http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3b.html?m=1
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html
http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-4.html
Part 5: Religion In The Making
So here I stand, with a thoroughgoing commitment to truth that limits my options. I must do my absolute best to live and believe truly. If I reject the religious experiences spoken of as data from which to draw conclusions about the world, then I cannot in good conscience give myself over to them. If, on the other hand, I find I cannot live without giving myself over to them, then I cannot but take them as data that I must use to build my vision of what the world is.
We ended the last section with a comment about the similarity of such a vision and what many religions call 'God'. But before we explore this similarity in more detail, we need to ask what religion even is.
a. What Is Religion
There are many interesting theories about the history of religion. Many center around an evolutionary model of development. This I think is good. There can be little doubt that religions has evolved over human history, and so any theory about what religion is must account for this fact. Indeed, it must be central to it. No doubt, darwinism itself must fit into a thoroughgoing account of religion, if it is to be intellectually satisfying for most people. But I think using such an account as the SOLE or even primary foundation for a model of what religion is, is in error.
For such an account necessarily discounts the deciding nature of the individual. Darwinian accounts of human action discount free will as a factor. This isn't a bad thing. All good scientific models leave something out. The classic solar system model of the atom, leaves out the fact that electron activity can be described using a cloud model. But the cloud model leaves out something that the solar system model gets right: the fact that electrons travel within shells. No model is all-encompassing, and in the case of complex issues like atoms or human behavior, each is likely to capture only a part of the truth. Darwinian models, understood in this restrictive sense, are beneficial. But when they are made the end-all be-all they obscure more than they reveal. And since our discussion of religion so far has had so much to do with making choices, about how to respond to experience, about what we really believe about those experiences, the model of religion that is going to be most useful as we move forward will have to account for the people as beings possessed of free will, as deciders.
Most of what I say here is going to be taken from Alfred N Whitehead's brilliant book RELIGION IN THE MAKING. You can get it online, I highly recommend it though the language is very dense. Part of what I will try to do here is make it more accessible.
Religion, in this model, begins with ritual. Ritual provided people with the ability to explore experiences and the emotions attending those experiences without actually repeating the event. For instance, a hunter experiences thrill and fear in the hunt. The community may invent a dance that not only allows a person to re-encounter those feelings, but to communicate them to those who do not take part in them. A hunter's wife, then, through a dance, can feel what it is like for him to hunt. Experience itself, in the sense of phenomenological content, is isolated and then explored through ritual. Thus play, art, and religion all have their sources in the same human activity: ritual.
Over time, a community organizes itself around its rituals. This causes them to form beliefs about the ritual. The emotions and experiences change the way people think about the world. Thinking is staring to become important in religion, but emotion is still primary. So the hunter in ritual has isolated the experience of hunting, and the feelings that attend it. He perhaps now worships a god of the hunt, which others can also experience through the ritual. Rituals and beliefs form varying degrees of relationship with historical facts. For instance, passover probably began as a harvest ritual. But when the Hebrews escaped from Egypt, it became a way to remember those events and what it was like to experience them. So the emotions changed, and the ritual changed. The historical event heightens the power of the ritual, and the ritual deepens the memory of the event, making it something that can be re-experienced over and over again. Stories grow up around the event, stories that serve the same purpose as the ritual. Various people re-experiencing the event, isolate or concentrate on it's emotional and phenomenal core.
The account of the Hebrews crossing the Reed Sea in Exodus includes in it both a more primitive version and a later version. The more primitive version is rather mundane. The Hebrews cross a Sand Bar that is brought to the surface by an east wind. The Egyptians are unable to cross because they are on chariots. But the later version has God holding up the water like a wall for a long time, and drowning the Egyptians that follow.
The later version is the result of a people trying to capture the feelings and the experience of the event. For in the Reed Sea crossing, what the Hebrews felt, what has spoken to the Jews who descended from them to the present day, is the experience of salvation, the sense of being preserved within the world from all the dark and turbid forces that threaten the human adventure.
As time goes on, and especially as the religious community gets bigger, people begin to bring rational reflection to the enterprise of religion. Doctrines are created, that try to formalize and universalize the insights of the religious community, contained within their body of scripture. Theology seeks to categorize and organize the insights of religious experience, indeed of phenomenology in the same way that science seeks to categorize and organize the insights of sense experience, and the third-person perspective (which abstracts away from phenomenology altogether). At this point, religious groups start to function as doxastic communities, groups of people who have had experiences like our own, against whom we can check what we have felt and encountered within our experiences. This is religion seeking intersubjective agreement.
So as we move from the raw human experiences we had before, we find that there are communities out there that might have something to offer us, for they have been experimenting and isolating experiences like our own for a long time. Religion provides a community against which we can check our own experience. It also provides rituals and stories that give us the opportunity to isolate the elements of our experiences that fascinated us in the first place. Religion then functions as a way to isolate those experiences, push them as far as we can go, and stay true to our first insight: that life is an adventure. Religion turns our self-exploration into an adventure, and helps us wash ourselves in the religious encounter with the world.
