On
Doing Philosophy of Religion
(pdf available here)
(A
talk given to the Open End, Birmingham University, UK)
We
have to start from where we are and what we are. As I see it,
one of the most important things about us is that we are fragments
of a much larger whole, and any possible completeness cannot
lie in an isolated individual completeness but in a right relationship
to the rest of the whole. Physically we are sub-microscopic
dots in the vastness of the universe. As human beings we are
one among some six billion others. As personalities we are incomplete,
imperfect, idiosyncratic, always needing the complementarity
of others. As thinkers we can only operate from a partial point
of view, with limited abilities, with biases and prejudices,
and with a very limited range of experience. Trying to look
at myself in this light, in relation to work in the philosophy
of religion, the only kind of which I am capable is the kind
in which I have been trained, which is the post-logical positivist
kind broadly called analytical. This began as linguistic analysis
but has long since broadened out considerably to include metaphysics.
You identify a problem, learn what has been said about it by
major thinkers past and present, examine critically what they
have said, and occasionally come up with a new suggestion of
your own. You are naturally attached to this and will defend
it against criticism the process whereby it is tested
in debate. You have to remember that it is an hypothesis, not
a revealed truth, and you have to be ready to modify and develop
it, and if necessary in the last resort to abandon it. But as
in the sciences failed hypotheses can also contribute to the
larger process of truth seeking.
But if a philosophical
hypothesis is to contribute, either by being tenable or by being
seen not to be tenable, it has to be formulated as clearly and
precisely as possible. So analytical philosophers try not to
go in for vague but impressive sounding language which cannot
be cashed as usable intellectual currency. Further, so far as
I am concerned, life is too short to spend it on authors who
cannot think clearly enough to write clearly. Reading them is
okay for the young, who quite rightly will try anything because
they think they have all the time in the world; and in this
way, hopefully, they develop discrimination. But as time becomes
more precious, you tend to discriminate more severely. Nevertheless
as I read stuff whose approach or method is alien to me, I have
to recognise that there is plenty of good work going on in ways
which are not to my own taste. But personally I benefit more,
whether I agree with them or not, from lucid thinkers such as
Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley,
Hume, Kant (who was difficult but never vague), Russell, Moore,
Popper, Hartshorne, Quine, Wittgenstein (who was clear though
never systematic), more than such as Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer,
Derrida, etc.
The other side
of our fragmentariness is that we only have a limited responsibility.
We are not responsible for finding the whole Truth, but only
for contributing the little that we can to the search. Again,
we are not responsible for the state of the whole world, let
alone the whole universe. We can take the Dalai Lamas
advice: when you have the power to change things for the better,
you must do so, but when you cant, dont worry about
the fact that you cant.
Another limitation,
or example, of fragmentariness, is that I am a westerner and,
like all of us, an heir to the western Enlightenment. I have
often had it pointed out to me by colleagues of the eastern
cultures, particularly in India, how western are the presuppositions
of so many of us whom they meet. They see in us, for example,
individualism as opposed to their more communal outlook, binary
either/or logic as opposed to their tendency to both/and thinking,
and suspicion of the mystical as opposed to their tendency to
embrace it. But more than a year spent at different times in
India and Sri Lanka, and shorter times in Africa, has taught
me that there are different ways of being human, which are the
great cultures of the earth, and that the culture in which I
happen to have been born, and which has formed me, is not normative
for all humanity. Therefore we have to accept our own fragmentariness
and our need for the balancing influence of others. This is
one reason, incidentally, why Christian theology ought to be,
although it still usually isnt, done as though in the
presence of people of the other world faiths.
More individually,
I like order and clarity and dislike chaos, vagueness, and cloudiness.
I prefer to leave my desk empty rather than littered with unfinished
business. And so in my metaphysical speculations I am probably
trying to tidy up the universe in my own mind by finding a systematic
picture of it! Question: are systematic thinkers generally also
tidy in other aspects of their lives? And unsystematic thinkers
generally untidy? Certainly the very systematic Kant was famously
tidy, and the very unsystematic Donald Mackinnon, who was a
colleague in Cambridge, was incredibly untidy. Note that if
there are these correlations, this in no way invalidates either
kind of work. It just means that it requires different kinds
of mind to do different kinds of intellectual job.
