Choosing our religion
Rupert Shortt on the current state of global faith
Despite the spread of secularism in the West, rising levels of religious belief in the world as a whole have become incontrovertible. Three-quarters of humanity profess a faith; the figure is projected to reach 80 per cent by 2050 – not just because believers tend to have more children, but also through the spread of democracy. Significant, too, is the growing prominence of post-secular thinking in several disciplines. Things looked very different as recently as the 1980s. Influential commentators assumed that mainstream religion would fade away within a few generations; anglophone theologians, to name only one group, were often intellectually insecure. The turning of the tide is a significant chapter in the history of ideas meriting a full-length study of its own. Its main conclusions are worth outlining. The scales of debate on whether religion does more harm than good will tilt a bit if the theistic picture looks more coherent on closer inspection than many had previously thought, and naturalism – the thesis that everything is ultimately explicable in the language of natural science – less plausible as a consequence.
For example, a student embarking on a philosophy of religion course today might typically be told that there are six strong arguments for the existence of God: the modal ontological argument, the kalām cosmological argument, the argument from moral truths, the argument from mathematical truths, the argument from fine-tuning, and the argument from consciousness. None of these should be seen as logically coercive, but that does not render them redundant. If this form of reasoning can draw one towards the threshold of belief – to the point where one makes a life-changing commitment, moving beyond intellectual assent alone – or if it can build bridges with atheism, demonstrating that religion is not irrational, then it will have served a valid purpose. Believers seeking a more straightforward rationale for their convictions interlacing reason and faith could cite three forms of awareness: first, that we are embodied beings with the capacity to grasp meaning and truth; second, that our status is to be viewed as a gift prompting awe, gratitude and a heightened sense of ethical responsibility; third, an acknowledgement of this gift as grounded in a reality that freely bestows itself on us.
We can also note that divine transcendence is pictured in broadly complementary ways across the major faiths. The conception I have in mind can be found in various forms of pagan belief deriving from late antiquity such as Neoplatonism; in the three Abrahamic religions; in Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism; in Sikhism; in some aspects of both Taoism and Mahayana Buddhist visions of Buddha Nature. They all tend to see God as the one infinite source of all reality: uncreated, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcending all things and, precisely by dint of not competing for space with creation, immanent to all things as well. From this standpoint, it is not even appropriate to say that God exists if by “existence” we mean that God shares a property with created being. Better, rather, to say that God has uncreated being, or is being itself: the absolute on which the contingent relies at every moment.
In at least some major strands of Indian religious thought, God is described as infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss – sat, chit and ananda in Sanskrit – from whom we derive our existence and in whom we are to achieve ultimate fulfilment. St Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Christian theologian, describes the divine life as an eternal act of knowledge and love, in which the God who is infinite being is also a boundless ｅxpression of consciousness, knowing himself as infinitely good and so also an infinite outpouring of love. David Bentley Hart notes that a medieval Sufi thinker such as Ibn Arabi draws attention to the shared root of the terms wujud (being), wijdan (consciousness) and wajd (bliss) to designate God’s mystical knowledge. Hart sees that these terms also encapsulate the ways in which several faiths picture the believer’s own appropriation of the reality of God:
For to say that God is being, consciousness, and bliss is also to say that he is the one reality in which all our existence, knowledge and love subsist, from which they come and to which they go, and that therefore he is somehow present in even our simplest experience of the world, and is approachable by way of contemplative and moral refinement of that experience. That is to say, these three words are not only a metaphysical explanation of God, but also a phenomenological explanation of the human encounter with God.
This model need form no challenge at all to the integrity of science, notwithstanding ignorant, authoritarian voices in parts of the Muslim and Christian worlds who oppose the teaching of evolution in schools among other subjects. To show why, some commentators have given the example of a basic act such as heating water on a stove to illustrate the difference between what is technically known as primary and secondary causation. According to classical monotheistic teaching, the process has been misconceived by believers and non-believers alike in three ways. The first mistake is to suppose that the gas heats the water and God is not involved at all; the second, that God heats the water and the gas plays no part; the third, that God makes the gas act on the water as a puppeteer moves a puppet, meaning that the gas does not exercise a power of its own. The Abrahamic faiths take a more nuanced view. As a canvas supports a painting, so God makes the whole situation to exist: the gas, its power and its action on the water. God and the gas work at different levels, not in competition. Creation is thus seen as a relationship of radical dependence. To cite an insight deriving from St Thomas Aquinas, God’s creation of the world should not be likened to a carpenter making a chest. A better analogy would be more intimate – a singer producing a song, for instance. The difference is profound. Carpenter and chest are discrete entities. Carpenters can pass on the articles they make, never seeing them again. But a song is by definition an emanation of a singer.
