As soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science...The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty... Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be
Bertrand Russell (1872--1970)
This is a book for those who wish to reason about religion, those who puzzle about the question "what rational sense can we make of religious beliefs and what do they mean?" I shall address topics as diverse, perennial, and timely as the nature of faith, arguments for and against the existence of God and arguments for and against the separateness of Brahman and jivas, the problem of suffering, the possibility of life after death, and religious approaches to moral issues and the meaning of life. I do not promise answers to these questions, and certainly do not promise definitive religious answers -- for the latter are the purview of the science of theology. This is a philosophy book, and philosophy is the art of using reason to discover meaning and what is possible. My hope is to encourage the reader to enlarge his or her thoughts by comparing and contrasting the philosophical insights offered by the different World Religions and examining the global application of those insights for today. In the twenty-first century, there is no better way to free our ideas about religion "from the tyranny of custom" than to have an informed and global understanding of the great religious ideas of humankind.
The audience for this philosophical approach to religious issues includes both believers and non-believers. In our world, there are many who do not care to think about religion. But there are also those who are strongly religious, and those who, while they may not have religious conviction, wonder about the truth of religious belief. This book addresses the latter two groups - believers and non-believers alike who wonder about religion, who take religion seriously and see religion as at least potentially addressing the big questions of life.
The Problem of Religious Commitment
Why be religious? In some ways this is an old question, yet it has a distinctly modern cogency. In our age, skeptics may ask this question, but more than ever committed religious people are inescapably confronted by it. For religious belief has come to appear irrational for the modern person. We are, it would seem, too scientifically sophisticated, too aware of other cultures and other ways of thought, too historically conscious, to believe in the old religious traditions of a pre-scientific, culturally parochial age. After all, science explains all -- or at least can seem to hold out the promise of doing so. For example, belief in miracles can seem rather quaint today; the notion that God acts in history is often relegated to the disclaimer that the insurance company is not responsible for "acts of God," as when the branch of a tree falls on your automobile during a high wind.
Further, we live in the "global village," drawn together by instantaneous information and ubiquitous video cameras. While this often sensationalizes the trivial, it also means that we have not just heard of but actually seen the alternative thought worlds and the alternative lifestyles of others, in our own country as well as around the world. Within our pluralistic society and this international pluralistic outlook, belief in a specifically Hindu God, or Muslim God, or Jewish God, or Christian God, can appear parochial, a vestige of an earlier age. And even if some people believe in a particular God, that is all right for them -- just as others in different social groups and cultures as a matter of fact believe in a different divine reality, or do not believe at all. From within the new perspective of cultural relativism, religious commitment may be accepted today, but only within its proper cultural place.
However, the global information age also challenges the non-believer. It is too facile for those without any particular religious beliefs to assume that there could not be good reasons for the religious life. If religious folk often err on the side of blind proselytizing, the a-religious often err on the side of uninformed disinterest. We wonder about the universe, are intrigued by the physiology of the brain, the mechanisms of the biosphere, and the possibility of black holes; we should equally wonder if there could be any good reasons for belief in a Transcendent. We question civil authority, argue about social issues like abortion and about international policies like environmental protection, work hard at our educations, our careers, our human relationships. It is at least odd, if not intellectually inexcusable, to ignore the completeness of this evolution of the modern mind by putting one's own mind in neutral when it comes to religious views.
To return to the believer, "Why believe in God?" was a virtually unthinkable question in the medieval period of the Judaic and Christian and Islamic and Hindu traditions. The appropriate question had become "What does God (the God of my tradition) require of humans?" Our world is different. In our world, even within the community of faith, Divine Providence is no longer an unshakable given. In Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky expresses this culturally and historically transformed outlook of modern worldviews. Raskolnikov, the protagonist, discusses with Sonia, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, her plight as a young prostitute. He suggests that Sonia's younger sister might also fall into prostitution for the sake of economic survival:
"No, no! It can't be, no!" Sonia cried aloud in desperation, as though
she had been stabbed. "God would
not allow anything so awful!"
"He lets
others come to it."
"No, no! God will protect her, God!" she
repeated beside herself.