Moving on, what
is the philosophy of religion? It is analogous to the philosophy
of science, of law, of mind, of morality (i.e. ethics), of knowledge
(i.e. epistemology), etc. It is thus not itself a religious
exercise but a meta exercise, and it can be carried out by non-religious
as much as by religious people. So my own main project in the
epistemology of religion, which has been to try to see what
in the light of contemporary epistemology a viable religious
interpretation of religion would look like, could in principle
be done by an atheist. The difference between myself and the
atheist would consist in the philosophically extraneous fact
that I do and the atheist does not see life in a religious light
which can make use of such an interpretation. In actual fact
most of those who spend their time on the philosophy of religion
do so because they are philosophers for whom religion is very
important and thus worth thinking about. But religion can also
be important to people, not because it has value to them, but
because they feel threatened by it and need continually to assure
themselves of its falsity. They are as obsessed with religion
as any Christian fundamentalist. They are indeed the mirror
image of Christian fundamentalists, and disapprove of the likes
of me for not upholding the antiquated theology which they love
to attack.
Now my own philosophy
of religion manifesto. I hold that from our point of view within
it the universe is ambiguous as between religious and naturalistic
interpretations. Complete and consistent accounts of both kinds
are possible, at least in principle, each including within it
an account of the other. To accept either is, and is equally
I want to stress that word equally - an act
of faith in the sense that it commits one to a view which cannot
be proved, or in any precise sense of the word probabilified,
and which therefore may be mistaken. This is something
that naturalistic thinkers find it as hard as religious thinkers
to accept. They dont like to think of naturalism as a
faith, though in fact it is.
Concerning this
ambiguity, on the religious side the traditional theistic arguments
are not conclusive, although they are intellectually fascinating
and should certainly form part of the a philosophical education.
Nor is the modern revival of the ontological argument by Hartshorne
and Malcolm, based on Anselms so called second form of
the argument; nor is Plantingas version, using possible
worlds logic, and nor again is Swinburnes cumulative argument
using Bayes probability theorem. I wont bore you
here with these, or with the fine tuning argument
in astro-physics propounded by Barrow and Tipler and many others,
which is also suggestive but also inconclusive.
Let us now use
the word God as our familiar western term for the
putative Ultimate Reality to which the religions point, without
at this stage defining that reality as an infinite person, or
three infinite persons, or in any other specific way. The right
approach for a religious interpretation of religion is, I believe,
not an argument directly for the existence of such a reality,
but an argument for the rationality of trusting religious experience
as a mediated awareness of that reality about which more
presently.
On the other
side, although the naturalistic assumption is pervasive in all
our minds, and is indeed completely dominant as an unquestioned
assumption of our western culture, its very dominance hides
foundations which are as shaky and inadequate as the theistic
arguments. For the only religion-proof form of naturalism requires
strict materialism, or as a more friendly name for it, physicalism
the view that nothing exists but the physical universe,
including of course human brains and their activity. For if
there is further reality beyond the physical, this constitutes
a gaping hole in a thoroughgoing naturalism. If naturalistic
thinkers are not willing to commit themselves to strict physicalism
they ought to be aware that their position has thereby ceased
to be religion-proof. In a universe in which there is reality
beyond the physical it is impossible to exclude the divine a
priori.
But there are
serious logical and empirical flaws in strict physicalism. The
logical flaw is that the physical universe is law-governed and
proceeds by cause and effect, so that everything that happens
is determined. It is true that the physicists speak of indeterminacy
in the movements of the ultimate quanta of energy. But (a) there
is a question whether this simply means that we cannot predict
the movements of the ultimate particles, not that a theoretical
omniscient mind could not predict them, and (b) even if there
is genuine quantum indeterminacy, this is swamped in the large
scale statistical regularities which constitute the laws
of nature somewhat as the fact that we cannot predict
when a given individual will die does not affect the statistical
death rates of large populations. And physical objects at our
level of awareness are multi-billion populations of the ultimate
particles. And so according to physicalism all events, at least
on the scale of which we are conscious, including crucially
the continuous electro-chemical activity which constitutes the
functioning our own brains, are determined. But in that case
we meet the contradiction, which has been pointed out by 20th
century philosophers such as Karl Popper, and which Epicurus
pointed out long ago when he said that He who says that
all things happen of necessity cannot criticise another who
says that not all things happen of necessity. For he has to
admit that the assertion itself happens of necessity.
So there is a practical contradiction at the heart of any strictly
physicalist position practical as in the case of the
man who saws off the branch on which he is sitting .
