can also be stimulants to new ways of thinking, not only by posing striking alternatives to our old ways of thinking but also by making us aware of how these old ways have been tacitly shaped by the distinctive character of our native language and culture. These encounters can lead, among other things, to new ways of critically assessing the adequacy of our habitual faith stances and of potentially altering or enriching them by comparing and contrasting them with stances molded and developed in other kinds of language and culture. What was before largely unconscious and taken for granted can thus be brought more clearly and fully into view. Aspects of one’s claims to knowledge that were before mostly blindly adhered to are now made objects of clearer sight. One’s critical faculties are sharpened by new challenges, problems, and opportunities. And elements of the personal faith implicitly operative in one’s claims to knowledge are now exposed for fresh examination and judgment. But one must continue to rely in the final analysis on the language and culture which one indwells, even as one subjects aspects of them to critical scrutiny and alteration. And one’s personal faith will continue to inform at deep levels this scrutiny and alteration even as aspects of that faith may also be brought into critical perspective. One can no more leap completely out of one’s language, culture, or faith than one can leap out of one’s skin. No matter what changes are made, there always will be persistent carryovers in the midst of the changes. This statement remains true even in cases of conversion from one form of existential faith to another. No matter how transformative the con-
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version experience may be, it will take much of the old language, culture, and faith into its new form, including assumptions, habits, values, and the like of which the person undergoing the conversion will not be fully aware. There is a new centering, to be sure, and it may have radical effects on the person’s outlook, commitments, and life. But the new centering will take place within continuing contexts of language and culture, and within tacitly enduring aspects of the old faith. None of these things can be left completely behind; all provide materials and resources that are necessarily brought forward into the altered form of life. 4. Most of what counts as knowledge for us at any given time is what we accept from the claims of others. We accept these claims because we have confidence in the relevant abilities, skills, and backgrounds of the claimants and in their honesty and trustworthiness. It would be impossible for anyone to confirm at firsthand all that must be assumed in order to think and live in the present world. The fund of commonly assumed and accepted knowledge is too complex and vast for anyone to be master of it all. It is an indispensable part of the language and culture that surround us on every hand and thus of the context required for whatever types of investigation or inquiry in which we may be personally involved. Knowledge requires a social context, therefore, and one that is generally more implicit than explicit in its influences on thought and action. In innumerable ways, we have to accept what others claim to know along with the justifications they allege in support to their claims. Without such wide-ranging trust, all but the most elementary kinds of firsthand claims to knowledge would be impossible. At an even deeper level, we have to assume that others exist and that they have minds similar to our own. Even so penetratingly original and astute a philosopher as Immanuel Kant never found it necessary to question or defend his assumption that other minds exist and that they are structured exactly as his own mind, at least with respect to their most basic capacities, categories, and modes of operation. This assumption is central to his whole program of critical philosophy or his proclaimed Copernican revolution in philosophical thought (Kant 1958: 22). Kant reposed unquestioning confidence, that is to say, in the existence of others with whom he could communicate and reason, others with minds similar in basic respects to his own. A proof is not really a proof in philosophy or any other domain if it fails to convince anyone but oneself. And truth is not really truth if its range is restricted to oneself. Statements such as “This is true for me but for no one else,” or “It does not matter whether anyone else accepts my claim to truth” fail to comprehend the meaning of truth. They fail so completely that they must be seen, on careful examination, to be contradictory. These observations point in another way to the large amount of assumption that enters tacitly into our searches for knowledge and our claims to knowledge. The need for justifications for our claims to knowledge has
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itself a social reference because justification is a social enterprise. I present a claim to those competent to understand, and I accompany my claim with an attempted justification that I assume they are competent to assess. I do so within a linguistic and cultural environment that has major components common to us in this context of inquiry. Confidence in the existence, competence, and commonalities of others is logically antecedent to all inquiry, to all claims to truth, and to all attempted justifications of those claims even though it can also be reinforced and confirmed as our inquiries and affirmations are discussed and shared. The fact that at least some competent others will need to be convinced if our claims have any semblance of acceptability as being true also brings to light the risk implicit in claims to new knowledge. We have to accept this risk for failing to convince others if we are to make any contributions to the fund of accepted knowledge. We must have, that is to say, the courage of our convictions, a courage that is given strength and character by our personal faith. Confidence in ourselves and in the honesty, integrity, and receptivity of others are thus constitutive elements not only in claims to knowledge but also in the comprehensive existential faith that makes us who and what we are. Without such confidence, very little in the way of significant contributions to knowledge can take place, just as, without it, it would be difficult in the extreme to live effectively in the social world. If we cannot face up boldly to risk, uncertainty, and the possibility of failure in our ongoing inquiries and ventured claims to truth, little will be accomplished in those areas. And if we cannot assume the truth of most of what others tell us, we are left with the hopeless task of trying to invent all truth from scratch. When I fly in an airplane, for example, I place my confidence in those who know how to design and fly airplanes. I do not need to be an aeronautic engineer or trained pilot. Nor do I need to know at firsthand what such people claim to know and to be justified in knowing. I repose tacit confidence in their knowledge and understanding, and in the skills required to put that knowledge and understanding to use. Our personal faith, and the confidence and trust in oneself and others that can grow out of it and give expression to it, are also important to our search for knowledge in another way. We seek to know what is true because we want to know what is worth entrusting our lives to at the most fundamental level. Our faith seeks understanding. Louis Dupré remarks that even on the most elemental level religious feeling “urges on to reflection” (Dupré 1972: 36). What he says is true of all forms of faith, religious or otherwise. Faith has a built-in impetus toward knowledge because it craves for a content of belief that can give reliable conceptual structure and character to the world and to the living of one’s life in the world. Blind faith will not do for persons of committed and questing faith, because it is arbitrary and without support. One cannot live a responsible and meaningful life by
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tosses of the die. A viable faith must of course be able to take seriously into account the convictions of others and the proffered reasons for those convictions, but it cannot ground itself merely in the unquestioned claimed authority of those convictions. Persons of faith must be able to think for themselves, because only by doing so can their faith become truly their own. And only by doing so can they fully engage the intellectual or rational parts of their natures. Nevertheless, truth has an ineliminable social character, as we have already seen. It is necessary that the search for truth take place not just in solitude (although that too is important) but also in consultation and conversation with others, because the justifications required for reliable claims to truth must be ones that others can comprehend and endeavor to confirm. It is one thing to rely uncritically on the authority of others. It is another thing to search for truth in concert with others—not just others of the present but others of the past and those who have helped to build traditions of the past, including traditions that persist into the present—and to take their claims and arguments fully into account when seeking truths satisfactory to oneself. This procedure is of vital importance when seeking truths to guide the whole focus and direction of one’s life. So we find ourselves in need of relying to a considerable extent on what others have found to be true in the course of our daily lives, and we need to recognize that our personal claims to truth must be brought to the test of the critical judgments of others who are competent to make such judgments. But most importantly, we must work strenuously to make claims to truth in the realm of existential faith genuinely our own, even as we investigate such claims in community with other persons of the present and the past who address or have addressed issues connected with these claims. Trust in the honesty, competence, and fair-mindedness of others is an essential tacit component in such investigations, as it is in most of the affairs of everyday life. Such trust can be undergirded even as it is also presupposed and built upon by existential faith. 5. A fifth tacit assumption in our search for knowledge and claims to knowledge is that of the order and intelligibility of the universe and of our capability of gaining at least some degree of understanding of the universe. Even the convinced skeptic must make this assumption, because the skeptic arrives at and announces his conclusions based on arguments the skeptic assumes will make sense to others as well as to him or her—others whom the skeptic believes to exist along with the skeptic in some kind of common, at least partially intelligible world. Were this not so, there would be no point, and in fact a flat-out contradiction, in trying by speaking or writing to convince others of the unavoidability of skepticism. Polanyi argues to this effect when he says, “Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely
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the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs” (Polanyi 1962: 297). His position is finally no different, then, from the non-skeptic who presents and defends arguments for his or her position. Implicit confidence in some kind of intelligibility in the world, in some reliable processes of reasoning about the world, and in the capacity of others to weigh the outcomes of such reasoning is necessarily operative in both cases. Ultimately, both skepticism and non-skepticism are faith stances, at least to the extent that they grow out of and are allowed to affect the whole quality and tenor of one’s life. The confidence of either position in an intelligible world or in the receptivity of competent others to argumentation about the world cannot, without the circularity of tacitly appealing to what is to be proved or disproved, be finally confirmed. But the circularity of skepticism, seen as a total way of life and a comprehensive posture of faith, is self-stultifying in a way that the circularity of non-skepticism is not. We saw this earlier in the case of David Hume’s skeptical program, a program that he himself conceded could not be put successfully into practice. There is no escape, therefore, from confidence in some measure of intelligibility of the world and in our ability as human beings to gain reliable knowledge about at least some important aspects of the world. Such confidence is implicit in all claims to knowledge and in all attempts to justify such claims. And at bottom it reflects an underlying stance of faith, especially to the extent that a stance of faith—whether it is skeptical or non-skeptical, religious or nonreligious—is articulated and defended in the form of specific beliefs and as part of a proposed comprehensive worldview. Even if the skeptical faith stance is not explicitly defended but only reluctantly assumed, the assumption itself is still open to critical analysis and counter-argument. The fact that we can acknowledge that it is susceptible to argument reveals once again the underlying and inescapable conviction that the world is intelligible and that we are capable of discerning important aspects of its character, whatever that character may turn out to be. How might confirmed skeptics respond to these observations? They might concede that epistemological skepticism cannot be defended without contradiction and try to make their case on that ground alone, that is, that claims to knowledge finally make no sense. But they also might opt to argue and to conclude—without the need to advocate epistemological skepticism—that experience and reason can show life itself to be absurd and not worth living, and thus deny that any positive stance of existential faith is rationally defensible. In another work (Crosby 1988) I have tried to show, however, that arguments in support of such existential nihilism and of the destruction of faith in the meaning of life it entails can often be found to rest on unrecognized but wide-ranging assumptions that should be called seriously into question.
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Hence, a tacit appeal is being made to convictions that lie below the surface of awareness but that can be shown to be controversial and debatable when brought into the light of day and made subject to conscious examination. Paradoxically, not only is trust in such tacit assumptions required but also an appreciable amount of confidence is needed in the nascent worldview and encompassing faith that may be implicit in those assumptions—no matter how negatively inclined that faith may be—even as one concludes that existential faith is without justification and therefore that existential nihilism or wholesale despair of the meaning of life is warranted. Particularly relevant to our purposes in this discussion is the fact that existential nihilists who present and argue for their outlook, as is the case with skeptics of any stripe who choose to articulate and defend their views, must assume some intelligibility in the world, a capability in themselves to attain knowledge of the world, and an ability in others to respond to their proposed reasoning about the character of the world. 6. Finally, we should not neglect to take note of the passions, purposes, and values implicit in the search for the truth, in claims to truth, and in arguments given in support of these claims. It is important that we do so in order to continue to counter the notion that knowledge and faith, or reason and faith, are antithetical to each other. Behind this notion is the idea that faith is something arbitrary, willful, emotional, and freighted with personal commitments and values, while knowledge, rightly regarded, is something impersonal, value-free, and distinct from mere subjective predilection or intent. According to this way of looking at the matter, facts are rigidly separate from values, and rationality is an entirely different thing from emotion. But responsible claims to knowledge are not the impersonal, coldly calculated, and purely objective things they are often thought ideally to be. Emotions are involved, specific purposes are served, and values are acted on whenever we attempt to establish or evaluate such claims. These three factors are indispensable parts of the claims’ tacit background. This is so primarily because there are no truths without commitments to statements as true. As we saw earlier and as Polanyi insightfully insists, all knowledge is personal in the sense that it is affirmed by persons and ultimately based on deep-lying assumptions and commitments within those persons, including those reflective of and rooted within their personal forms of faith. Responsible truths are those for which individuals must take personal responsibility, implicitly or explicitly. And it is they, in the final analysis, who set the standards for judging and justifying those truths even as they reach out beyond themselves to lay hold of truths not confined to them. “Every factual statement,” Polanyi affirms, “embodies some measure of responsible judgment as the personal pole of the commitment in which it is affirmed.”
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There is also a nonpersonal pole of truths beyond the self for which one seeks justification, but it and the personal pole are bound inextricably together. All truth, in other words, is truth in relation. Thus commitment is “the only path for approaching the universally valid” (Polanyi 1962: 312, 303). Because personal involvement and commitment are inescapable both in the search for knowledge and in claims to knowledge, emotional, intentional, and valuative factors also are necessarily involved. We crave satisfaction of our desire to know. There is a thrill when we resolve a difficult puzzle or problem and feelings of frustration and disappointment when we fail to do so. A theory we have long endeavored to formulate and discover has the allure of beauty about it when it is found, and this allure may be a significant part of our reason for affirming it. Creative thinkers in particular fields of inquiry are passionate in their search for truth; without such driving passion, intention, and motivation, few if any significant new truths within the field would be found. The search for truth is purposive because it has the end of truth in view. And humans would not crave knowledge to the extent they do did they not highly value it, value it so intensely in some cases as to devote considerable amounts of their time and energy, if not their entire lives, to pursuit of it. Truth and value cannot be rigorously distinguished because truth is a fundamental type of value, as the whole history of fervent human aspirations toward truth, and often toward types of self-contained truth with no perceptible immediate day-to-day applications, so clearly shows. Aristotle long ago took note of the fact that human beings deeply desire to attain knowledge, and thus that they take delight in their senses and love them for themselves and for what they reveal about the world, not just for their utility (Aristotle 1941: A, 1, 980a, p. 689). Charles Hartshorne argues that “the idea of neutral, non-appreciative awareness—‘bare awareness,’ it might be called—is a self-contradictory abstraction” and that “apart from factors of motive and valuation, apart from aesthetic and emotional aspects, nothing recognizable remains of consciousness or experience” (Hartshorne 1934: 108; quoted in Dombrowski 2004: 85). The same must be affirmed of knowledge and the search for knowledge: motive, valuation, and emotion are necessarily involved in conscious endeavors to arrive at truth. Robert Solomon’s statement regarding the relation of emotion to reason is pertinent and convincing: Among the many meanings that have been suggested for the concepts of reason and rationality, none has been more destructive than those that systematically oppose reason to emotion, that is, to oppose rationality as reasonableness to being emotional as being unreasonable. . . . I think that this opposition between rationality and
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emotion needs to be reconsidered, and the priority of dispassionate (or passionless) reason deeply questioned. (Solomon 2002: 70) One way to understand and acknowledge the point of Solomon’s statement, and to broaden it beyond emotion to the factors of volition and value, is to consider the role of felt intuition in the search for and discovery of knowledge. Much that now counts as knowledge was vague and inexplicit before it became explicit. It began with someone’s felt surmises and hunches, with intimations that seductively eluded clear articulation. There were beckoning possibilities of truth that lurked in the dim background of awareness, suffusing it with emotional overtones. A person’s intentionality or will at some time seized on these possibilities, endeavoring to bring them to the surface and make them clearly understandable and considerable as candidates for knowledge. Valuation was obviously operative because the person was committed to the task at hand as something important and worth carrying out. Teased by provocative and insistent hints of truth, the person sought to bring them into focused awareness. The role of intuition in the search for knowledge as thus described is analogous to our endeavor to remember something we have forgotten. Let us say we are trying to remember where we left our watch or keys sometime during the previous evening. The memory lies just over the threshold of our conscious awareness, taunting us as we struggle to recover it. It may take time to do so, but when we succeed the memory pops into consciousness and we have the recollection we sought. The case is similar with the intuitive sources of knowledge. Vague, seductive hunches and intimations may finally bear fruit as we persistently subject them to inquiry. We succeed in expressing what before we only dimly perceived. We are purposive throughout our search for the elusive candidate for truth, our feelings are powerfully aroused and engaged by the haunting intuition, and we yearn for its articulation as something important and valuable. Once articulated, the candidate for truth is capable of being critically assessed by being brought before the personal and public courts of consciously directed experience and reason. The process of thinking that brings us to this outcome is not exclusively intellectual; it has components of emotional sensitivity, resolute intentionality, and pursuit of value. And since its adjudication, both by oneself and others, requires indwelling personal judgments, these three components will continue to be involved. The elements of affect, intention, and value involved in claims to truth become especially evident when persons try their best to convince others of the truth of certain beliefs. It is obviously important to them that others accept the claims as true. They may argue for the claims with
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great intensity and passion. When I was a young professor an older and wiser colleague advised that I should take careful note of when people in a discussion become particularly adamant and unyielding in pressing their claims. This means, the older colleague pointed out, that a lot is riding on the claims for such persons and that I should try to understand why they are so deeply concerned that the claims be accepted as true. The same point holds, he went on to say, about oneself when involved in discussions where issues come to be argued with great fervor and one finds oneself also to be unusually persistent, intense, and impatient in trying to drive home one’s own claims. “Try to figure out what is going on behind the scenes of the claims themselves,” he enjoined. “And do so for yourself as well as others. What is the underlying issue (or issues) at stake? Is there more to the differing claims than what lies on their surfaces? Why am I or another participant in the discussion becoming so emotionally aroused in presenting our respective claims?” Applying his excellent advice and these questions to myself as well as to others, I often find the answer to be subtle and hard to pin down. Some gnawing concern about one’s self-image or self-esteem may be involved. Or, more deeply, something about one’s whole purchase on and perspective on life may be threatened, in ways of which one is not fully aware. One may be troubled about suspected inconsistencies in one’s commitments and beliefs that are being brought to the surface in the discussion, inconsistencies one does not want to admit to oneself and certainly not to others. Or the difficulty might be that someone, possibly including oneself, may be becoming increasingly frustrated by being unable clearly to articulate certain cherished beliefs or by being unable to find ways to make them as convincing to others as they have up to now appeared to oneself. One might even begin to suspect, as one persists in trying to argue for the claims in question, that one does not really have completely convincing or perhaps even plausible reasons for accepting them or the pattern of assumptions one begins to discern as underlying them. The general lesson of my colleague’s advice, then, is that complex factors of intention, emotion, and aim in presenting claims and arguments may be hidden from view. It is important that one give attention to this possibility both in oneself and in others, and that one try to discern the actual nature of the discussion as it affects the participants at some level deeper than that of the overt topics under discussion. Whatever lies at the heart of the disagreements between or among participants in a discussion is something well worth attending to, just as I noted earlier in reflecting on my debates with fellow philosophers. The topics at the center of awareness may be fringed by unconscious assumptions, problems, concerns, frustrations, fears, aspirations, and the like that are not plainly evident in the discus-
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sions themselves—even to the discussants—but that profoundly affect the developing character of the discussions. Matters relating to the personal worldviews and faith stances of the participants may be provoked, jarred loose, and unearthed by aspects of the specific topics being discussed or by unexpected directions the discussion begins to take. And the participants’ emotions, purposes, and values—perhaps even some basic to their general sense of personhood and well-being—may be threatened in ways of which the discussants are only faintly aware. As emphasized earlier, therefore, behind claims to truth are persons making the claims and at least implicitly having to take responsibility for them. It should come as no surprise that features of the overall quality of these persons’ lives or of their respective stances of faith enter into the claims and arguments they set forth. What looks only like an isolated or particular assertion or argument may hide issues of a more complex and comprehensive character. I can use a personal example to make this point. When I argue, as I sometimes do, for the position known in philosophical circles as noncompatibilist or libertarian free will, I tend to do so with particularly fervent passion and conviction. I ask myself why this is the case, and I realize that much of my general view of life rests rather heavily on this position. If we are not genuinely free, in the sense in which I use the term free, then at least for me life would not be worth living. I am deeply desirous of having some degree of personal control over my own life and of believing that human history and the future of human beings allow for significant amounts of deliberate control of events and outcomes. Determinism and its compatibilist version hold up the specter before me of being a puppet or automaton, or of unconsciously living out some kind of posthypnotic suggestion. I am comfortable with cause–effect relations providing the necessary context for acts of freedom, contexts without which freedom itself would be admittedly be unintelligible, but I cannot with equanimity accept the notion that everything is causally determined and that there is no place in the universe for real chance or novelty, or for free acts of the human will in the noncompatibilist or libertarian sense of free.10 And yet, I am also well aware that many if not most contemporary philosophers seem quite comfortable with the compatibilist view and argue with calm assurance and stubborn insistence for its truth. I suspect that more than strict reasoning is involved in this disagreement for them as for me. It is not so much arguments as differences in fundamental temperaments or perspectives that finally decide the issue for particular persons. There seems to be a strong need on the part of some thinkers to envision the world as a closed causal system and humans as part of that system. This view used to be undergirded by theology in its conviction and assurance that God
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exercises complete control over past, present, and future. More recently, it has been given credibility and support by the impressive successes of the natural sciences in examining causal laws and causal factors underlying events. The universe is evidently seen as somehow chaotic, undependable, or even unintelligible by some persons if there is admitted to be such a thing as chance or freedom, and it is this root conviction, accompanied perhaps by a covert emotional repulsion felt with regard to its alternative, that may guide their arguments for determinism at a deeper level than that of the arguments themselves. In other words, elements of their personal stances of faith or their most comprehensive senses of orientation within the world and visions of the world may well be at stake. With respect to either case—that of my own assertions and views or that of the assertions and views of others who disagree fundamentally with me on this issue—I am arguing here that our respective points of view cannot be rigorously separated from the full gamut of who we are and of what we tenaciously if not always consciously or explicitly hold most dear. I realize that I may be accused of committing an ad hominem fallacy in arguing in this manner, but the notion of personal knowledge with which I am working and which Polanyi and others have defended makes the parameters of the commission or noncommission of this fallacy less clear than we might in our uncritical moments have thought them to be. In this chapter I examined the role of knowledge in faith and the role of faith in knowledge in general. I have tried to exhibit the inseparability of the two, whether the focus is on faith’s seeking understanding or on the reliance at critical points of the search for knowledge and claims to knowledge on some form of faith. I also have taken issue with the idea that reliable knowledge is or should be regarded as wholly impersonal or “objective” and thus as cleanly separable from commitments, passions, purposes, or values of the claimants to such knowledge. In place of this idea, which I regard as untenable, I have developed, defended, and adapted for the purposes of this chapter a version of what Michael Polanyi calls personal knowledge. In the next chapter I take up again the theme of the role of existential faith in knowledge by directing attention to the more specific subject of claims to knowledge in the natural sciences and to the indispensable role in these claims of underlying forms of faith.
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Science cannot stand alone. We cannot believe its propositions without first believing in a great many other startling things, such as the existence of the external world, the reliability of our senses, memory and informants, and the validity of logic. If we do believe in these things, we already have a world far wider than that of science. —Mary Midgley1
Ours is a scientific age. This is perhaps still truer for some places on our planet than for others. But it is unquestionably true that scientific ideas, theories, technologies, approaches, and the like are reaching across cultural differences and having decisive impacts throughout the world. The historical development we now routinely label globalization has its roots not only in such things as the intricacies of worldwide economic interdependence and trade and the ease of travel and communication, but also in what increasingly is coming to be acknowledged as a shared scientific view of natural laws and physical processes, organic structures, and operations including those of the human brain, medical diagnosis and treatment, and the nature of the physical cosmos as a whole to the extent that it is amenable to scientific investigation. The particularities of culturally engrained outlooks and beliefs seem to be increasingly transcended by the global reach of scientific ones and by the technological achievements ongoing investigations of the natural sciences have helped to make possible. These developments have lent credence to the notion that the natural sciences are somehow above the fray of entrenched cultural differences and disagreements, and that they are “objective” in a way that other aspects of culture are not, mired as the latter are often thought to be in outmoded, idiosyncratic, culturally relative, and mere “subjective” modes of thought. Whereas it used to be assumed that religion is “the tie that binds,” that tie
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now is assumed in some quarters to be more fittingly and exclusively the natural sciences. It is further assumed by some that religion and science stand in stark opposition to one another. These same people often tend to identify religion with faith, and faith with a set of poorly supported or unsupportable beliefs, and thus to conclude that science and faith have nothing to do with one another. I have tried in earlier chapters to cast serious doubt on much of this picture of faith and of the natural sciences in their relations to faith. I do not deny the worldwide reach of the natural sciences, that this is a highly significant fact of our time, and that it may help to bring people of different cultures together. But I do reject the notions that the natural sciences alone are equipped to bind the world’s peoples together, that they are purely objective and culture-independent in a way that other aspects of cultures are not, that faith and religion come down to the same thing, and that science has or should have nothing to do with faith. I am particularly intent on defending the notion that all aspects of human thought, including the natural sciences, are dependent at crucial points on faith as I conceive it and that faith thus conceived is not the exclusive province of religion.
A NARROW VIEW OF THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND FAITH AND REASONS FOR OPPOSING IT The view of the relations of science and faith I oppose can be brought into clearer view by considering a version of it set forth and argued for by the philosopher Susan Haack in her book Defending Science within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. She writes, I hadn’t forgotten that according to some philosophers, among them both Peirce and Popper, belief has no place in science. I agree that faith, in the religious sense, does not belong in science; though in their professional capacity scientists accept various claims as true, this usually is, or should be, tentative and always in principle revisable in the light of new evidence. (Haack 2007: 62) Several things should be noted about this statement. One is that Haack assumes that faith and belief are synonymous. A second is that faith is identified, at least for her purposes here, with religion. And a third is that scientific claims are said to be revisable in principle in light of new evidence, whereas religious ones are not. These ideas are given further expression and endorsement when she states that Religion, unlike science, is not primarily a kind of inquiry, but a body of belief—“creed”—is the word that comes to mind. . . . Religious belief is supposed to be, not tentative or hedged, but a profound,
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and profoundly personal, commitment. To disbelieve, or to believe wrongly, is sinful, and faith, i.e., commitment in the absence of compelling evidence, often conceived as a virtue. . . . By contrast, although in their professional capacity scientists sometimes accept many propositions as true—some of them very confidently and firmly, and not a few pretty dogmatically—faith, in the religious sense, is alien to the scientific enterprise. This is why it sometimes said that belief has no place in science. (Haack 2007: 267) By “belief” in this last sentence she means to refer to “faith” in the previous one. And although she admits that scientists accept many propositions, some of them “confidently and firmly” if not “pretty dogmatically” adhered to, these propositions apparently do not count as beliefs in the sense that belief can be said to be an expression of faith. Another significant contrast Haack claims to obtain between religion—with what she alleges to be its reliance on faith defined as “commitment in the absence of compelling evidence”—and science is contained in the following statements. In them she tries to make clearer what she means by her claim that faith or belief has no place in scientific propositions or scientific reasoning. She asserts that although religion relies on “evidential resources beyond sensory experience and reasoning, most importantly on religious experience and the authority of revealed texts,” inquiry in science “relies on experience and reasoning” and requires “no additional kinds of evidential resource beyond these, which are also the resources on which everyday empirical inquiry depends.” She also insists that, unlike religion, “Science is not primarily a body of belief, but a federation of kinds of inquiry” (Haack 2007: 266; see also x, 312). But of course science has numerous substantive beliefs upheld over significant periods of time, and religion allows for and exhibits ongoing inquiry, as the history of religions clearly shows. Religious inquiry generally seeks to take into account, as it must, the evidential resources of ordinary, broad-based experience and reasoning in its search for a comprehensive vision of the world and the place of human beings in the world. It does not just appeal to separate or isolable religious experiences or to authoritative texts. Although some extremely insular or conservative religious persons or outlooks may approximate to Haack’s description, many do not. We also should note in passing that religious experience or religious dimensions of experience may put us in touch with matters of great value and importance, whereas ancient texts may contain penetrating wisdom about ourselves and the world from which we have much to learn. The two should not be brushed so peremptorily aside.2 Moreover, existential faith, as I have been characterizing it here, is not blind acquiescence to external authority, and it does not just consist of creeds or propositional beliefs.
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Haack’s conception of faith is shown to be even narrower than I have depicted it so far when she not only identifies faith with religion but also tends to assume throughout her volume an identity of religion, as she discusses it, with traditional Christian theism. She somewhat reluctantly admits that theology can be recognized as a kind of religious inquiry but fails to take sufficiently into account that not all religious inquiry is theological, in that term’s sense of inquiring into the nature of God (Greek: theos) and God’s relations to the world (Haack 2007: x, 266–67). There are, after all, nontheistic religions such as Taoism, early Buddhism, and versions of religious naturalism. Most importantly, she fails to understand that existential faith underlies and frames specific claims to scientific knowledge, which is what I intend now to show in greater detail but have already sought to show with respect to knowledge in general. If what I am contending and will continue to argue for holds true, then the sharp opposition between science and faith Haack so adamantly insists on must be rejected. The concept of faithful reason that is a central theme of this book will be upheld, and it will be shown to apply as fully to scientific investigations and claims to knowledge as it does to all other types of investigation and knowledge. Implicit in these points is that science is not the impersonal, detached, self-sufficient, self-contained, and wholly objective enterprise it is sometimes assumed to be but is itself a prominent example of what Polanyi calls personal knowledge. That is to say, it rises out of the perspectives of persons and exists in intimate relation to these persons’ perspectives, together with all of the commitments, assumptions, values, purposes, hopes, aspirations, and the like characterizing the persons in their engagements in scientific inquiry and claims to scientific knowledge. In making this observation, I do not in any way mean to impugn the importance or reliability of the natural sciences but only to describe what I regard as their true character. These sciences have distinctive tasks to perform, but in doing so they do not escape the conditions under which other claimants to knowledge have to operate. Nor do they escape critical reliance on elements of existential faith. It is not so much that I regard each and every tacit assumption, unconscious commitment, or habitual way of thinking or acting on the part of individual scientists as itself a distinctive act of faith. What I claim instead is that the most firmly held but generally unspoken and unacknowledged assumptions, commitments, loyalties, habits of thinking, and the like that lie behind scientists’ particular inquiries and assertions about the world—when taken not in isolation but together—bring into focus significant aspects of the overall quality, orientation, and outlook of their lives. These tacit outlooks and dispositions are deeply rooted in who the scientists are, not merely as purveyors of knowledge, but as whole persons. And whole persons, as I argued earlier, are persons of faith.
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Before I proceed to examine the role of faith in scientific claims to knowledge, let me set forth again the conception of existential faith with which I am working throughout this book. It is important that we keep this conception of faith in mind as we continue to analyze its crucial role in claims to knowledge. One’s faith is the ultimate source and focus of meaning, importance, and value in one’s life. It is one’s most basic and compelling vision of what the universe is like and of what one’s place and responsibility are within the universe. It informs every aspect of how one feels, how one chooses, and how one lives. It defines what one yearns to achieve and become at the deepest levels of one’s being. It is the most fundamental character, quality, and direction of one’s life. Faith’s principal elements are worldview, trust, devotion, hope, courage, and an always searching and questioning doubt. It is what finally empowers one to continue to affirm one’s life in the face of life’s most formidable challenges and demands, threats and uncertainties, distresses and sorrows. Faith may be religious and often is, but it need not be. There is secular faith as well as religious faith. In either case, it is the central purpose of one’s life and the focal point of one’s orientation to the world. Everything that one is or does stems finally from it and refers finally back to it. One can speak meaningfully about the character of one’s faith and should strive to do so, but faith also has an intractable aspect of mystery or transcendence. Not everything about it admits of clear articulation or expression. There is a keenly felt but stubbornly elusive quality about faith, an urgent, gripping, suffusing sense of decisive importance, assurance, and demand that can only be put partly and sometimes only quite haltingly into words. Faith not only has a tacit dimension of its own, it is the deepest lying, more often than not tacit background of all that a person is or does.