"But, perhaps, there is no God at all," Raskolnikov answered with a sort of malignance, laughed and looked at her.2
Raskolnikov's words speak to our age.
While skepticism is not uniquely modern, skepticism about religion has become particularly widespread as a natural consequence of certain uniquely modern problems. But does the resistance of modern problems to easy religious solutions indicate a fatal deficiency in religious belief? Or instead, can religion adjust to the modern mind, and are these problems more like anomalies, that force one's worldview to evolve while leaving it intact? Whichever is the case, as we assess issues facing the believer and the non-believer, we will see a repeated pattern: in the modern age, what makes one person skeptical of religious belief is precisely what the religiously committed must confront if they seek a reasonable faith. Given modern grounds for doubt, what we shall be asking is what could justify the faith of the religious person in a global age.
Religious Epistemology
Many of the issues addressed in this book concern religious knowledge,-or epistemology of religion. These are not easy issues. Still, they are essential to an informed judgment, whether one of belief or disbelief. So in order to bring these issues to a wide audience, they are presented here in a manner intended to be accessible to the general reader, and not just to the specialist. However, since this book is introductory in nature, it is only possible to develop some potential solutions to certain trenchant philosophical issues in religion. For those who wish to pursue individual questions in finer detail, suggested readings are given at the end of each section. Likewise, a glossary, a chronology of the World Religions, and simplified schemes for classic arguments are offered for further clarification.
More specifically, this short introduction to global philosophy of religion addresses three interrelated epistemological problems: (1) what is the rational justification for holding one set of religious beliefs instead of some alternative religious (or even non-religious) worldview?; (2) how could one's own religious beliefs be rationally justified when there is insufficient proof?; and (3) are the non-rational elements of religion somehow rationally justified? In addressing these questions over the course of the book, I will set out what I take to be the inevitable failure of purely rationalistic, classic philosophical, psychological, and sociological arguments both for and against religion. This analysis will eventually lead us to ask: if reason cannot decide the issue for or against the religious life, what, if anything, is the value of the religious life? To answer this question, I will develop a rational defense of the non-rational - or, better, extra-rational - elements of religion: love, faith, compassion, and devotion.
The pluralism of the modern religious situation produces religious uncertainty, forcing people to choose between religious options. The sociologist Peter Berger calls this necessary choice the "heretical imperative."3 There is often no immediate and uncontested right religious option for the modern person. So every religious choice has an element of heresy, because to choose any religious option is to reject other, well-received (orthodox) options. Further, as Paul Tillich notes, even within the faith stance one does choose:
If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. Faith is certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy. But faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a finite being. This element of uncertainty in faith cannot be removed, it must be accepted.
Given that genuine faith will be a "doubting faith," is religious commitment worth the risk?
The risk to faith in one's ultimate concern is indeed the greatest risk [a person] can run. For if it proves to be a failure, the meaning of one's life breaks down; one surrenders oneself, including truth and justice, to something which is not worth it.
Whether one should take this risk depends on whether there is a place for religion in the modern world (that is, the world as conceived by the modern mind). For while religious faith is not just a matter of rational belief, we do not want our faith to be irrational. And if there is no place, e.g., for God or Brahman or Nirvana in the modern world, directing oneself toward God or Brahman or Nirvana is not rational, and clearly not worth the risk. Against the prevalent modern sense that there is no place for the Transcendent, I hope to show that there is a place for rational faith in a Transcendent, even though a healthy skepticism should underlie that faith.
The World Religions
This book
addresses philosophical issues in the World Religions. All of the World Religions are concerned
with a Transcendent and the relation of humans to that Transcendent. Some traditions not addressed - such as
nature religions like the Japanese Shinto tradition or ancient Greek polytheism
- do not conceive of a Transcendent, while others - including Shinto but also
native American traditions like Navajo or Hopi - while they have persisted over
long periods of history, have remained ethnocentric and so are not World
Religions. One cannot convert to being
Navajo, and thus it is not a World Religion, whereas while the small but global
tradition of Judaism is comprised today primarily of ethnic Jews, one can
convert to this World Religion.