If these points are absorbed, it becomes clearer why the doctrine of creation as classically framed cannot be undermined by Darwin’s theories. Aubrey Moore was right to say that “Darwin appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend”, because he held that God had made a world which makes itself. Another pious misconception, especially common in the Islamic world, leads people to forswear insurance – and even preventive measures such as equipping ships with lifeboats, on the basis that any disastrous event would be the will of God. That such attitudes are highly damaging ought to be self-evident. But for those who don’t see them as forming grounds to throw out the baby of faith with the bathwater of misinterpretation, the answer to bad theology is the good sort, not no theology at all.
Other aspects of a more rigorous theological framework deserve a mention. Some conservative believers have taken a dim view of all human activity that does not have a specific religious shape. But a major strand of Christianity, Thomism – itself an edifice resting on the foundation of fruitful exchanges between Jews, Muslims and Christians – maintains that nature has its own integrity because it reflects the rationality of the Creator. In the fullness of time creatures have evolved with the capacity to think, receive and process information, and to reason about their place in the world as a whole.
From this we may infer that an open-handed believer in one tradition has solid grounds for supposing that other spiritual paths may be approximating to this or that aspect of truth. The global faiths are usually specified as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Even if we granted that one of these six (or another) embodies a definitive disclosure of the truth of our being, that should not imply that all other religions are meaningless. Islam, for example, though considering itself the vessel of God’s final revelation in the Qur’an, nevertheless explicitly teaches that Judaism and Christianity in particular contain significant elements of the truth. Several Mughal rulers of India extended this concentric model to include Hindus, who were also classed as “People of the Book” alongside Christians and Jews because of their scriptures. Christianity’s presentation of the workings of grace beyond the visible Church may be deduced from John 14:6 (“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”). Though this is seen both by certain believers and their critics as an exclusivist proof text – you cannot be saved unless you’re a Christian – the opposite interpretation is valid. “Me” refers to the Word of God, God’s reason and wisdom, which, as the Prologue of John’s Gospel makes clear, enlightens all people. The insight itself echoes earlier biblical teaching that humanity is made in the image of God.
Several more inferences implied by these points should be outlined. Given that we are truth-seeking – and truth-discovering – beings, advances in empirical knowledge were bound to arise in the fullness of time. Religion can be more or less conducive to this process. Science prospered in Muslim and Christian societies (especially the latter) because of their faith in a Creator whose grounding of the intelligible world formed a focus for confidence in rational enquiry as such. This was no accident. That science developed at a slower rate in civilizations such as India is partly connected with the otherworldliness of Hinduism and Buddhism; that it has withered as well as thrived in the Islamic and Christian worlds at different times is certainly connected with the ebb and flow of contrasting theological tides.
What of discipleship in practice? Many, of course, are uninterested in technical arguments about the existence of God or the theory of knowledge, focusing instead on how to live their lives. The patterns of altruistic giving associated with religion could all be grouped together as cultural instances of “good works” (kala erga, in the New Testament’s phrase). In Hindi, the notion of dān (giving) has resonances with the Bhagavad Gita and the principle of dharma (duty), while seva (selfless service) is similar to the Christian diakonīa. The anthropologist Jonathan Benthall notes that Islam “has stimulated the process of deprovincialising the common assumption that charity is a monopoly of the Euro-American West”. Resembling the Hebraic tithe, Zakat is a basic injunction in the Qur’an and one of the five pillars of Islam. on a wider scale, all the major faiths preach salutary messages to a world facing dire environmental problems, abiding (though rapidly falling) poverty, and the mixed consequences of globalization.
In acting as they do, believers are consciously or unconsciously echoing a concern seen in much ancient philosophy. Just as there are objective grounds for establishing whether a lion or a lamb is flourishing – if it is well fed, well integrated in its environment, and free of disease, for example – humans can be appraised in allied ways. Aristotle taught that we have natural needs and capacities, the fulfilment of which amounts to happiness.
A crucial difference between humans and other animals is equally plain. Genuinely fulfilled human lives involve further dimensions including dignity, which is connected with the exercise of choice; and virtue, implying the need to stretch or transcend ourselves. G. K. Chesterton wrote that it makes little sense to upbraid a lion for not being properly lion-like: lions are lions. The same is not true of human beings. People everywhere have a striking idea that they ought to behave in certain “humane” ways, but also an awareness that they do not in fact behave as they should. It is often noted that these two facts are the root of all clear thinking about ourselves and our world.