FACTORS UNDERLYING CLAIMS TO KNOWLEDGE IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES The six factors I argued in the previous chapter to lie under all claims to knowledge and to rest finally on stances of personal and communally shared forms of existential faith also lie at the basis of claims to truth in the natural sciences. I want to defend this allegation in some detail by looking now at how aspects of each of the six factors enter into and influence the ongoing work of practicing scientists. We sometimes hear on television and radio, or read in newspapers and magazines, the statement that science has now shown such and such to be the case. But the term science in such statements is an abstraction. Science does not do anything. It does not make pronouncements, address and resolve problems, or establish claims to knowledge. It is particular scientists who do these things. Science is not—despite the ways in which it is sometimes carelessly presented or talked about—a
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disembodied entity, an impersonal single method, or a compendium of indisputable findings but a collective term for persons engaged in a wide variety of specialized activities and for what these persons tend to regard as appropriate methods, current theories, ongoing investigations, and open questions in their respective fields of inquiry. In other words, scientists are first and foremost human beings and only secondarily professionals engaged in a particular kind of work. This is true of participants in all lines of work and endeavor. Scientists are no exception. It is essential for us to note, therefore, that scientists were required to live effectively in the world as children and young adults and to have appropriate and sustaining basic attitudes toward the world long before they became mature practicing scientists. And as whole persons they must continue to do so. This point reminds us of the first of the six factors discussed in the preceding chapter, namely, animal faith or the instinctive attitudes and capabilities all humans share with animals that lack language. Among the aspects of animal faith I indicated earlier is reliance on the five senses as essential sources of awareness and means of adjustment to the natural environment. I want to focus on this aspect in order to call attention to its critical bearing on the day-to-day work of scientists. Haack comments that “the evidence of the senses ultimately anchors our theories in the world; it is a real constraint” (Haack 2007: 125). This statement is every bit as true for scientists as it is for nonscientists. Reliance on sensate experience is crucial to scientific theories because it constitutes the empirical basis on which these theories are confirmed or disconfirmed, a basis without which no scientific theory can be regarded as a satisfactory theory. This reliance is presupposed by the natural sciences. It is a larger framework in which they function. There can be no ultimate scientific proof of this reliance because all scientific proofs must finally take it for granted. It might be objected that natural scientists have shown a number of inferences from sensate experience to be false. For example, they have shown that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that the sky is not positioned over the earth like a blue canopy or dome, even though our uninformed senses seem to tell us plainly that these things are true. Furthermore, scientists have developed complicated arguments claiming the existence of billions of galaxies in the far reaches of space, even though these supposed galaxies cannot be directly observed or identified as such by the naked eye. They also have provided convincing evidence for the existence of atoms with particular atomic numbers and weights and for astoundingly small entities, structures, and processes comprising atoms, despite the fact that the atoms themselves lie far beneath the range of our unaided senses. And they have created instruments that greatly expand the scope and accuracy of sensate experience, radically revising what can be detected by ordinary sensation. Such things as tracks in a cloud chamber, a magnetic
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resonance image, or x-ray crystallography photographic plates mean little or nothing to those uninitiated into the relevant scientific theories. It is not sensate experience as such, therefore, but scientifically interpreted and instrumentally refined, directed, and corrected sensate experience that is important in science. Scientists must, or so the objection goes, be guardedly skeptical about the immediate deliverances of the five senses, not uncritically dependent on them. These observations do not detract in the least, however, from the fundamental point that scientists must tacitly assume, at critical junctures, the reliability of their five senses. All of their theories must be cashed out in something that can be publicly observed and pondered—meter readings, measurements, graphs, photographs, spectrum lines, data on computer screens, and the like. Convincing scientific theories must make specific and precise predictions, and these predictions must be empirically confirmed. Without their five senses, moreover, scientists would be unable to communicate with one another. There could be no scientific conferences, journals, or cooperative work in laboratories. This aspect of animal faith is necessary for science to proceed. It is not and cannot be proved by scientists. It rather must be presumed by them. Scientists cannot be universal skeptics about sensate experience and still be scientists. The point about scientists having often to supplement ordinary sensate experience with complex instrumentation and with sometimes highly elaborate patterns of theoretical interpretation puts us in mind of the importance of acquired habits and skills in scientific thinking and practice. This is the second factor underlying claims to knowledge I discussed in the previous chapter. It not only is the case that scientific observations generally are guided by theoretical assumptions of which practicing scientists may not be immediately aware. It also is the case that the instruments on which scientists depend for confirmation of particular theories are themselves the products of theoretical outlook and assumption. These instruments usually are designed for specific purposes that depend for their cogency and intelligibility on an unarticulated network of expectations, beliefs, habits, and skills. By long education in the accepted outlooks, principles, theories, and beliefs of the scientific community as a whole, individual scientists become accustomed, not merely to seeing, but to seeing-as. That is, they may be baffled initially by what they observe in such things as cloud chambers, computer readouts, mathematical formulas, electron microscopes, or photographic plates, but over time they become accustomed to seeing what is deemed to be scientifically relevant in those things. In this way, they acquire the indispensable habits and skills of the practicing scientist in a particular field. Not everyone can learn these habits and skills. They require special kinds of aptitude, interest, discipline, and commitment. There are tacit
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elements in the teaching and learning of them that cannot be expressed by explicit directions or rules. The transition from seeing to seeing-as on the part of a fledgling scientist sometimes may be sudden and abrupt, as in a gestalt shift. He or she suddenly sees and understands what before was largely mysterious and opaque. In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn places heavy emphasis on the extent to which young scientists are initiated into standard assumptions, outlooks, and problem-solving techniques of their scientific communities. These things soon become second nature, as does the seeing-as that is made possible by them. They become so deeply engrained by effective scientific education and habituation as to lie below the level of conscious awareness. They profoundly affect the kind of person the scientist becomes and the kinds of general outlook and commitment he or she acquires. As Kuhn puts the matter, when his or her initiation takes hold, the student of science “has assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing” (Kuhn 1970: 189). The developing scientist is molded by his or her scientific community, acquiring through the tutelage and exemplary approaches, procedures, and practices of that community the habits and skills necessary for successful and productive participation in the community. In Haack’s words, maturing scientists become able “to call unreflectively on tacit knowledge—knowledge which they might, but might not, be able to articulate if called upon to do so” in formulating good scientific theories, or in evaluating proposed theories for their reasonableness and value (Haack 2007: 144). All scientists work with a large and mostly unconscious fund of background beliefs, many if not most of which are acquired through their earlier education and initiation into the scientific community. These beliefs and the skills and techniques they inform provide an essential context of relevance and meaning for whatever theory assessments or research projects scientists might undertake. Something similar might be said, by way of analogy, of seasoned wine tasters. They are instructed by their teachers and by the accumulated lore of vintners through the ages, and they develop over years of initiation and practice an ability to judge the relative qualities of wines almost instinctively and without thinking. Like practicing scientists, they have acquired the habits and skills required for doing their job. Practitioners in either field do not so much think about these habits and skills as put them unreflectively and routinely into practice. Such habits and skills become an integral but largely unconscious part of the kinds of person the accomplished scientists or wine tasters have become. And what they have become as persons affects at a fundamental level what they purport to know. Their claims to knowledge and the strategies and practices reflecting those claims are not detached and impersonal but things in which they are personally involved and for which they must take personal responsibility.
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I am not suggesting that the entrenched habits, skills, and beliefs of either scientific practice or wine tasting amount to the whole of scientists’ or wine tasters’ beliefs, commitments, or outlook on the world, or that either is likely to constitute the entirety of their respective stances of faith. Things are much more complicated than that, or at least usually so.3 But there are indispensable and pervasive elements of what is unspoken and unconscious—and yet firmly depended and acted on—in the makeup of persons in all walks of life. These elements affect not only what persons believe but also how they act and live. The implicit and unquestioning trust of persons in these tacit elements, a trust on the basis of which they may devote considerable portions of their lives and life’s work, are likely to figure prominently in the centered acts of the total person I have identified with existential faith. The tacit aspects of scientific outlooks and practices, and the implicit confidence reposed in them, are vital ingredients in scientific claims to truth, and they and the confidence given to them help to give structure and character to the lives of individual scientists. What they are as scientists affects the fullness of what they are as persons, and what they are as persons—including but not restricted to the effects of their scientific habituation and training—affects their practices and claims as scientists. Their tacit commitments as scientists both influence and are influenced by the commitments of their whole lives of faith. Where the one leaves off and the other begins is not at all easy to determine. The two cannot be so easily compartmentalized and separated off from one another as is sometimes believed. Discussion of the acquired habits and skills of the practicing scientist leads naturally into the third factor underlying claims to knowledge. Scientific thinking takes place within an established scientific culture and community and in the context of the modes of discourse and analysis that culture and community have developed up to the present time. No scientist can start from scratch. All must carry out their investigations in the context of an existing community and its accepted language and culture. As physicist Lee Smolin demonstrates in his book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, this community and its current outlook and convictions can strongly influence what sort of investigations take place at a given time in the natural sciences. It can bias hiring practices, funding agencies, and referees for journal articles and grant proposals, for example, and determine over significant spans of time the problems and fields for which teachers and researchers are hired and what projects and investigations are deemed worthy of being funded. Smolin shows in some detail how all of this is the case with respect to researches into string theory, the idea that the ultimate constituents of matter, force,
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and energy are tiny vibrating strings. He contends that string theory has been strongly favored by the community of physicists and their funding and hiring agencies over a period of about thirty years, in opposition to other theories such as his own favored theory of loop quantum gravity, and that the former continues to be strongly favored despite a glaring absence of empirical confirmations or tests of it and despite an embarrassing proliferation of multiple versions of it and a continuing inability to find convincing ways of choosing among them. Smolin concludes, moreover, that string theory has become for large numbers of its proponents “a religion,” reflecting an unswerving identification with the group of string theorists, their collective consensus, and their close-minded opposition to different views that he characterizes as “akin to identification with a religious faith or political platform” (Smolin 2007: 275, 284). The lesson I draw from his discussion is twofold. First, he exhibits the significant extent to which group culture and convention can tacitly influence the work of scientists, and second, he shows how uncritical group consensus can become so powerful and restrictive as to shut the door to the possibility of plural approaches to scientific problems, thus running the risk for greatly inhibiting scientists’ creativity and openness to different and possibly more productive ways of thinking. Thus, the factor of the encompassing influences of cultural settings and inheritances can have a negative as well as a positive effect on the thinking of scientists. Without it, they would have no place to start and no context within which to operate. They must repose tacit confidence in most aspects of their scientific culture in order to make explicit contributions to other aspects of it. But this confidence must not be allowed to override their capacity for questioning, criticizing, and innovating in areas of cultural consensus that might otherwise blind them to possibilities of fresh approaches and new ways of theorizing. Reliance on the scientist’s cultural inheritance is not an unmixed blessing. It must be held in tension with informed trust in his or her own capacity for innovative thought that may go against the grain of some aspect of the prevalent scientific culture. Both kinds of confidence, and the tension between them, will generally function latently in the minds of productive scientists and tacitly influence their claims to knowledge. In my earlier description of the third factor underlying claims to knowledge, I also stressed the importance of one’s inherited language as an influence on one’s ways of thinking and acting. In being initiated into the community of scientists, one also acquires a rich scientific vocabulary that soon becomes an instinctive mode of discourse. With that, one also becomes acculturated into a scientific way of envisioning and responding to the world. Most particularly, in a number of natural sciences, one learns to couch scientific problems and attempted solutions to those problems in
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mathematical form. In doing so, one gives evidence of implicit trust in the power of mathematical reasoning to discover principles and processes of nature. In Chapter 1 I mentioned the profound confidence Paul Dirac expressed on his own behalf and that of Erin Schrödinger in mathematics as the key to the scientific study of nature. This confidence works at a mostly tacit level in the investigations of scientists who make use of mathematical reasoning. They typically do not question the relationship between pure logic and mathematics and the structures of the world. What makes sense in these domains is assumed almost without question to make sense out of the world. The precise nature of the connection, if any, between these purely rational domains and the domain of the sensibly perceived world is murky and unsettled even to highly competent logicians and mathematicians (to say nothing of philosophers).4 But typical scientists waste no more time in questioning and analyzing the epistemic character of logic and mathematics than they do in puzzling about the reliability and necessary role of sensate experience to their disciplines. Their confidence in logical and mathematical reasoning as a principal means of ferreting out and explaining natural processes is generally tacit, unquestioned, and unqualified. J. M. Coetze observes, for example, that [i]n the area of animal physiology, criteria of proof usually come framed in statistical terms; the statistics in turn depend on the mathematics of probability, and the mathematics of probability rests on rarified philosophical assumptions. All in all, a body of difficult theory which even the professional scientific practitioner revisits only rarely and more or less takes on faith. (Coetze’s foreword to Balcombe 2010: x) Such generally unquestioning confidence is likely also to color scientists’ basic outlook on the world and to be an important if only tacitly assumed component of the existential faith that characterizes them as whole persons. And of course scientists are not only members of scientific communities and participants in the cultures of those communities but also of more encompassing societies and cultures. They bring to their scientific investigations influences of these wider societies and cultures as well, including the language they speak and the views, interpretations, and categorizations of the world implicit in their native languages. So what I said in the previous chapter in this regard applies here as well. Both scientific culture and its special language (including the language of mathematics) and the larger surrounding culture and language influence in numerous tacit ways the thinking and approaches of scientists. In other words, the work of particular scientists is made possible by contexts of meaning that are prior to, implicit within,
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and essential to that work. Whatever is made explicit in the way of questions, claims, arguments, and proofs rests on a bedrock of much that is tacit and inexplicit. Scientific persons, like all persons, are influenced and shaped in profound ways by the cultures in which they stand. The fourth factor underlying claims to knowledge is obviously operative in claims to scientific knowledge. That factor, it will be recalled, is trust in the reasoned claims of others and in their honesty and capability in setting them forth. Smolin points out that [n]o scientist can directly confirm more than a small fraction of the experimental results, calculations, and proofs that form the foundations of their beliefs about their subject; few have the skills, and in contemporary science no one has the time. Thus, when you join a scientific community, you must trust your colleagues to tell the truth about the results in their domains of expertise. (Smolin 2007: 287) In the natural sciences, this trust must also be extended to those who conceive, design, and manufacture the delicate instruments on which scientific researches so crucially depend.5 I do not mean to suggest that such widespread trust must always and in all respects be unqualified or unquestioning. Assumptions about the competence or credibility of others must sometimes be questioned and with good reason, and a scientist cannot always rely on the forthrightness, fairness, or trustworthiness of his or her colleagues. Scientists are human beings and susceptible to the foibles, temptations, and weaknesses of human beings, especially when reputations and careers are at stake. Nevertheless, the kind of trust of which we are now speaking is in general essential and inescapable for all scientists. It is presupposed as a tacit and pervasive component of scientific practice. Haack gives specificity and vividness to this important fact when commenting on the work of James Watson and Francis Crick that led to discovery of the DNA molecule. She writes with reference to a paper entitled “The Structure of DNA,” published by the two molecular biologists in 1953, Watson and Crick’s evidence includes both experimental/observational results, and other biological, chemical, etc., presumed knowledge. Their observational evidence relies on all kinds of complicated techniques and equipment (electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, procedures for extracting and purifying the material under investigation, titration, sedimentation, etc., etc.). The reliability of these depends, in turn, on other background theory and other observational evidence.
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Much of their evidence is drawn from the work of others— [Rosalind] Franklin’s X-ray photography, [Erwin] Chargaff’s rules, etc., etc. In the notes to the paper on which I am focusing, twenty-three other papers are cited; but this is only the tip of an enormous iceberg, for Watson and Crick also depend implicitly on a vast body of what could by that time be simply taken for granted as background knowledge. (Haack 2007: 81; see Watson and Crick 1953) Similar observations could be made about the innovative work of all practicing scientists. New discoveries are made in the context of countless old ones and within complicated networks of theoretical assumption necessary to give plausibility and meaning to new scientific discoveries and the new claims to scientific knowledge they contain. Implicit trust in the honesty and reliability of the work of other scientists, past and present, is unavoidable. For scientists, this form of trust is also nested within the more general kinds of trust in one’s fellow human beings that are necessary for everyday life. These wider types of trust are necessary not only to scientists’ work in the classroom, on the computer keyboard, or at the laboratory bench but also to such things as their driving home safely from work on a crowded highway or confidently taking the medicine that may have been prescribed by their doctors and prepared by their pharmacists. This more enveloping social trust, in its turn, blends imperceptibly into the quietly sustaining ultimate trust that is a central component of the various forms of existential faith—religious or nonreligious—that give fundamental quality and character to the lives of individual scientists, just as it does for persons involved in other modes of life and fields of endeavor. So once again, confidence in cognitive claims, including those of natural scientists, has its ultimate source and resting place in existential faith, even as this confidence also helps to shape the conceptual outlook of particular kinds of existential faith. The beliefs and practices of engaged scientists are bound to temper and influence the character of their existential faith, and the all-pervading depth and meaning of their existential faith is bound to inform their work as scientists. Here as elsewhere, knowledge and faith can and must work together, not in opposition to one another. We are talking not merely of professed faith but of the actual faith that gives structure, character, and direction to the whole of one’s life. Professed faith and actual faith are not always the same. One’s actual faith is reflected in the way in which one lives one’s day-to-day life, and in the convictions, dispositions, and commitments of one’s innermost being, not in what one may casually, prudentially, or inauthentically claim to believe. Another factor underlying scientific inquiry and scientific claims to knowledge is conviction of the general order and rationality of the universe
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and of our capacity as humans to comprehend at least significant parts of that order and rationality. This is the fifth of the factors associated earlier with knowledge in general, and it applies to scientific knowledge as well. Mary Midgley remarks that belief in a law-abiding universe is “a real belief, not just a policy” and “a precondition of any possible physical science.” And she elsewhere notes that “order is what science studies; if it is to proceed on any given subject matter, it has to assume in advance that there is order there, that it will be penetrable to mind” (Midgley 1985: 110, 79). Polanyi gives voice to this contention when he writes of “the intuition of rationality in nature” that must be “acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory” (Polanyi 1962: 16). Haack chimes in with her similar observations that “it is incomprehensible why anyone would try to find out how things are in the world if they didn’t think there is a real world which is a certain way and not other ways” and that it is “incomprehensible why anyone would seriously engage in scientific inquiry, or in everyday empirical inquiry, if he didn’t think the world is knowable to some extent by creatures with powers such as ours . . .” (Haack 2007: 139). These observations have obvious merit. They point to an implicit assumption or conviction that is essential to the work of natural scientists. The continuing successes and accomplishments of the natural sciences may help to lend credence over time to the belief that the world is to a significant degree knowable and that scientists are capable of contributing in important ways to our knowledge concerning it. But this idea also must be presupposed by these scientists as a tacit acknowledgment without which their investigations would make little sense. The conviction that may be given support by accumulating evidence is also a prior assumption and fundamental factor that makes understandable and needful the process of gathering that evidence. I want to make two essential points, however, by way of clarifying and qualifying this assumption of an intelligible universe and of the ability of scientists and others to comprehend it. The first point is that one need not be a traditional epistemological realist or correspondence theorist in order to have the assumption. One can be a kind of pragmatist, for example, needing only to acknowledge that the experienced world exhibits what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce calls “secondness” (see Peirce 1992: esp. 249). That is, the experienced world pushes back. It has obduracy or a constraining and limiting power that functions to confirm or disconfirm particular scientific theories. This obduracy, which constitutes the essence of the requirement that scientific theories pass the tests of relevant experiments and experiences, allows us to gain knowledge of structures and processes of the experienced world that belong to it and not just to us or to our constructions. We stand in relation to the world and come to know it through that relation. In con-
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trast with the outlook of traditional realism, pragmatists find no plausibility in the idea of a purely external truth in itself, preexisting all interpretation or reaction, to which scientific claims must somehow correspond. The world to be interpreted and understood is the experienced or experienceable world. But pragmatists can still affirm truth in relation, meaning that scientists and others are not just gazing at their navels or admiring their arbitrary and purely imaginary mental projections when they assume the possibility of gaining meaningful knowledge of the world. This implication holds as much for a pragmatic version of the assumption under discussion as it does for a realist version. The second point is that when we speak of the intelligible order of the world we do not have to think that the world has no elements of disorder or that it exhibits total, unqualified lawfulness. We do not have to assume, in other words, strict causal determinism or that the world is in principal knowable in its every aspect. There can be much to be known scientifically without our having to think that everything about the world is knowable, scientifically or otherwise. A world that is a blend of causality and chance, where predictable causal relations provide the context for chance occurrences (and free choices), can be scientifically knowable with respect to the regularities of its causal laws and, if not with apodictic certainty, with high degrees of probability in regard to its stochastic processes. The deeplying assumption of the world’s knowability and of our competence to gain significant knowledge of it still stands. The world does not have to be regarded as entirely penetrable by mind, then, for the fifth factor underlying scientific claims to knowledge to be feasible and effective. Scientists can assume at least the world’s partial penetrability and on that basis tirelessly explore the extent to which it can be known. They need not assume that it can be completely known.6 Nature may play dice, contrary to Albert Einstein’s famous dictum that it does not, and the world may be analogous only in part to tightly laced formal systems like those in logic or mathematics. But it still can admit of having its most fundamental structures and systems amenable to scientific investigation and explanation. The assumption of the intelligibility of the world and the capacity of humans to know it can continue to be reverenced and respected by practicing scientists—as it must be in everyday life by us all. Disputes among scientists about fundamental issues and unresolved problems in their respective fields of inquiry will no doubt continue, but the assumption of the order and intelligibility of the world will be operative in those disputes and be taken for granted as part of the tacit background of the approaches and claims of participants on all sides of the disputes. Moreover, confidence in the intelligibility of the world can contribute importantly to existential faith. We can trust a world that we are capable of knowing. The more we come to know and understand it, the more inclined
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we will be to live with confidence and assurance in it. In fact, our desire to know the world can be construed as part of our need to be at home in it, and thus as part of our continuing search for ever more meaningful and fulfilling existential faith. The desire—and the confidence, hope, and effort that go with it—thus inform and are informed by the depths and dimensions of faith in their relations to the whole of life. Also, our increasing understanding can give us ever increasing awareness of the wonder of the world’s intricately coordinated structures and processes, and of the inexhaustible mystery that is our conscious selves as part of it. Existential faith can thus be expanded and deepened, not restricted, by the accumulation of scientific knowledge—an accumulation that is itself made possible by our initial underlying trust in the intelligibility of the world and in ourselves as actual and potential knowers of the world. Finally, there is the sixth factor implicit in the search for knowledge and claims to knowledge that I discussed in the previous chapter, namely, that of deeply motivating passions, purposes, and values. This factor also figures tacitly but with critical importance in the investigations, theories, and justifications of the natural sciences. Theologian Langdon Gilkey speaks of “the unremitting eros to know, the unrestricted passion of the rational consciousness to explain, to understand, and to judge validly—that lies back of all science as a human activity.” He points out that without passion no method is possible. For method demands care, a determination to know and so an unceasing dissatisfaction with not knowing; it thus also requires patience, rigor, self-discipline, and hope—and all of these presuppose a deep passion to know, cool and untemperamental as [scientific] inquiry may seem from the outside. And he remarks that, paradoxically, the scientific mind cannot aspire toward a knowledge that is disinterested or devoid of anterior bias, prejudice, or emotional fixation “without such a passion to know superseding all other interests” (Gilkey 1970: 255–56). Far from being devoid of all passion, then, scientists are profoundly motivated by the passion to know and to know as truly and fully as possible. This passion, when fully operative, enables scientists, as Gilkey notes, to acknowledge the tentativeness and fallibility of their findings and to continue to bring seriously under investigation anomalies and uncertainties that may threaten those findings, even when the scientists’ own pet theories or reputations are at stake. He provides us with an admirable summary of the eros, passion, and deep-lying commitment characteristic of the attitude of responsible scientists when he suggests the following as a statement of the scientist’s credo:
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[W]hatever else I might wish, I will assent to nothing that is not established; I am not content to falsify or even to guess; I will accept no surrogate for understanding and verification; and I will continue relentlessly to ask questions, to probe, and to inquire until all the pertinent questions I can raise are answered—even if these questions render my own hypothesis more shaky than if I had desisted. (Gilkey 1970: 256) It is not only a passion for knowing that is highlighted in these observations of Gilkey. Implicit in his observations is also the purpose of knowing to which scientists ardently devote much of their lives and the intense value they implicitly attribute to the aspiration for knowledge and the accomplished act of knowing. These elements of passion, purpose, and value are presupposed in scientific inquiries and achievements; without them, the acclaimed findings of the natural sciences would not have been possible. The three elements pervade the work of natural scientists and must be acknowledged as integral if only implicit aspects of the claims to knowledge they set forth. I have a friend who is a highly competent and well-funded researcher into types of cancer and into actual and possible cures for cancer. I recently asked him if he thought that cures for all the types of cancer could eventually be found. Without a moment’s hesitation, he informed me of his assurance that they could. He has spent a good portion of his life in this kind of research. Not only is he passionately devoted to it, he has every confidence in its successful outcomes. His life as a scientist is driven by the confidence and hope of success in the work to which he has devoted himself. He values it highly and pursues it purposively, not only because of his intense love for scientific inquiry and scientific knowledge but most of all because of what he trusts his researches can contribute to the amelioration, if not eventual elimination, of a disease that plagues millions of human beings. His scientific work is far from being dispassionate, whatever objectivity its outcomes may eventually claim. His search for scientific laws is driven by a profound sense of creative purposiveness and open-ended inquiry that defies reduction into impersonal algorithms or all-constraining laws. And the epistemic and social values he is profoundly committed to in his researches belie the notion that scientific investigations must be or could ever be completely “factual” or value-free. My friend is a human being who also happens to be a scientist. And his humanity is carried relentlessly and without pause into his work as a natural scientist. His whole being and the existential faith that sustains it find expression in his passionate devotion to his scientific research. This devotion is presupposed by his science; it is not created by it. So we see once again that existential faith and reason do not stand in opposition to one another. Reasonable faith and faithful reason are not
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contradictions but commonplaces. This is as true for claims to knowledge in the natural sciences as it is for other kinds of knowledge. Faith and reason are in constant interaction with one another. Each can be challenged by the other, but each also is dependent on the other. Reason needs faith and faith needs reason; each plays an essential role in relation to the other. Without reason or rationally based claims to knowledge, faith would have no intellectual content and thus could not be a centered act of the whole person. Without faith, reason would lack much of the implicit context of meaning, motivation, purpose, and value that is operative in the whole of life and that is essential to its operations. In the next chapter, I explore some relations of existential faith to moral outlooks and practices. In doing so, I attempt to show that moral reasoning, like scientific and other forms of reasoning, is also crucially dependent on aspects of existential faith. Because faith pervades and finds expression in the whole of life, it should come as no surprise that it has an essential role to play in the moral dimension of life or that the moral dimension of life should have important influences on and implications for the life of faith.
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The demand that we should be virtuous or try to be good is something that goes beyond explicit calls to duty. . . . I would rather keep the concept of duty nearer to its ordinary sense as something fairly strict, recognizable, intermittent, so that we can say there may be time off from duty, but no time off from the demand of good. —Iris Murdoch1
Faith and morality are not one and the same. And neither is reducible to the other. Nevertheless, the two are intimately related, as I attempt to show in this chapter. Iris Murdoch, in the chapter’s epigraph, distinguishes between duty and good, on the basis that duty is intermittent and allows for time off because it concerns only particular transient situations of daily life, while the demand of good allows for no time off. What she here calls duty I call morality, and what she calls good I call faith. My warrant for making these terminological changes is simply that Murdoch means pretty much by her two terms what I mean by mine. To be good, for Murdoch, is to be virtuous, as the epigraph implies, and goodness or virtue for her is a holistic state of being, not just a series of discrete acts in response to the moral call to duty. The discrete acts give partial expression to the state of being but should not be identified with it. “The rational formality of moral maxims made to govern particular situations,” Murdoch writes, “might make them seem like separated interrupted points of insight rather than like a light which always shines.” She goes on to note that “[w]e tend to feel that these dissimilar demands and states of mind must somehow connect, there must be a close connection, it must all somehow make a unified sense; this is a religious craving, God sees all” (Murdoch 1993: 482–83). Murdoch characterizes this religious craving for unity and wholeness as “a form of heightened consciousness . . . it
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is intense and highly toned, it is about what is deep, what is holy, what is absolute, the emotional imaginative image-making faculties are engaged, the whole man is engaged. Every moment matters, there is no time off” (Murdoch 1993: 484). Much of what Murdoch says here about religious faith—in particular, its craving for maximum unity and depth, its engagement of the whole person, its recourse to imaginative images, and the fundamental place it accords to the emotions as well as the intellect—I have claimed to be true of the nature of faith in general, religious or secular. And I am in full accord with her contention that morality, seen as an impelling sense of duty and as the will to perform discrete dutiful acts in appropriate situations, points beyond itself toward faith. The light of faith, closely related to what Murdoch terms the all-pervading, unrelenting “demand of good,” shines through the whole of life and provides for it a comprehensive sense of meaning, purpose, and value to which moral decisions and acts of moral duty give their own distinctive, even if only partial, expression. Let us examine this relationship more closely.