Finally, there are religions which are not only ethnocentric but
historical dead ends, such as the ancient Egyptian religion, and there are new
religions which lack the historical longevity and global spread yet to be
considered World Religions. In contrast
to ancient Egyptian religion, Zoroastrianism is a World Religion with a now
small but still living tradition in India as well as adherents in the Middle
East.
Following the common demarcation of the World Religions, I will
concentrate on the five traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam. But I will also include
reference to the Chinese traditions as well as to some of the important if more
modest sized World Religions like Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and the Baha'i
tradition.
The Relation of Scientific
to Philosophical Approaches to Religion
Just as philosophical approaches to science must address the facts about science as well as the conclusions and processes of science, the philosophy of religion must address the facts about religion. Historical facts are particularly pertinent to global philosophy of religion. On the one hand, too often in Christian-oriented philosophy of religion, for example, there is either a naive dismissal of other religious worldviews or misleading generalizations are applied to other religious worldviews. More attention to the specific beliefs, individual philosophers, and historical developments of the World Religions can correct this. Still, on the other hand, mere facts will not settle philosophical issues in or about religion. Indeed, since philosophy is deductive, facts function primarily as counterinstances to any purported philosophical conclusion about religion. One example will serve to illustrate this.
A recent movement in America in biblical history is the Jesus Seminar, which is again pursuing the search of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship in Germany for the historical Jesus. As in the earlier search for the historical Jesus, the Jesus Seminar operates on the assumption that the philosophical importance of Jesus' ideas will be discovered when one knows the historical facts. The group's founder, Robert Funk, says in Honest to Jesus, "I am more interested in what Jesus thought about God's domain than what Peter the fisherman and Paul the tentmaker thought about Jesus of Nazareth." And the reason he gives for this is:
I am inclined to the view that Jesus caught a glimpse of what the world is really like when you look at it with God's eyes. He endeavored to pass that glimpse along in disturbing short stories we call parables and in subversive proverbs we call aphorisms...As divine Son of God, co-eternal with the Father, pending cosmic judge seated at God's right hand, He is insulated and isolated from His persona as the humble Galilean sage...there is not much left of the man who loved to laugh and talk at table.
So rather than seeing Jesus as Christ, Funk prefers to think of Jesus as a "Galilean sage." There are a number of philosophical problems with this approach.
First, when compared to any significant historical philosopher, Jesus was not a philosopher. He did not, as far as we know, consistently develop rigorous arguments to defend his positions. So the interpretation of Jesus as a mere sage leaves us with an insignificant gnostic shadow, a sort of fortune cookie philosopher with a ready aphorism, rather than a seminal figure in the World Religions. This parallels often held views of Shakyamuni Buddha as a philosopher. While unlike Jesus, Siddhartha Gautama apparently was a philosopher, he too is philosophically insignificant compared to others if he is treated as a mere philosopher.
This brings us to a second problem. Funk speaks as if there were pure "facts" and uninterpreted experiences to which we could appeal to settle the nature of the historical Jesus and his philosophical-religious significance. So he proposes a quest to:
Liberate Jesus from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him. What would happen if "the dangerous and subversive memories" of that solitary figure were really stripped of their interpretive overlay?
This ignores the work of post-Kantian philosophy in the West, and vis-à-vis Asian philosophical thought is contrary to the long Indic tradition that humans always see with interpretation, indeed are always caught in maya (illusion), a view encapsulated in the Jain notion of anekantavada. On both ancient Indic views and post-Kantian Western views, there is no such thing as an uninterpreted experience, and there is no neutral standpoint from which to judge correct interpretation of historical fact.
And this leads to a third difficulty with the idea, exemplified by the work of the Jesus Seminar, that historical facts might settle philosophical issues. As Funk states the interpretive framework (hermeneutics) of the group:
Since that symbolic world [that is
ingredient to traditional Christianity] is crumbling or has crumbled the times
call for a wholly secular account for the Christian faith, not just for the
sake of its appeal to the third world, but primarily for the sake of those who
inhabit, the contemporary, scientifically minded Western world.