Science, when it wants to learn about some object of interest. Takes that object of interest and separates it, abstracts it, from most everything else. (This is not universally true, but I am speaking here of reductive science which is quite useful though it has it's limits. Still, I'll be speaking very generally here.) It takes it, and it breaks it down, it experiments with it, it ponders it, it pushes that one object of study as far as it can go. In religion our phenomenal encounter with the world should be subject to the same kind of abstraction.
b. Gods, Gods, Everywhere, and All I Wanted Was A Drink
So what started as simple curiosity about our selves, now has turned into a major adventure into thought and emotion. And there are so many ways to choose from whereby we may explore those emotions. Atheists often claim that religious people are all 'atheists' about every god they don't happen to believe in. This seems to me to be rather silly. It would be like saying that people who believe in quantum gravity theory are 'antiscience' about string theory. But people who believe in quantum gravity theory don't deny that string theory is science. They deny it is true.
I think of different religions as attempts to create pictures using religious experience. I can evaluate how good they are at this, based on my own experience and how good they are at providing the elements I listed as the reason religion matters in the first place. One question a person asks is whether they can speak to the experiences that brought one to religion. Another is whether they provide a good and steady doxastic community that can help check mistakes. Finally, one needs to consider if they are the most conducive at pushing religious experience as far as it can go. I do not think of other religions has absolutely wrong. They are more or less wrong. No religion is 'right' in the sense of giving a 100% perfect model for the experiences at question. Any more than any one scientific theory can be taken to be all-encompassing for the object at issue. Rather, every scientific theory is in a constant state of flux, models are tweaked and tinkered with, seeking an ever-improving picture of the object of study.
Different 'gods' are competing models concerning how we should think about that part of the world that will allow us to account for us living into those experiences that we spoke of earlier, and more I haven't listed. People will weigh differently which experience is more important, which model is simplest and most consistent not only with RE, but with what is known from sensory experience as well, and which experiences need to be accounted for at all. For instance, a Buddhist is likely to focus primarily on life-as-venture and self-as-community, whereas I as a Christian weigh equally those experiences that make joy the center of the world. Some Christians will emphasize those experiences of joy over and against our experience of horror and evil, which I will discuss later. I consider those latter experiences as supremely important as well.
So religious disagreements are no different than any other intellectual disagreement. The believer in quantum gravity may disagree with the string theorist about the latter's theory being predictive or simple. The string theorist may insist that the quantum gravity believer's theory doesn't explain enough. They are weighing the data differently. Religious disagreements are caused by similar differences.
But whereas the scientists' disagreement has no bearing on how people are going to live in the world, the religious people's disagreement has HUGE moral and metaphysical consequences. As Alfred N Whitehead says, "You use arithmetic, but you are religious. Arithmetic of course enters into your nature, so far as that nature involves a multiplicity of things. But it is there as a necessary condition, and not as a transforming agency. No one is invariably "justified" by his faith in the multiplication table. But in some sense or other, justification is the basis of all religion. Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape. Religion is force of belief cleansing the inward parts. For this reason the primary religious virtue is sincerity, a penetrating sincerity."
This is why religious disagreements LOOK different from other disagreements. But in point of fact, the reasons for disagreement are usually the same.
c. Which Model?
In the next section, we will talk about some other experiences that stand as a kind of counter-evidence to what has been said so far. Then we will work on which model best suits the experiences spoken of earlier. At this point, the argument will become more idiosyncratic, since I cannot convince people to weigh the data of human experience the way I have. In every intellectual disagreement, there are some evaluative differences that cannot be overcome, differences about which experiences are more important and why. But for now, let me say that it should be obvious that given the experiences I've presented, and the analysis and weighing process that took place earlier on, certain models should be pretty well excluded.
For if I see the experience of risk and venture as being 'like the universe is not indifferent to the human adventure' then obviously, I am going to have to have a picture of this reality as something that cares about what we do. Further, if I take my experience of judgment seriously, this reality must see and judge. And so religions that deny the personhood of God are not going to work for me. If I see humor and joy as making the joy the center of the world and overcoming time, and so choose to see the universe as a place where joy stands at the center and time is transcended, this reality is going to have to be in some sense redeeming. If I see the interconnectedness of all things as pointing to one all-encompassing selfhood, then my vision must ultimately be UNIFIED. So polytheism is out. If I seek a reality that justifies the conviction that, in the end, 'everything will be alright', then this reality must be truly good and in some way capable of overcoming the evils of the world. Religious models that fit the phenomenological picture I put forth earlier are going to have God at the center. For it would be the acme of denial to talk of a transcendent personality that loves and saves the world without recognizing that this is exactly the role God plays in other religions. This would be particularly true of the Judeo-Christian religions, which emphasize God's oneness, goodness and salvation.
So far, this is where I lay my cards. I do this not arbitrarily, and not because God supposedly came down and told me to believe this way (we'll get to that part later). No, I choose that religious model because it fits the experiences I spoke of earlier, having analyzed and weighed them as I have. I have moved from experiencing, to analysis, to organization and now I proceed to the point where I check my conclusions against other doxastic communities. These are the communities that have even the possibility of serving the purposes I need a religious community for for, for only they speak to the reasons why I care in the first place. Other people will weigh these experiences differently, others will analyze them differently. But at that point our argument isn't here, at this point, but earlier on, in the premises portion of this paper.
One more aspect of the religious encounters I spoke of earlier need to be addressed. Whatever model I come up with must speak to the sense contained in humor of turning the world upside down. There must be something truly 'inverting' about the model I build. That final 'must-needs' of my humanity will be one of the last I address. First we need to stop and step back for a moment, recognizing that religious experience is not all there is to human life. What about the world of the sense? And what about the various challenges the particular things we see and know bring up for the picture I have put forth here? It is to those questions I will turn next in this paper.
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