THE PARTIALITY OF MORALITY AND THE WHOLENESS OF FAITH The partiality of morality in contrast with the wholeness of faith is shown by the fact that the demands of morality are for actions that are at least in principle under our control. Our sense of duty calls on us to do something about particular problems or concerns, to decide and act in ways that address these problems and respond appropriately to these concerns. It is not always easy to make or to know how to make such decisions or to perform such actions, but they fall within the orbit of what we are capable of doing and of what we can hope to change for the better by our acts of will. In contrast, one’s faith can be a source of composure and strength, as well as resourcefulness and receptiveness, in response to those things not under our control, those things that cannot be changed or produced by acts of the will. An example of such things is past actions (or inactions) for which one is personally responsible and for which one may feel gnawing remorse, regret, or guilt. Being now in the past, these actions cannot be changed. One can have no present control over what has already happened. The stark fixity of past actions and their consequences may profoundly threaten one’s sense of moral worth and erode one’s feelings of capability for moral actions in the future. But the character and focus of one’s faith may provide resources for forgiveness and rekindling of hope, resources that enable one to reestablish a sense of self-worth and to find new assurance and ability to make amends for a grave misdeed—or a sequence of such misdeeds—in the past and to live a more responsible life in the future. Faith can strengthen one’s moral
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capacity and resolve by enabling one to come positively to terms with past actions over which one no longer has control. In similar fashion, we may have little or no control over actions of other persons or of institutions that have dire effects for our own lives or the lives of others. These acts may be callously neglectful or cruelly malicious and cause great harm to ourselves, our loved ones, our friends, or people in our community or nation. We cannot avoid their evil consequences or undo their harmful effects. We can subject them to condemnatory moral judgments but we have no way to alter them by means of our moral actions. Yet we must find ways to bear up under them and live in the face of them. Once again, faith, with its hidden resources of strength, may enable us to cope with events or actions beyond our control and beyond the reach of our moral decisions and actions. The faith that is the underlying quality of our entire lives can give us the courage and hope to persevere despite our inability to change the wounding circumstances in which we find ourselves or others. In a widely read book about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, psychotherapist Viktor Frankl points out that persons who have or can be helped to find a strong and sustaining sense of the “why” of life, with a forward-looking commitment to cherished future prospects and goals, are generally able to bear up under the “how” of their present experiences, no matter how threatening, trying, or harrowing those experiences may be. Helping his fellow inmates to focus on the “why” of their lives rather than on the “how” of their pathologically cruel treatment by their Nazi captors was often, he records, the key to their survival under the horrible conditions of the concentration camps (Frankl 1963: 121). Faith can provide an abiding sense of the “why” of life, of its all-encompassing purposes and values, and in that way enable us to find inner poise and peace even when sorely beset by evil deeds of others over which we have no moral purchase or control. A third example of events beyond our control, events lying beyond the scope of moral decision and action, is that of accidents and natural happenings that may inflict great harm or have disastrous effects but are unforeseen and unpredictable, and the fault of no individual person or group. Examples are accidental injuries, onsets of illness, tornadoes, floods, fires, pestilences, and the like. Moral decisions and practices have no bearing on the occurrence of such events. The events are causes of loss, suffering, or sorrow over which we have no moral control. They can produce extreme anguish and desperation, and they pose issues, not for morality, but for faith. Our faith can enable us to continue to live and affirm our lives despite such wrenching setbacks and threats. Faith places morality within a larger context of confidence, hopefulness, motivation, and meaning. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, a strong faith can make one
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feel “absolutely safe” in one’s inner being even when beleaguered by perils and dangers on every hand (see Monk 1991: 51; also 67, 116).2 Can any of the above—one’s own regretted deeds now fixed in the past; the harmful misdeeds and criminal acts of others over which one has no control; or unforeseeable accidents and natural calamities—be threats to faith itself? Admittedly, they can. There is no guarantee that all forms of faith will be equally adequate to cope with such things, or at least not without fundamental revision. Faith may be gradually strengthened by success in dealing with them, but it also can be gravely endangered and weakened by the threats they pose. As I pointed out earlier, faith should not be regarded as something permanently fixed but as something that has to be allowed to grow and change in response to changing circumstances. But the main point I want to make here is that the three types of situation I have cited—all of them situations beyond personal prediction or control—are problems for faith, not for moral action, except to the considerable extent that morality itself depends critically on the centered act of the whole person that is existential faith. Another type of event that cannot be anticipated or controlled by moral duty but that also falls within the province of faith is a type that does not bring harm, evil, or suffering in its train but does quite the opposite. This type I term, using familiar religious parlance, events of grace. Examples would be a chance meeting with someone who turns out to have a decisive positive effect on one’s life, being suddenly struck with a life-altering realization when casually reading through a book or engaged in an ordinary conversation, being helped in a time of critical need by a stranger, or being graciously forgiven by someone whom one has wronged. Gifts of grace can be relatively small ones as well, for example, the spontaneous smile of a loved one, the unprovoked playfulness of one’s pet, the chance sighting of a whitetailed deer bouncing light-footedly through the trees, or the discovery of a tiny green frog hopping about in one’s mailbox on a moist summer morning. Such events can bestow actual or potential good, but they are unmanageable and unpredictable and therefore cannot be brought about by acts of the moral will. However, one’s faith can help to prepare one for the occurrence of such events and to make the most of them when they occur. Faith in this sense is an openness and receptivity to unanticipated gifts of goodness in one’s life, a readiness to be thankful for them, to ponder them, and to build on them, together with the humility to acknowledge that one can take no credit for them. Events of grace cannot be produced on demand but can be significant sources of rejuvenation and renewal, and they can sometimes open up welcome prospects for life that may have been hitherto unimagined. The experiences and grateful appropriations of such events can be important milestones on the journey of faith and enrich one’s life. Properly acknowledged, they enable us to appreciate how much of life is gift and not just achievements of dogged personal planning or acts of will.
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We can take advantage of such gifts by giving thanks for them and seeking to find ways to put them to good use. Here acts of will, including acts of moral decision and duty, can have their place. But, by definition, we cannot willfully bring events of grace into being. A sense of humble gratitude complements and balances the sense of moral responsibility. So I have cited two basic kinds of occurrence over which we have no moral control: evils or calamities that lie beyond the reach of present decision and action, and gifts of unanticipated goodness for which we can claim no personal credit or desert. Both lie beyond the reach of moral duty but bring us squarely within the realm and resources of faith. I do not mean to suggest that the will, including moral choices and actions, has no role to play in the life of faith. It assuredly does, for faith is the fundamental character of one’s life as a whole, involving heart, mind, and will. I only want to call attention to the fact that the intermittent, discrete decisions and actions called for by the sense of moral obligation involve an important part of life but not the whole of life. Existential faith, for its part, informs, motivates, and orients the whole of life at its deepest levels. This is a basic way in which morality can be distinguished from faith and be seen to point beyond itself to faith.
ASSUMPTIONS ESSENTIAL TO MORALITY In this section I expound further on the relations of faith and morality by calling attention to certain fundamental assumptions that are presupposed in morality and tacitly involved in its outlook and practice. These assumptions are operative behind morality as its necessary backdrop, in contrast with the events and happenings lying beyond the reach of morality that I indicated in the previous section. And they lead by another route to existential faith. The assumptions are as follows: 1. Human freedom is real. 2. We are capable of discovering and confirming (not just inventing) basic moral values with which to direct our free choices and actions in a responsible fashion. 3. We live in a world that permits moral improvement and thus the justification and realization of moral hope. 4. It is possible for us to work effectively with others toward a better world for all, and it is incumbent on us to do so. Let us look at each of these assumptions in turn to see why each is essential to responsible moral reasoning and acting, as well as in order to understand
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ways in which each of them relates to existential faith. In so doing, we can bring into focus in another context—that of moral reasoning and acting—the concept of faithful reason that is a major motif of this book. 1. Responsible moral action requires the reality of human freedom. Ought, as the familiar saying goes, implies can. It would make no sense to speak of our having moral obligations in general if we were not capable in general of choosing freely for or against those obligations, and thus of being personally and ultimately responsible for doing so. It also would make no sense to speak of a person’s having a particular moral obligation that the person is incapable of acting on. It would be nonsensical, for example, to say that Jones is obligated to identify for the police the visual characteristics of a person who robbed a bank in his presence when it turns out that Jones is blind. One cannot be obligated to do something that one is constitutionally incapable of doing. Also, one cannot be expected to reason meaningfully about his or her obligations if he or she is not free to weigh the pros and cons of possible rational justifications for those obligations. Thus, both the practice and the outlook of morality rest on an essential assumption of the reality of human freedom. The possibility of responsible moral actions and the assumption of freedom to perform the actions go necessarily together. The assumption of personal freedom is also essential to existential faith. A meaningful faith implies freedom of thought and action. If actions of the will are a necessary part of the whole person, as I believe to be the case, then it is important that those actions be capable of being free. I do not contend that they must be totally free. In fact, total freedom is an absurdity if it is taken to require independence of a causal context. Without a causal context, we would be incapable of exercising our freedom because our actions could have no predictable effects in the absence of a causally ordered world. Also, there would then be no neurological basis for our free acts, and the actions of the mind would then, contrary to all our experience and current scientific knowledge, be completely independent of the processes of the body. The causally conditioned and embodied but still genuine freedom3 essential to morality is also essential to faith, therefore, if an effective and appreciably untrammeled will is to have the significant place I believe it must have in faith, regarded as the stance, outlook, and conduct of the whole person. It should be abundantly clear that faith without the ability freely to choose among and take responsibility for possible values is meaningless, for values are implicit in the goals and purposes pursued and acted on in the life of faith. Not all the values significant for faith are moral values. There are other kinds of obligations incumbent on persons of faith, whether their faith is religious or secular. For example, there are implicit values in particular practices and observances (ceremonies, readings, recitations, vows, sacraments, prayers, meditations, rituals, etc.) of forms of faith that are not
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synonymous with obligatory moral values. There are aesthetic values intimately connected with forms of faith as well. Such values are inherent for instance, in the various and sometimes elaborate or extensively developed symbolic expressions of faith whose role I stressed in an earlier chapter. But moral values also have a decisive role to play in existential faith, pointing the way to moral duties and obligations consistent with and inspired by forms of faith and even serving, as we shall see later, as important tests of the viability of particular forms of faith. 2. It also is the case, conversely, that can implies ought in the sense that awareness of one’s ability freely to do something or refrain from doing it poses the problem of finding and acting in accordance with reliable values or criteria to guide one’s choices and actions. Without such values or criteria, both freedom and moral obligation would become meaningless because the freedom of moral action would then be entirely capricious or arbitrary, and there would be no way to distinguish morally responsible or truly obligatory decisions and actions from those that are irresponsible or nonobligatory. An ability to choose, without distinct values or criteria to guide our choices, would leave us in a moral void. Morality thus presupposes the possibility of discovering, and not just arbitrarily inventing, reliable guides for moral choice and action. Such guides are initially acquired in childhood, become deeply inbred over time, and are charged with emotion. It is also the case, as psychological studies have shown, that without accompanying and motivating emotional feelings, human beings are incapable of making many decisions necessary for normal life.4 Decisions about moral criteria, therefore, are not likely to be purely rational, if the latter be taken to mean devoid of emotional associations, motivations, or dispositions. But it is possible to bring such criteria under greater or lesser rational scrutiny and to critically examine the emotions that underlie adherence to them. Emotions will continue to figure in such evaluations, but it will be emotions and reason in concert, not emotions to the exclusion of reason. Furthermore, emotions themselves deserve recognition as having cognitive promise and cognitive significance in their own right, especially when it comes to criteria of moral choice. The emotion of sympathy, for example, can play a crucial role in the recognition and development of legitimate moral criteria. The nineteenth-century moral philosopher John Stuart Mill makes this emotion, along with that of self-preservation or self-defense, a cornerstone of the concept of justice he develops in his utilitarian theory of ethics (Mill 1957: 63). The discovery of guides for moral conduct can be greatly motivated and facilitated by one’s faith. Traditions of faith are generally rich in moral injunctions and in principles of moral action. This is as true of secular traditions of faith (e.g., secular humanism or Marxism), as it is of religious ones. Forms of faith, as we have already seen, involve rational inquiry and
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thought, and part of that is investigation into and attempts to give reasonable support to putative moral values and criteria for moral choice. The Epistle of James in the Christian New Testament states, “faith apart from works is barren.” And Jesus insists in the gospels that by their “fruits” true prophets as well as his faithful followers are to be recognized and known (James 2:20; Matthew 7:16, 7:20; John 15:8). Benjamin Franklin once noted in a similar vein that “vital religion has always suffer’d when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue.”5 A large portion of the works, fruits, and virtues called for in these comments is those of a moral character.6 How to discern what these works, fruits, and virtues associated with faith should be like is therefore of critical importance. Faith is not just a matter of belief but of resolute, committed, devoted practice; and specific moral decisions and actions figure prominently in the life of faith. Moreover, one’s faith will tend to frame and underlie one’s search for and adherence to criteria of moral choice. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that in discovering moral principles we thereby discover all or even the most fundamental principles of faith. Nor do I wish to claim, on the other hand, that all of morality derives directly from faith. Faith is the background of morality as it is of all types of thought and endeavor, but morality has a domain of inquiry, thought, and action that is distinctly its own. I mean only to say, therefore, that although faith is different from morality and broader in its scope than morality, morality is a crucial constituent element in the life of faith. The search for appropriate moral standards should thus be considered an essential accompaniment of the search for a viable and practicable faith. And it must be assumed in the domains of both morality and faith that the search either has been or is capable of being successfully carried out. 3. Moral outlook and practice also critically depend on the assumption that the world is not just a mélange of facts but an arena of values as well—values that can be found in the world itself and are not just projected on it by subjective preferences, wishes, or predilections of human beings. In an earlier book, I presented a series of arguments for the presence of values and disvalues in the natural world. I shall not go over that ground again (Crosby 2002: ch. 4). My point here is that a necessary ground of moral trust, hope, and aspiration is confidence that we live in a world that allows for and gives support to the discovery of distinctive, morally binding values, obligations, choices, and actions. For one thing, because we humans are in our biological natures social animals through and through, our survival throughout history has depended on the continuing development of moral principles, codes, and understandings that can be shared with other human beings. These are not mere external appendages to our communal existence but lie at its very
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heart. It also is the case that since our lives are undergirded and made possible by numerous kinds of ecological interdependencies, it has been and continues to be necessary for us to find ways to relate in a supportive, balanced, and fair-minded manner to the nonhuman natural environment as well. Our existence within human communities and our place within the larger ecological communities of nature as a whole not only endorse but demand moral considerations and obligations of many different kinds. This realization calls attention to a basic even if generally unspoken and simply presupposed assumption of the moral life. The assumption can be brought within the province of faith when we reflect on how critical it also is to faith that all meaningful values, including those of morality, have ontological status and not just be matters of subjective preference or desire. One cannot be profoundly committed to values and the ways of life they imply if those values are viewed as mere subjective whims, subject to change at any moment depending on arbitrary, fleeting changes of mood. The world in which one lives must be regarded as a world rich with value and as imposing obligations and values that apply to human beings in their relations to one another and to their natural environments. These values are not restricted to moral values but many of them play important roles within the domain of moral obligation and responsibility. The commitments of faith include the commitments of morality, and both are enshrouded by an all-pervading sense and assumption of living within a world of values that cry out for wholehearted respect and dedication.7 4. As part of my discussion in Chapter 4 of the relations of faith to inquiries and claims to truth in the natural sciences, I stressed the importance of a particular scientist’s being able to trust the reports of other scientists on their discoveries and findings. Any given scientist can only do the work of a small part of science as a whole, and he or she must do that work in the context of what innumerable other scientists have contributed and continue to contribute to the various fields of science. In similar fashion, the work of moral living, if it is to be efficacious on wide as well as small scales, requires cooperation with others and thus confidence in the willingness, good faith, and ability of others to endeavor in concert with oneself to bring about a better world. A lifetime of effective moral experience with others may reinforce and give support to this idea, but it is first and foremost a basic presupposition of morality—an assumption without which it would quickly break down and become impossible. An aspect of this assumption is the belief that others can be affected by the pleas, persuasions, exemplary acts, and strategies of morality—sometimes in decisive ways—and thus that moral striving and moral living can have an impact and make a difference. Finally, there is the implicit notion that we are obligated to be moral in our relations with one another, that morality is incumbent on each and every one of us.
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The interrelated features of this fourth assumption are foundations of moral hope, the hope that the world can be improved and its moral failings ameliorated by dedicated moral practice in concert with others. Evil does not just result from the actions of dissolute individuals acting singly; corrupt human institutions produce vast amounts of moral evil. And just as institutions require the concerted actions of many persons in accordance with what come to be ingrained even if not always explicitly acknowledged traditions, policies, and practices of those institutions, so effective moral resistance to institutional evils and endeavors to transform existing traditions and practices of those institutions in the direction of moral principles, require collective moral responses. These responses, in their turn, necessitate confidence in the right-mindedness, seriousness, persistence, and dependability of those with whom one sets out to work so as to bring needed changes in the moral quality of institutions. Here the resources of collective power as well as persuasion must be kept constantly in mind and drawn on as occasions demand. The creation of powerful new institutions may be needed to fight against rampant corruption in old institutions. Beneath it all is mutual trust on the part of those seeking ways to find collective moral leverage against encrusted institutional evils. Firm confidence is also required in the susceptibility of corrupt individuals and corrupt institutions to meaningful moral renovation and improvement—or, in the case of institutions, to their replacement, when called for, by different and better institutions. Where does faith fit into this picture? It comes into play most importantly, in my judgment, in the fundamental attitude toward human beings that an adequate moral outlook on the world would seem to require. This attitude is that of regarding all persons as having intrinsic and not merely instrumental worth and thus as richly deserving of moral respect. It also is that of having stubborn confidence in an underlying capacity of all persons—however benighted or recalcitrant they may be at present—to think and act morally, and to respond to moral injunctions and moral persuasions. This attitude prohibits treating persons as mere instruments to be used for attaining private or parochial ends. It is captured in the second formulation of Immanuel Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only” (Kant 1949: 46). But the notion does not originate with Kant. It is implicit in the golden rule and other parts of the Christian scriptures, and it has profound historical rootage in the conviction of Jewish and Christian theism that every human being is a child of God, made in the image of God, and is thus to be accorded the unequivocal respect and regard this status entails.8 As children of God, all humans are also adjudged to be moral in the core of their being and thus never to be beyond the reach of moral renovation and persuasion. Moral life is therefore eminently worthwhile, and moral hope is justified. This
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notion reflects the stance of Jewish and Christian faith, and it shows how faith can illuminate and influence the moral life. I do not want to argue that being convinced that all human beings have intrinsic value and are potentially moral in their nature requires that one have the specific faith stance of a Jew or Christian, or even that one be theistic in one’s religious outlook. But I do want to point out that this faith stance often lies behind the conviction and that it has been a significant source of its persistent acknowledgment and promulgation as a fundamental moral principle—if not the most basic of all moral principles—by large numbers of people in the Western world. The principle also has inspired the tireless working for and development of democratic systems of government in many parts of the world, systems based on the view that all humans are created equal, that they are therefore entitled to equitable treatment under law and equal representation in government, and that they are capable of moral responses and moral actions in their own right. The religious underpinnings of this view should not be minimized or underestimated. Faith and morality are thus in this way closely conjoined. Another example of the interweaving of faith and morality is the outlook that inspired the lifelong efforts of Mohandas Gandhi to bring about what he regarded as a proper moral attitude toward and just treatment of the “untouchables” of India. Gandhi in 1927 stated the basis in his religious faith of his conviction that the untouchables should not be discriminated against or relegated to an inferior status in the following way: “I believe in the rock-bottom doctrine of Advaita and my interpretation of Advaita excludes totally any idea of superiority at any state whatsoever. I believe implicitly that all men are born equal. All . . . have the same soul as any other” (Gandhi 1959: 1). On an earlier occasion, Gandhi stated, “I do want to attain Moksha [final liberation or release from the wheel of being and becoming]. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and the affronts leveled at them, in order that I may endeavor to free myself and them from that miserable condition” (Gandhi 1956: 165). The phrase “free myself and them” reflects the Bodhisattva ideal (heartily endorsed by Gandhi) in Buddhism, namely, the view that one does not seek salvation for oneself apart from the salvation of all others, that the two are necessarily connected with one another. It also is consistent with Gandhi’s principal faith stance of Advaitan (nondualistic) Hinduism. In the midst of his work with one village in India, Gandhi was asked if his aim in doing so was purely humanitarian. He responded, “I am here to serve no one else but myself, to find my own self-realization through the service of these village folk” (Aiken 1985: 232; quoted in Fox 1995: 112). Paradoxical as this statement may sound, it is perfectly consistent with the Advaitan belief in the essential unity of all beings in Brahman. Our little
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individual self (jiva) is one with the cosmic Self (Atman), which is in turn identical with Brahman. In striving, therefore, for the well-being of others we also strive for our own well-being. Religiously viewed, we are inseparable from one another. Gandhi’s moral outlook and practice and his religious outlook and practice were bound tightly together. Under the inspiration of this religiously founded moral principle of the equality of all human beings and of his solidarity with and compassion toward all persons, Gandhi was eventually successful, by embarking on an arduous six-day fast, in preempting the government’s attempt to grant untouchables only the status of separate electorates under a new constitution in 1932. His protest forced the government to adopt a more equitable arrangement for the people Gandhi called Harijans or “the children of Krishna.” This term is reminiscent of the Western idea of the equal status of all human beings as beloved creatures of God.9 There is dispute about the extent to which the caste system of India, with its marginalizing of the untouchables, was religiously sanctioned and derived in the past, but the extent to which it was so derived and continues presently to be widely accepted and associated with Hinduism—especially in the innumerable rural villages of India—illustrates the fact that religious faith can give support to immoral as well as to moral outlooks and practices. History provides numerous other deplorable examples of this fact in both Western and Eastern cultures: religiously sanctioned slavery, racial discrimination, repression of women, inquisitions, unjust wars, pogroms, witch hunts, hate crimes, and genocide. This observation is not confined to religious outlooks and practices. The recent histories of Nazism and Stalinism, for example, abound in brutal evils underwritten by these two secular faiths. Faith (or particular aspects of faith) is not always salutary. There are perverse forms or expressions of faith, and this point brings us to a consideration of the critical role of morality as a test of the plausibility and adequacy of forms of faith.
MORALITY AS A TEST OF FAITH The relations between morality and faith are not just one-way. It is not only the case that faith lies in the background of morality, inspiring, motivating, shaping, and informing it in a variety of ways, some of which we have now indicated. It also is the case that morality can and should be an essential constraint on the claims and practices of faith, claims, and practices that may threaten at times to get entirely out of hand and to offend in flagrant and even horrifying ways basic moral sensibility, regard, and judgment. In this section, therefore, I call attention to the critical bearing of moral considerations on a viable faith, just as in the first two sections of the chapter I discussed some important contributions of faith to morality. The moral
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check on faith is simply this: Any claim or practice of faith that results in recognizably immoral treatment of a person or group of persons must be called into serious question and either radically revised or completely abandoned. In our ecologically aware age, the same point must now clearly be made in regard to claims or practices of faith that cause needless harm to nonhuman creatures or to their environments. Such claims or practices cannot be morally countenanced, which means that they cannot be thought to be appropriate aspects of a stance of faith. The point applies to any stance of faith, whatever it might be. There may of course be gray areas about which there can be honest and reasonable dispute. It is not always entirely clear what is morally obligatory or morally prohibited in a given situation. In a particular situation, for example, there may be a “real, unavoidable choice of evils,” something that, as Mary Midgley notes, we might fail to grasp “in our protected age” (Midgley 1986: 28–29). There also can be an unavoidable choice between goods, where choosing one good requires not being able to choose the other. But once an attitude or action is recognized to be immoral, and clear moral alternatives to it are seen to exist, claims or practices of a form of faith that sanction or lead to it cannot be approved or allowed to continue. It not only is the case that faith without works is dead; it also is the case that a faith that routinely endorses or produces immoral practices is deadly. It is a danger to all and should not be tolerated. In other words, there is a moral obligation to reject it or those aspects of its teachings and practices that result in immorality. There can be no truth of faith consistent with clear-cut violation of fundamental moral principles. A faith that does not pass the muster of these fundamental principles is an unlikely candidate as a viable faith. Morality can thus serve as a basic test and corrective for claims and practices of particular forms of faith. There is more to faith than morality, as we have already seen, and faith is not reducible to morality. Louis Dupré points out, for example, that “[i]t is a desire to be united with the divine nature, not a need to follow a model of moral virtue which inspires . . . [the typical Christian] to imitate Christ” (Dupré 1972: 529). It is equally true that morality should not and cannot be swallowed up into faith, its dictates made entirely subservient to the claims of faith. Despite the autonomy of each, however, morality and faith are related closely, and the tie between them should not be severed. If it is severed, and faith or some aspect of it is made immune to moral examination and criticism, the results can be disastrous. Although moral tests of the soundness of particular forms of faith or of aspects of them are extremely important and need constantly to be kept in mind and brought into play, we need to distinguish this role of morality from what can be labled moralism. Moralism can have a crabbing and inhibiting effect on forms of faith. It does so by focusing, not on the inner
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spirit of moral rules, guides, or injunctions, but exclusively on their outward letter, and by confining the outlook and practices of faith itself to this too restrictive letter of the law. Moralism is thus a kind of moral literalism. One result of it can be contempt for those who do not act in strict accord with every fine detail of what self-styled authorities of a form of faith may deem to be essential to the practice of the faith. Such haughty contempt can infuse a dark stain of intolerance, inequality, and discord into a community of faith. The resilience, freedom, and tolerant spirit needed for a sound faith can in this way be violated and lost sight of, to say nothing of the close attentiveness to the varying opportunities and demands of different situations that is required for a sound morality. Also, an appropriate sense of the priorities of moral principles in relation to one another is lacking in a moralistic outlook on the world, so that relatively minor principles tend to be accorded the same status and importance as critically important ones. Finally, moral principles and rules come to be regarded, in a moralistic perspective, as ends in themselves rather than as means to humane and moral ends. When moralism and faith are closely associated with one another, the result for morality and faith is a tight-lipped, judgmental, intolerant, and inflexible attitude that is inimical to the best contributions of both to thought and life. Moralism should not, therefore, be confused with morality. Moralism should be recognized as a potential source of serious distortion and crippling of forms of faith, in contrast with morality proper, which can provide much needed critical perspective on the claims and practices of faith. In this chapter I have discussed ways in which morality relates to and draws on resources of faith and ways in which the claims and practices of faith need to be brought under the critical eye of moral judgment. I have done so without suggesting that either domain should be reduced to the other. Each has its own distinctive sphere and range of concerns. Throughout this chapter and the other chapters that precede it, I have insisted on and regularly assumed a conception of existential faith that does not restrict it to specifically religious outlooks or religious systems of thought and practice. I have contended that secular faith is a perfectly meaningful term and not, as others might assume or assert, an oxymoron. It follows that the term religious faith is not a mere redundancy, because I am claiming that there are nonreligious, that is, wholly secular forms of faith. This contested (and contestable) notion demands further clarification and defense, and that will be the major concern of the next chapter.
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To have faith is to be human, in the highest, truest sense. . . . to appreciate this truth about humankind—to recognize faith in its multiformity as a uniform and central human category—is difficult for all Westerners, but perhaps especially in our day for secularists. —Wilfred Cantwell Smith1
As much as I admire and assent to the statement of Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the epigraph to this chapter, I must dissent from his inference that the statement brands every human being as homo religious (Smith 1987: 138). I do not think that all humans are religious even though I think that the vast majority if not all of them have some sort of existential faith. There is such a thing as secular faith, in other words, and significant numbers of people have been in the past or are in the present adherents and practitioners of some type of purely secular outlook and commitment. Such persons do not characterize themselves as religious, do not identify with any specific religious tradition or community, and do not subscribe to any set of recognizably religious teachings or practices. In fact, for various reasons they explicitly reject religion in all of its forms, so far as the focus and direction of their own lives are concerned. But such persons are generally, in my view, persons of faith. The widespread and largely unquestioned tendency to assume that faith is confined to the province of religion, and that to have faith is necessarily to be religious, must therefore be firmly resisted. I argued previously that claims to knowledge in general and those in the natural sciences in particular rest on, point toward, or otherwise involve existential faith at critical points. And I sought to show that morality and existential faith complement, support, or critique one another in important ways, showing that each has need of the other. In this chapter I discuss at length two forms of secular faith, secular humanism, and scientism, in order 93
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to demonstrate with these examples that not all types of faith are necessarily religious. Why do I do so? The first reason is to give further evidence for my insistence that the scope of existential faith is broader than that of religion, and thus to continue to take issue with the common tendency in our culture to identify faith with religion. A central thesis of this book is that faith, properly understood, plays an essential and ineliminable role in secular as well as religious modes of life. The second reason is to show that faith and reason are not necessarily opposed but commonly work together and complement one another. The third reason is to exhibit that the relations between religious and secular perspectives are generally not relations of faith, on the one hand, and nonfaith, on the other, but relations of different kinds of faith. Religious criticisms of secular outlooks or secular criticisms of religious ones are likely to be encounters of one strongly held species of faith with another. Thus, for the secular person to claim that religion must be seen as a matter of clinging doggedly to so-called faith without recourse to evidence and reason, and that to be secular is firmly to reject reliance on faith in favor of exclusive appeals to evidence and reason, is to misconceive both religious and secular outlooks. Similarly, for the religious person to claim that his or her view must rest solely on so-called faith in sacred authorities or sacred texts, and that critical, open-minded appeals to evidence and reason are somehow impious or threaten the integrity of religious conviction, is to misconstrue the nature of religion and much that is basic and lasting in the histories of religious traditions. To think in these ways is to make the differences between secular and religious outlooks and the possibilities for meaningful dialogue, interaction, and consensus building between them appear more yawning and unbridgeable than they actually are. These ways of thinking can have divisive and alienating consequences in a pluralistic society and an increasingly interlinked world such as our own, a society and world that are in urgent need of exposing and resisting distorting caricatures of differing points of view and of continuing to search for grounds among them of mutual cooperation and understanding.