The compatibility of science and religion will be addressed in chapter 10. But regarding Funk's suggestion, if a humanistic worldview is presupposed, it does not follow that the Christian (or any other religious) worldview is false. And of course if a humanistic worldview is presupposed as Funk does, the text would not be understood as expressing veridical experiences of the Transcendent. But this just begs the question. Again, philosophical issues are not settled by supposedly neutral historical facts. Nor is the significance of religious beliefs something which could be settled by historical facts. Whatever value the worldviews of the World Religions do have, as we will see throughout this book, their value will depend on whether they can indeed direct humans toward a Transcendent. The rest is just history or sociology or psychology.
Against Global Theology or a Global Philosophy of Religion
This book does not espouse a global theology - as for example Wilfred Cantwell Smith has proposed - not only because this book is not a theology, but also because a global theology is a philosophically impossible ideal. Global theology is an attempt to produce a single, universal religious perspective which all humans could hold. This necessitates obviating the specific doctrines of each tradition which, if true, would conflict with other traditions. For example, Jesus could not be the unique incarnation of God for Christians if Christians were to subscribe to a global theology which included Muslims, Buddhists, and Baha'is, just as Buddhists could not continue to hold the conception of anatman (no-self) if they were to subscribe to a global theology with those who hold that humans have souls. Moreover, precisely what does give a religious worldview its power as an action guide for a meaningful life is the specificity of the doctrines and moral directives which it sets out. Hence, the idea of a global theology does not really designate a religious worldview, for it is not a theology so much as a vision of general religious principles which humankind does, or could hold, in common. But such an abstraction, while having a certain philosophic interest, is of no practical interest for a lived religious life.
Likewise, this book does not set out a global philosophy of religion. There are global issues in the philosophy of religion, and a number of those are addressed here. But the idea of a single global philosophy of religion is specious. First, since there can be no global theology, there can be no correspondent global philosophic inquiry into that purported theology. Second, there are a multitude of philosophic approaches, and it seems highly unlikely that any one single philosophic approach could triumph over all others and so form the basis of a global philosophy. It simply does not follow from the commonality of humankind that there is a single, distillable essence of human philosophic inquiry. In short, both theology and philosophy certainly seem to be irreducibly plural, much as the world's religions, while sharing characteristics which make them all religions, are irreducibly plural.
The Way of Knowledge Versus The Way of Love
This brings us to the perennial question of whether, if there is a way to the Transcendent, it is a way of knowledge - i.e., a purely philosophical path - or a way of love. Typically those who conceive of the way (or the mystical path) to the Transcendent as a perfecting of the intellect, think of humans as sharing common intellectual capacities which enable all humans to follow this same ascent to the Transcendent. In a general sense this is, to use a Western term, "gnosticism." As a specific historical movement prevalent during the first centuries of the Christian Church, Gnosticism was the view that gnosis or knowledge is the way to salvation for humans, where humans are seen as sparks of the divine spirit, who are trapped in this world in the prison of the flesh. However, the later medieval domination of Aristotelian thought among Christian, Islamic, and even Jewish thinkers led to a form of gnosticism in the broader sense, where intellect was thought to take precedence over the heart.
A striking example of this gnostic emphasis on reason is found in The Guide for the Perplexed by the great Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides (1132-1204):
A
king is in his palace, and all his subjects are partly in the country, and
partly abroad. Of the former, some have their backs turned towards the king's
palace, and their faces in another direction; and some are desirous and zealous
to go to the palace...some reach it, and go round about in search of the
entrance gate; others have passed through the gate, and walk about in the
ante-chamber; and others have succeeded in entering into the inner part of the
palace, and being in the same room with the king in the royal palace.
...The
people who are abroad are all those that have no religion...I consider these as
irrational beings, and not as human beings...
Those
who are in the country, but have their backs turned towards the king's palace,
are those who possess religion, belief, and thought, but happen to hold false
doctrines...These are worse than the first class...
