Memento Mori

Like most philosophers, I had always found the arguments for theism flawed. Unlike most, however, I had found the arguments for a wholly scientific worldview equally untenable. Since these seemed the only alternatives for describing what, at bottom, the human situation really is, religious inquiry, for me, was at an impasse.

It was the premature death of my first wife and the subsequent deaths of many friends that returned me to the subject of religion. I could neither grasp nor still the thought that they would never come again, nor could I any longer conveniently forget that soon I, too, would not exist. I set side the standard questions of philosophy and took up, once more, the question that motivates religion: “What is the meaning of our lives?” I became theologically concerned.

A Culture of Irreligion

It was not a comfortable decision. Among philosophers, the question of life’s meaning is regarded as jejune. The self-doubt this stirred was tempered, however, by my assessment of the current intellectual scene. Ideas were gaining credence in academic circles and beyond that plainly bore upon the meaning of human life. But they did so in ways that were destructive, intellectually as well as spiritually.
“Postmodern” philosophy and literary theory were reviving and broadcasting ancient skepticisms: The possibility of knowledge was denied. Reality was deemed a fiction—a construction of the human mind. Language was a barrier to truth—a filter that distorted our vision of the world. Objectivity was said to be impossible. Evaluation was the expression of mere preference. Texts were claimed to have no meaning other than what readers might attribute to them.
Science and medicine indirectly strengthened this attack on rationality. Advances in genetics and brain physiology spawned articles and books explaining mental operations as the product of non-mental causes.

It was becoming scientifically naïve to think that civilized development was the consequence of reasoning, evidence, moral insight, and critical reflection; none of these could have effects because none were physical conditions. The ideas by which we lived, and that we believed to have been thoughtfully derived, were blithely explained as the product of electrical and chemical processes.

Together, these ideas savaged responsibility. Since a free or uncaused will was scientifically absurd, a so-called “choice” could only be explained as the product of a physical brain (certainly not an imaginary self). But not to worry, since no choice could, be, in reality, better than another. The idea of an inherently right or wrong choice had been unmasked as an illusion.

These skeptical and scientistic theories synergistically abetted a culture driven by acquisitive self-interest. Enamored of profit and persuasion, it was a culture ready to agree that there exist no “objective” standards, no oughts or ought-nots, that might demand restraint. In thrall to endless economic growth, it was a culture with no time for the timeless, a culture so changeful nothing in it could possibly matter.

“The measure of all things” was demand. All else was supply—science, technology, art, communities, families, cities, governments, “yeah, even the great globe itself.” Nothing had inherent value; nothing could command us. Evaluative terms like “good,” “right,” “true” or “desirable” were thought to signal only the utility of things for whatever goals we happened to have. It was a life tailor-made for skeptical philosophy.

The whole signaled a collapse not easily described. What had been lost was, in some way, deeper than intellect or morals. I can only describe it as loss of seriousness. The kind of meaning that lies, so to speak, in the mountains, no longer had a place. A cavalcade of psychological and economic mechanics had separated life from its roots. I thought myself a witness to the twilight of religion.

Finding a Direction

The world’s religions were, it seemed, forever struggling to grasp and to express something that lay so deep in the well of life it could not quite be seen. Whatever it was, it struck the religious sensibility as something ultimate and, thus, beyond any possible explanation.

It was, as a developed idea, the hidden and supreme source of human guidance. It was the basis of all laws—physical, rational, moral, and aesthetic. And, as if that were not mystery enough, it was responsible for our creation.

Its names are, of course, well known: “God,” “Yaweh,” “Allah,” “Brahman”—or, in the East, the “the Way” or “Li.” But however it was pictured, it was sovereign and external. It gave meaning to us; we did not give meaning to it. This was, for religion, the essential direction in which meaning enters our lives.