SECULAR HUMANISM AND FAITH Secular humanism’s focus, as its name implies, is squarely on human beings. “Humanism’s basic prescriptions,” says the secular humanist Paul Kurtz, “concern man and his works.” He insists that all “value is relative to man and to what he finds worthwhile” (Kurtz 1983: 119). Corliss Lamont, another prominent defender of the philosophy of humanism, declares that “humanism’s ultimate faith [is] in man,” and he speaks of humanism as “a man-centered theory of life” (Lamont 1965: 13, 3). Lamont also proclaims that, for the humanist, “the chief end of human life is to work for the hap-
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piness of man upon this earth and within the confines of the Nature that is his home.” And he contends that nothing is evil “except in relation to human life, strivings, and aims” and except to the extent that something might “interfere with human well-being” (Lamont 1965: 3, 147). Secular humanists place great stress on “the preciousness and dignity of the individual person” (Kurtz 1983: 43) and on the reality of human freedom, the pressing need for freedom of inquiry and the full range of civil liberties, and the indispensable importance and value of sound democratic institutions. They repose strong confidence in human ideals, prospects, and purposes, and in the capacities of human beings for steady moral progress and increasingly rational ways of thinking and living. Theirs is an intensely hopeful outlook, a fact that reminds us of one of the six facets of faith I discussed earlier.2 Humanists place special emphasis on the suitability of scientific methods of inquiry to address and resolve basic human problems as well as to provide an ever-growing understanding of the processes of the natural world. They reject belief in, reliance on, or need for any type of supernatural realm, being, presence, transformative power, or source of knowledge. The scope of the secular humanist vision is entirely this worldly and naturalistic. In keeping with the conception of faith I am explicating and defending throughout this book, Kurtz acknowledges that “reason alone is never sufficient for the fullness of life,” although “it is a necessary condition for its attainment.” He observes that “[in] the practical life reason cannot exist independently of our passionate nature. The union of thought and feeling is essential to happiness.” He concludes that “[c]ognition that is fused with affection and desire in lived experience expresses the whole person” (Kurtz 1983: 168). Lamont notes that “[e]motion and reason are not, as popularly believed, opposed to each other; they are complementary and inseparable attributes of human beings.” The role of reason, therefore, is “not to act as a force contrary to the emotions and to assume the impossible task of driving them out or suppressing them. . . .” It is rather to “guide and redirect emotional life; to replace antisocial passions, motives, ambitions, and habits by those that are geared to the common good” (Lamont 1965: 247). Humanism’s insistence on the reality of freedom and the importance of free thought and action also exhibits the premium it places on responsible acts of the will. This strong insistence on the engagement of the whole person— heart, mind, and will—in the humanistic vision of life shows in this way that it is appropriate to refer to secular humanism as a form of existential faith. Lamont reinforces the contention that humanism is a form of faith with the emphasis he lays, by implication, on the profound seriousness and finality of existential commitment required in his own philosophy of humanism when he states that “no man has a philosophy worthy of the
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name or has achieved full stature as a human being unless he is willing to lay down his life for his ultimate principles” (Lamont 1965: 9). The facets of wholehearted trust, devotion, and courage I associate with the act of faith are implicit in his statement. Another facet of existential faith I identified earlier is a healthy amount of skeptical doubt, tentativeness, or reservation even in one’s most fervent commitments. This facet too is reflected in secular humanism’s outlook. Lamont states that “[f]aith in scientific method functions as a regulative principle of human action,” and he notes that the two principles of the Uniformity of Nature and of Causality are “assumptions” or “postulates” in which anyone who subscribes to “scientific method as the surest path to the truth” must “have faith.” Such faith is justified, he says, “in every new scientific discovery and in the everyday life of mankind.” But it remains probabilistic and open to possible doubt (Lamont 1965: 216–17). Kurtz declares that “[o]ne has to be skeptical of all things, in a constructive, positive way, including any dogmatic application of reason.” He insists upon the need for “some skepticism about even the reaches of science or the possibilities it provides for reforming our moral life. . . .” And he encourages a skeptical outlook toward the humanist’s “own naturalism and humanism, recognizing their limitations” (Kurtz 1983: 272, 121, 112). Finally, Kurtz is humbly cognizant, as an announced secular humanist, of “the rich variety, diversity and relativity of value, and of the fact that there are alternate paths men may take to achieve the good life” (Kurtz 1983: 121). He does not dogmatically insist on the sole reasonableness or rightness of his own form of faith. Kurtz entitles one of the chapters of his In Defense of Secular Humanism “Moral Faith versus Ethical Skepticism” (chapter 12). Moral faith, he explains, “is at the core of a person’s value structure” and “gives vent to [the person’s] . . . deepest attitudes and longings. Thus a moral faith is generally grounded in one’s first principles.” “Our basic commitments, whether to love, piety, science, or the general happiness,” Kurtz adds, “express [our] . . . deepest values and the kind of world we wish to bring about.” These values have “deep roots within the individual personality and/or the social institutions that espouse the faith,” and they are not regarded as simply matters of emotional “taste or caprice” (Kurtz 1983: 103). Kurtz thus espouses a view of moral values similar to the one set forth in the previous chapter of this book, namely, that they are closely tied to the faith stance of the whole person and that they reflect a view of the nature of the world in which one lives. That is, they are regarded not as mere arbitrary, subjective projections upon the world but as rooted in the deepest aspects of one’s own being as a creature of the world. Kurtz speaks in a similar way when he asserts that the humanist’s “first principle of life” is “that life is worth living, at least that it can be found to have worth” (Kurtz 1983: 156). This principle, he says, “is the primordial fact of life; it is precognitive and prerational and it
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is beyond ultimate justification. It is a brute fact of our contingent nature; it is an instinctive desire to live” (Kurtz 1983: 159).3 Neither he nor anyone else can finally prove this principle, he acknowledges. It is rather what he terms “a normative postulate, on the basis of which I live” (Kurtz 1983: 158). This fundamental normative postulate is presupposed by morality and all other aspects of life and points beyond morality to the worldview and life orientation of the whole person. The postulate is basic to the moral life, I might add, because my instinctive recognition of the worthiness of my own life can readily lead to the question of whether there is any significant moral difference between my life and that of other persons. Surely they value their lives just as I value mine. On what possible basis could I think otherwise? Hence, there is every reason for me to respect their lives as I respect mine. We can carry further this reasoning from what Kurtz claims to be a fundamental postulate of moral faith by asking whether the same is not also true of all forms of life, human or otherwise. This way of thinking can lead us to acknowledge the intrinsic worth of nonhuman forms of life—bent as each life form is on its own survival and that of its progeny—and the consequent entitlement of each to a similar moral respect and regard. Kurtz’s postulate can thus be shown to have profound implications, not only for human ethics, but for ecological ethics as well. Here is one example of faith—in this context, an aspect of secular moral faith—seeking understanding of its far-reaching implications for thought and action. The secular humanism endorsed by both Kurtz and Lamont is, then, a stance of faith. It would not qualify as such if we thought of faith as an arbitrary leap with no basis in experience or reason. But their humanism is an example of both reasonable faith and faithful reason. Its reasoning rests at critical points on faith, and its faith informs its reasoning. Lamont offers what he calls his “minimum definition for a functioning religion.” He states that a functioning religion “must be an over-all way of life (including a comprehensive attitude toward the universe and man) to which a group of persons gives supreme commitment and which they implement through the shared quest of ideals” (Lamont 1965: 144). What he calls a religion I prefer to call a posture of faith that may or may not be religious in character. I do so because his definition is general enough and yet informative enough to encompass avowedly secular persons, communities, and ways of life and because it resembles in important ways the description of the nature and roles of faith being developed in this book—faith that may or may not assume the form of a specifically religious standpoint and commitment. Lamont himself confesses that he prefers to call humanism, which, he admits, easily falls within his definition, not a religion but “a philosophy or way of life” (Lamont 1965: 144). His preference is commendable, for the definition outlines the overall attitude and orientation of existential faith as
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something that in some form or other functions as the basis of any flourishing person or community of persons. I can make a similar observation about Kurtz’s characterization of religion. “So far as persons are aware of their basic values, and as those have some controlling emotive power in their lives,” he writes, “they may be said to be ‘religious.’ When someone becomes concerned attitudinally with his ultimate principles, he is functioning religiously” (Kurtz 1983: 116). This portrayal of religion, like Lamont’s, is better suited to describe the nature of faith in general as I conceive it. The two characterizations and the conceptions of faith they suggest bridge the differences between religious and secular forms (or philosophies) of life. Faith thus understood is not confined to the domain of religion but has an indispensable role to play in secular outlooks as well, including the outlook of secular humanism.
SCIENTISM AND FAITH We saw in the preceding section that secular humanism—as a comprehensive worldview, commitment, and path of life—should be regarded as giving patent expression to a type of existential faith. Despite this fact, however, I have argued that there is no warrant or need to baptize it as a religion. Instead, we should view it as a secular alternative to religion. The same observation can be made of what I call scientism. Scientism is a secular form of faith that is prominent in our day, and far from being a religion or a religious outlook, it usually sees itself as in the business of countering religion, exposing its obsolescence, and replacing it with a scientifically based, all-encompassing vision of human life and the world. Scientism is reductionistic in its various manifestations. One example of it is so-called eliminative materialism in the fields of neurophysiology and cognitive science, where the claim is defended that all things mental are, at bottom, nothing but physical processes within the brain. The conscious mind and all that seems to be so important to it—feelings, values, aspirations, ideals, sensations, volitions, beliefs, and so on—are mere epiphenomena or spin-offs of mechanical workings of the brain and have no independent status or reality and no capacity to affect goings-on in the body or the world. To think otherwise is to succumb to a nonobjective, nonscientific, and hence indefensible “folk psychology.” Physicalistic scientific explanations of mental phenomena are therefore held to be entirely comprehensive and final explanations; whatever falls outside the range of such explanations is claimed to be illusory and to lack credibility or significance (see Churchland 1981, 1988). Another example of scientistic reductionism is the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, which met in the years 1924 to 1936. Some salient doctrines of this group were given succinct and popular expression in the
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philosopher A. J. Ayer’s book Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer 1946; first published in 1936).4 Ayer’s exposition of logical positivism asserts that whatever cannot be scientifically investigated and verified must be relegated to the status of mere subjective expressions of emotion. It concludes, therefore, that any claim to cognitive significance or objective reality on the part of nonsciences such as the arts, religion, morality, or metaphysics must be swept aside. Assessment of cognitive truth and of what is objectively real lies solely within the province of science, and all claimants to them, whether in the realms of the inorganic or organic, the nonhuman or the human, the personal or social, must be reduced, if at all successful, to the competency of science and brought within the scope of the verification procedures of science. The type of faith exhibited in this second example of scientistic reductionism, as in the first one, is uncompromising faith in science über alles, that is, in the absolute dominance and hegemony of science over all other disciplines. Whatever is deemed to be nonscientific is judged to be of negligible cognitive importance or value. Such a view is far too broad to be itself provable by any branch of science or all branches of science taken together. It is a view of far-reaching faith, based in part on the explanatory successes of the sciences and the benefits conferred by the sciences—and in particular, the natural sciences—on human beings in the last few centuries. It is not gratuitous in its form, for sophisticated reasons have been offered in its defense. But it is a claim about the scope of science as a whole that lies outside the range of strict scientific assessment or verification and has the character of an all-encompassing faith. A third example of scientism, and the one to which I devote more sustained attention here, is sociobiology. The version of it I want to analyze is laid out in E. O. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize Winning book On Human Nature. Wilson describes sociobiology as “an attempt to integrate the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities,” and his formal definition of it is “[t]he scientific study of the biological basis of all forms of behavior in all kinds of organisms, including man” (Wilson 1982: 7, 230). Throughout the book, Wilson characterizes sociobiology as a version of scientific materialism. He defines the latter term as “the view that all phenomena in the universe, including the human mind, have a material basis, are subject to the same physical laws, and can be most deeply understood by scientific analysis” (Wilson 1982: 230). His book as a whole makes abundantly clear that the outlook and program of sociobiology as he conceives it can best be described as an attempt to bring all areas of human life under the aegis of evolutionary biology, which Wilson regards as the master discipline for this purpose, the discipline whose explanatory power and potential means of direction and control probe to the most intimate levels of human behavior, belief, aspiration, and value.
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Wilson’s scientific materialism, as brought to focus in his integrative and ultimately thoroughly reductive program of sociobiology (I say more about its reductive character later) resembles in many ways the humanism of Kurtz and Lamont. For example, it is focused almost exclusively on human beings and regards scientific methods of investigation and confirmation as the most fruitful means for addressing their most pressing problems and for finding effective ways to alter and improve their lives. But Wilson insists that humanists have not gone far enough in rigorously examining and comprehending the genetic and evolutionary roots of human nature. They have failed to understand the profound extent to which these roots lie at the basis of and can serve adequately to explain the origins as well as the meanings (Wilson 1982: 5) of the current forms of morality, religion, the arts, sociopolitical systems, and culture as a whole. And humanists have not investigated ways in which these root structures, emotions, and dispositions that were formed in the earliest years of the evolutionary development of the human psyche and that cannot be ignored, bypassed, or eliminated can now be scientifically redirected and sent into new channels so as to achieve at last the fullness of life sought for in the humanistic vision (Wilson 1982: 214). Wilson also holds out the hope that scientists will eventually be able to alter the genetic structures of human organisms and in that way even more radically redirect the course of human life toward truths and values “conforming to the canons of scientific evidence” (Wilson 1982: 37; see also 216–17). Wilson reflects that “much of contemporary intellectual and political life is due to the conflict between three great mythologies: Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism” (Wilson 1982: 199). Marxism is an inadequate mythology because it ignores the “greater structure” in human organisms that sociobiology focuses on, namely, the structure of genetics and evolutionary adaptation stemming from ancient times. This structure makes human beings less readily pliable to the Marxist vision of a total reformation of human nature than Marxists think would result from their revolutionary program. “Marxism,” Wilson complains, “is sociobiology without biology” (Wilson 1982: 199). He regards traditional religion as the “chief competitor” of the scientific naturalism of sociobiology and claims that religion can be fully explained by sociobiology and that sociobiology gives every promise of being able to replace it as a newly dominant, far more effective mythology developed and directed by the techniques of scientific investigation and subject to the tests of scientific method (Wilson 1982: 201). Why does Wilson speak of scientific materialism and its accompanying program of sociobiology as a “mythology” to be ranged alongside two alternative and competing mythologies of traditional religion and Marxism? One reason is that he believes that his program is capable of filling the role of religious mythology and vastly improving on it by exposing religion as “a
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wholly material phenomenon” and thus eliminating the need for appeal to “the divine spirit and other extraneous agents” (Wilson 1982: 201, 200). A second reason is that scientific materialism has the form of an epic whose narrative sweep is grander, more imposing, and more convincing than any religious one. It recounts the evolution of the universe from the big bang of fifteen billion years ago to the present, explaining the origins of such things as the physical elements, stars, planets, and the beginnings of life on earth. It testifies to “a cause-and-effect continuum from physics to the social sciences, from this world to other worlds in the visible universe, and backward through time to the beginning of the universe.” In doing so, it views every last detail of the universe as “obedient to physical laws requiring no external control” (Wilson 1982: 200). The evolutionary epic is founded, therefore, on an iron rule of causal lawfulness to which scientific materialists like Wilson are tenaciously committed but which, he admits, “can never definitely be proved” to apply to everything without exception. This commitment rests, he notes, on a thoroughgoing scientific confidence in “parsimony in explanation” (Wilson 1982: 200). The comprehensive vision of universal causal law extending to the farthest reaches of interstellar space, tracing back into the remotest regions of the past, and applying to every aspect of earthly existence, is a third reason for Wilson’s regarding his scientific materialism as a mythology. He also regards it as an all-inclusive mythology for a fourth reason. Not only does Wilson’s materialism purport to explain everything in the universe, past, present, and future, but its program of sociobiology is designed to produce on that basis fundamental changes in human behavior by rechanneling the basic structures of human organisms, and especially their extremely powerful emotional aspects, that stem from the organisms’ evolutionary past. Sociobiology has a prescriptive as well as a descriptive aspect, therefore, and in this important way resembles the mythologies of Marxism and traditional religions. Wilson dreams of putting scientific techniques of analysis, explanation, and modification to use in transforming human life, putting it on a firm moral plane, and bringing about an era of universal human happiness and fulfillment. He observes that the genetically embedded emotional factors in human beings “are powerful, ineradicable, and at the center of human existence,” and he insists that “scientific materialism must accommodate them on two levels: as a scientific puzzle of great complexity and interest, and as a source of energies that can be shifted in new directions when scientific materialism itself is accepted as the more powerful mythology” (Wilson 1982: 214). We are mythopoeic beings in our core, he alleges, and we empower our myths with emotional force. “This mythopoeic drive can be harnessed to learning and the rational search for human progress if we finally concede
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that scientific materialism is itself a mythology defined in the noble sense” (Wilson 1982: 208). Wilson has a fond and far-reaching vision of the prospects for the salvation of human beings analogous to the similar visions in Marxism and traditional religions. This is a final reason for regarding his vision as a type of mythology. What Wilson calls mythologies I call forms of faith, and I suggest that his sociobiological outlook and prescriptions, and his own fervent commitment to them, be recognized as a form of faith. His descriptions of mythologies as comprehensive worldviews; his strong emphasis on the interconnected roles of beliefs, emotions, and decisions in mythological systems; his conviction that everything in existence is amenable to complete explanation by scientific laws and the methods of scientific investigation and confirmation; his intention to use the worldview or myth of scientific materialism and its accompanying sociological program to radically transform the character and prospects of human life; his belief that scientific materialism can function as a secular replacement for religion; and the evident engagement and commitment of his own being in championing his recipe for wholesale human betterment show him to be setting forth and recommending a distinctive form of existential faith, as I have earlier characterized the nature of faith. Wilson also states, as we saw earlier, that the totalizing perspective of what he calls the evolutionary epic is ardently “believed [by scientists like himself] but can never be definitely proved,” meaning that it incorporates a stance of faith and does not just set forth incontrovertible facts. He speaks, as we also saw, of the scientific materialist’s “devotion to parsimony in explanation,” which is another aspect of the guiding faith stance of the scientific materialist as a human being. It is surely a matter of debate whether or not the universe as a whole is ordered in such a way as always to favor simplicity and parsimony in explanation. And he ventures the fervent hope and assurance, in contrast with already established scientific fact, that “scientific naturalism is destined to alter the foundations” of the systematic inquiries of social scientists and humanistic scholars, as well as theologians, “by redefining the mental process itself” (Wilson 1982: 211; italics are mine). He augments this declaration of hope in the final paragraph of his book when he talks of the “true Promethean spirit of science” which “constructs the mythology of scientific materialism, guided by the corrective devices of the scientific method, addressed with precise and deliberately affective appeal to the deepest needs of human nature, and kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed” (Wilson 1982: 217). So scientific reasoning, as he describes it, is not only grounded in faith at critical junctures but culminates in faith when it comes to the most basic and wide-ranging issues of life in their relations not only to the past but also to the future. Wilson is correct in extending the terms mythology
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and mythopoesis beyond their familiar home ground of religious traditions and applying the terms to Marxism and to his own plan of reforming and redirecting inherited factors of the human organism on the basis of the biological sciences. I contend that it is equally legitimate to regard these terms, as he interprets and puts them to use in describing his program, as closely approximating (if not being altogether identical with) what I continue to explicate in this book as existential faith. I indicated earlier that a central trait of scientism is that it is reductionistic, and I showed respects in which this is the case with eliminative materialism and Ayer’s version of logical positivism. It should by now be clear that sociobiology, as Wilson interprets and explains it, is also thoroughly reductionistic in its approach to human beings and the world. Let me give some examples. He reduces beliefs to the domain of the biological sciences when he claims that “beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival” (Wilson 1982: 4). He tells us that “the core of social theory . . . is the deep structure of human nature, an essentially biological phenomenon that is also the primary focus of the humanities,” and he explains that “[t]he heart of the scientific method is the reduction of perceived phenomena to fundamental, testable principles” (Wilson 1982: 11). Wilson contends that “[m]orality has no other demonstrable ultimate function” than that of safeguarding the gene pool. He states that “religious practices can be mapped onto the two dimensions of genetic advantage and evolutionary change” and insists that “[b]y traditional methods of reduction and analysis science can explain religion but cannot diminish the importance of its substance” (Wilson 1982: 175, 180). It might be thought that the “substance” of religion is something peculiarly its own, but Wilson hastens to explain that the traditional role of religion in the emotive life of humans was to help over long years to insure their survival and genetic adaptation. “Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners,” he writes, “will propagate the physiological controls that favor acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes. The genes that prescribe the controls will also be favored” (Wilson 1982: 185). But these practices and their critical role in human life can now be replaced by scientific techniques of conditioning and controlling the emotions so as to steer them in desired directions, leaving no distinctive role or need for religion. Wilson’s belief that human beings are essentially today what they were in the earliest stages of their evolution, with the same powerful emotions that then enabled them to survive and procreate in their hunter–gatherer environments, is itself reductionistic in character. It reduces the present to the past and allows for little fundamental change in the most basic motives and attitudes of humans over extremely long periods of time. According to him, as we have seen, these motives and attitudes are ineradicable and
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cannot be changed; they can only be redirected. There is more than a hint of a genetic fallacy in this belief, which lies at the heart of his sociobiology. The present nature of humans might be quite different from that of their earliest origins, but Wilson assumes throughout that it is not and cannot be. The final example of the reductionistic character of Wilson’s myth of scientific materialism I note is his view of the nature of the human mind. “The mind,” he assures us, is “more precisely explained as an epiphenomenon of the neuronal machinery of the brain. That machinery is in turn the product of genetic evolution by natural selection acting on human populations for hundreds of thousands of years in their ancient environments” (Wilson 1982: 202). Wilson thus views the mind as equivalent to or completely reducible to the brain, and he sees the brain as nothing more than “a machine of ten billion nerve cells.” The mind is then “the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions,” meaning that “boundaries limit the human prospect—we are biological and our souls cannot run free” (Wilson 1982: 1). The notion of mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain is reminiscent of the eliminative materialism I described earlier in this section. Wilson continues to affirm that mind is “truly mechanistic,” but he notes, “the mechanisms are far more complex than anything else on earth.” This observation entitles him, he thinks, to believe that “the paradox of determinism and free will” is “not only resolvable in theory, it might even be reduced in status to an empirical problem in physics and biology.” But this “might even be” is nowhere fully explicated, despite Wilson’s vague mention of “feedback loops” among “brain schemata” and we are left to wonder how he expects the paradox to be resolved (Wilson 1982: 79). The paradox is made all the more evident by Wilson’s frequent emphasis on the importance of “conscious choice,” “force of will,” “conscious design,” and “exercise of will” in setting up and carrying out the program of sociobiology (Wilson 1982: 7, 203). It sounds like we are free to deliberate, choose, and act, and we are enjoined to do so in the interest of bringing about sociobiology’s critical renovations of human emotions, outlook and behavior, but it is not clear how the “machinery” of the brain with which the mind is said to be identical can account for such freedom. At any rate, the point I want to make here is that Wilson reduces mind to brain and its so-called machinery, and he seems untroubled by any of the obvious problems posed by this reduction, including accounting for the freedom that in other contexts is so obviously important to him and for his proposed program. An essential part of Wilson’s own stance of faith, then, is his faith in the omni-competence of science and in the implicit numerous fiduciary elements in science itself that were pointed out in chapter four of this
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book. This assumed omni-competence entitles him, he thinks, to reduce everything to scientific explanation and scientific control, including the deepest concerns of morality and religion. It also gives him confidence that scientists are best suited by their outlook, training, and methods to steer individuals and societies in new and vastly more valuable directions. He insists, therefore, that everything should not only be reduced to science, and especially biological science, but that everything should be turned over to the guidance and direction of scientists. They can not only analyze the factual aspects of human life and the world but are also equipped to study and prescribe the values by which human beings should aspire to live and use the techniques of science to attain. All of this does indeed amount to a sweeping and all-comprehending mythology, or what I prefer to describe as a resolute stance of faith. In this chapter I have defended the claim that faith is not restricted to religion but can take secular forms. I have done so by describing two versions of secular humanism, those of Kurtz and Lamont, and by laying out the version of scientism called sociobiology developed by Wilson. I also briefly mentioned two other kinds of scientism, those of eliminative materialism and logical positivism. Both humanism and scientism as so described can rightly be seen as examples of faith and of a faith that is thoroughly secular, not religious. I have sought here in some detail to show this to be the case. Marxism is another comprehensive secular vision to whose character as a type of faith I called attention in Chapter 2. But existential faith, whether it is religious or secular, is not at all times sturdy and strong. I pointed to one example of this fact when describing, in Chapter 2, Arthur Koestler’s erosion and collapse of faith in Marxism. In the next chapter I discuss the topic of crises of faith in which persons experience a virtual absence of sustaining faith or the potential or actual loss of faith and all that it means or has meant in their lives.
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The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith. —Bart D. Ehrman1
As seen in Chapter 2, doubt is one of the six facets of a healthy and enduring faith. It keeps faith responsive, alert, and alive, saving it from stultification and atrophy. The doubt facet of existential faith is what spurs a faith to grow and mature throughout one’s life, and it is what helps to impart an aspect of continuing and developing reasonableness to it. Doubt is a necessary part of a person’s responsiveness to changing circumstances in the world and in his or her own life. Faith should not stand still any more than the world stands still or any more than people can avoid changing over time, changing not just physically as they grow older but mentally as well, as they continue critically to assess the consistency and adequacy of their beliefs, attitudes, emotional responses, decisions, and consequent behaviors—and of the faith that underlies them. However, doubt does not always have positive results as far as faith is concerned. Doubts can become so basic, persistent, and gnawing as finally to undermine a particular form of faith and lead to a loss of that faith. A person is then left, at least temporarily, without a sustaining faith. What was once a ground and center of one’s being, a source of ongoing confidence and hope, the focus of ultimate trust and devotion, is now only a gaping emptiness of meaning. The collapse of faith may be experienced as something like tumbling into an animal trap fashioned of brushes laid over a deep pit, and there may be little assurance of being able to find the wisdom or strength to claw one’s way up to firm new ground. Or, to use a 107
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different metaphor, the transition from one form of faith to another one, as yet unknown or only dimly perceived, that may lie in the future can be compared to venturing to cross in a wildly swaying boatswain’s chair from one pitching ship to another in a dark and tossing sea, with no assurance that a successful crossing will be made. This can be a deeply disturbing and terrifying experience. It can even destroy a person’s will to live. In this chapter I first consider some of the factors that may lead to the weakening and final loss of a faith. Then I discuss how individuals may work their way through to an alternative faith that they now perceive to be more honest, consistent, and realistic than the faith that came before. For some, active doubt and persistent inquiry may lead through an anxious dark night of the soul to the warmth and radiance of a bright new day—a newfound sustaining faith. For others, out of that darkness a less brilliant but yet kindly light may dawn, a more somber but also more realistic and still satisfying faith. For still others, a collapse of faith may leave in its wake an aching sense of nostalgia and disappointment that is replaced only by resigned acquiescence in something far less splendid and moving than the faith that possessed them earlier. In this case, there is a new faith that informs these persons’ lives, giving their lives structure and meaning. It has rescued them from the darkness resulting from the snuffing out of an older faith, but it is a faith haunted by feelings of profound loss and regret, a faith with greatly attenuated promise and hope. Few, if any, are able to live for long without faith of some kind. Animal faith and various kinds of elemental trust and orientation will remain in a crisis of faith to sustain the transition to a more adequate form of faith. But weathering a crisis of faith may mean for some the landfall of a new form of faith that is in some significant ways less deeply inspiring, satisfying, and expansive than the older form of faith they left behind, whereas for others the process may have an exactly opposite effect. I discuss examples of different modes of experiencing and working through crises of faith as the chapter unfolds.
FACTORS THAT CAN LEAD TO A COLLAPSE OF FAITH What are some of the reasons that help to explain why a particular form of faith lapses and is no longer able to evoke the conviction and commitment it once did? One reason has already been indicated. The doubt aspect of faith, if it is especially persistent and sincere, can sometimes eclipse the other facets. Continuing honest doubt and inquiry may culminate in disillusionment about a particular form of faith, exposing what are now felt to be radical inconsistencies in it or failures of it to be adequate to critical aspects of ongoing experience. For example, experience of a terrible tragedy or evil may lead a person to lose faith in the unqualified goodness of God
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or a placid faith in the basic goodness of humanity or the world. Or the loss may stem from a deepened awareness of the vast amount of general suffering and pain in the world—some of it inflicted by humans upon one another and other parts of it resulting from nonhuman natural causes and effects. Or a person my find that his or her faith is in increasing tension with the findings of contemporary science and be torn between these two outlooks and modes of thought. Ancient religions are set within ancient cosmologies and within some (if not many) obviously outmoded ways of thinking about humans and the universe, and it may at some point not be at all clear to a person adhering to one of these religions how much of the teaching of the religion is separable from those old cosmologies and perspectives. How much, in other words, is disposable husk, and how much of what is left is dependable and meaningful kernel? A pall of disheartening doubt can gradually fall over a person’s faith as a consequence of such ruminations. Alternatively, an adherent of a scientistic form of faith such as the ones described in the previous chapter may become increasingly troubled by encounters with issues and dimensions of life that do not seem to fit neatly within the parameters of scientific outlooks or to admit of adequate interpretation, explanation, or resolution by them. Or a humanistic faith that focuses almost exclusively on the human situation or on human aspirations and concerns may be cast in radical doubt by evolutionary and ecological understandings of humans as but one late-coming, radically interdependent biological species among hundreds of thousands of others on earth, or by contemplation of the billions of galaxies, stars, and planets disclosed by modern cosmology, some of the latter in all likelihood favorable to intelligent but nonhuman forms of life. In similar fashion, the God or gods of supernaturalistic faiths that center entirely on human history and the plight of human beings on earth may in due course be viewed as too anthropomorphic and quaint to preside over such a vast universe, a universe in which humans would seem to play a relatively minor role. The focus of exclusively human-oriented faiths, whether secular or religious, may thus come increasingly to be seen as too parochial and narrow, and the credibility of the faiths may suffer as a result. Or a faith that seems to be intellectually satisfying may turn out over time not to satisfy the emotional side of a person. It continues to make conceptual sense but no longer has motivational power, the power to speak to and satisfy the person’s deepest emotional needs. Such a person seeks soul-stirring inspiration and transformation of life, not just intellectual satisfaction. A full-blooded faith must appeal to the mind and have reason on its side. But it must lay claim to a person’s heart as well. Other factors that can threaten faith with crisis and loss also should be mentioned. After being exposed to the historical criticism of the Bible or detailed study of the Bible, a biblical literalist may reluctantly conclude that literalistic interpretation of the Bible is no longer viable and that the
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faith that rested heavily on it now also must be called into serious question. Or an anxious questioning of a faith may result from encounters with religions, worldviews, and paths of life quite different from one’s own that are deeply meaningful to countless numbers of other people and have been so through long periods of time. What one formerly took to be the one true faith, with exclusive claim to ultimate meaning and value, may now come to be seen as one faith among others and as having no unquestionable right to supremacy. Is one’s cherished faith, then, just an arbitrary outcome of one’s particular acculturation and upbringing, and can one cling as confidently and tenaciously to it now as one once did? The answer to this question may turn out to be negative, and the weakening or even extinguishing of a form of faith may result. A person may seek earnestly for the experiences of the fruits promised by a form of faith and yet fail over time to have those experiences, with the result that the person begins to lose confidence in the form of faith itself. Or a person may come to feel that the demands of a faith are so rigorous and burdensome that he or she despairs of ever making real progress toward them. Such a person progressively loses the sense of being able to live up to the demands and with that waning of confidence begins to experience a slackening of wholehearted commitment to his or her faith. This may be true especially of those who are perfectionistic in their approach to their faith, expecting it and their commitment to it to conduct them to a perfect state of awareness and a perfect pattern of life. Martin Luther’s well-known despairing struggles to win a righteous God’s acceptance and his own redemption by arduous self-denying practices such as ceaseless prayers, penances, pilgrimages, and self-flagellations are a prominent example. He finally had to fall back on a different kind of faith based entirely on undeserved and unearned divine grace. Other persons may exhibit a desperate and ineffective clinging to a faith they subconsciously recognize to be inadequate because they fail to take into account the possibility that there are meaningful alternatives to it. It is either this or nothing! The consequence is that the faith fails to give wholeness and integration to that person’s life and only brings increasing frustration and immobilization. Finally, there are cases in which individuals undergo persistent and pervasive despair of everything, including all forms of faith. Chemical deficiencies and imbalances in the physiology of such persons may be the underlying causes of total, all-consuming, horrifying despair, and these may require the care of physicians or psychiatrists. We now know that in many cases appropriate medications can cure or greatly alleviate the problem. Or there may be conceptual factors behind such total despair. Persons may conclude that no form of faith makes sense. The world is absurd, and human life is absurd, meaning that all forms of faith are delusions. But the bases on which this conclusion is drawn will, in all probability, reflect some deep-
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lying if largely unconscious form of faith—for example, faith in the power of reason and in one’s having been led by strict reasoning to such a negative outcome. It is interesting that a thinker such as Jean Paul Sartre contends we act in “good faith” only when we affirm the absurdity of the universe, meaning, one would think, the irrationality of all kinds of faith in general, but he places implicit faith in himself as a thinker and in the complex trains of reasoning laid out his lengthy treatise Being and Nothingness that bring him to this conclusion (Sartre 1993). By “good faith” Sartre means a fundamental honesty and integrity about the human condition and the world and recognition that one must take full responsibility for one’s actions. These actions, in their turn, result from and express one’s “original project” that is chosen freely without prior norms or conditions of any kind. This original project plays a role in human life that is similar in many ways to what I am calling existential faith, but for Sartre it is an arbitrary leap into the void of an absurd and meaningless world. Lacking anterior justifications or reasons, it must therefore be seen not as reasonable but as unreasonable faith, a conception closely and surprisingly allied, it would seem, with the view of religious fundamentalists who counsel us to cast reason aside in the name of what they call faith. The instinctive will to live, in humans and all other organisms, militates against the view that everything without exception is pointless and absurd; there still may be the fundamental faith that despite all its hardships, disappointments, and terrors life is somehow still worthwhile. Furthermore, life faces to the future, and who can tell what the future may bring, not just in the way of frustration and evil but also of fulfillment and good? One may think and feel differently tomorrow than one does today. Lacking this instinctive faith in the worth of life itself or at least in the worth of one’s own life, some persons may choose to commit suicide, showing that life without faith of any kind is certainly undesirable and probably in the long run impossible. A full and meaningful life, by all odds, requires a full and meaningful faith. Now that we have seen how crises of faith can be precipitated, we can turn our attention to examples of ways in which the crises can be worked through and how new forms of faith can be found to take the place of the old ones left behind. The first two examples do not involve mere revisions of established forms of faith, although that too is an important topic, but conversions to new ones, that is, passing from one distinct form of faith to another. The process of conversion need not be sudden; it may be gradual and incremental. But the end result of it is a radically different kind of faith. The last example is that of a profound and far-reaching revision of perspective and commitment within a single general form of faith or particular tradition of faith.