Those
who desire to arrive at the palace, and to enter it, but have never yet seen
it, are the mass of religious people; the multitude that observe the divine
commandments, but are ignorant. Those
who arrive at the palace, but go round about it, are those who devote
themselves exclusively to the study of practical law...but are not trained in
philosophical treatment of the principles of the Law and do not endeavor to
establish the truth of their faith by proof...But those who have succeeded in
finding a proof for everything that can be proved, who have a true knowledge of
God, so far as a true knowledge can be attained, and are near the truth,
wherever an approach to the truth is possible, they have reached the goal, and
are in the palace in which the king lives.
...The
true worship of God is only possible when correct notions of Him have been previously
conceived...man's love of God is identical with His knowledge of Him...the
intellect which emanates from God unto us is the link that joins us to God.
Though Maimonides sees knowing God as equivalent to loving God, it is clear that this is an intellectual love rather than an affective or emotive love. Thus he identifies nearness to God with "true metaphysical opinions" about God. As Maimonides' analogy so pointedly illustrates, this is an elitist view, reserving nearness to God for the intellectually endowed and culturally privileged, and relegating the common religious person to the outskirts of God's favor.
We will return to this in chapters 13 and 14, but for now we should note the alternative to this way of the intellect. That alternative is the way of love or what is known in Hinduism as bhakti-yoga: love of, and passionate devotion to, God. The way of love speaks of a love which involves knowledge but goes beyond knowledge, a love which is open even to those not intellectually or culturally privileged. The Bhagavad-Gita (Song of the Lord) enunciates three fundamental types of yoga (or discipline-methods): jnana-yoga, the way of contemplation; karma-yoga, the way of obligated action; and bhakti-yoga, the way of devotion. Arjuna asks his charioteer Lord Krishna:
The ever-integrated come
to worship You in love, while some
the Imperishable, Unmanifest,
but which know Discipline the best?
Krishna responds:
Their toil is weightiest
whose thoughts pursue the Unmanifest,
for hardly can the bodied soul
achieve the unmanifested goal.
Thus, having noted the difficulty of the way of the intellect, or jnana-yoga, Krishna does not reject it but says of bhakti-yoga:
By undivided love alone
can I be truly seen,
in such a Form and as I am
be known and entered in.
In the West, we find this same idea of the way of love or passionate devotion to God in, for example, the Spanish mystics of the high Middle Ages. (Though they became marginalized figures in comparison to the reigning Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.) However, not only are such famous mystics as St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross in effect Christian bhaktas, but so is St. Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury and author of the highly intellectualized "Ontological Argument" for God's existence (see chapter 4). Before presenting his ontological argument for the being "than which no greater can be conceived," Anselm says:
Let me seek thee in longing, let me long
for thee in seeking, and find thee in love and love thee in finding...for I do
not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to under.
Similarly St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), the Franciscan opponent of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas at the University of Paris, who feels humans possess an innate idea of God and who accepts Anselm's Ontological Argument, himself turns to the mystical insight which St. Francis of Assisi has attained:
I breathlessly sought this peace, I, a
sinner...I ascended to Mount Alverna as to a quiet place, with the desire of
seeking spiritual peace and staying there, while I meditated on the ascent of
the mind to God, amongst other things there occurred that miracle which
happened in the same place to the blessed Francis [St. Francis of Assisi] himself,
the vision namely of the winged Seraph in the likeness of the Crucified.
Though Bonaventure develops a philosophical theology, and though he endorses an argument which is as intellectual as Anselm's, he concludes:
All truly spiritual men have been invited
by God to passage of this kind...all intellectual operations should be
abandoned, all the whole height of our affection should be transferred and
transformed into God...
If you should ask how these things come
about, question grace, not instruction; desire, not intellect; the cry of
prayer, not pursuit of study; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man;
darkness, not clarity; not light, but the wholly flaming fire which will bear
you aloft to God with fullest unction and burning affection. This fire is God.
The first half of this book will focus more on the way of the intellect, or jnana-yoga (though the fulfillment of this path in Hinduism would also require meditative realization). In the later chapters we will turn more to a consideration of the way of love or bhakti-yoga. Thus, as we turn to the considerations of chapter 1 and the question of why religion needs philosophy, we should keep in mind that pure philosophy or gnosis or the intellect may not be the final way to the Transcendent.