So when Susan
Greenfield for example, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford,
says in her recent fascinating popular TV programme about the
brain that freewill is an illusion, and holds that more research
is need to find out just where in the brain the illusion is
created, she is revealing a complete lack of philosophical sophistication.
This on two counts. First, she presumably thinks that, in coming
to the conclusion that free will is an illusion she was making
a rational judgment based on evidence, and does not realise
that, according to her own conclusion, her brain came by physical
necessity to that conclusion, and differs in this respect from
many other brains, such as for example (amongst many others),
that of Wolf Singer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for
Brain Research in Frankfurt who is, if Susan Greenfield is right,
programmed by physical necessity to conclude that mental attributes
transcend the reach of purely neurobiological reductionism
(From Brains to Consciousness, ed. Rose, Penguin Books,
1998,p. 241). And second, like so many neuro-scientists, she
fails to appreciate the elementary point that the fact that
mental events are always correlated with brain events does not
mean that they are identical with brain events.
But there are
also empirical, in the sense of observational, difficulties
involved in physicalism. I am not myself very impressed by the
ESP experiments done by Rhine at Duke University and by many
others elsewhere, probably because I have an irrational distrust
of statistical data; but I am impressed by some of the anecdotal
evidence, - anecdotal being a scientists disparaging
word for real life human testimony as distinguished from laboratory
experiments. Law courts work largely on the basis of real life
human testimony, as indeed does much of ordinary life, and it
seems to me a perfectly valid basis on which to form beliefs
about events of a kind that can only very unreliably be produced
at will in a lab. Let me give an example which came to my attention
only a few weeks ago of anecdotally evidenced ESP. I was having
lunch with a former neighbour who has recently retired from
being a judge. He is a standard agnostic, but he told me of
an experience that has left him extremely puzzled. A barrister
a generation older than himself had been his pupil master and
mentor and had been almost like a father to him. When the older
man was dying of cancer the judge visited him every day and
spent as much time as he could with him. One day the old man
seemed to be approaching a critical state, and when the judge
left for the night he asked the nurse in charge to ring him
if the patient became worse, saying that he would want to come
at any time. Then he went home. At three in the morning he suddenly
woke with a very strong sense or feeling that the old man was
present there with him in his bedroom, not physically present,
not seen or heard, but nevertheless very definitely there. In
the morning the nurse told him that she had not rung him during
the night because the end came too suddenly, but the patient
had died at 3 a.m. He saw the medical record which confirmed
the time. He could not believe that his experience at 3 a.m.
could have been pure coincidence, and he asked me what I made
of it. I said that a minimal interpretation would be unconscious
telepathic contact between himself and the patient. The literature
of parapsychology contains innumerable examples, sometimes in
the form of what are known as crisis apparitions. Some of the
most impressive of these come from the time before telephone
and radio, when messages from, say, India to Britain took many
weeks. They are cases, typically from the 19th century, of a
husband in India being quite unexpectedly killed in an accident
and of his wife in England seeing an apparition of him at that
same time and being aware that he had died, the wife having
told others about this both orally and in writing very soon
afterwards and long before the official news came. This telepathic
explanation was a relief to the judge, since it did not commit
him to a belief in any kind of life after death. But for our
present purpose it is important to see that if such telepathic
interactions, i.e. nonphysical effects of one mind on another,
occur, this is as fatal to strict physicalism as would
be a proven life after death.
I should add
here that Soviet researchers at the Institute for Brain Research
in Leningrad, before and up the second world war, who were of
course dogmatic materialists, were nevertheless interested in
telepathy, which they found to be a genuine phenomenon, and
worked on it because their authorities thought it might possibly
have some military use. They devised experiments to find out
what kind of physical radiation from brain to brain was involved.
They put the telepathic sender and receiver, one in a screening
chamber of sheet iron and the other in a screening chamber lined
with lead. This was to confirm that when you cut out known forms
of radiation, telepathy does not occur. But to their surprise
the screening made no difference to the positive results. They
also found that distance between the two subjects, varying from
25 meters to 1,700 kilometers, made no difference and that there
was no time-distance correlation, as there is with all known
forms of radiation. And so they left the presumed physical nature
of telepathy as something yet to be discovered, their materialist
faith being too strong to admit a non-physical mind to mind
causation.