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FROM FAITH TO FAITH The first example of the transition from one posture of faith to another is that of the biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman, as recounted in his book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. As Ehrman’s statement in the epigraph to this chapter indicates, it was the problem of suffering that led eventually to his final abandonment of the Christian faith that had meant so much to him for so long and had been the cornerstone of his life. More specifically, it was his conviction over many years of studying the Bible that it contains contradictory approaches to the problem of suffering, none of which offers a convincing resolution of how the widespread suffering in the world can be made compatible with the supposed absolute power and goodness of the biblical God. And it was not only the scale of suffering that troubled him; it was the obviously unequal and unjust distribution of suffering. Good and innocent people suffer grievously in countless instances, while evil and guilty ones enjoy the fruits of a seemingly unperturbed and prosperous life. So suffering cannot be rationally accounted for solely by God’s punishment for the sins of those who undergo it. Nor does it make sense to think of God causing people to suffer only in order to test and refine the strength and persistence of their faith. For this would require us to believe that some innocents—babies or young children, for instance—are caused to suffer to the extent they do in order to strengthen the faith of others, since their suffering could have no conceivable needful effect on these innocents themselves. A biblical expression of this idea is God’s testing Abraham by demanding him to sacrifice his only son, a quite innocent Isaac, on an altar. The Prologue and Conclusion of the book of Job express a similar outlook, where the satan or “adversary” calls on God to test the blameless Job’s faith by visiting on him monstrous sufferings. Belief in an afterlife of endless bliss does not begin to compensate, in Ehrman’s view, for the atrocious sufferings of life here on earth. The slate board of those massive sufferings cannot simply be wiped clean and forgotten. And if heaven eventually is possible for beings such as we are, why did God not allow us to live in heaven in the first place? Or why did he not at least give us the intelligence and wisdom to use our freedom in ways that would avoid our doing evil and enable us to live peaceably together? The apocalyptic solution of God’s final division of the “sheep” from the “goats,” welcoming the former to life in a new heaven and earth purged of all suffering and consigning the latter to everlasting fire, does no better. Even the notion of a wholly innocent Jesus dying on the cross in order to take our sins on himself fails to make sense to Ehrman, because the notion has its dubious rootage in the idea that all of human suffering is
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God’s penal retribution on the human race because of the magnitude of its original and continuing sins, a wrathful and just retribution that can only be satisfied and set aside by the sacrifice by God of his incarnate self to his transcendent self or by God’s willing the sacrificial death of his perfectly innocent only son. Finally, Ehrman rejects two other solutions to the problem of suffering. One is that all suffering is brought about by human misuses of freedom. But this proffered solution fails to explain such natural disasters as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and the like, and it does not explain why a good God does not miraculously intervene to prevent human inflicted sufferings on the scale of the Nazi holocaust, the rape of Nanjing, the killing fields of Cambodia, or the genocidal machete slayings of Rawanda. If God was powerful enough to direct the Babylonian armies to raze Jerusalem and its sacred temple and take the Jewish people into exile, Ehrman reasons, surely he could do this much! But he does not. And then there is the biblical idea that suffering is redemptive. While admitting that this supposed solution may hold true in some cases, Ehrman responds to it as a general approach to the problem of suffering by saying “I just don’t see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of malnutrition, or when thousands of people die today (and yesterday, and the day before) of malaria, or when your entire family is brutalized by a drug-crazed gang that breaks into your home in the middle of the night” (Ehrman 2008: 275). The biblical book that now appeals most to Ehrman, thoroughly chastened and disillusioned by his realization of the inadequacy of all of these attempts to account for suffering in its relation to a supposed wholly good and all powerful God, is Ecclesiastes. This book offers no solution to the problem of suffering. By Ehrman’s reading, it has the quiet and stubborn wisdom of admitting that there can be no solution, that suffering is dark, mysterious, and inexplicable. All we can do is to cope with it as best we can. This seems also, he observes, to be the central message of the poetic dialogues in the book of Job. Ecclesiastes offers no hope of an afterlife, and its author views this life as “vanity and a chasing after wind.” There is nothing better for humans to do, therefore, than “to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil.” All of life’s experiences come “from the hand of God” and must be recognized to be fleeting, ephemeral, unpredictable, and often inequitable. The righteous are frequently found to suffer, and the evil doers to prosper, but that is just the way of the world. The same fate of death and annihilation will come to all in the end, good or evil, righteous or wicked. So far as we are able to know, this will never change, for there is “nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11, 2:24). Ehrman’s newfound faith—and we can rightly characterize it as that— resonates with the message of Ecclesiastes and with the poetic dialogues of Job, and he is no longer persuaded or moved by the alternative and at least
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initially more hopeful views in the bulk of the Bible. So far as his formerly confident Christian faith is concerned, the problem of suffering that has long troubled him has at last become an inexorable stumbling block and point of no return. His new faith is not as cosmic and magnificent as his old one. It is tamer and much more down to earth. It lacks the evocative thrill and mystery of the supernatural. For it, this life with all its messiness and ambiguity is all there is. That, Ehrman tells us, “should not be an occasion for despair and despondency, but just the contrary. It should be a source of joy and dreams—joy of living for the moment and dreams of trying to make the world a better place, both for ourselves and others in it.” We can work “to alleviate suffering” and to bring “hope to a world devoid of hope.” We should enjoy all the world has to offer in the way of love, friendship, family, work, recreation, home, travel, food, and drink. We should be active and committed citizens, working against cruelty, bigotry, racism, and other kinds of evils in the world. “We should do what we can to love life,” Ehrman urges, for “it will not be with us for long.” And we should honor not only our own lives but that of all those others who may be helped by our efforts to attain better lives of their own (Ehrman 2008: 276–78). For Ehrman, there is no longer an almighty and all-loving God who answers prayers, performs miracles, and becomes incarnate in his Son; an everlasting heaven purporting to compensate for the sufferings and injustices of this world; a final judgment and ultimate victory of good over evil; a cosmic source of forgiveness and empowerment; or a supernatural source of comfort and help in time of need. All of these things his conversion to a new, more sober and attenuated form of faith has required him to lay aside. He must now make do with what is available to him in this life and in this natural world. But for him, it is enough. He considers himself to be free of illusions and equipped to celebrate all that life has to offer, not only in the way of personal enjoyment or gain, but also in the way of serving others and doing what he can to reduce the suffering in the world. This is his new faith. And it contains a new kind of trust, devotion, courage, and hope. Ehrman reflects that his conversion to a this-worldly agnosticism was not easy. It produced much regret and pain. He left his earlier faith “kicking and screaming” (Ehrman 2008: 3, 126). One of the consequences of his conversion was that he now feels himself to be at odds with members of his family and close friends. They cannot understand the radical change in his outlook or life, and what seem to him obvious and unavoidable questions about his former faith are not for them particularly glaring or disturbing. Even his own wife does not regard the supposed problems with Christianity that have tormented him for so long as personally troubling problems. She remains a convinced and confident Christian. Ehrman also confesses that he cannot help having lingering doubts about the change in his life, sometimes wondering deep down inside himself whether he has made the
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right decision in giving up his former faith. Perhaps all of it was true after all, and he might even be doomed to hell for his apostasy. Finally, he regrets that no longer has a God to thank for all the good things in life and particularly in his own life. A larger implication of this last point is that there is now for him no sympathetic and succoring heavenly Father with whom he can commune in worship and prayer, and whom he can devoutly honor and serve in his daily life. His conversion has given him a strong feeling of intellectual honesty and personal integrity, but it also has left deep scars (Ehrman 2008: 125–28, 4). Ehrman’s descriptions give only slight indications of the pain and bewilderment he must have undergone as he wrestled with the loss of a faith that he “had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from [his] . . . teen-aged years onward” (Ehrman 2008: 3), a faith that had once been the linchpin of his being. Ehrman was torn away from his long held Christian faith, as we have seen and in his own words, “kicking and screaming.” The movement from one faith to another that we shall examine next is that of the widely read apologist for Christianity C. S. Lewis, as described in his book Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Lewis 1955). Lewis’ experience of conversion was not away from but at last into an ardent Christian faith to which he clung for the rest of his life. He describes the experience—in language strikingly similar to Ehrman’s characterization of his opposite path of conversion—as that of “a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape” (Lewis 1955: 229). Lewis’ conversion moved from a materialistic and atheistic faith similar to that of the secular humanists and scientistic thinkers discussed in the previous chapter, to Absolute Idealism, then to theism, and finally to Christian theism. He had been a nominal, perfunctory Christian early in his youth but had soon become an atheist. His atheism involved not only denial of God’s existence but also denial of anything beyond this world, that is, rejection of any kind of supernatural reality. For a long period, he was fascinated by imagined worlds, especially those of Nordic and Celtic mythology but also ones of his own fertile creation. With them he often experienced a peculiar kind of “Joy” that came in aching stabs of longing, hinting at a far-off realm of mountains and gardens and wondrous events that lay over the horizon of clear thought and ordinary experience. But he found himself unable to attribute to these airy intimations of Joy any kind of real existence. In fact, he kept in his mind a clear distinction between reality and the world of imagination, despite living much of his life at that time in his imagination. Reality seemed to him flat and pale by comparison. Then there was a period in which the lure of the imagination waned and the stabs of Joy virtually ceased or were at least pushed into the background of Lewis’ consciousness. This was a time of firm empiricism and uncompromising materialism that Lewis characterizes as his “New Look”
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(Lewis 1955: 201). He also calls it, in a term significant for our purposes, his materialistic faith (Lewis 1955: 174). With it, he vowed to set aside all of his former romantic inclinations and yearnings. But eventually his close friend and Oxford classmate Owen Barfield convinced him that a behaviorist theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics was the only possible outcome of a rigorous sensationalistic materialism, and that this outcome made knowledge itself extremely difficult if not impossible to comprehend or defend. Lewis could not go so far as to endorse such resolute behaviorism, and his thought soon veered in the opposite direction from what he termed his former materialistic “realism” in which he affirmed the “rock-bottom reality of the universe revealed by the senses” (Lewis 1955: 208) toward the English versions of Hegelian Absolute Idealism that were then regnant at Oxford. Beyond the curtain of the senses, with all their seeming muddles and contradictions, this philosophy holds up an alluring vision of the Absolute, where the fleeting, disconnected, and discordant episodes of sensate Appearance are regarded as mere darting shadows thrown off by the timeless serenity and seamless unity of absolute Reality. For a time, Lewis found this philosophy to be satisfying, comforting, and even, in its own way, religiously inspiring. But it had one great defect, as he was later to reflect. The religion of Absolute Idealism, he muses, costs nothing. “We could talk religiously about the Absolute,” but there was no danger of its doing anything about us. . . . This quasi-religion was a one-way street; all eros . . . steaming up, but no agape darting down. There was nothing to fear; better still, nothing to obey” (Lewis 1955: 210). In other words, the Absolute cares nothing about human beings or the problems of their lives. It places no demands on them, and it makes no effort to communicate with them or help them. Humans can aspire to be in closer touch with it and to attune their thoughts and lives with it, but by its very nature it can make no reciprocal response to their efforts. Lewis’ commitment to Absolute Idealism was a transitional stage in his conversion, first to theism and then to Christian theism. It enabled him to affirm the reality of a spiritual world beyond the veil of this physical world, and it gave him insight into a splendor of ultimate spiritual presence and power on which this world depends. His attraction to Absolute Idealism, he was later to claim, was evidence of the one true God in this manner calling him home. The Norse and Celtic gods had hinted in this direction, and now, with Idealism, he was brought a step nearer to what was to be his final goal. After becoming a fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford in 1925, Lewis read the Hippolytus of Euripides. This work somehow enabled him to reaffirm the essential role of the emotions in human life and to move further toward acknowledging, rather than denying, the deep significance of the stabs of Joy he had experienced so frequently earlier in his life. Suddenly, his romantic
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impulses gained new legitimacy. He was moved even more abruptly than by the lure of Idealism out the arid desert of New Look materialism and back into the lush and verdant “land of longing” that had for so long held his imagination in thrall (Lewis 1955: 217). When he read Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity shortly thereafter, he began to discern for the first time the all-important difference between Joy as a self-contained subjective experience and what it might imply in the way of objective reality. Lewis’ realization turned on Alexander’s distinction between “enjoyment” and “contemplation.” The former is the subjective experience, while the latter is the object or external reality to which the experience makes reference. Did Joy have an object beyond itself? Were his infusions of Joy pointers to something that exists not only in the imagination but also in reality itself, something that is perhaps of incalculable value and importance? He now was able to tie these questions to his belief in the Absolute, and he came to the conclusion that Joy is the yearning of the finite and fragmentary human spirit for the Absolute, for reunion with that which is ultimately and completely real. Joy was not, therefore, something to be cherished for its own sake—for the sheer aching delight it might give to its experiencer—but for the sake of its object, for the sake of that to which it points and in which it finds its true fulfillment and meaning. Lewis tells us that he had never confused Joy with mere pleasure. He had always seen it as something much grander and greater, and as something that could not be willed into experience. To be Joy, “[i]t must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” (Lewis 1955: 72). But now he realized that Joy’s true significance lay in what it referred to, something beyond the pale of ordinary earthly experience and existence. Lewis’ mind was, at last fully, open to the reality of the supernatural and no longer confined to the things of this world. The old unquestioning naturalistic, materialistic faith was being gradually but inexorably left behind. The next step in Lewis’ conversion came when he began to wonder why he had to put up with the “mystifications” (Lewis 1955: 223) of the Absolute when there lay ready at hand the simpler and more comprehensible idealism of eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley. This idealism features a God distinct from ourselves whose ordered thoughts we think after him when we have sensations of the world. Lewis judged that such a God does all of the work needed in Absolute Idealism but allows us to have some idea of what he is like as a Being separate from ourselves. Lewis modified Berkeley for his own purposes, making the latter’s thought more concordant with Absolute Idealism. He reasoned that such a God projects us in the manner of Shakespeare projecting his characters onto the stage. We are like Hamlets in that we can never meet or have dealings with Shakespeare, even though it is Shakespeare that creates us. We can stand
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in awe of such a God or, as Lewis then preferred then to call him, “Spirit” (Lewis 1955: 223), but we can never, and need never, commune with him. Thus Lewis continued stubbornly to resist moving toward traditional theism, with its central idea of I–Thou encounters with a fully personal and graciously interactive God. His God was still the heady, abstract, relatively remote God of the philosophers, not a God with whom humans can have intimate and active two-way relationships. Lewis’ resistance to theism, he was soon to realize, was an unconscious desire not to be interfered with, to protect himself, not to be in relation to a God who would place stringent practical demands upon him and thus expose and require something to be done about the dreadful “zoo of lusts, . . . bedlam of ambitions, . . . nursery of fears, . . . [and] harem of fondled hatreds” that seethed within him. In contrast with theism, idealism of the Hegelian or suitably revised Berkelian sorts had the advantage of being “talked, and even felt” without having to “be lived.” It did not require a “wholly new situation,” that is, a radical reorientation and transformation of a person’s entire being (Lewis 1955: 226–27). It called for intellectual acknowledgment of Deity but not for practical, everyday commitment, service, and obedience to it. For Lewis, however, this comforting and complacent picture was soon to be replaced by a more robust, demanding, and soul-searing theism—by the vision of a God who requires not just the consent of a coldly reasoning mind but the devotion and surrender of every last part of a person’s life. While heading up Headington Hill on the top of a bus, Lewis became suddenly aware that he was “holding something at bay, or shutting something out” (Lewis 1955: 224). He was free to do so, he felt, but he also had the freedom to tear off the armor that shut him in and to bare his life at last to the reality and all-embracing rule of the theistic God. He was given no motives or sanctions for doing the latter, no promise of what he could personally gain from it. He was simply called on to acknowledge, worship, and serve God because God is who he is, with every right to expect total commitment from his creatures. Lewis struggled with this new awareness night after night in his room in Magdalen. Finally, in 1929, he “gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” The “compulsion of God” had, paradoxically, become his “liberation” (Lewis 1955: 228–29). In relating the final stage of his conversion, namely, conversion to the incarnate, suffering, and triumphantly resurrected God in Christ of Christianity, Lewis broods briefly over the problem of other religious traditions as possible alternatives to Christian faith. He tells about how he became convinced that they were preparations for the emergence of Christianity as the finally true faith and that the myth of the incarnation is different from the imaginative myths of other religions in that it gives every indication
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of recounting a historical fact. The historicity of Christianity, he became convinced, is one of the marks, and perhaps the most important mark, of its superiority to other religions. Lewis’s complete conversion to Christianity occurred suddenly one day when he was on the way to visit a zoo at Whipsnade. “When we set out,” he says, “I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but when we reached the zoo I did.” His experience was like that of “a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed” becoming “aware that he is now awake” (Lewis 1955: 237). The old bittersweet stabs of Joy still come to him as often and sharply as before his conversion, Lewis recounts, but he has lost nearly all interest in them. He now regards them as emotional pointers toward the God of Christian theism that, having at one time functioned to show the way, now can be left behind. They are like a signpost people come across when lost in the woods. Once they know the right direction, they have no need of this or other signposts. They can travel confidently toward home. The surprise of Joy reached its culmination and completion in the challenges and assurances of a fresh new faith. Lewis’ whole crisis of faith and its eventual resolution can be summarily analyzed as resulting from his attempts to reconcile the demands of a highly active emotional responsiveness and temperament with the demands of critical reasoning. Such a reconciliation of heart and mind, where each contributes fundamentally to rather than conflicting with the other, is essential to any sustainable act of faith considered as a centered act of the whole person. The particular modes of such reconciliation can of course vary from person to person, but the course of Lewis’ life as he describes it from its outset and up to the point with which he concludes Surprised by Joy provides us with an instructive example of one way in which it can be sought for and achieved—at least to the abiding satisfaction of a convert to Christianity like Lewis himself. We have now considered two striking examples of conversion from one distinct form of faith to another. The two have moved in diametrically opposite directions. Bart D. Ehrman moved from a deeply committed evangelical Christian Protestantism, with a firm faith in the absolute power and goodness of God who has revealed himself definitively in the Bible and especially in His incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, to a reluctant abandonment of belief in God and sober adoption of a form of this-worldly secular agnosticism. His conversion turned on the problem of suffering. Despite relentless searching, he was unable to find any convincing biblical or other sort of solution that could reconcile the widespread suffering in the world with the existence of a merciful and loving God. His guideposts became the biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Job that pointed, incontestably for him, to the inexplicability of suffering and the impossibility of arriving at a convincing reconciliation. His only recourse, he finally concluded, was
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to live without faith in God, to enjoy as best as he could the good things of this world before his life is brought to its inevitable extinction, and to work to alleviate the sufferings of others. C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, moved from a stance of confirmed atheistic naturalism and materialism to one of wholehearted commitment to a traditional Christian outlook and way of life, with all the supernatural accoutrements of a transcendent personal deity, special revelations from that deity, promise of a glorious new life beyond the grave, repeated miraculous divine interventions into human history and earthly affairs, and the crowning miracle of the birth, death, and resurrection of the graciously forgiving and saving deity in the person of Christ. Lewis’ account of his conversion experience in Surprised by Joy makes no mention of the problem that so troubled Ehrman, namely, the problem of suffering and evil in its relation to a supposed all-powerful and all-loving God. Lewis was later to be brought forcibly up against this problem when his beloved wife Joy, after a temporary remission, wasted away and finally died from cancer. His grief-stricken meditations on the problem are set forth in a frank and searching book called A Grief Observed, which is based on his journal entries following her death (Lewis 2001). Lewis’ faith was deeply shaken but not broken by this experience. He interpreted it tentatively along the lines of one of the options considered but rejected by Ehrman: that suffering is necessary for its redemptive effects. In Lewis’ case, the idea was that God allows us to suffer or perhaps even causes us to suffer, sometimes almost unbearably, as a way of opening our hearts more fully to him and him alone, of tearing us away from all our lesser concerns and preoccupations—including even our deepest loves—and jolting us into awareness of our true focus and destiny as his creatures. Lewis’s overall conclusion from his terrible experience of grief and loss, however, was that God’s ways are mysterious and ultimately hidden from us and our puny capacities of understanding. When we are brought at last fully into the presence of God, all such problems will be seen to have simple and satisfying solutions, ones we are incapable of comprehending here and now. Thus, the problem of suffering that finally crushed Ehrman’s faith somehow allowed Lewis’ faith to continue to flourish, and to flourish on a more profound level than before.
A RADICAL REVISION OF FAITH The next example I consider, as indicated earlier, is that of a radical revision within a general form or tradition of faith rather than of complete conversion from one distinct kind of faith to another. It is the example of the journey of faith of the Jewish theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, as described in his book After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary
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Judaism (Rubenstein 1966). Ehrman was driven to a reluctant secularism and abandonment of his formerly strong religious convictions by what he finally came to regard as the intractable problem of suffering in its relation to faith in God. Rubenstein, for his part, was drawn sharply away from a liberal, rationalistic, de-ritualized, ethical, and optimistic form of Judaism—as represented in the Reform Judaism of his day—to affirmation of the central importance of a much more traditional, mythological, ritualistic, and deeply pessimistic kind of Jewish faith that focuses primarily on emotional and subconscious factors in religion rather than its intellectual or ethical significance. The pivot of his abrupt change of outlook was the problem of suffering, as it was for Ehrman, but in particular the horrendous and incomprehensible sufferings inflicted on millions of Jewish people by the Nazi “final solution” in the 1930s and 1940s. The young Rubenstein was first attracted to the idea of becoming a Unitarian minister and setting aside his own Jewish heritage, but he later decided to affirm his identity as a Jew and to study to become a rabbi in the community of Reform Judaism. He was attracted by Reform Judaism’s optimistic belief in the human potential for progressive moral improvement and its confident hope that continuing education, enlightenment, and assimilation would soon put an end to the scourge of anti-Semitism. He also liked Reformed Judaism’s emphasis on the rational and ethical in religion, and its downplaying of both literalistic and emotional interpretations of Jewish symbol, myth, and ritual. But by fall 1944 alarming facts about the Nazi death camps had come to the surface, and Rubenstein was thunderstruck by reports of the camp at Madjdanek, Poland, with its huge piles of ownerless shoes. His complete disenchantment with classical Reform Judaism followed soon after. He rejected the cheerful optimism of liberal religion and was now convinced that people had not undergone steady moral improvement over the centuries and would never do so. The death camps for Rubenstein were no sport or exceptional event in human history unlikely to be repeated. Instead, “[t]hey revealed the full potential of the demonic as a permanent aspect of human nature.” He was shaken into a startling awareness that the difference between Germans and others “was not very great. Given similar conditions of political and social stress, most of us could commit very terrible crimes.” His rupture with “[t]he polite, optimistic religion of a prosperous middle class” was deepened by the realization that peoples occupied by the Nazis in the West and the East, and even in notable cases some of the Allies, had either cooperated with the Nazi persecutions of the Jews or failed to make persistent efforts to assist the Jews in their peril (Rubenstein 1966: 216). Rubenstein’s rationalistic, optimistic liberalism and his former attraction to Reform Judaism were shattered on the rock of the Nazi holocaust. He left the Reform seminary of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he had been enrolled, and he
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completed his rabbinical studies in the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Rubenstein drew on a number of sources for the development of his new conception of Judaism and the nurture of his own greatly altered faith. One was the mysticism of the Kabbalistic thinker of the sixteenth century, Rabbi Isaac Luria. Another was the existential philosophies of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. A third was the “Death of God” movement of the mid-1960s. A fourth was the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. And the fifth important influence was the thought of Paul Tillich, who was one of Rubenstein’s teachers at Harvard University after he completed his rabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Behind these influences was the lure of ancient Judaism, with its fixed rituals and traditions, toward which he was now powerfully drawn. But for him it had to be a Judaism stripped of belief in or reliance on a theistic Father God—a radically reinterpreted Judaism in a time of the death of God. In Luria’s mysticism, the Godhead is a Holy Nothingness or primordial sacred ground that separates itself into God and the world. In its superfluity of being prior to the creation, the Godhead is “no thing,” so we can say that the world is created out of no thing. This is Luria’s and Rubenstein’s version of creatio ex nihilo. But it is equally the case that God himself “can exist only when He becomes less than Himself and ceases to be no thing” (Rubenstein 1966: 230). So both the world and God arise when the Godhead or the primal ground of all that is separates itself into these two forms of existence. The Holy Nothingness that lies behind all persons and things is Rubenstein’s religious ultimate. It is impersonal, uncaring, and unfeeling. It is completely unlike the theistic Father God of traditional Judaism. In fact, Rubenstein says nothing about the character or role of the existent God who Luria claims to have arisen, along with the world, out of the Holy Nothingness. His focus is entirely on the Urgrund or Godhead. The finite persons and things of this world are “divine sparks” thrown off by “the creative diminution of the Godhead.” The act of creation, Rubenstein asserts, is a “catastrophe” or “fall,” and humans as its creatures are stuck between two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, they instinctively strive to maintain themselves in existence, but on the other, they yearn with desperate longing to return to the primal ground from which they came. “The ultimate goal of the created world is the reparation of the catastrophe and a return of all things to God as He was in the beginning” (Rubenstein 1966: 231). This account is only a myth, Rubenstein tells us, but it expresses the profound truth that humans exist as finite, alienated creatures who cannot be satisfied with their separated and broken character and who are drawn toward the nothingness that preceded their birth and to which they shall return at their death.