This seemingly simple fact explained to me modernity’s inherent irreligion. The postmodernist, skeptical, scientistic, and self-interested standpoints all insisted that meaning flowed from us into the world. It was we who decided all laws but the physical (and for some even physical law was our own logical convention). There was no meaning to life beyond what we assigned to it. We lived and died, yearned and fought for ideals and standards that had no more basis in reality, no more right to command or direct us, than the imaginary gods of myth.

Some may conclude that “religion” is simply a mistake; I cannot. Religion is no less a universal and continuing domain of human interest than morality, science, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, mathematics, or aesthetics. I cannot suppose the world’s population fundamentally deluded.

The task at hand, then, was to elicit—from the life we already know—a conception of that sovereign, external, creative, and ultimate “something.” I say “from the life we know” because (as the book argues in detail) neither I nor anyone else can lay claim to receiving a “revelation” on the subject untouched by his or her own judgment. In any case, I had no such revelation and expected none.
To rethink religion would, therefore, be to rethink what William James called “religion’s object.” It would be to understand in a new light that external, creative something that is essential to life’s meaning. The book’s pervasive theme, therefore, is an analysis of “God” as religion’s seminal idea.

The rationale for this approach is that the idea of a creator-god must satisfy the deepest religious yearnings. If the ways could be specified by which the idea of “God” accomplished this end it would, I thought, constitute a “map” of the requirements that any revised notion of “religion’s object” would have to satisfy.
Whatever of religious significance that effort might uncover, the truth of it would have to be established on the basis of facts and situations with which you, the reader, are familiar. In rethinking religion, the life we live is our only sacred text. Alas, there is no road to a responsible theology (for that is what Rethinking strives to be) without showing, argument by argument, why theistic supernaturalism and scientific naturalism—the two alternative accounts of what is ultimately real—are, in the end, indefensible.

The book argues that neither is consistent with life as we understand it in the offices and practices of consequential living—that is, when, in Gide’s phrase, “the chips are down.” Each is a theory purporting to explain human life. But, in explaining what lies behind that life, each, in the end, explains that life away. (Meister Eckhart and the writers of the Upanishads rightly saw that if all is a function of God’s will, the life we experience is a kind of illusion, while, in similarly finding things illusory, the behaviorist, B. F. Skinner contended that what we think never explains what we do.)

Plainly, Rethinking is more a study than a “read.” The closeness of its arguments may be more suited to the student than the general reader at whom this book is—perhaps foolishly—aimed. But what consideration of a religious framework is authentically undertaken without discipline, commitment—and fearlessness?

To the end of “spreading the word,” I have endeavored to avoid specialized language, both theological and philosophical, and have confined the writing almost exclusively to arguments whose examples are drawn from everyday experience. No attempt is made to survey the literature, in large part because I think theism and scientism turn out to share the same logic and by virtue of that logic, the same faults. Their conflict is less a war than a family quarrel.

From the book’s analysis of “God”—and “reality” as seen by theistic, empirical, and skeptical approaches—a positive account of religious significance emerges. Miracle and mystery are found within the ambit of responsible life and are accorded a non-supernatural, yet literally miraculous or mysterious status. We live ultimate reality every day, and do so in a way that cannot be explained. From the standpoint of Rethinking Religion, we are the universe thinking—earth made flesh, flesh made spirit.

In consequence, the idea of “God” as lawgiver and creator acquires a non-supernatural, non-scientific description consistent with the feelings of attraction, fear and awe that Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy famously described as essential to authentic religious experience.

No doubt, for the general reader, the most unfamiliar aspect of this book is its use of philosophical argument. In aid of the serious, lay seeker (and. I think, those who favor contemporary perspectivist or neo-Nietzschean philosophy), the book’s first chapter discusses philosophical reflection, relating it to religion and truth, and offering guidance with respect to the doing of it.

Finally: Rethinking swims against the current of contemporary opinion. But, so be it. The warfare “between science and religion”—between a wholly scientific version of reality and a supernatural one—has gone on too long for either one to be correct. The world may be saved by history and politics, but knowing that it has will be a matter for religion.

—Alan L. Soffin