Now I suppose
that nothing in this area can be said to be 100% certain. But
it does seem to me more rational to conclude that ESP occurs,
and is not a physical effect, and therefore that there is more
to reality than matter, than to maintain a dogmatic physicalism
regardless of the evidence. It is also necessary, as I pointed
out earlier, to affirm intellectual and volitional freedom because
to profess to deny it on rational grounds is be in a self-contradictory
position. But in that case the physicalist, or naturalistic,
assumption is simply a local cultural consensus taken, as a
cultural consensus always is, as established fact. For if there
is reality beyond the physical, or in addition to the physical,
the door is open to religious possibilities.
So the situation
thus far is that, on the one hand, there are no religious phenomena
and ESP as such is not a religious phenomenon - that
cannot in principle be described in purely naturalistic terms.
But on the other hand, the assumption that the naturalistic
account is correct does not have a privileged status over against
a religious account. It only seems so from the point of view
of an already existing naturalistic faith. The exceptions to
this statement are those in which a religious picture contradicts
known, or highly probable, conclusions of any of the special
sciences as, for example, in the case of creationists
who believe that the world was created some four thousand years
ago. And of course the churches, from the time of Galileo to
Darwin, have been habitually behind the times and have needlessly
involved themselves in contradictions of this kind. But that
is a problem for the churches, not for philosophers. Setting
the churches self-created problem aside, the naturalistic
picture is threatened by the fact that it can only be totally
consistent and religion-proof if it accepts a strict physicalism,
to embrace which as a freely reasoned belief is self-refuting,
and which also has at least a potential a problem, I would say
an actual problem, with ESP.
But on the other
side, a religious picture is threatened by the appalling problem
of human and animal suffering and human wickedness, the ancient
problem of evil. For the great world faiths are all, though
in different ways and with different qualifications, forms of
cosmic optimism. And so the fact of evil constitutes the biggest
obstacle there is to all major forms of religious belief. Any
religious interpretation of the universe has to recognise the
extreme toughness and non-human-centredness of any creative
process that is taking place, and has to set this within a very
large view, involving many lives in many worlds. I have attempted
this in Evil and the God of Love and Death and Eternal
Life, and cannot attempt to summarise all that here. For
our present purpose I simply have to leave it as a vast acknowledged
problem.
But how to justify
accepting religious experience as cognitive? This is a difficult
area because religious experience covers such a
vast field ranging from manifestly human imaginings expressing
hopes and fears and prejudices, to profoundly impressive and
valuably transformative experiences. We have to take the matter
in three stages. First, we live all the time by the principle
that what seems to be so is so, unless we have adequate reason
to doubt it. In other words, it is in general rational to trust
our experience. Otherwise we would walk into walls, get run
over by traffic, etc., etc. This principle is of course always
subject to the proviso that we have no good reason to suspect
our experience in a particular case to be erroneous or hallucinatory.
But apparently cognitive experience is, so to speak, innocent
until proved guilty. This basic principle, I suggest, applies
to religious as much as to sense experience, for both are apparently
cognitive. And so instead of assuming that it is guilty until
proved innocent, we should assume that it is innocent until
proved guilty. And so the question becomes, on what grounds
have we our modern western society - judged it to be
guilty, delusory?
Well, the paradigm
of experience that we all accept as cognitive is sense experience,
because (1) it forces itself upon us, so that (2) everyone participates
in it, and (3) it is uniform or very largely so
throughout the world. If we did not experience the physical
world correctly for the kind of physical organism that we are,
the world would eliminate us. In contrast, religious experience
(1) is not compulsory, so that (2) not everyone at any given
time seems to participate in it, and (3) it is not uniform throughout
the world, but on the contrary takes many different forms. At
first glance these differences discredit religious experience.
But on second thoughts, not. The second and third factors both
depend on the first, the compulsoriness of sense experience
versus the non-compulsoriness of religious experience. But I
suggest that this is appropriately correlated with the different
putative objects of these two types of experience. Our natural
or physical environment has to force itself upon us as sheer
brute fact if we are to survive within it. But if we are living
at the same time within an interpenetrating supra-natural environment,
may this not be of such a kind that it does not force
itself upon us? Is it not of the very nature of value-laden
reality that it can only be freely recognised? Suppose the Transcendent
to which the religions point is such that the only appropriate
human recognition of it is a self-committing cognitive choice,
reorientating us, or beginning to reorient us, towards a reality
of limitless value - in traditional religious terms, a faith
response involving the whole person? Will not this be, in its
very nature, a response that cannot be forced? And if the religious
response is in its essential nature free, it is not surprising
that we do not find everyone making that response. It may be
that ultimately everyone will, but at present not.