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The existentialist philosophies, as Rubenstein interprets them, complement and give support to this bleak picture. They emphasize the absurdity of the universe and of the human situation in the universe. They stress the idea that we are thrown into the universe and into our particular place and time therein with no choice in the matter. They state that there are no heavenly norms to guide our decisions. There is no God to help us in our need. There is no cosmic purpose. We are orphaned and alone, left to fend for ourselves in a cold and uncaring world. The existentialists portray us as having to face our finite predicament without illusion or ultimate hope. Our only hope lies in our limited human resources; there is no redemptive power outside ourselves, and only annihilation awaits us at the end of our lives. Rubenstein even asserts, following the suggestion in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Family Muskat, that the Messiah comes finally to us all. It is our individual deaths, which alone can bring to an end the pathetic suffering and yearning of the human spirit and deliver it at least into the embrace of the Holy Nothingness that is the only true God (Rubenstein 1966: 184, 198, 260). Rubenstein pays particular attention to Camus’ novel The Plague. Father Paneleux in that novel believes that God is the Lord of history, and he regards the terrible plague that has fallen upon Oran as God’s punishment of human beings for their sins. His thinking is in line with the Jewish prophets of old who regarded the sufferings of Israel as God’s punishment for Israel’s disobedience to Him and for their breach of His covenant with them. But when Paneleux has to witness a small innocent boy die horribly from the plague, he can no longer cling to his previous theological explanation for suffering. He has to admit to himself that there is no ultimately satisfying explanation and that much human suffering is arbitrary, inexplicable, and absurd. “What Camus demonstrates,” according to Rubenstein, “is that, if there is a God of history, the measure of punishment he metes out to men is totally incommensurate with their actual guilt.” He continues by applying this “profoundly untenable” notion to the holocaust: “If there is a God of history, He is the ultimate author of Auschwitz. I am willing to believe in God the Holy Nothingness who is our source and final destiny,” he writes, “but never again in a God of history” (Rubenstein 1966: 203). Like the poetic part of Job and like Ehrman, Rubenstein rejects the idea that all human suffering can be conceived as purposeful divine retribution, and it is primarily on the basis of this rejection, as it relates to the irremediable tragedy of the holocaust, that he dismisses the possibility of belief in a personal God. He parts company with the atheistic existentialists, however, in that he insists that religion cannot be dispensed with. He also differs with Ehrman in this regard, because Ehrman broke his ties with his own Christian religion and is no longer affiliated with a church community. He shares the existentialists’ rejection of a personal God acting
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behind the scenes of human history but is convinced that we need religion and religious community more than ever in a time of the death of God. The existential analysis of the ultimate hopelessness and absurdity of the human predicament “leads me,” he concludes, “to look to the religious community as the institution in which that condition can be shared in depth” (Rubenstein 1966: 154). We note his reasons for coming to this conclusion as this discussion proceeds. Rubenstein also claims to have much in common between himself and the “Death of God” theologians in the mid-1960s: people such as William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer. He disagrees with their focus on the future and rejection of the past, their unbridled optimism, their reliance on Christian symbolism (albeit radically reconceived), and their relative neglect of the priestly function of religion, with its ritual and liturgy. But he shares their conviction that God has died in our time. The nineteenth-century prediction of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Madman that the death of God would soon have to be acknowledged, in the chapter by that title in The Gay Science, has been fulfilled in our own day (Rubenstein 1966: 245). For Rubenstein, after the holocaust, there can be no justification for belief in a loving, caring, personal God and every reason, in the interest of human honesty, sanity, dignity, and freedom, for rejecting that belief out of hand. Whether others are prepared to acknowledge it or not, the death of God is an inescapable cultural fact of our time. “To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, antihuman explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes.” This idea, Rubenstein exclaims, “is simply too obscene for me to accept” (Rubenstein 1966: 151). In his view, traditional theism is irreparably broken on the wheel of unimaginable gratuitous suffering and evil inflicted on innocent human beings in the Nazi concentration camps. No amount of optimistic rationalization, explanation, or counter evidence can bring it back as a viable option for human thought and life. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud are an important influence on Rubenstein’s revised faith for at least three basic reasons. One is that these theories emphasize the crucial significance of the unconscious mind and of the emotions arising from and rooted in the unconscious mind. In his analysis of dreams, Freud distinguishes between the manifest level of dreams and their latent level. The former is helter-skelter and devoid of any apparent coherence or meaning, but the latter is rich in information about people’s unconscious lives and the early and long-forgotten experiences underlying them. According to Freud, the unconscious factors teeming in the depths of their minds influence people’s thoughts, emotions, and actions in highly significant ways of which they are generally unaware. Rubenstein draws on these ideas by contending that the myths, symbols, and rites of Judaism and other religions are for the most part literally
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untrue, but that they are laden with profound and essential psychological meaning. They plumb depths of the unconscious mind that mere rational ways of thinking and acting cannot fathom. For this reason, the myths, symbols, and rites of religious traditions and religious communities are indispensable ways of evoking and meeting the deepest emotional needs of human beings. The essential work they do and have done for centuries is performed primarily on the unconscious level. There they can have cathartic and healing effects without which an authentic and affirming personal life—to say nothing of the prospects of living peaceably and harmoniously in community—would be, in Rubenstein’s view, extremely difficult if not impossible. “The fact that myth and religious symbol no longer are regarded as true at the manifest level,” he observes, “is entirely irrelevant to their central function, which is to give profound expression to our feelings at the decisive times and crises of life” (Rubenstein 1966: 233). The “decisive times” are such things as birth, puberty, marriage, old age, and death. The second aspect of Freud’s thought that Rubenstein finds to be insightful and important for the development of his own form of faith is the constant interplay between eros and thanatos in humans that Freud discusses in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There is a tenacious drive to live in human beings but also a persistent yearning to die and be relieved of the anxieties and frustrations of their precarious lives, and these two impulses are in constant tension with one another, according to Freud. Human life is lived on a kind of unsteady fulcrum between them, but eventually the balance will be tipped toward extinction as all humans succumb, as they must, to the inevitability and finality of death. Rubenstein sees in Freud’s thought a sober and generally pessimistic outlook on life in the world similar to his own views, and he is especially struck by the similarity between Freud’s dialectic of eros and thanatos and the similar tension in Luria’s mysticism between the instinctive drive to live and the longing for reunion with the Holy Nothingness from which humans and everything else originated and to which they are impelled to return (Rubenstein 1966: 231–32). Finally, Rubenstein thinks that Freud’s account in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism of the sons rising up against their primal father in order to satisfy their sexual impulses is significant because it shows the indispensable need “of law and discipline for the social process.” The sons discovered that they had to impose on themselves the very rule of exogamy that the primal father had imposed on them in order to avoid a war of all against all. For Rubenstein, this Freudian account, although hardly acceptable as explaining religious origins, underlines the role of communal religious myth and ritual as essential ways of limiting and channeling the aggressive instincts of human beings (Rubenstein 1966: 254, 121). The thought of Paul Tillich takes up some of the themes of these other influences on Rubenstein. For example, in his book The Courage to
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Be, Tillich insists that it was necessary that the theistic God die, because as Absolute Subject this conception of God makes of humans mere objects and deprives them of their dignity and freedom. Also, the theistic God must give way to what for Tillich is the true religious ultimate: Being-Itself, the “God beyond God.” The latter, he tells us, is both ground and abyss, and on it all finite persons and things radically depend. It can be symbolically portrayed but not literally described. These ideas are not only close to Luria’s mysticism; they also recall the Death of God theology. And they tie in closely with Rubenstein’s outlook. Furthermore, Tillich insists in his Dynamics of Faith and other writings on the indispensable role of myths and symbols as the primary language of religion. He holds that we can no longer affirm literal truth in these myths and symbols. For thoughtful people today they are “broken” because the worldview in which they were first formed and to which they give expression is no longer tenable. Nevertheless, they can still function to open up dimensions of reality and of the human unconscious that would otherwise remain closed. They point beyond themselves to an infinite basis of reality in which all finite persons and things participate. In Tillich’s view, symbols and myths engage and appeal to the emotions in powerful ways and help inestimably to give humans the courage to confront and cope with existential threats to their self-affirmation such as fate, guilt, and meaninglessness, threats that cannot be annulled because they are necessary aspects of human finitude. These threats have cognitive import because they serve as constant reminders to humans of their finitude and guard against overweening arrogance, thoughtless optimism, and overestimation of human capacities. But they also point to the mysterious power of being or courage of self-affirmation that sustains human beings and enables them to live despite their anxious awareness of the threats of non-being. For Tillich, it is the primary business and the priestly function of religion to deal with and help humans to cope with this threatening dialectic of being and non-being. The dialectic is similar in a way to Luria’s and Freud’s image of an instinctive will to live held in precarious balance with a seductive urge toward death as the final extinction of the anxieties of life in the world.2 Tillich’s stress on the nonremovable anxieties, vicissitudes, and limitations of finite human existence, his insistence on the brokenness of ancient symbols and myths, and his denial of the literal existence of a personal God to whom humans can turn for help in prayer and with whom they can commune in a comforting I–Thou relationship, are reminiscent of some of the themes of atheistic existentialism—a movement of thought by which Tillich himself was strongly influenced. Rubenstein too, and partly due to the influence of Tillich, is aware of the crying need for long-established myth, symbol, and ritual in a time of the death of the theistic God. These
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media of expression and enactment for him have powerful and indispensable importance for the emotional and unconscious parts of human life despite the fact that they contain little in the way of literal truth. Religious liberals, in his judgment, have a tendency to put too much emphasis on consciously rational and ethical themes in their understanding of the religious life, and they attach far too little importance to the emotional and unconscious factors in human experience on which powerful myths, symbols, and rituals have critical bearing. The primary function of religion, according to Rubenstein, is not prophetic or ethical but priestly. “It offers men a ritual and mythic structure in which the abiding realities of life and death can be shared.” And his emphasis on sharing these realities means that this ritual and mythic structure cannot be effective on a merely individual basis. They require religious communities and religious institutions in which human beings can participate. “As long as men are born, pass through the crises of transition in life, experience guilt, fail—as fail they must—grow old, and die, traditional churches and synagogues will be irreplaceable institutions” (Rubenstein 1966: 205–06). This observation means for him that secularism and secular individualism cannot substitute for religion or fill its essential communal role. Publicly shared religious myths, symbols, and rituals may lack literal truth but they are profoundly true psychologically (Rubenstein 1966: 145, 148). Despite the fact that the traditional theistic “God is totally unavailable as a source of meaning and value,” these psychological and religious means are the answer to the problem of “how men can best share the decisive crises of life, given the cold, unfeeling, indifferent cosmos that surrounds us and given the fact that God the Holy Nothingness offers us only dissolution and death as the way out of the dilemmas of earthly existence” (Rubenstein 1966: 205). The fixed form of rituals makes it likely that those who follow us will share in them with us, just as those who preceded us in times long past have done. And rituals insure that no one is left to face the crises of life by himself or herself, or to be allowed to assume that he or she is alone in guilt, regret, or sin (Rubenstein 1966: 237, 103). All the major religions are psychologically true for their believers, Rubenstein asserts, and none, including his own Jewish religion, are truer than the others. He does remark, however, that his Judaism is “truer” than Christianity in one respect: Christianity is gravely mistaken in its idea that “the career of Jesus changed the meaning of the Synagogue and its traditions.” He must resist, he says, Christianity’s compulsion “to define the ultimate meaning of my religious community in its own special perspectives.” He counters with this assertion the claim of C. S. Lewis noted earlier that Lewis’ religion of Christianity is the religion for which all other religions are preparations and in relation to the definitive truth of which they are only approximations. But Rubenstein regards Christianity as on a par with
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other religions so far as psychological truth is concerned. It has its myths, symbols, and traditions that can speak powerfully to those whose “absurd given” is to be born and brought up under their aegis, just as he has been thrown into his own religious traditions and community. What the Torah is for him, the New Testament is for Christians, and so on for the sacred scriptures, rites, and disciplines of the other religions of the world (Rubenstein 1966: 148–49). These, then, are some of the resolute and carefully thought-out views and the stance of faith to which Rubenstein was driven after he was shocked into awareness of the horrors of the holocaust—with what for him is their inescapable consequence of the death of the theistic God in his own culture and time—and after he fell away from his earlier commitment to an optimistic, liberal, ethically oriented Reform Judaism. His radical revision of faith is much darker than before, but it is also in many ways deeper, more compassionate, and more in touch with what he has come to regard as the fundamental issues, trials, and anxieties of daily life. It is a faith that he can confess with renewed honesty and integrity while still honoring the faiths of other human beings and the traditions and communities in which they struggle to find and affirm their own versions of religious meaning, healing, and hope. We have seen in this chapter that faith is not something static or unchanging. It has its ups and downs, its crises and transitions. Indeed, it must do so, because life itself is dynamic and confronts us with unpredictable burdens and catastrophes as well as unexpected challenges and opportunities. Its puzzles and perplexities are also profound, forever challenging us to new depths of awareness and response. We have seen from the three examples presented here that individuals can be converted away from secular forms of faith and toward religious ones, but that they can also be converted away from religious stances toward secular ones. Moreover, they can make major adjustments and changes within a single form of faith. This chapter also has helped us to understand how critical it is for humans everywhere and in every time to find and affirm a form of faith that can guide and help them as they confront the great issues of life, issues of vulnerability, uncertainty, guilt, suffering, separation, sorrow, and death, as well as those of grace, forgiveness, strength, love, joy, and renewal. An enduring faith is an honest and realistic faith. It is not a mere building of castles in the sky or indulgence in unconstrained flights of emotion or imagination. Faith must deal honestly and directly with the daunting problems of everyday life, both on a personal and on a social level, and it must be able to face up to the ambiguities and atrocities of human history with continuing resolution and hope. The example of Ehrman shows with exceptional clarity that these matters cannot be addressed or resolved simply on the basis of external authorities, whether they are books, persons, traditions, or
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institutions, no matter how insightful, inspiring, or exemplary these putative authorities may be deemed to be. The profound questions and issues of life must be brought finally before the court of one’s personal experiences and processes of reasoning and be adjudicated there. The judgments of this court must be taken into consideration with the utmost seriousness and be allowed to inform at the deepest levels one’s decisions and actions. One’s faith can be instructed by external sources of authority, but one must not allow oneself to be uncritically ruled by them. To respect and revere such sources, and to draw on them as needed, is certainly appropriate, but they cannot substitute for first-handed assessments and decisions. We have observed that two of the crises of faith discussed in this chapter, those of Ehrman and Rubenstein, turned on increasing awareness of the dire threat posed to faith by formidable and inexplicable suffering and evil. Ability to offer genuine strength, resourcefulness, hope, and meaning in the face of the palpable pains and evils of the world is in my judgment the litmus test of the adequacy of each and every form of religious faith and, in the last analysis, of secular forms of faith as well. We also noted that after his triumphant writing of Surprised by Joy Lewis’ Christian faith was exposed to the bafflement and agony of experiencing his wife’s suffering and death. His faith was severely tested in the crucible of this experience. But he found in his faith the power to cope and endure, and he was even able to attest to a final deepening and strengthening of his trust in the Christian God as the focus of his faith. Rubenstein teaches us to recognize how important the emotional side of faith is and how necessary it is for faith to speak to the unconscious depths of the human heart. We are taught in this regard also by Lewis’s persistent struggles to bring into coherent relation the demands of his head and heart. Finally, we have learned, especially from Rubenstein, the lesson of seeking to gain an attitude of tolerance, openness, and understanding toward those whose paths of faith, in their external expressions if perhaps not as much in their psychological depths, are different from our own. No single form of faith can hope to capture the multifaceted complexity of life in all its dimensions or to make smooth and easy the formidable hurdles, constraints, and bewilderments life sets before each of us as finite beings. No personal form of faith, then—and this includes our own form, whatever it may be—is immune to criticism, modification, improvement, or even possible abandonment in favor of a more adequate alternative. Existential doubt, as an essential part of a lively, sound existential faith is our constant reminder of this never to be forgotten truth. An adequate and sustaining faith is dynamic, active, and open, not fixed, passive, and closed. We also should never forget that there can be cruel, perverse, and destructive forms of absolutistic faith and demands for unquestioning consent such as those of Tomás de Torquemada, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saloth Sar
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(Pol Pot), and James Warren (“Jim”) Jones that should be criticized and fought against with all our strength. In the next chapter, I invite readers to share in an account of my own journey of faith. I do so, not because I think my personal journey is important enough in its own right to warrant presentation in the final chapter of a book of this type, but because I think that readers are entitled to know and may be interested in knowing something about my own faith stance and convictions, and how I was brought to them. This information will give insight into the person behind the book, and it will provide additional evidence for my contention that the nature of faith, its manifestations in both religious and secular forms, its dynamic character, and its essential role in human life are topics of fundamental and inescapable importance and therefore well worth pondering. My journey also can serve as yet another example of the fact, insisted on and argued for throughout this book, that the concept of faith should not be restricted, as it all too often is, to the traditional theistic forms of it with which we are most familiar in Western culture. Nor, again, should the act of faith be confused with arbitrary, unthinking, docile acquiescence in external authority. How thoughtfully and intelligently to tread upon the path of faith, with recognition of our deepest emotional needs and aspirations, and with due care for the making of decisions that will eventually add up to the overall character of our lives, is a question confronting and incumbent on us all. Our answers to the question may differ, but the question of faith and of the adequacy, development, and course of our own personal faiths is something we should not, and in the last analysis cannot, avoid.
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MY PERSONAL JOURNEY OF FAITH
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence. —Thomas Berry1
My present stance of faith is that of what I call “Religion of Nature.” I have described and defended it in a number of recent writings (see esp. Crosby 2002, 2008). It is a version of a recently re-emerging movement of thought, especially in the United States, called religious naturalism.2 Bart D. Ehrman’s journey of faith, sketched in the previous chapter, wrenched him away from the supernatural focus and assurances of Christianity and brought him to an entirely this-worldly faith. For him, it was a reluctant but necessary journey. My journey has been equally unavoidable and has taken me by progressive stages away from an earlier commitment to Protestant Christianity toward a new naturalistic faith of Religion of Nature. Whether this destination is final or not, I cannot tell. I feel strongly that it is, but I do not know what the future may bring in the way of doubts, trials, revisions, new insights, or crises concerning my present form of faith. None of us can possess such knowledge, despite whatever current confidence we may have. In this chapter I first say something about my upbringing and my original commitment to Protestant Christianity. Then I indicate some of the milestones marking the route of my eventual departure from it. In the last section of the chapter I provide a summary characterization of the faith I hold today and indicate some of my reasons for holding it. I do so in the interest of providing yet another example of the dynamic character of existential faith and illustrating some of the ways in which it may change over the course of a person’s life. 131
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In my own case, I think that the primary impetus for change was intellectual, but it also has had had an important emotional or motivational aspect that I explain in due course. In describing my own journey of faith, I do not mean to suggest that all forms of faith must undergo as drastic a change as my own has, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that all must take the specific path I have taken. But I do mean to say that all healthy forms of existential faith should be open to the possibility of needed revision or change as persons mature and develop in their stances of faith. I think that strong and convincing reasons can be given in support of my present stance of faith, but I am also aware that there is a sense in which these reasons, or at least some of them or aspects of some of them, are rooted in and give expression to my faith. As I have argued throughout this book, there is a relation of codependence and reciprocity between faith and reason, each informing and influencing the other at critical junctures. I allude to some of these supporting reasons in this chapter, and I have developed more detailed defenses of Religion of Nature in other writings. But this does not mean for a moment that I regard all other stances of faith as wholly misguided or as entirely lacking in cogency and reasonableness appropriate to their distinctive perspectives. There is plenty of room and need for alternative responses of faith and different ways of viewing and living one’s life in an incalculably complex, precarious, bewildering, and enchanting world. There also is patent need for proponents of different faith stances to engage in ongoing dialogue with one another for the sake of mutually enriching and broadening criticism, challenge, and insight. I offer the description of my path of faith in this chapter with this awareness and in this spirit.
THE CHRISTIAN STARTING POINT I was a senior in college and a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry when I was visited by an official of my Presbytery in northwestern Florida who was charged with keeping in touch with candidates from the Presbytery during their college educations. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned to him that I had been diligently studying the New Testament in English translations and in its original Greek language. I indicated that I had not found a clear and unambiguous basis there for formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity by the great church councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century, and I asked what he thought about this matter. His answer surprised me. He remarked that, in light of the nature of my question, I should change my plans and not endeavor to enter the Presbyterian ministry. Apparently for him, a doubt of this particular kind was simply not appropriate or allowable. It was even too impertinent to be acknowledged or discussed. I did not take his advice because I considered it
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to be insensitive and unreasonable. I could not see why it was illegitimate to raise questions about theological beliefs relating to my faith, including this important question about the biblical basis of the doctrine of the Trinity. This episode shows the Presbytery official to have had a dogmatic and inflexible conception of the nature of faith, one that could make little allowance for the role of critical reasoning or for the questions that might naturally be raised by undergraduates as they reflect on the nature of their faith. But the episode gives insight into two things. The first is the rather stubborn, unbending fideism and authoritarianism of many pastors and laypersons in the Southern Presbyterian Church in my hometown of Pensacola, Florida, and elsewhere in the Deep South when I was coming of age in the middle decades of the last century. It was the strict, single-minded, and largely close-minded atmosphere in which I first learned about the teachings of Christianity, was powerfully drawn to it, and came to accept it as my personal faith. It also was the atmosphere in which I was inspired to make the significant step of studying to become a Presbyterian minister. For a long time I took the atmosphere for granted and did not think to question it. The second thing this episode shows is that I had begun to have some doubts about my Christian faith in my later college years, staunch and generally unquestioning though that faith still was, doubts that were to grow more persistent and troubling in the years to come. The religious context in which I was reared was not of the thoughtful, reflective, articulate religious type. It was more of an instinctive, taken-for-granted, and rarely discussed type. My stepfather3 had one year of college education, and my mother had none. Ours was not a household in which sustained intellectual discussions about religion took place. My mother attended a neighborhood Presbyterian church regularly and saw to it that her children went to Sunday school and, later on, to church on a regular basis. My stepfather’s commitment to church attendance was not as ardent, but he supported her and went to church with her at her request. His brother was a Methodist minister who became progressively well known as he served large churches in Florida. My maternal grandfather attended a large downtown Presbyterian church faithfully and enthusiastically, but my maternal grandmother did not. My stepfather’s mother and sister, who lived nearby, were faithful churchgoers in the Methodist denomination. I was a nominal Christian as a child, but in my high school years I became active in the youth group of the downtown Presbyterian church my grandfather attended. The advisors of the group were a couple who had been missionaries in Asia for many years. They were always available for discussion, encouragement, and advice and were greatly loved by the youth under their care. I also regularly attended two Sunday and one weekday services in this church and came to admire and be inspired by the sermons and warm personality of the pastor of the church, who was of Scottish heritage and
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delivered his clear, imaginative sermons in a pleasing brogue. In company with a male friend who was one class behind me in high school, I joined the church and affirmed a Christian faith. Both of us eventually decided to study for the ministry. We had deliberated on this possibility for some time and discussed it at length. We felt that this was the appropriate route for us to take, given our particular interests and our strong desire to devote ourselves to Christian service. We were no doubt influenced by the examples of the pastor and the husband and wife youth group leaders (and former missionaries) whom we had come to love. I preceded my friend in attending Davidson College in North Carolina, a Presbyterian liberal arts college. My college years put me in touch with a stimulating world of history, culture, and intellectual inquiry. We attended required daily chapel in the auditorium and a required worship service each Sunday evening there and later in the newly built campus church. We were required to take two semesters of Bible, and all our professors were Christians. Every Sunday evening after worship there were open houses held by the professors, and the students could attend any one of these they chose. There were about eight hundred male students in all. We knew everyone by name and greeted one another by name as we walked across the campus. Our classes were small and taught by dedicated faculty. It was a warm and nurturing Christian community. But the college also had high educational standards and was intellectually demanding. Davidson greatly expanded my outlook and understanding, and I became more deeply informed about many aspects of the world of which I had previously known little or had been unaware. My Christian faith was broadened and nurtured as well, and it remained generally unquestioned and intact. After completing my four years of undergraduate education, I enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary. Although some people in the Southern Presbyterian Church regarded this seminary as suspiciously “liberal,” it stoutly adhered to the Reform tradition and to what in my own time there was the neo-orthodoxy and avowed antiliberalism of theologians such as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The biblical concept of sin was taken with utmost seriousness in the seminary, and we were taught that only Christ could deliver us from the bondage of our sin. The ancient Christian creeds tended to be taken for granted at the seminary and there was a firm insistence on the biblical foundation of Christian faith. We learned to read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek (I had already studied Greek in college) and devoted ourselves to careful exegesis of biblical texts. The techniques of Higher and Lower Criticism of the Bible were readily employed. We learned about the Documentary Hypothesis of the origins of the Pentateuch, about redactions and additions in other ancient texts, and about the different dates, settings, and characters of the four gospels, the writings of Paul, and other writings in the New Testament. We
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also learned about the numerous variant readings of biblical texts, especially those in the New Testament, and about the fact that there were no extant original manuscripts of any biblical text. Biblical literalism was rejected. We were taught to focus on the Word of God behind the words of the text, to appreciate the hand humans had had in bringing the texts to their present forms, and to see the Bible as bearing witness to the acts of God in human history during the biblical epoch, which covered well over one thousand years and reached its consummation in the saving death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his climactic resurrection from the grave. This was all pretty exciting stuff. I lived and breathed the biblical epoch and the early history of the Christian church. I had a strong dislike for John Calvin, more of an appreciation for Martin Luther, a liking for the writings of Emil Brunner, and a marked interest in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr. I also was fascinated by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and immersed myself in number of his imaginative and beautifully written works on my own. And I remember reading with interest and excitement Paul Tillich’s newly published book The Courage to Be, but I realized years later when I re-read the book that I had actually understood little of it then. Still, a fly had landed in the ointment of my developing and more knowledgeable Christian faith. It was the fly of Biblical Criticism and its exposure of the all-too-human character of the Bible. The Bible, I came to see, was not the unquestionably authoritative text I had once viewed it as. It was a fallible document that had undergone many changes over the years. The authorship of its books was generally unclear, and there had been modifications to the texts over the centuries. The originals of many of its books had been handed down orally for some period of time before they came to be written down, and the written texts had sometimes been altered, as was evident by different styles of writing and references to different historical periods. I submitted an exegetical essay for an award at the seminary, went away for the summer, and was surprised on my return to learn that I had received the award and the small monetary payment that went with it. The essay focused on the highly problematic textual and early manuscript evidences relating to the ascension narratives in the gospels. There was no entirely dependable external biblical authority, then, to which I could turn for the content or confirmation of my faith. I had to think and reason for myself. Nevertheless, my basic Christian faith remained strong. Upon graduation from the seminary, I became the pastor of a small church in a tiny town near Wilmington, Delaware. I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister shortly thereafter. In this church I endeavored to preach and practice my faith in the ways in which I had learned to augment and understand it in the seminary. I fear that my sermons were often abstract, academic, and too laden with theological jargon. At twenty-four years of age, I had a considerable amount of book learning but little experience of
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the rough and tumble of daily life outside of an academic setting. I had had little opportunity or need to test my faith among laypersons or to learn how to communicate effectively with them. They often came to me with questions I did not know how to answer and felt inauthentic or incompetent in trying to answer. I did not feel confident enough in the receptiveness of these laypeople or in my own role as their minister to share honestly with them my own religious questions, some of which were becoming increasingly pressing for me. For example, one young man who was not a member of my church came to me and asked that I hold a memorial service for his brother who had killed himself with a shotgun. I readily agreed to conduct the service. This young man was greatly disturbed and asked me many searching questions about the meaning of life, the nature of God, the prospects of an afterlife, whether his brother would be saved in heaven despite having committed suicide, and so on. I knew the standard theological answers to such questions, but I was not altogether satisfied with them and did not know what better answers to give in their place. In some ways, I was as disturbed by his questions as was he, especially in their relation to the tragedy he was experiencing firsthand. A faith once nurtured in solitude or in a community of like-minded professors and fellow students now had to be brought into a public arena, shared in that arena, and brought to the test of probing questions, problems, and concerns raised by people of various ages as they went about trying to live their lives. There were issues of child abuse, suicide, and racism to be dealt with. There were marital problems, losses of loved ones, grave illnesses, and feelings of despair. There were deep theological problems about the efficacy of prayer, interpretations of perplexing passages in the Bible, divine goodness and justice, the nature and hope of an afterlife, and so on. As a result, my own theological questions were mounting in urgency and importance. I was no longer content with answers I had earlier thought to be adequate. After three years serving the Delaware church, I began to realize that I was probably better suited to a life of teaching in a college or university where my inquiries could be more honest, direct, and sustained; where I could specialize in open-ended questions rather than poorly thought-out answers; and where I did not have to function as an authoritative source of solutions to deeply felt questions that were as troublesome to me, if not more so, as they were to the questioners. I was a Christian still and probably in some ways a more mature one than I had been before, but I felt that I had a long way to go before I could be completely settled and confident in my faith. Despite my youth and inexperience, my Delaware congregation granted me constant affirmation and support as their pastor, a fact for which I shall always be grateful. I learned a great deal from them and made many
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good friends among them while serving as their minister. But I was now convinced that being a minister was not the role in life for which I was most inclined or best equipped. I applied to various schools for doctorate work in the field of religion and decided to enroll in the joint program in religion at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York City. I wanted to prepare myself for a career in teaching and research, and a career in which I could provide resources for helping young people to develop their intellectual outlooks, think through options available to them, and set out upon their own paths of faith. Four important things happened to me as a student in New York, so far as my faith was concerned. One is that I was exposed for the first time at Columbia to teachers who were not of my own religious persuasion. All of my previous undergraduate and graduate instructors had been Christians. Some of my professors at Columbia were Jewish, for example, and some were atheists and secular humanists. A second thing was that I began to study in some depth religious traditions other than my own such as Judaism, Islam, and the religions of southeastern and far eastern Asia. A third was that I took a number of courses at Columbia in Western philosophy and became increasingly absorbed in philosophical questions and systems of thought. And the fourth was that I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the thought of the nineteenth-century New England Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell, whose strikingly original ideas, liberal leanings, and unconventional writings created a scandal in his place and time but who also pointed the way—for some in his own day and also for me—to radical new ways of interpreting the Bible and thinking theologically. I was having many new experiences and encountering many fresh and challenging ideas in my ongoing journey of faith. My exposure to the thought of respected and admired professors who did not share my assumed outlook or beliefs, and the study of other religions which were long-lived and profound but provocatively different from my own, were significant challenges to my faith. These two influences were constant reminders that I could not simply take my particular faith for granted, that it was but one of many different ways of interpreting and responding to life’s basic questions and living in the world. How could I be sure that my path of faith was the right one, even if only right for me? The study of Western philosophy, with its unearthing of fundamental problems and the enticing diversity of its proffered solutions to those problems, showed that there were no easy resolutions to be found. Thinkers far more original, penetrating, and insightful than I could ever hope to be had explored these problems in great depth but had not reached agreement on how to resolve them. In light of these three influences, I realized with a blend of daunting trepidation and stirring excitement that much of own thinking heretofore had been provincial, shallow, and immature. My Christian faith was
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challenged and made more thoughtful by these experiences, and I was even less inclined than before to be satisfied with religious assumptions that I had not previously brought to the surface and subjected to critical analysis. My most important experience in New York was the writing of a dissertation on Horace Bushnell’s theory of language in the context of other theories of language, most of them American, in the nineteenth century. Bushnell developed his theory of language as a way of interpreting and understanding his Christian faith, and especially as a way of reading the Bible. The theory emphasized the crucial role of metaphor and symbol in all language, but especially in the biblical texts and in theological discourse. The theory went against the grain of the dominant understandings of religious language and theological reasoning in Bushnell’s time. That understanding emphasized, not metaphor and symbol, but a literal, doctrinaire, and highly rationalistic way of interpreting the Bible and doing theology. In contrast, Bushnell was convinced that the real power and import of religious language lay in its richly variegated and sometimes clashing and paradoxical symbolic forms—its myths, metaphors, rites, parables, and stories that could not be translated into equally meaningful literal statements. To ignore or downplay these imaginative symbolic meanings in favor of the wooden literalism and contentious logomachy he believed to be characteristic of his time was to lose sight of what is most eloquent, convincing, and profound in religion, and what speaks most directly to the passions of the heart and the life of faith. These ideas got Bushnell into a lot of trouble and put him in imminent danger of being defrocked. But he persisted in developing them with thoughtful, sprightly, highly readable sermons and books, and eventually some theologians and fellow ministers came over to his side. His life and thought gave considerable impetus to the emergence of Protestant liberalism in the United States in the later years of the nineteenth century. He was a forceful advocate of thinking for oneself, of focusing on firsthanded religious experience rather than external dogmas or authorities, of giving due place to the emotions, of opposing biblical literalism, and of allowing for and encouraging diverse points of view that could seek to express the multiple and inexhaustible overtones of meaning in religious symbolism (see Crosby 1975). Bushnell’s ideas opened up a new world of thought for me. Perhaps theological ideas such as the incarnation of God in Christ and Christ’s atoning work, resurrection from the dead, and ascension into heaven could now be given a symbolic, rather than a literal, interpretation. Perhaps even the concept of God could be interpreted more adequately along these lines. And perhaps the revelatory authority of the Bible lay in the extent to which it could inform, illuminate, and guide the experience of its readers rather than in some more external, absolute, rigid sense of the idea of authority.
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Finally, the notion of multiple meanings and possibilities of interpretation in religious symbolism threw open the door to a better appreciation and understanding of reasons for differing religious outlooks within and among religious traditions. And it showed how the symbolic meanings could outlive the now dead cosmologies and other outmoded beliefs of ancient times. Something of the spirit of these ideas had already informed my thought, but Bushnell’s influence helped me to crystallize that spirit and make it more conscious and perspicuous. It is an approach to faith and an attention to the vital importance of its symbolic expressions that has much in common with the ideas of Tillich and Rubenstein. In the early 1960s, my doctoral degree in hand, I became assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Centre College of Kentucky, a Presbyterian liberal arts college similar to Davidson. I had never taught before but now found myself to be responsible for teaching eight different courses over two years, including all of the philosophy courses. Classes even met on Saturdays, so I was kept quite busy preparing the courses, teaching them, and evaluating and advising students. I learned a tremendous amount teaching these courses, at least as much as my students did and probably much more than they did. My teaching enabled me to build upon and supplement what I had learned at Union-Columbia and to continue to develop my own outlook on the world. I was active in the local Presbyterian church, which also was the church for the college. Several of the members, including some from the college, and I organized a group that met for discussion and prayer on Monday nights. But we did not just discuss and pray. We also went to the local mental hospital and visited with patients there beforehand. In this way, we combined service activity with our discussions and prayers. It was a lively group, and I was its informal leader. However, in the last year of the three years I spent at Centre, I began to realize that prayer was no longer meaningful to me. I did not feel that I was actually in touch with a personal God with whom I could commune in prayer. No matter how hard I tried to construe it symbolically, the idea of God was becoming more remote from my experience and increasingly difficult to comprehend or affirm. I consoled myself with the thought that the problem was with me, not with God. Princeton had taught me to acknowledge an extremely high doctrine of God, with constant warnings against the sins of arrogance and idolatry, so it was perhaps to be expected that God would seem, especially in some periods of my life, to be distant and inaccessible. This might be a way of drawing me more closely to him, or it was a mark of my finitude and the weakness of my faith. After all, God was utterly unique and not to be compared with anything in this world. The gap between God and his creatures was enormous, and only God could reach across it by acts of his own will in accordance with his own purposes. These purposes might
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not always be clear to us. These thoughts were comforting but not altogether convincing. Cracks were beginning to show in my theistic Christian faith, but it had not yet reached its breaking point.