And against this background we can perhaps see the justice of claims made by preachers down the ages: that our challenge is to align ourselves to the good and grow in knowledge of it. I would not dream of suggesting that the process cannot go wrong, or that groups and institutions cannot become corrupt or moribund. Still less am I implying that they should escape scrutiny and just criticism. My suggestion is that at their best, the spiritual paths concerned offer an overarching vision of wholeness encompassing the ethical and emotional spheres, as well as the rational. The insight is well encapsulated by the philosopher Clare Carlisle:
For many religious practitioners … devotional and contemplative practices are ways to reach towards the transcendent, and possibly even touch it. Over time, these practices open up their minds and bodies, expand their receptivity, shift the horizon of what they can feel and understand. And after years of practice it may no longer seem strange or unnatural to perceive moments of grace, when the transcendent flows right through the middle of life.
This comment partially answers a related question: why join a community of belief in the first place? Why can’t you be “spiritual” in isolation, with or without an overarching context of meaning? You can, of course. You can also do much good. The Church has consistently taught that conscience is the exercise of reasoned judgement. But it is communities of conviction which hone the vision, provide due means of discernment, and get things done. So the Jewish thinker Jonathan Sacks describes religion as
part of the ecology of freedom because it supports families, communities, charities, voluntary associations, active citizenship and concern for the common good. It is a key contributor to civil society, which is what holds us together without the coercive power of law. Without it we will depend entirely on the State, and when that happens we risk what J. L. Talmon called “totalitarian democracy”, which is what revolutionary France eventually became.
Here we have a cogent argument against consigning faith to the purely private domain. In order to forestall resentment in what can become religious ghettos, a better way is available in the form of “interactive pluralism”, which encourages robust dialogue among faith communities and between them and the State. No one has received the whole truth “as God sees it”, so all have something to learn, and all are accountable.
Sacks makes clear that many (believers and their critics alike) err in applying secular assumptions about power in a religious context. The model of a deity with unconditional power can all too easily develop into a projection of a given set of human norms to be imposed willy-nilly on others. Much mainstream religion contains the antidote to its own poison, however, including through the belief that creation is itself a radical act of sharing. Divine power, which displays no anxiety or rivalry, is best conceived in terms of a liberty to let the other be. Critics have regularly complained that faith is associated with heteronomy (the brute imposition of law from the outside), and thus with intolerance. But if our spadework in various parts of a large field has turned the soil effectively, then some large assumptions may need revisiting.
Rowan Williams, a Christian counterpart to Sacks, identifies four core constituents of religiously informed human maturity: the management of dependence and freedom, the educating of the passions, attitudes to time, and the acceptance of mortality. The first of these connects with observations already made. The Enlightenment formed a protest against unaccountable authority, but at the price of enthroning the private autonomous individual as the final arbiter in questions of meaning and value. The result was yet another false binary. Religious believers can reply that while undue subservience is plainly bad, no one should be an island. We are not self-created; we have nothing we have not received; the very acquisition of language itself involves considerable acts of trust.
Again, this is not at all to say that all in the religious garden is lovely. It would be a colossal understatement to claim that every believer you or I have ever met is a spiritual athlete radiating a liberating sense of dependence, healthy levels of self-criticism, intellectual openness and serenity in response to time’s arrow. The need to distinguish between lofty ideals and often grubby reality when discussing religion at a more general level plainly applies just as much to spiritual practice. The dispiriting counterpart of non-disabling dependence is infantilism. Institutions apparently proclaiming release to the captive all too often become repressive. People can try to make their feelings the servants of their wills, with sometimes disastrous results. Ritual understood as a fruitful focus of spiritual energy can become a mechanical end in itself, while some religious language raises anxiety about death and the hereafter rather than watering seeds of hope – or else promotes political quietism through peddling pie in the sky.
I have hardly produced a comprehensive conspectus on “religion” here. But we are now at least equipped with some criteria allowing us to distinguish between good and bad ｅxpressions of it. The really important questions centre on what sort of outlook is being nurtured by the practice of faith. Is it open-handed, outward-looking, conducive to human flourishing in the fullest sense? Is it freely chosen and adaptable without being weak-kneed? Is this all reproduced on a larger scale, namely through the acceptance of pluralism within society?
These questions can in turn form an inspiration and a warning to believers and atheists alike. The former may be challenged to see themselves more as others see them; the latter to view religion as amounting to something rather different from assent to dubious propositions.
This is an edited extract from Does Religion Do More Harm than Good? (SPCK, £9.99), published this week.