But what about
the third factor, the immense variety of forms of religious
experience around the world, in contrast to the global uniformity
of sense experience? Does not this discredit it? Not, I suggest,
if we apply another epistemological principle which is well
established elsewhere. This is the principle that was succinctly
expressed by Thomas Aquinas when he wrote that Things
known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower
(S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). But this has a much wider
application than he realised which provokes the thought
that almost everything has been said before, but often by people
who did not know that they were saying it! Its most massive
and influential development is of course in Kants first
Critique. But Kant applied it only to sense experience
and did not extend it to religious experience. Consequently
his own epistemology of religion was quite different from that
which I am going very briefly to outline. He held that in the
case of sense experience there is a reality beyond us, which
is somehow affecting us all the time, but that the form that
our awareness of it takes is always and necessarily determined
by the structure of human consciousness. And so he sought to
identify the categories (substance, causation, etc) that are
necessary for experience to occur within a unitary finite consciousness.
What I want to take from him, however, is not his complex categorial
system but only his basic insight that we cannot be aware of
things as they are in themselves, unobserved, but always and
only as they appear to us with our distinctive, and distinctively
limited, cognitive apparatus. Our world, as we consciously perceive
it, is partly our own construction, a fact that requires the
distinction between the world as it is in itself and as to appears
to us. This is a commonplace today in cognitive psychology as
well as in epistemology. To develop a concept of Wittgensteins,
though in a way that he himself did not authorise, all experiencing
is experiencing-as.
So my neo- or
quasi- or, if you like, pseudo- Kantian suggestion is that whereas
Kant held that God is a necessary postulate of the moral life,
I suggest that a transcendent Ultimate Reality, or the Real,
is a necessary postulate of the religious life in its global
variety. This Reality is experienced by human beings in a manner
analogous to that in which, according to Kant, we experience
the world, namely by informational input from external reality
being interpreted by the mind in terms of its own categorial
scheme and thus coming to consciousness as meaningful phenomenal
experience. But whereas Kant held that the categories of thought
structuring sense experience are universal throughout the human
species, the categories of thought which structure religious
experience are historically formed and vary from culture to
culture. The two key concepts are those of deity, which presides
over the monotheisms and polytheisms, and of the non-personal
absolute, which presides over the non-theistic religions. These
basic categories are, to use Kants language, then schematised
or made concrete, not as in Kants system in terms of the
abstract form of time, but in terms of the filled time of history
and culture, as a range of specific god figures (Jahweh, the
Heavenly Father, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva, etc), and specifically
conceived absolutes (Brahman, Nirvana, the Tao, etc), which
thus constitute the personae and impersonae of the Real in relation
to humanity. And although there is not time to expand this here,
this hypothesis requires that the Real in itself is, in relation
to the human mind, ineffable, or as I would rather say transcategorial,
i.e. beyond the range of our human conceptual systems. And if
we ask, as well we may, why we should postulate a transcategorial
Ultimate Reality, the answer is that this constitutes the difference
between a religious and a naturalistic understanding of the
universe. A religious interpretation of the universe will be
founded on the basic faith that religious experience is not
purely projection, but is responsive projection. If we then
take account not only of one tradition but of religious experience
globally, then I suggest that we shall require the two tier
model of the transcategorial noumenal reality and its varied
phenomenal manifestations to human consciousness.
It follows that
religious experience is not to be taken at face value as an
experience of the Ultimate Reality as it is in itself but rather
as an experience formed jointly by the universal presence of
the Real and our own varying religious conceptualities and spiritual
practices. And if we now ask how it is that the ineffable Real
can affect us, the answer has to be that given by the mystics,
namely that there is an aspect or dimension of our own nature
that is inherently responsive to, or akin to, or on one view
even continuous with, the Real. This is the image of God within
us, or what the Quakers call that of God in everyone, or the
atman which we all are in the depths of our being and which
is ultimately identical with Brahman, or the universal Buddha
nature which is obscured within us by self-concern, but the
recovery of which is a salvific transformation, or again the
Tao within which answers to the Tao without.
Religious experience,
then, I am suggesting, is to a greater or lesser degree a fragmentary
response to the Real. But we have to note that religious concepts
can also inform modes of experience that are in no degree responses
to the Real, but entirely projections of human hatred, greed,
and prejudice. The criterion, which is taught in all the great
traditions, lies in the fruits of such experience in human life,
namely in a gradual transformation from natural self-centeredness
towards a universal compassion, feeling with and for others,
and acting accordingly.