THE BREAKING POINT In 1963, my second year at Centre, the Anglican bishop of Woolwich in England, John A. T. Robinson, published a book called Honest to God. The book created a stir and was especially upsetting to Christians of the neoorthodox stripe. It brought the transcendent, supernatural, personal God of classical theism tumbling down to earth. When I read the book not long after its publication—probably in 1964 during the first part of my last academic year at the college—it seemed to dovetail with my inability to experience the presence of a personal God in prayer and to relate to other serious problems I was beginning to have with traditional Christian theology. It tied in not only with my intellectual life at the time but with my emotional and motivational life as well, my waning ability to feel the presence of God or to respond experientially to it. I read Robinson’s book avidly and was stirred by its ideas. Robinson himself was strongly influenced by the thought of Paul Tillich, and he argued that Christians should abandon the idea of a “God out there” existing in a supernatural realm apart from the physical universe. Instead, they should opt for the symbolism of a radically immanent God conceived along Tillichian lines as the ground of all being. Jesus’ paradigmatic life of self-surrender to others in love reveals, according to Robinson, the nature of God as love and love as the ground of being. When we speak of God, then, we are speaking of the divine love that lies within the heart of things, and not of a personal being who created and rules them from above and beyond the world. Robinson saw the images of God and of God in Christ as symbols of sacrificial love that can motivate and inspire us to love and serve one another. But he also interpreted these images as pointing to the ultimacy of love as the ground of all existence.4 I was already having trouble with the conception of God I had assumed up to this point, coming increasingly to view it—despite all my attempts to justify it to myself—as incurably anthropomorphic, that is, too much like a human being, with human-like traits raised to the nth degree, and projected onto the sky. It was increasingly difficult for me to conceive of God as a distinct personal being who presides over a vast intergalactic universe that he has supposedly “created out of nothing,” a phrase that now seemed devoid of meaning. Robinson’s suggested revision of the concept of God was so radical and convincing as to make me begin to wonder why we needed to speak of God at all. Should we not just give up the idea altogether as reflective of the worldview of a distant time and no longer appropriate
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or meaningful for our own time? My reading of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 1957) and using it as a required text in classes on philosophy of religion gave additional force to this question by showing that there is no convincing way to argue unequivocally from the nature of the universe as we experience it to the universe’s derivation from or dependence on a personal God of any sort or to the panoply of divine traits assumed in traditional Christianity. But what should we do with the basic problem of explaining the existence of the universe? If we do not need a personal God for that, do we not need something closely akin to it in ultimate majesty, transcendence, and power? I realized that there is a debatable assumption lurking beneath this question. The assumption is that the existence of the universe as a whole needs to be explained. Theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury had argued that only God exists necessarily and that everything else is contingent and dependent on God for its existence. Thomas Aquinas also had the unquestioned assumption that the continuing existence, even if not an original coming into being, of the universe is in need of explanation, as did many other theologians before and after him. It is probably correct to reason that something must exist necessarily in order for other things to come into being and pass away, but why could we not view the universe itself as existing necessarily, in one form or other, forever? I was later to realize that Baruch Spinoza’s notion of natura naturans or “nature naturing” can be conceived as the ultimate dynamic and creative principle or power implicit in nature itself and not residing in some transcendent divine Being.5 This immanent creative principle can account for, or simply be seen as descriptive of, the continuing existence of the universe in all the transformations it has undergone and will continue to undergo throughout endless time. All meaningful explanations in this scenario, then, would presuppose the givenness of the world as the context for explanations within the world, and the world itself would not be in need of explanation by anything outside itself. I had first studied the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead in a course taught by Daniel Day Williams at Union Seminary, and I had continued to read Whitehead and be fascinated by his ideas. His notion of successive cosmic epochs allows for different universes, each with its own distinctive constituents, principles, and laws, to emerge out of previously existing ones. The new ones are transformations of old ones, and there is no absolute beginning of the succession of different universes as a whole (Whitehead 1978: 91–92). I was now beginning to think that the principle of parsimony favors this view of the universe (or succession of universes) as over against the one of an absolute beginning resulting from a oncefor-all act of divine creation out of nothing. Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God served for me as an important catalyst for ideas such as these. My
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long adherence to a conventional conception of God, and in fact to any conception of God whatever, was coming to an end. The fatal blow to my Christian faith was administered by Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz, which I read and re-read after I had taken a position in the philosophy department at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. I began teaching there in fall 1965 and remained until my retirement in 2001. Rubenstein’s book was one of the books that came to be identified with the Death of God movement in the mid-1960s. I was influenced by other writers associated with this movement such as Bishop Robinson, but Rubenstein was the one who forced me to face up to the question of how belief in an all-loving and all-powerful God who is said to be active in human history can be reconciled with the vast amount of evil in the world. That vast amount was made starkly and unavoidably evident for me, as it was for Rubenstein, by the genocidal evil of the Nazi holocaust. The traditional theistic problem of evil had not seemed to bother me as much before I read Rubenstein. I do not know how to explain this strange fact. Perhaps part of the reason was my reading of philosophers such as Whitehead and William James, who argued that God is not infinite in power but is limited by the autonomous powers of the world. I had encountered something similar to this idea much earlier at Davidson, when reading about the views of Edgar Sheffield Brightman. Thus, God can work to avoid evil and bring about good by his estimable powers of persuasion, but not by absolute control or manipulation. This idea was philosophically suggestive and certainly more coherent than the traditional conception of God, with the seemingly contradictory attributes of absolute goodness and absolute power in face of the evils of the world. But it did not speak to my emotions. It seemed to have little religious meaning or to provide little religious motivation for me. If I could believe in God, I thought, this would be the God in whom I would believe, but I could not quite accept it. It seemed too pat, a kind of ad hoc solution to a glaring and intractable problem. Unable to make up my mind about the issue, I tended to push it into the background, perhaps to await later consideration. Now because of the harsh impact of Rubenstein’s reasoning, I could not honestly say that I had a theistic belief or commitment of any kind. If God could not or would not do something to avoid horrible evils such as the holocaust—seeing to it, for example, that Adolf Hitler had a disabling illness in the mid-1930s before the “final solution” got underway—was God’s power and influence not ultimately weak and even negligible? And did we humans not have every right to question and even deny God’s existence rather than trying to make it square with the brute facts of our existence? It is not only a violation of every moral sentiment to think of an allpowerful God as somehow orchestrating events of history, including such things as the holocaust, in order to realize his hidden but supposedly wholly
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good purposes. This view, as Rubenstein rightly observes, is “too obscene” to contemplate. But a God too weak to prevent the holocaust and other kinds of flagrant, widespread sufferings and evils in the world—especially those that routinely torment, wound, and kill innocent persons—made belief in God in my judgment at that time (and to the date of this writing) basically unhelpful, unconvincing, and irrelevant. After Auschwitz, Rubenstein’s previous form of Jewish faith was demolished. After Rubenstein, my Christian faith collapsed into total ruin as well. It was not Rubenstein’s book alone that had produced this result, as I have been explaining, but my reading of it brought the Christian stage of my journey of faith to an abrupt and unavoidable end. I formally demitted (resigned) the Presbyterian ministry in 1969. I was left for some time in an outer darkness, with no semblance of an active, meaningful faith. I had lost God, a Savior, the hope of immortality, and confidence in the triumph of good over evil. The magical warmth and wonder of the Christmas and Easter seasons had faded. The great Christian choral music of the past and the hymns I had loved so well had lost most of their former meaning. I yearned to recapture the assurance of Christian faith, but found that I could not. Like Ehrman, I ceased attending church and thus lost the experience of participating in and having the support of a religious community. This was a painful part of my life, but it also had another side. Despite the aching sense of terrible loss, I also had strange feelings of liberation and relief. I was at least being honest with myself in acknowledging my doubts and the changes they called for in my basic commitments and beliefs. A new sense of integrity was mixed with my sorrow and regret as I faced an unknown future. I toyed for a while with humanism as an alternative to my previous Christian commitment. But I soon was put off by its unquestioning optimism, too confident and excessive rationalism, and tendency to focus too narrowly on human beings and their needs, ideals, and concerns as the putative object of ultimate commitment and concern. Surely, I thought, there must be something more ultimate and of more comprehensive scope and importance than the human beings who have come late onto the evolutionary stage and will probably eventually leave it when the human species—like hundreds of thousands of other past species of biological organism—becomes extinct. And even to focus primarily or exclusively on humans in their natural setting on earth is to act as if the earth were the only planet or place of habitation for similar life forms in the entire enormous universe, an idea I found to be statistically unlikely and difficult if not impossible to take seriously. Missing too in humanism, at least as I interpreted it at that time, was sufficient explicit awareness of or attention to the inexhaustible wonder, depth, and mystery suffusing the world and our place as humans in the world, a haunting sense that requires evocation by powerful imaginative
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symbols framing thought and enactment, and not just a compendium of reasoned statements of belief, important as these also are. Such symbolic means of evocation and expression also are necessary, I reflected, to make close contact with our emotions and to unlock the unconscious dimensions of our minds. In these respects, I agreed fully with thinkers such as Bushnell, Tillich, and Rubenstein. The gist of my personal dissatisfaction with humanism, as I came to regard it then and continue to regard it today, is well stated by Thomas Berry. He deplores our persistent tendency, especially in the West, to “think of the human as primary and the universe as derivative rather than thinking of the universe as primary and the human as derivative” (Berry 2009: 128). The urgent need for the fundamental shift of focus to which Berry alludes is made especially evident by the ecological threats and devastations we are experiencing and becoming tardily aware of in our time. We are not the focus of the universe. We are but one of its countless offsprings and humble participants. To assume otherwise is to inflict ruin on ourselves and our natural home.
MY NEW FORM OF FAITH I always have had an active interest in the natural sciences. And it was these that pointed the way for me toward a new kind of faith, the faith that I am committed to today. I have already spoken of the incredibly vast intergalactic universe opened up to our vision and imagination by the cosmological science of the twentieth century and of the fact that it seemed to me to make the theistic God, regarded as a distinct personal being who created and now presides over the enormous reaches of the universe in space and time, too puny and small in conception to play such a role. Theism, for all its insistence on the unimaginable magnificence of God, sometimes made him appear to me like the bogus and ineffectual would-be wizard behind the curtains in the movie The Wizard of Oz, a movie I had enjoyed immensely as a child. I hesitate to put the matter so baldly, and I mean no disrespect to those who have a strongly sustaining and meaningful theistic faith, but this is how theism increasingly felt to me. The incomprehensibility of God’s alleged omni-attributes, and the well-known difficulty of relating them coherently to one another, also contributed to this conclusion. Scientific cosmology directed my attention away from God and toward the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the universe itself. Rather than thinking of all of this as derived from a more ultimate principle, presence, or power, I was now increasingly able to acknowledge it as ultimate in its own right and having no need to depend for its character or existence on something beyond itself. Furthermore, I was becoming comfortable with the idea that nature is our home and that we need yearn for no other. In it, and not
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in God, we live, move, and have our being during the comparatively brief span of our lives. Martin Luther heralded principles such as sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia in his own day. I was now eager to proclaim the principle of sola natura. What image shall I use at least to begin to suggest the wonders of our natural environment and my own sense of their numinous character and religious meaning? I could speak of towering mountains, of restless ocean waves reaching to the horizon, of the fierce beauty of Bengal tigers, of tumultuous waterfalls, of erupting volcanoes, and the like. But I prefer to speak of the golden-orb-web spider (Nephila clavipes). This creature, sometimes called the “giant wood spider,” built an enormous, intricate, golden-tinted web between two long-leaf pines in my back yard. I measured the distance between them, and they are eight feet, eight inches apart. The threads of the web have a tensile strength greatly exceeding that of steel. The female spider that spins the web is large and elaborately decorated. I did not see her building her web, but it is a thing of striking complexity and beauty. She hangs head-down in her web day-by-day. Occasionally, she will move to feed on insects caught in the web or to repair the web after a rain or windstorm. Once fertilized by a much smaller and less ornate male mate, she will lay her eggs in a sac spun on a tree, depositing hundreds of eggs there. Not having watched her start her web, I do not know how she managed to span the considerable distance between the trees in order to attach the long support lines for it. At the time of this writing, she has left her web after residing on it for about a month. But the web still hangs between the trees, looking more limp and bedraggled with each new day. My wife Pam and I enjoyed seeing this beautiful spider hanging in her web every morning or busily moving about to perform her tasks. We will miss her. All the wonders of nature are compressed for me and brought to evocative symbolic expression in this spider and her marvelous life and work. I feel a strange but compelling kinship with her that cannot adequately be put into words. She is but one of the countless numinous wonders of nature that could be brought into view. These multifarious wonders thrill and mystify the heart. I mentioned the influence of scientific cosmology as one factor that has guided me toward Religion of Nature. Two other influences of the natural sciences have also been pivotal for me. One is the theory of evolution, which connects all natural organisms, including ourselves, with one another through a span of time that reaches back into early years of earth’s history. The other is ecological science, which exhibits our interlinked mutual dependencies across space, joining all of us creatures of nature into a gigantic earthly biosphere. The biosphere, in its turn, is sustained by energy from the sun, which is transformed into the energy of plants, passed down into organisms whose food is the plants, and through them into creatures that
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feed on the plant-eating organisms. The plants, in the meantime, use the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy for their own nurturance, a process that releases the stable amount of oxygen into the air that sustains all the aerobic beings of the earth. These matters are now commonplace knowledge, of course, but if we step back from them and look at them from a fresh and receptive angle, they boggle the mind. And these are only the gross outward details of earthly life. The more particular ones such as organic chemistry, cell biology, mutations, modes of birth and care for the young, mating calls and displays, defensive techniques, cooperative strategies, and so on are endlessly fascinating. And beneath it all is the elusive quantum world, explored by physicists with developing theories such as String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity Theory that defy the imagination and stretch our minds almost to the breaking point. This is not to say, however, that the nature that is the focus of Religion of Nature is merely the nature described by the natural sciences. It also is nature as lived, as experienced in bodily feelings and mental awareness, as celebrated in poetry and the other arts, as encountered in the concreteness and immediacy of everyday experience. We gain essential insight into the nature of nature and the sublimity of nature not merely from the outside, from the abstract methods of the natural sciences, but from within, from the perspective of our own lives. And all of our human capacities, creations, and technologies are gifts of this same nature of which our human species is an integral part. We often speak of “going out into nature” when we visit a national park, go to the seashore, or hike and camp in the woods. But we can no more speak meaningfully of going out into nature than we can make sense of going out into the skin of our bodies. We are always in nature, and nature is always in us. It is the oxygen we breathe in and the carbon dioxide we exhale. It is the metabolic processes of our bodies. It is our regular heartbeats. It is the food we eat and the liquids we drink; the fabrics we wear; the wood, brick, and mortar of our houses; and the metals and chemicals of our automobiles, airplanes, and space shuttles. We live nature through and through, nature sustains us moment-by-moment and day-by-day, we come from it, and we shall return to it. It is not for me, as ultimate reality is for Rubenstein, a Holy Nothingness. Instead, it is the staggeringly full and ceaselessly fecund Holy Everything that surrounds, suffuses, and sustains us humans and all other forms of being. We should not think for a moment, however, that nature is always beautiful and creative, a source of unalloyed joy and delight. It has its inescapable and undeniable dark side. Its creations go hand in hand with its destructions. Its destructions are sometimes horrible and devastating. Storms, earthquakes, mudslides, fires, pestilences, and famines can mercilessly sweep thousands and even hundreds of thousands of humans and other sentient beings in their path.
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Moreover, we human beings as aspects of nature, with our dazzling powers of creativity and goodness, are also capable of deeds of enormous destructiveness and evil. It is not only the Nazi holocaust that shows this to be sadly true. It is formerly beautiful cities bombed to rubble from the air; the ravages of the battlefield made possible by technological inventions such as tanks, field guns, machine guns, rockets, high-powered rifles, and drones; cruelly unjust social and economic systems; the heartless abuse and neglect of children; the pitiless conditions of sweat shops; theft, rape, murder, and extortion; and the like. Religion of Nature does not countenance a glib, romantic optimism about the human condition or about its being embedded in nature. Its sense of life is tragic although not despairing. Both nature and human nature are radically ambiguous when it comes to considerations of good and evil. We can and should aspire with confidence and hope toward all the good and all the alleviation of suffering it is possible for us to produce and attain, but we should also always be aware of the menace of destructiveness and evil that threatens us from within ourselves and on every side, and from nonhuman as well as human sources. Nature as the focus of religious commitment and concern is not unambiguously good. But it is not unambiguously evil either. Realism demands unwavering respect for both of its aspects. It might seem odd to hold up such a blend of good and evil as worthy of religious devotion. Should not the object of religious faith be unambiguously good? And is not the traditional conception of an all-good and all-loving God infinitely superior to a nature riddled with ugliness and evil as well as resplendent in beauty and goodness? The truth of the matter is that any God responsible for creating nature as it undeniably is must be held accountable for its condition and for its potentialities for evil as well as goodness. Even if God has not created this world, as process theology maintains, God must continue to have dealings with the world and to be inevitably embroiled in its ambiguities (see Crosby 2008: 16–19). I submit that no coherent and reliable conception of a religious ultimate can escape being affected by radical ambiguity. The Hindu pairing of Shiva the Creator with Kali the Destroyer gives powerful symbolic expression to this fact. Moreover, if we give the matter careful thought, it turns out that it is difficult if not impossible to imagine a world that is on balance better than the one we already have or better suited to our nature as finite beings. I came to this realization by pondering over the years in my teaching and reading the philosopher of religion Ninian Smart’s provocative essay entitled “Omnipotence, Evil, and Supermen” (Smart 1965). It is doubtful, moreover, that after due consideration we humans would really want to live in a different kind of world (see Crosby 2008: 26–33). But what about the absence of conscious purpose in nature? Is this not a serious deficiency of nature as a possibly deserving focus of religious commitment? I do not think that there is a purpose of nature as a whole
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or that it is guided by some ultimate purpose or overall telic end. It is not the product of a purposive Creator. But to deny that there is a purpose of nature should not blind us to the fact that there is purpose in nature.6 We are creations of nature, for example, and our conscious lives exhibit many different kinds of purposes that we seek for, succeed in attaining, or hope to attain. The same is true of other conscious forms of life however far down the scale of life consciousness is to be found. And this is probably farther down the scale than we tend normally to recognize or assume. Consciousness and purposiveness go necessarily together, and both are probably fairly rampant in varying degrees in nature or at least are not confined to humans. The world is full of purposes and purposive activity, then, although we cannot speak of a purpose for the existence of the world as a whole if we subscribe to Religion of Nature. This is not the place for extensive description, development, or argument concerning Religion of Nature, but I can mention a few more of its features here.7 There is no hope in this outlook of an afterlife. Humans are deeply linked, both in time and space, to all of the other creatures of earth. They are not pure spirits in their essential natures but thoroughly embodied beings. And like all embodied beings, they come into being at birth and pass away at death. There also is no eschatology or promise of an ultimate triumph of goodness over evil or of a final end to suffering and pain. The future is open, and there are no guarantees. Humans have an obligation to continue to work for the betterment of humankind and for the health and wellbeing of nature—its natural environments as well as the life forms within those environments. They should struggle tirelessly against suffering and evil and labor for their mitigation but cannot hope finally to eliminate them. Unpredictable aspects of human freedom and the workings of natural law pose insuperable barriers to naïve optimism. Life is uncertain and precarious, not only for other creatures but for us as well—this is a mark of our oneness with them. In the perspective of Religion of Nature, humans are expected to develop their social ethics as a subset of their environmental ethics, based on their best understandings of the needs of human beings and human societies and of ways to live in balance and harmony with other natural creatures. Their social ethics must exhibit a thoughtful autonomy based on careful reasoning and attention to cumulative experience, an ethics that is consistent with the general outlook of Religion of Nature but not directly derived from it. Humans are not obligated to live ethically in strict accordance with nature, for example. That is, they are not obligated, despite being encouraged toward a profound reverence and respect for nature, slavishly to mimic patterns of relationship exhibited in the nonhuman parts of nature such as predation, cannibalism or the routine neglect of weak and supposedly “unfit” progeny.
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Instead, they should continue to discover, practice, and embed within their communities and institutions ethical principles and obligations appropriate to human beings. These principles and obligations include caring for the poor, the sick, and the needy, and for the victims of cruelty, neglect, and injustice. They also include appropriate punishments for the perpetrators of injustice and other legal sanctions disparaging injustice and honoring justice. And they involve envisioning, constructing, and maintaining social systems that can best conduce to the flourishing of individuals in stable, wellordered, just, and equitable relationships with one another. Adherents of different religious (and secular) outlooks may come to the same or remarkably similar conclusions when it comes to developing ethical and legal systems. Different worldviews and paths of life can overlap in this regard. As we saw earlier, faith and morality interrelate but are not the same. It should also be noted that Religion of Nature is not alone in denying the existence of or the need for a theistic God. Many of the religions of the world are not oriented around God or a conception of God. Theravada Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, for example, do not have a monotheistic conception of their respective religious ultimates. And we should also take note of the fact that such things as prayer, meditation, ritual celebration and enactment, and various forms of symbolic expression are perfectly appropriate in Religion of Nature. Its view of prayer is admittedly not that of an I–Thou encounter with a personal God, but it can easily take the form of declarations of gratitude and hope; confessions of sins and resolves to seek the forgiveness of those one has wronged; affirmations of intention to become a better person, to help others, and to do good in the world; expressions of admiration and praise for the stupendous wonders of nature; and the like. All of this can take place both individually and in community. Religion of Nature’s reverence for nature can find expression in ritual celebrations of various kinds, and we know from history how diverse, creative, and inspirational these and other symbolic evocations of the power, mystery, and splendor of nature can be. We find such evocations everywhere in dance, drama, song, story, sculpture, and painting, and they are rampant in the lore and practice of all societies, no matter how young or old. Nature does not have to be regarded as a creation of God or as suffused with a divine presence and power to be widely and instinctively honored in symbol and myth, or to be communed with in prayer and meditation. In what sense, however, does Religion of Nature offer salvation? And is that not the central function of all religion? Salvation cannot mean going to heaven when we die, since Religion of Nature has no concept of heaven and does not affirm an afterlife. But salvation need not be other-worldly, nor can it in any event be merely other-worldly. It must relate to our lives here and now, and not just to a putative life beyond the grave. The hope
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of salvation in the former sense is indeed characteristic of all the major religions of the world, whether they endorse something like the Christian conception of personal immortality or not. And something like it is characteristic of secular forms of faith as well. It is also the goal of Religion of Nature. A strictly this-worldly salvation means for it three things: assurance, demand, and empowerment. Let me briefly reflect on each of these aspects of salvation as they pertain to Religion of Nature. Once I have done so, I can bring this chapter to a close. The assurance aspect lies basically in the idea of our being at home in nature. For those of us who have been reared in a culture dominated by the traditional teachings of the Christian religion, this idea is more elusive and strange than we might think. Our culture has long taken for granted the notion that humans are the lords of nature, created by God to exercise dominion over it. It has also taught that humans are spiritual beings in their essential nature and that their entanglement in the processes of nature is only a temporary state of being. Their ultimate destiny is in a heavenly realm far removed from the frustrations, limitations, tragedies, sufferings, and pains of this earthly life. This world is a fallen world, and we cannot feel at home here. We should instead yearn for the radically different new life that awaits us beyond the grave. This idea is so deeply embedded in Western culture as to make it difficult for Westerners to imagine humans as one of the spin-offs of biological processes who belong, along with other organisms, wholly to the earth and who are humbly dependent on, rather than entitled to be dominant over, these other organisms and who are critically reliant upon the finite physical resources of the earth itself for everything pertaining to their livelihood and continuing well-being. The traditional concept of God views God as having created the universe out of nothing and as having no dependence on or need for it. The human creatures of God are seen as made in God’s image, and it is but a step from this notion to seeing them as being like God in not belonging to the earth or being dependent on it, and as being purely spiritual (again like God) rather than material in their true nature. Given these deeply entrenched views, it is not all easy for us, molded as we are by Western culture, to feel at home in nature or to affirm ourselves as nothing more or less than creatures of nature. Religion of Nature emphasizes in every possible way that this is our true character and destiny, and that we should do everything in our power to realize it and act in accordance with it. To realize it in the depths of our being and to have it pervade and color the whole of our lives is the work of a lifetime. It requires among other things radical rethinking and recentering, and the disciplines of persistent prayer, meditation, and other forms of religious practice. To attain this state of awareness and mode of
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life is to be profoundly assured in our inner being because it is to come to terms with what we are and to cease the futile and misdirected yearning to be something other than ourselves. Our kinship and communal relation with all other natural beings is a given, but thoroughly to understand and feel its import in such a manner as to have it become the center of our existence and the focus of our lives is to experience an essential part of what it means to find salvation in Religion of Nature. Salvation in this first sense of the term means achieving authentic self-realization through appropriate and mutually beneficial relationships with humans and nonhuman members of our earthly community. It means gaining a profound sense of connectedness with all other forms of life and being that can cure the oppressive feelings of alienation, loneliness, and separation that are so endemic in our individualistic Western culture.8 The truth of the matter, from the standpoint of Religion of Nature, is that we cannot become fulfilled selves until we experience ourselves as living in deep relation to other persons and to other aspects of nature, and until we accept and affirm our status as natural beings. Religion of Nature stresses the fact of this deep interconnectedness and relatedness throughout all of nature and gives us the confidence and assurance of being a cherished, welcome, and contributing member of the household of nature. It assures us of being truly at rest and truly at home here. Whereas traditional theism placed us in a realm beyond this world, Religion of nature locates us squarely in this world. The former points us in a vertical direction, whereas the latter orients us horizontally. This means that we are already where we are meant to be and that we can settle into our earthly home and give fervent thanks for the privilege of being here. In his book Alone, the explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd gives us matchless insight into what it means or can mean to feel at home within nature. It is mid-April 1934, and Byrd is alone at his Bolling Advance Base on the Ross Ice Barrier in Antarctica. He will remain there in complete isolation and approaching total darkness until Aug. 11, when he will be joined at last with some of his group from Little America. Around 4 p.m. on April 14 he is out on a walk, and the sun has just set. An aurora is pulsating to the northeast, Venus is brilliant in the deep blue of an eastern sky, and opposite her is a twinkling star. The temperature is 89 degrees of frost. The ice barrier stretches to the horizon on all sides and is the color of dull platinum. Byrd muses on the scene and expresses the sense of incontrovertible union with the cosmos it evoked within him. The day was dying, the night being born—but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what
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Byrd’s lyrical statement of his mystical sense of belonging, of being a tiny and yet integral part of the vastness, sublimity, and beauty of the universe, enables us to grasp something of the profound importance and meaning of the assurance aspect of Religion of Nature’s concept of salvation. Berry adds his eloquent voice to that of Admiral Byrd and speaks to the same effect when he proclaims that [w]e discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens; when we are most intimate with the air we breathe, the Earth that supports us, the soil that grows our food, with the meadows in bloom. We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here. (Berry 2009: 95) Salvation in the perspective of Religion of Nature consists in significant measure in a similar calm and fortifying assurance of being at home in the natural world and of being able to find fullness of life here and now rather than in some transcendent place and time.9 The demand aspect of salvation follows from the assurance aspect. To be assured of what we are as creatures of nature is also to be obligated to act in accordance with that assurance and to weave it ever more tightly into the fabric of our being. Living lives of compassion, respect, and active attendance to the needs of other human beings is part of this demand. But the demand extends beyond the human community to the encompassing community of the diverse living beings on this earth and to our shared natural environment. Our ecological duties and obligations complement our human social duties and obligations. If the earth is our home, we should devote an attention and care to its overall balance and well-being that are comparable in importance and value to the concerns we have for our own families and our local homes. Salvation as demand also means that we should work to deepen within ourselves and other human beings the realization that we belong here and
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an awareness of all that follows in the way of both benefit and responsibility from this pivotal fact. I am talking here not just about environmental ethics as the appropriate larger setting for social ethics, as important as that topic is. I am also talking about the sensibilities and demands of an environmental faith. As seen in Chapter 5, faith relates not merely to specific choices and actions in moral situations but to the whole of one’s being. Incorporating the full significance of this mode of being into our most basic patterns of thought and action, both individually and institutionally, is the aim of the demand aspect of salvation in Religion of Nature. A faith that is all assurance and no demand would be a weak and ineffectual faith. The assurance provides context and support for the demand, and the demand is implicit in and follows from the assurance. Moreover, repeated successes and accomplishments in responding to the demand reinforce the assurance. Were it otherwise, faith would not be an act of the whole person. A faith that is genuinely salvific must have these two entwined aspects. A third aspect is required as well. And that is the aspect of empowerment. It is one thing to speak of the assurance provided by Religion of Nature and of the demands and goals it sets before us. But where are we to find the motivation, strength, and ability to realize the demands and goals, and thus to continue to deepen and reinforce the sense of assurance this form of faith promises? There is no God to whom we can turn for such empowerment, so where do we turn? The answer is that we must turn to ourselves and to the resources and inspirations of our natural home. Nature has planted within us not only an instinct to live but also an instinct to live well and to make the most of our natural abilities. It has engrained within us as social animals a drive to live in community and to give support to one another in community. It has conferred on us a remarkable amount of native intelligence and imagination, and given us considerable latitude for the exercise of purposive freedom. It has endowed us with the gift of language that not only facilitates explicit and detailed interpersonal communication but also greatly expands and enriches our capacity for thought and recollection. There is also the fact that nature provides for our needs by giving us resources of food, water, air, clothing, shelter, protection, tool-making, other kinds of technological invention, and the like. Finally, there is that fact that we humans are often deeply inspired by features of our natural environment and feel a compelling fascination for them and sense of connection with them, a fact to which the art and lore of every human culture and the whole of human history give eloquent testimony. Yes, we also have other impulses and motives. Humans can be aggressive and hurtful toward one another, and they can inflict devastating harm on their natural environments.10 They can misuse the resources of nature, and their technical achievements can be put to bellicose as well as to peaceful uses, producing widespread pain and suffering. They can view nature as
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ripe for exploitation and suited only to serve narrow and short-range human ends. Their intelligence and freedom can be put to evil as well as to good uses. To all of this history also gives sad and ample testimony. But the impulses for good are in us as well. The future is open, and we do not have to continue to commit the mistakes of the past. Instead of building and rebuilding destructive habits and ways of life, we can build constructive ones, ones deeply informed by respect and reverence for one another and for our natural home. It is within our power to do so, and our instinctive love for and sense of intimate connection with the whole of nature can be built upon and inspire us to do so. Our technology can be put to use in helping us to avoid natural disasters or to mitigate their effects for humans and other parts of nature. And our native intelligence can guide us in finding ways to establish more just and equitable institutions and communities. It would be naïve and foolish of us to expect to succeed in abolishing all destruction and evil, but we can make significant inroads against them. Religion of Nature agrees with Ehrman’s and Rubenstein’s insistence that there is no personal God to help us in this regard. But there is also no need to waste time and energy trying to figure out why God would cause or allow so much suffering and evil in the world. For Religion of Nature there are no Job-like situations that pose seemingly intractable problems for theodicy. The holocaust is our own doing and our own responsibility, not God’s. This realization is itself empowering, because it makes painfully evident our human capacity for monstrous evil, exposes the formidable character of this enemy of goodness, and throws us back on our own resources for fighting against it. The good that humans are also capable of is made evident by the comparatively stable, peaceful, and just communities we humans also have been able to found and maintain in various places and times—something we tend at times to forget in our pessimistic and despairing moods—and by the effective leadership of noble, just, courageous, and imaginative human beings with visions for the betterment of humanity and for instilling respect for our natural environment. I have in mind as recent examples persons such as the social visionaries Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the insightful social and political philosophers Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls, and the influential and inspirational ecological thinkers Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Arne Naess. There are no guarantees of final success nor any afterlife or eschatology supposedly to make all things right. We are on our own, and we must each work within the span of an earthly life. But we have each other, and we can give encouragement and aid to one another. We have the fertile capacities of our minds and the sympathetic, familial impulses of our hearts. We also have the inspiration of an inexhaustibly glorious, mysterious, and numinous natural world of which we are an integral part. For Religion of
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Nature and its distinctive form of faith, it is enough. This has become my firm commitment and conviction. In this chapter I provided one more example of the role of doubt in the life of faith and of the importance of allowing doubt to play its critical role in helping to produce a form of faith that can be adhered to honestly and with integrity. The presence of lingering doubt in all healthy forms of faith is a necessary reminder of the finitude and fallibility of those forms of faith. None of them can pretend to capture or fully to comprehend all the nuances, turns, and complexities of human life, to say nothing of the enormity of the universe. None of them can provide complete and unassailable certainty. They are all, at best, approximations to envisioned ideals, ideals that are themselves sometimes only dimly perceived. And what works effectively for one person or community of persons in the way of faith may not work so well for another. But the effective working of any form of faith critically depends on its openness to new insights and ideals, to its honest confrontation with the trials and tests of daily life, and to the possibility of different ways of thinking and acting in the world.
CONCLUSION This has been a book about the interrelations of faith and reason. I have argued that there is no adequate existential faith without reason and no adequate reason without existential faith. In fact, I want to affirm that neither reasonless faith nor faithless reason has any clear meaning. The faith may in some cases be perverse, and the reason deficient or grossly distorted, but the two will still be there, working in tandem. Hitler and Stalin were men of faith, guided by a deluded reason and a demonic, single-minded commitment, a fact that serves to remind us that some forms or manifestations of faith can be radically cruel and inhumane. I also have argued that faith is operative at the deepest levels not only of religious but also of secular outlooks on and responses to some of the most crucial challenges, issues, and exigencies of life in the world. The examples of religious and secular faith to which I have made reference throughout this book give support to this statement. The role of reason is evident in my own present form of faith, the outlines of which I have drawn in this final chapter. It was operative in the years of my developing and changing Christian faith, and it continued to play an active role through the course of my transition from Christianity to Religion of Nature. Reason was clearly a significant factor in the journeys of faith of Ehrman, Lewis, and Rubenstein described in Chapter 7, and its critical role can be readily observed in the examples of secular forms of faith I discussed in Chapter 6.