All this is not
an argument that those who do not currently participate in the
wide range of human religious experience should accept it as
authentically cognitive. They are not under any obligation to
do so. For they are operating with a more restricted range of
data than those for whom religious experience is an important
part of their data. As a large intermediate group, many ordinary
religious believers who do participate in this mode of experience,
though only very rarely and slightly, can properly be influenced
by the existence of the saints or mahatmas in whom we see very
clearly the fruits of the religious response. However if there
is nothing at all in your experience that resonates, however
feebly, to the reports of the saints, then you have no reason
to think that they are more in touch with reality than the rest
of us. On the contrary, they must be more deeply deluded. So
my argument is the comparatively modest one that, as rational
beings, those who do participate in the wide field of
religious experience are fully entitled to trust it as genuinely
cognitive, as an enhanced awareness of reality, though one that
involves all the time our own human conceptual systems and human
imagination.
So the two basic
contrary responses to the ambiguity of the universe consist
in two different ways of experiencing our existence within it.
In one way our life is, at least sometimes, experienced as taking
place in relation to, or in the presence of, an Ultimate Reality,
variously conceived and experienced as one or other of its humanly
formed personae or impersonae. One aspect of this is the sense
of an overarching meaning in life, going beyond the individual
meanings which we find or construct for ourselves, in our relationships
to others, in the use of our skills, in the creation of beauty
or the discovery of truth, and so on. The more ultimate meaning
of our lives depends on what kind of universe we believe ourselves
to be part of, and more particularly whether we believe that
we exist within a cosmic process leading to a limitlessly desirable
future. For the meaning of the present moment depends, in important
measure, on the future to which it is leading a point
that Sartre made very well. The outcome determines retrospectively
the meaning of the events leading to that outcome. If the process
of existence is not leading anywhere, then we are just contingently
fortunate or unfortunate in the circumstances of our lives,
but with more misfortune than good fortune being presently evident
in human life as a whole. And thats all there is to it.
If on the other hand the cosmic optimism of the great religious
traditions is well founded, this gives to our present situation,
both in its fortunate and its unfortunate aspects, the positive
character that Julian of Norwich expressed in her famous saying,
which she repeats a number of times, that in the end all
shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing
shall be well. This was not for her a guarantee against
accidents and illnesses, hardships, pains, sorrows, failures,
death. It did not mean that we may not face all manner of sorrows
and disasters, as well as all the wealth of good things that
also happen to us. It means that beyond all this, and within
all this, we can have an ultimate trust. In practice, let it
be admitted, this can often be so difficult as to be beyond
the capacity of almost anyone. Even Jesus, as he died, is said
to have felt deserted by God. But nevertheless, according to
the religions, the structure of the universe meaning
not just the physical universe but the totality of reality
is such that the cosmic optimism which they teach is objectively
well founded.
So, to conclude,
my basic epistemological argument is that it is as rational
for those who participate sufficiently in the religious response
to the universe to adopt and try to live in terms of a religious
conception of it, as it is for those who do not currently participate
in that response to adopt a naturalistic interpretation of it.
I would add however that we seem to have an inborn tendency
to experience the natural in terms of the supra-natural. This
tendency can be repressed or perverted, as in Soviet Russia,
Maoist China, and Nazi Germany, and also in a quite different
way in our own contemporary western secular culture. But we
are ourselves part of the totality of reality, and it may well
be that the religious aspect of our nature answers to the character
of the totality. At any rate, I maintain that it is just as
reasonable, just as rational, just as intellectually responsible,
to take the risk of trusting the religious aspect of our nature
as it is to take the opposite risk of suppressing it
which is not, needless to say, a risk of perdition, but of being
blind, at least for now, to an enormously important and transforming
range of reality.
I would also
add, however, that from a religious point of view it is entirely
possible for many people to be responding in their lives to
the universal presence of the transcendent Real in a felt imperative
to value and serve their fellow humans both near and far, without
using religious concepts to structure that awareness. In other
words, there can be, and are, secular servants of
humanity who may also attain the level of saintliness. If the
religions are right, there is a great deal more for them still
to discover, but the discovery in this life or beyond
will be wholly positive, not a judgment but
a welcome!
© John Hick,
2001.