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I have also exhibited the presence of faith and the major role played by it in claims to knowledge in general and claims to scientific knowledge in particular. And I have discussed some significant relations of faith and morality. I developed a view of the nature of faith by discussing and illustrating six facets of faith and their interrelations. And I insisted upon the dynamic character of faith and the essential role played by critical doubt in imparting to faith this dynamic, ever-developing character. I have also emphasized throughout this book the central part played by symbolic expressions and practices in the thought and life of faith. There are no doubt persons, scholars and nonscholars alike, who will take issue with some if not many of my observations, claims, analyses, and arguments. I have intended for them to be thought provoking and controversial. But I hope that this study will stimulate further thought on a fascinating and important topic, one that relates intimately to our daily lives as religious or secular persons. It also is a topic that bears crucially on the many aspects of our social and political interactions that relate explicitly or implicitly to our different forms of faith. Our individual and communal quests for sustaining faith and rational understanding will be most fruitful when tempered by the spirit of a reflection by Berry with which I bring this book to a close: “The sacred is that which evokes the depths of wonder. We may know some things, but really we know only the shadow of things” (Berry 2009: 176).
NOTES
CHAPTER 1. INITIAL SKETCH OF A CONCEPT OF FAITH 1. Caputo 2007: 143. 2. Proverbs 3:5, in The Holy Scriptures: According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation. 3. There is debate about how fundamental causal determinism was to Einstein’s objection to quantum theory. The physicist Jeffrey Bub gives evidence for the view that what was primarily at issue for Einstein was his conviction that “the properties of systems described by the [quantum] theory” must be “determinate, that is, that the values of the physical magnitudes are definite without regard to any consideration of the observational context” (Bub 1988: 61). This comment still leaves open the question of whether quantum phenomena involve real or only apparent elements of chance. For some passages that affirm the importance of strict causal determinism in Einstein’s outlook, see Isaacson 2007: 84, 323–24, 333.
CHAPTER 2. FACETS OF FAITH 1. Salzberg 2002: xiv. 2. James 2:19, in The Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version. 3. Job 13:15, in The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation. 4. This story by the poet Hesiod (ca. 700 BCE) is recounted in Hamilton 1953: 70–1. 5. The story of Noah and the flood is in chapters 6 through 9 in the Book of Genesis. 6. This metaphor aptly captured the British attitude toward India during the time it was a colony of Great Britain, but the metaphor’s positive connotation was likely to be called into question by the many citizens of India who yearned for freedom from British rule. 7. Tillich is talking here of his version of the Christian faith, and he relates this matter to the sin of idolatry. But I think that his observation about the importance of acknowledging an aspect of self-negation in the symbols of faith pertains to all the forms of faith, given the scope and complexity of them that I am seeking to analyze and describe in this book.
CHAPTER 3. FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 1. Polanyi 1962: 267. 157
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2. Whitehead makes a similar point when he remarks, “the art of literature, vocal or written, is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates” (Whitehead 1964: 115; emphasis added). 3. See Stone 2008 and Crosby 2002. 4. An extensive investigation of the resources and implications of various religious traditions for environmental thought and action is provided in Gottlieb 2009. 5. “Q” is an abbreviation for Quelle, the German word for “source.” 6. A historical root of our strong tendency in the West to identify faith with belief in a particular set of doctrines is what Harvey Cox calls “the ‘imperialization’ of the [Christian] church and the glorification of the bishops” that had its beginning in the fourth century of the Common Era and continued on into the high Middle Ages. “[N]ow faith,” Cox continues, “came to mean obeying the bishop and assenting to what he taught. Faith had been coarsened into belief, and this distortion has hobbled Christianity ever since” (Cox 2009: 98). 7. “When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework,” writes Polanyi, “we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body. . . . They are not asserted and cannot be asserted, for assertion can be made only within a framework with which we have identified ourselves for the time being; as they are themselves our ultimate framework, they are essentially inarticulable” (Polanyi 1962: 60). 8. I adopt the felicitous term animal faith from Santayana 1923. Animal faith encompasses both the cognitive and existential realms, providing necessary and substantial basis for our thought and reasoning, as well as for our being able to adapt to our natural environments and to survive and flourish within them. Animal faith is thus presupposed in all viable forms of existential faith. 9. Hume was well aware of the destructive effects of his skepticism for daily life. He argued that it is the “sensitive” rather than the cognitive part of our natures, and our reliance on “custom” or “nature” rather than reasoned belief, that enable us to live with confidence in the everyday world. He is famous for declaring that, despite his skeptical philosophy, he could “dine, play a game of back-gammon,” converse, and be merry with his friends—activities that made his speculations seem “cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous” (Hume 1978: Bk. I, Part IV, Sections 1 and 7, pp. 183, 269). 10. Compatibilism is the view that determinism and freedom are perfectly consistent with one another. We are free to the extent that we act out of our own personal motives, desires, impulses, characters, and the like, even though these are all causally determined. For discussion of a noncompatibilist or libertarian view of freedom, and arguments in support of it and critical of compatibilism, see Crosby 2005. See also Viney and Crosby 1994.
CHAPTER 4. FAITH AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 1. Midgley 1994: 108. 2. The fact that Haack does so easily brush them aside as having any evidential value opens the door a crack into what we may suspect to be her own form of existential faith, which is obviously naturalistic and not supernaturalistic and has little patience with traditional religious appeals or views.
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3. It is conceivable, but only barely so, that a person’s most centered and ultimate commitments might be to the practice of wine tasting and the lore that goes with it. It is more conceivable that one might regard researches and findings in the natural sciences alone as being somehow definitive of the ultimate aim and meaning of all of life and the only thing worth living for. The latter is what is sometimes called “scientism” or what could be described as a scientistic version of secular faith, and I take it up later. 4. For detailed discussion of the history of reflections on the problem of the relations of mathematics to the world, as well as an exposition of the unresolved status of such reflections to the present day, see Mario Livio’s intriguing and wellresearched book Is God a Mathematician? (Livio 2009). See also Monk 1991: 417–22 for a description of the sometimes-heated debate at Cambridge in 1939 between Wittgenstein and Alan Turing about the character and significance of mathematical reasoning. Wittgenstein insisted, as against Turing, that there is no such thing as the foundation of mathematics—the sort of foundation that had been sought for in the three-volume work Principia Mathematica, authored by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and first published in 1910–1913. According to Wittgenstein, mathematical proofs have nothing to do with truth; they involve only relations of grammar and meaning and are entirely invented rather than discovered. For Turing, on the other hand, mathematical investigations can lead (and often have led) to discoveries of highly significant truths. 5. Haack makes a similar point about scientific instrumentation (Haack 2007: 126). 6. Cosmologist João Magueijo makes these comments about the current search among physicists for a theory that would unify the two presently disparate and conflicting fields of quantum theory and general relativity, that is, the so-called Theory of Everything or Grand Unified Theory. “It could be that there is no unification and that gravity simply isn’t quantized. But this possibility seems to insult our sense of logic. Nature is crying out for a single principle capable of containing within itself the current shambolic variety of theories we use to explain the physical world around us” (Magueijo 2003: 235). What Magueijo interprets as logic and nature “crying out” for such a theory is at least in part his own strong faith in the unity and intelligibility of nature as a whole, a faith that is shared by many if not most natural scientists. This is not to say that Magueijo’s faith is misplaced, unreasonable, or necessarily unwarranted. It is simply to call attention to his comments as involving an aspect of faith, a faith that underlies and helps to motivate the researches of scientists such as himself.
CHAPTER 5. FAITH AND MORALITY 1. Murdoch 1993: 482. 2. Wittgenstein came to this realization while watching a play, Die Kreuzelscheibe, by the Austrian playwright Ludwig Anzengruber. Wittgenstein had specifically in mind religious faith, but his observation applies to secular faith as well. 3. By “genuine” freedom, as indicated in an earlier chapter, I mean a freedom that is not entirely determined by antecedent causes, either within the person or outside the person. In genuine freedom one acts purposefully and with ends in
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view within a causal context, but his or her actions are not totally determined by that context. Implicit in this notion is the conviction that the world is not a closed causal system but one in which genuinely free actions (as well as chance events) can routinely take place. 4. See in this connection Damasio 1994, especially chapters 3 and 4. One of Damasio’s main conclusions is that “[e]motion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason” (xiii). 5. Franklin is quoted by Aldridge 1967: 99. I owe this citation to Donald Wayne Viney; see Viney 2010: 87. 6. I am assuming that by “virtue,” Franklin means specific virtuous actions, as distinguished from Murdoch’s more wholistic interpretation of the meaning of the term. He is claiming, in other words, that consistent moral practices are of great importance in the life of faith and not just adherence to what may be regarded as correct doctrinal beliefs. 7. In an earlier book (Crosby 1981) I noted that religion incorporates both a personal and a cosmic dimension. Each of the six interrelated aspects of the theory of religion I developed there—uniqueness, primacy, pervasiveness, rightness, permanence, and hiddenness—has a personal as well as a cosmic aspect. What I claimed there for religious faith also applies to secular faith, namely, that such faith contains necessary assumptions not just about ourselves and our personal outlooks and commitments but about the character of the world in which we live as human beings. I also discuss this theory of religion in both its personal and cosmic aspects in chapter six of A Religion of Nature. 8. In an essay entitled “Kant’s Ideas About Ultimate Reality and Meaning in Relation to His Moral Theory: Critique of an Enlightenment Ideal” (Crosby 1994a; see especially 123–29), I discuss the religious (and more specifically the Pietistic Protestant) background of Kant’s insistence upon the inviolable sanctity of persons and thus their entitlement to be treated always as ends in themselves and not merely as means. In this essay I defend the thesis that anterior religious assumptions—usually tacit but sometimes explicit—pervade Kant’s moral outlook, in contrast with the view of the relations of morality and religion he develops, namely, that morality leads ineluctably to religion and that authentic religion must be based solely on morality. 9. Untouchables continue to be discriminated against in India today. The term untouchable was eradicated under India’s constitution in 1950. This group, which numbers in the neighborhood of two hundred million persons, prefers to refer to itself as Dalits, which means “downtrodden” or “oppressed.” The group has become increasingly assertive in demanding just treatment but remains subject to oppressive attitudes and treatments stemming from the ancient caste system of India.
CHAPTER 6. SECULAR FORMS OF FAITH 1. Smith 1987: 138. 2. See the section “Hope for the Living” in Kurtz 1983: 119–21. 3. Kurtz recognizes that “for some people life may not be worth living in every context and at any price.” For example, a particular person may be so bur-
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dened with pain or sorrow as not to want to live any longer. But what he wants to say “is that most human beings, in normal conditions, find life worthwhile.” He hastens to add, however, that “it is not simply life at all costs that men and women seek, but the good life, with significant experience and satisfaction.” Not just life, therefore, but “fullness of life” is what persons are most concerned with and intent on attaining (Kurtz 1983: 159). 4. It should be noted that the ideas of the Vienna Circle were more varied and complex than those set forth in Ayer’s rather straightforward and simple book. Although Ayer cites Ludwig Wittgenstein as a principle source of inspiration (along with Bertrand Russell) for this volume in his “Preface to First Edition” (July 1935), Wittgenstein was a lifelong opponent of scientism’s hegemonic claims. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he insisted that the most important issues of life cannot be spoken because they cannot be regarded as scientifically verifiable propositions. But despite this fact, he was convinced that they remain far more important than anything that can be scientifically analyzed, asserted, or defended. Such things lie beyond the reach of scientific language, but they do “make themselves [and their lasting critical importance] manifest.” See Wittgenstein 1961: 6:52–7, pp. 73–4. An informative discussion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that discusses the differences between saying and showing, and the crucial role of this distinction in the thought of the later Wittgenstein, is Schneider 2005.
CHAPTER 7. CRISES OF FAITH 1. Ehrman 2008: 1. 2. For some of Rubenstein’s references to or exhibitions of the influence on him of the thought of Paul Tillich, see Rubenstein 1966: 196, 201–02, 206, 229, 232, 238–39.
CHAPTER 8. MY PERSONAL JOURNEY OF FAITH 1. Berry 1988: 81. 2. See Stone 2008 and Crosby 2007a. These two sources compare and contrast the views of many religious naturalists of the past and present. Some recent books that develop and defend versions of religious naturalism are Corrington 1997, Goodenough 1998, Kaufman 2004, Peters 2002, Raymo 2008, Rue 2005, and Stone 1992. 3. My biological father and mother divorced when I was seven years old. My mother remarried not long after. My stepfather was a wonderful parent to me and my three siblings—a full brother, a half-brother, and a half-sister. He loved and cared for us all indiscriminately. My mother was equally loving and caring. 4. This notion is reminiscent of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where in Canto XXXIII, line 145 of the Paradiso, Dante speaks of “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.” 5. See Spinoza 1951, vol. 2. The reference to natura naturans and its relation to natura naturata (“nature natured),” that is, the present face of the universe, is in his Ethics, Pt. I, Prop. XXIX, pp. 68–9.
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6. I first became aware of this important distinction by reading Baier 1980. The distinction guards against the kind of uncritical conflation of the notion of “cosmic purpose” or “overall purpose in the universe” with the concept of an evolutionary emergence of purposive beings on earth that John Haught assumes and attempts to argue for. Contrary to Haught’s reasoning, purpose can, as the outcome of biological evolution, be “really resident in nature” without the need to ascribe some kind of overarching purpose or guiding telos to nature as a whole. The latter is not a necessary condition for the former. See Haught 2006: 119–20, and the whole of chapters 6 and 7. For arguments supporting an opposing view to that of Haught, see Crosby 2005, chapters 5 and 6, and Crosby 2009. 7. A summary of some central tenets of Religion of Nature and of some arguments offered in support of it is contained in Crosby 2007a. Robert Corrington made an insightful response to this essay from what he then characterized as a pantheistic perspective in Corrington 2007. Religion of Nature is neither a version of pantheism nor of panentheism because it does not conceive of nature or any aspect of nature as God or as being contained in God. 8. The fact that this sense of alienation or radical separation from nature is endemic in our modern Western culture stems partly if not largely from the heritage of seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, who dreamed of “formalizing nature to mathematics and thereby discerning the divine cosmic machine,” with the result that the human self is “separated irreparably from the world it surveys” and is thus profoundly alienated from the world (Tauber 2009: 173). The Cartesian heritage is implicit within and has been carried forward by the kind of narrow scientism that seeks to reduce (or assumes the reducibility of) everything to the terms of an objectifying science that either leaves human subjects out of account, relegates them to the periphery of the natural world, or explicitly denies importance or meaning to human experiences, aspirations, or concerns that cannot be described or explained in a rigorously scientific manner. Tauber’s instructive book Science and the Quest for Meaning is focused on the problem of how to heal the rift between humans and the world that has been opened up by a hegemonic and exclusivist conception of the natural sciences, as over against a view of these sciences’ contributions and role that sees them as one (but only one) essential aspect of a more encompassing and unifying worldview. He places this problem in illuminating historical perspective. 9. Both Berry and Byrd include God or some kind of active divine presence or purpose in their respective ideas about humans being fully at home in nature and about the sacred character of nature itself. Berry is a Roman Catholic priest, and Byrd’s ruminations while at the Advanced Base incorporate references to “purpose in the whole” of the universe and to “inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading intelligence” lying behind it (Byrd 1984: 85, 161). In this respect, their views are different from mine. But I share in their insistence on the integral place of human beings within the natural order. Our agreement on this matter, despite our difference on the existence or need for God or some kind of guiding cosmic intelligence or purpose of the universe as a whole, shows that the assurance aspect of Religion of Nature’s soteriology, as I am describing it, is not confined to Religion of Nature or to religious naturalism as such. 10. At the time of this writing, for example, there has been a tremendous explosion of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and vast amounts of oil are spreading
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out into the Gulf and toward shores to the north of it. Fish, birds, turtles, and other forms of wildlife in the Gulf, on its beaches, and in the wetlands that extend into it are affected. Many of them will suffer and die by being covered with the oil and/or ingesting it, and by the rampant pollution of their natural habitats.
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INDEX
Bushnell, Horace, 137–39 Byrd, Richard E., 151–52, 162
Absolute Idealism, 115, 116, 117 Abraham and Isaac, 112 absurdity of universe and human life, 110–111 acculturation, 49–51 does not entrap us, 49 afterlife, 112 agnosticism, 113 Alexander, Samuel, 116 Altizer, Thomas J. J., 124 animal faith (see faith, animal) Anselm of Canterbury, 141 anxiety, ontological, three types of, 29–30 Aquinas, Thomas, 40–41, 141 Aristotle, 40, 56 Augustine of Hippo, 19–20 Ayer, A. J., 99, 161 Baier, Kurt, 162 Barfield, Owen, 116 Barth, Karl, 134 being-itself, power of, 29, 126 Berkeley, George, 117 Berry, Thomas, 131, 144, 152, 155, 162 Bible historical criticism of, 109, 134–35 literalistic interpretation of, 109 symbolic interpretation of, 138 Brightman, Edgar Sheffield, 142 Brunner, Emil, 134 Bub, Jeffrey, 157 Buddhism, 15, 27 Bodhisattva ideal of, 89 Mahayana, and Christianity, 32 Theravada, 149 Zen, 33
Calvin, John, 135 Camus, Albert, 122, 123 Caputo, John D., 1, 23–24 Carson, Rachel, 154 caste system of India, 89–90 Centre College of Kentucky, 139 Christianity, 15, 23, 32, 38, 39, 40, 88–89, 91, 158 and author of this book, 131–44 and Bart Ehrman, 112–15 and C. S. Lewis, 118–20 historicity of, 118 and Judaism, 127 and Mahayana Buddhism, 32 and Q, Book of, 39 Cobb, John B., 32 Coetze, J. M., 71 Columbia University, 137 Communism, Soviet, 18–19 Confucianism, 15, 149 conversion, 50–51, 111, 114, 115, 119, 128 convictional openness, 8 Corrington, Robert, 161, 162 Cox, Harvey, 158 Crick, Francis, 72 Crosby, Pamela, xi, 145 Cupitt, Don, 21 Damasio, Antonio R., 160 Dante Alighieri, 161 Davidson College, 134 Dawkins, Richard, 41
171
172
INDEX
death camps (see suffering, problem of, in Nazi death camps) Death of God theologians, 124–26 Descartes, René, 162 despair, 110 determinism, causal, 59–60, 75, 101, 104, 157 Dirac, Paul, 10, 71 Dombrowski, Daniel, 26, 34 Doubt (see Faith, and doubt) Dunlap, Thomas R., 38 Dupré, Louis, 17, 52, 91 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 113 Ehrman, Bart, 107, 112–15, 119–20, 129, 130, 143, 154 Einstein, Albert, 11, 75, 157 Elster, Jon, 20 eliminative materialism, 98 environmentalism and faith (see faith, and environmentalism) and symbols, 38 epiphenomenalism, 98 Euripides, 116 evil, problem of (see suffering, problem of) Existentialist philosophies, 123–24 faith absolute, 29 and acculturation, 49–51 animal, 44–46, 108, 158 based partly but not wholly on reason, 4, 5, 7, 9, 95 not just belief, 5–7, 14, 62–63, 86, 158 not blind credulity, 4, 63 broader than religion, 2 centered act of the total person, 5, 20–21, 24, 64, 71, 83, 95–97, 118, 119 collapse or loss of, 30, 107–111 and courage, 26–31, 126 degrees of, 34 and devotion, 19–21
and disagreements, 59–60 discovered, not just created, 21 and doubt, 19, 21, 31–35, 107, 109, 114–15, 132–33, 155 emotional side of, 129 and encounters with other faiths, 8, 32, 35, 94, 110, 132, 155 environmental, 153 and environmentalism, 38 exclusivistic view of, 110 existential, 1, 5, 7, 11, 21, 43, 44, 53, 55, 65, 71, 73, 75–76, 83, 93–96, 103, 105 and external authorities, 128–29 and hope, 22–26, 128 not immune to criticism, 129 importance of, 130 indispensable to life, 2, 108 and intrinsic value of persons, 88–90 knowledge aspect of, 37–42, 52–53 leap of, 28 materialistic, 115–16 many different kinds of, 2 misconceptions of, ix–x and morality, 9, 79–92, 160 can be perverse, 90, 155 radical revision of, 120–28 reasonable, v, xi, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 77, 97, 111 not reducible to morality, 92 religious, 1, 64, 79–80, 85, 92, 94 not necessarily religious (see faith, secular) and response to things not under our control, 80–83 risks of, 28–29, 30 and science, 9–11, 61–78 and scientism, 98–105 secular, x, 1, 15, 19, 24, 65, 85, 92, 93–105, 127, 129, 155, 159, 160 and secular humanism, 94–98 and social and political interactions, 10, 156 not static or fixed, 21, 35, 82, 107, 128, 131–32
INDEX and symbols, 16–17, 32–34, 37–42, 85, 124–128, 138–39 and tacit cognitive confidence, 44 tacit dimension of, 65 and trust, 17–19 and worldviews, 13–17, 26, 34–35, 39 faithful reason, x, xi, 3, 9, 10, 11, 43, 64, 77, 84, 97, 132 fiduciary acts, 42 fiduciary programme, 4 finitude of human beings, 122–23 Frankl, Viktor, 81 Franklin, Benjamin, 86, 160 freedom compatibilist view of, 59, 158 libertarian view of, 59, 158, 159–60 Freud, Sigmund, 122, 124–25, 126 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 8–9, 90, 154 Gilkey, Langdon, 76–77 God, 23–24, 32–33, 79, 88, 108–109, 112–15, 117–18, 119–20, 123–24, 138–43, 144–45, 154, 162 death of, 124, 126, 128, 142 God above or beyond God, 29, 126 Godhead, 122 ground of being, 140 of history, 123 as incurably anthropomorphic, 140 and nontheistic religions, 149 Goodenough, Ursula, 161 Gottlieb, Roger S., 158 Grace, events of, 82–83 divine, 110 Haack, Susan, 62–64, 66, 68, 71, 74, 158, 159 Hamilton, William, 124 Harijans, 90 Hartshorne, Charles, 56 Haught, John, 162 Heidegger, Martin, 122 Hinduism, 15, 38, 89, 90 Advaita Vedanta, 15, 89, 149 Hitler, Adolf, 129, 142, 155
173
Holocaust (see suffering, problem of, in Nazi death camps) Holy Everything, 146 Holy Nothingness, 122–23, 125, 127, 146 human ethics a subset of environmental ethics, 148 humanism, 143–44 secular, 16, 94–98 humans capable of monstrous evil as well as significant good, 154 not focus of the universe, 144 not pure spirits in their essential nature, 148 Hume, David, 45–46, 141, 158 Innis, Robert E., xi Isaacson, Walter, 157 Islam, 15, 38, 41, 137 Shiite, 23 James, Epistle of, 17–18, 86 James, William, 142 Jesus, 86, 112, 135, 142 Job, Book of, 18, 112–13, 119 Jones, James Warren (“Jim”), 130 Joy, stabs of, 115–16, 117 Judaism, 15, 22–23, 38, 41, 88–89, 137 and Christianity, 127 Reform, 121, 128 and Richard Rubenstein, 121–29 Kant, Immanuel, 51, 88, 160 Kaufman, Gordon D., 161 Kierkegaard, Søren, 135 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 154 knowledge, general and acculturation, 49–51 and animal faith, 44–46 and confidence in the intelligibility of the world, 53–55 faith aspect of, 42–60 and habits and skills, 46–49 and intuition, 57 as justified belief, 42
174
INDEX
knowledge, general (continued) and passions, purposes, and values, 55–60 personal, 47–48, 55–56, 60 social character of, 51–53 tacit aspects of (see tacit dimensions of knowledge) Knowledge, scientific (see scientific knowledge) koans, 33 Koestler, Arthur, 18–19, 30, 105 Krishna, 90 Kuhn, Thomas, 68 Kurtz, Paul, 16, 94–98, 161 Lamont, Corliss, 94–98 Langer, Susanne K., 33 Leopold, Aldo, 154 Lewis, C. S., 14–15, 115–20 Livio, Mario, 159 Logical Positivism, 98–99 Loop Quantum Gravity Theory, 70, 146 Luria, Isaac, 122, 125, 126 Luther, Martin, 110, 135, 145 Mack, Burton L., 39 Magueijo, João, 159 Marxism, 6–7, 15–16, 22, 85, 100, 102, 105 Stalinistic version of, 90 Mathematics relation to the world, 159 role of in science, 10, 70–71 and truth, 159 Midgley, Mary, 14, 61, 74, 91 Mill, John Stuart, 85 Mission San Luis, 27 Moksha, 89 Morality assumptions central to, 83–90 autonomy of, 86, 91 and choice of evils, 91 and choice of goods, 91 and faith, 79–92, 148, 160 and freedom, 84 focuses on things under our control, 80
and hope, 88 intimately related to faith, 79 and intrinsic value of persons, 88–90 distinct from moralism, 91–92 ontological dimension of, 87 not reducible to faith, 79 and religion, 160 as a test of faith, 90–91 Murdoch, Iris, 79–80 mysteries of the world, 3, 8, 144 mythologies as forms of faith, 102 three great, 100 Naess, Arne, 154 natura naturans, 141, 162 nature ambiguity of, 147 not a closed causal system, 160 its creations and destructions, 146 as home, 144, 150–52, 162 as lived, 146 numinous character of, 145, 154 no purpose of as a whole, 147–48, 162 many purposes within, 148 ultimacy of, 144 Nazism, 81, 90 (see Holocaust; suffering, problem of, death camps) Neville, Robert C., 33 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 6–7, 23, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124 nihilism, existential, 54–55 Noah and the flood, 22 nonhuman forms of life, intrinsic worth of, 97 Nussbaum, Martha, 154 orthopraxy, 41 Pandora’s jar, 22 Pascal, Blaise, 7 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 74 persons, intrinsic value of, 88–90, 95, 160 Peters, Karl, 161
INDEX
175
Polanyi, Michael, 4, 37, 42–43, 47–48, 54–55, 55–56, 74, 158 Power, William L., xi Pragmatism, 74–75 prayer, 139–40, 149 Princeton Theological Seminary, 134–35 Proverbs, Book of, 3
religious forms of faith (see faith, religious) religious naturalism, 38, 131 Robinson, John A. T., 140–41 Rubenstein, Richard, 120–29, 139, 142–43, 154 Rue, Loyal, 161 Russell, Bertrand, 159, 161
Q, Book of, 39 quantum level of matter, 11, 146, 157 (see Loop Quantum Gravity Theory, String Theory)
Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), 129–30 Santayana, George, 158 Sartre, Jean Paul, 111, 122 and fundamentalists, 111 Salzberg, Sharon, 13, 20, 27–28 Schneider, Hans Julius, 161 Schrödinger, Erwin, 10, 71 science and faith, 61–78, 102 global influence of, 61–62 hegemonic conception of, 162 narrow view of its relations to faith, 62–65 presumed omni-competence of, 104–105 scientific knowledge and acculturation, 69–72 and animal faith, 66–67 and confidence in the intelligibility of the world, 73–76, 159 and habits and skills, 67–69 and instruments, 66–67 and passions, purposes, and values, 76–77 seeing-as in, 67–68 social character of, 72–73 not wholly detached or impersonal, 64, 65–66 and wine tasters, 68–69, 159 scientific materialism, 99–102 scientism, 98–105, 109, 115, 159 reductionistic, 98, 103–105 secular alternative to religion, 98 secular forms of faith (see faith, secular) secular humanism, 85, 94–98, 109, 115 focus is on human beings, 94–95 Shade, Patrick, 25
Raymo, Chet, 161 Rawls, John, 154 reason and emotions, 160 faithful (see faithful reason) and knowledge (see knowledge, general) not opposed to faith, 77–78, 132 presupposes faith, 46 and science (see scientific knowledge) reasonable faith (see faith, knowledge aspect of) (see faith, reasonable) religion (see faith, religious) liberal, 121 personal and cosmic dimensions of, 160 and secularism, 12 Religion of Nature, 131–32, 144–55 does not affirm an afterlife, 149 no guarantees of final triumph of goodness, 154 no Job-like situations in, 154 not pantheistic or panentheistic, 162 and prayer, 149 and salvation as assurance, 150–52, 162–63 as demand, 152–53 as empowerment, 153–55 and symbolism, 149 religious experience, 63
176
INDEX
Shakespeare, William, 38, 117 Shintoism, 41 Simmons, Phillip, 30 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 123 skepticism, 53–54 as faith stance, 54 Humean (see Hume, David) self-stultifying, 54 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 4–5, 6, 38, 40, 41, 93 Smolin, Lee, 10, 17, 69–70, 72 Sociobiology, 99–105 as an all-inclusive mythology, 100–102 prescriptive aspect of, 101 reductionistic character of, 103–105 sola natura, 145 Solomon, Robert, 56–57 spider, golden-orb-web (nephila clavipes), 145 Spinoza, Baruch, 11, 141, 161 Stalin, Joseph, 129, 155 Stone, Jerome, 161 String Theory, 69–70, 146 successive cosmic epochs, 141 suffering, problem of, 112–14, 120, 123, 129 apocalyptic resolution of, 112 in Nazi death camps, 121, 124, 127, 142–43, 147, 154 as divine retribution, 112–13 as redemptive, 113, 120 as test and refinement of faith, 112 unequal and unjust distribution of, 112 suicide, 111 symbols broken, 126 cannot be reduced to literal statements, 38, 138 importance of (see faith, and symbols) indispensable role of, 126 point beyond themselves, 126 primary language of religion, 126 propositional explications of, 39–40, 41
psychological truth of, 127 revisability of, 39 self-negation of, 157 transformative power of, 38 sympathy, emotion of, 85 tacit dimensions of knowledge, 4, 17, 43, 49, 53, 69, 72, 74 six aspects of, in knowledge in general, 43–60 six aspects of, in scientific knowledge, 65–78 Taoism, 15, 35, 64, 149 Tauber, Alfred I., 162 Taylor, Charles, 28–29 Theory of Everything, 159 Tillich, Paul, 5, 7, 29–30, 34, 122, 125–26, 135, 139, 140, 144, 157 Tippett, Krista, 30 Torquemada, Tomás, 129 Trinity, Christian doctrine of, 132 truth Social character of, 51–53 and trust in others, 51–53 a type of value, 56 Turing, Alan, 159 two-sidedness of faith and reason, 9 Union Theological Seminary of New York, 137 Untouchables (Dalits) in India, 89–90, 160 Vienna Circle, 98–99, 161 Watson, James, 72 Whitehead, Alfred North, 141, 142, 158, 159 will to live, instinctive, 111 Williams, Daniel Day, 141 Wilson, E. O., 99–105 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 81–82, 159 on the distinction between saying and showing, 161 lifelong opponent of scientism, 161
RELIGIOUS STUDIES / PHILOSOPHY
Reason Faith and
D O N A L D
A .
C R O S B Y
Few words are as widely misconceived as the word “faith.” Faith is often set in stark opposition to reason, considered antithetical to scientific thought, and heavily identified with religion. Donald A. Crosby’s revealing book provides a more complex picture, discussing faith and its connection to the whole of human life and human knowledge. Crosby writes about that existential faith that underlies, shapes, and supports a person’s life and its sense of purpose and direction. Such faith does not make a person religious and being secular does not mean one rejects all forms of faith.Throughout the book Crosby makes the case that faith is fundamentally involved in all processes of reasoning and that reason is an essential part of all dependable forms of faith. Crosby elaborates the major components of faith and goes on to look at the mutually dependent relationships between faith and knowledge, faith and scientific knowledge, and faith and morality. The work’s final chapters examine crises of faith among several noted thinkers, as well as the author’s own journey of faith from plans for the ministry to pastor to secular philosopher and religious naturalist. DONALD A. CROSBY is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Colorado State University. His books include Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil; A Religion of Nature; and The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism, all published by SUNY Press.
SUNY P R E S S
