Customer Reviews

Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

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I loved this book. I totally agree with Smith's statement that "Built into the human makeup is a longing for 'more' and I agree that religion does matter; however, I also understand why we live in an age of disbelief. So many antiquated religion concepts are difficult for modern men and women to accept. I recently came across a book An Encounter With A Prophet which seems to solve this problem and I would highly recommend it to those seeking the something more but unable to blindly accept religious dogma.

Huston Smith is a treasure, and "Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief" should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what's going on below the glassy, glitzy surface of America in the year 2001.

It doesn't matter whether or not you've read any of Smith's other books (which I have); it doesn't matter if you never saw his 5-part special with Bill Moyers (or watched it four times, as I have); it doesn't matter if you go to church every Sunday or avoid it religiously (as I do); what matters is that you get this book, for there are glittering gems on almost every page no matter what your churchly or secular orientation may be.

"Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief" is highly recommended for all who seek to know more tomorrow than they do today. And if Huston Smith should read these words, I would say, "You have no idea how important and appreciated you are by tens of thousands of anonymous readers."

Professor Huston Smith is indeed an inspiring scholar in world religion. His work, explaining the different ways in which human beings approach the unknown and seek transcendence and meaning for themselves is itself one of the best ways to gain an appreciation of the importance of religion and spirituality.

This book, Professor Huston's most recent, has a somewhat more ambitious goal than simply explaining and describing religious teaching. He tries to explain, in the words of his title, "why religion matters" and why it is of the highest importance to many people.

Although much of the book is eloquent and convincing, I found much of it unduly polemical and unconvincing. In particular, the first half of the book is taken up with a discussion and refutation of "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to the truth and out only source of knowledge. There is a wide-ranging attack on scientism, which broadens into a critique of the secular American university and of certain court decisions, which is intended to show not so much that scientism is wrong or incorrect but that it hasn't been proven. This is a worthy goal but the specifics misfire. In particular, Professor Smith spends too much time in criticising Darwinism and the theory of evolution, a criticism which I find markedly unsuccessful and probably unnecessary if I understand his broader claims correctly. He spends far too much time, I think, discussing a straw man, Hollywood's version of the Scopes trial, "Inherit the Wind."

The stronger portion of the book is included in part 2 which speaks eloquently of the nature of religious life, of the search for a transcendent reality separate from the world of everyday impulse and of the different ways religions have for approaching the divine. Professor Smith rightly ties in the religious quest with the quest of traditional metaphysics for the "big picture" as in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant.

In essence, as I understand Professor Smith, he argues that we don't know that the world of science is all that there is. Science is limited to a certain type of human cognition which may not be the complete story of the universe. This is, although Professor Smith does not point it out, a Kantian conclusion. Professor Smith also wants to make a great point over descriptions of religious attitudes and aspirations in explaining why religion matters. Here he comes closer to well stating his case.

The book is rather digressive in style. It was not written for the academic specialist. Some of the stories and anecdotes although intereting and well told are overly chatty and distract from the main points of the book. Also, a bibliography and citations to the many sources Professor Smith cites would have helped me understand the book and follow-up on points he makes.

I am not sure after reading this book if asking about the relationship between science and religion is itself asking the correct question to help understand religion. Professor Smith did not entirely convince me in his discussion of the relationship between the two, but he did come closer in convincing me, in his discussion of the religious attidtude,that he understands a great deal about the religious needs of human beings.

"What is the meaning of existence? Why are there pain and death? Why, in the end, is life worth living? What does reality consist of and what is its object" (p. 224)? In his book, Huston Smith explores life's big questions while examining the subject of why religion matters. Recognizing "the greatest problem the human spirit faces in our time is having to live in the procrustean, scientistic worldview that dominates our culture" (p. 202), he shows us "the importance of the religious dimension of human life--in individuals, in societies, and in organizations" (p. xix). "The culprit," Smith notes, "is not science itself, but our misconstrual of it" (p. 5).

It is evident to Smith that the human soul longs for God, "by whatsoever name," because God exists. He writes, "the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely. Built into the human makeup is a longing for 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite. This outreach strongly suggests the existence of the something that life reaches for in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air. Sunflowers bend in the direction of light because light exists, and people seek food because food exists" (pp. 3, 28).

I arrived at this book by way of Ken Wilber's writings, which contain references to Smith. In fact, there are moments in this book when Smith even sounds like Wilber. For instance, when Smith writes "we should enter our new millennium by running a strainer through our past to sift from each of its three periods the gold it contains and let the dross sink back into the sands of history" (pp. 22, 213), and "modernity's good--i.e., science--is certain to figure importantly in the third millennium, and postmodernity's focus on justice likewise stands a good chance of continuing" (p. 22), his ideas sound a lot like the "integral vision" of THE MARRIAGE OF SENSE AND SOUL (1998), in which Wilber integrates spirit and science. This is not a criticism, but merely an observation of the similarities between Smith and Wilber, and there are others.

Smith sees light at the end of his tunnel metaphor: "from God we derive, and to God we eventually return" (p. 261). His writing is conversational in tone, anecdotal, and witty. Approach this book with an open mind, and it will enrich your view of life. And if you like this book, then read Ken Wilber's MARRIAGE OF SENSE AND SOUL.

G. Merritt

If anyone is going to make a case for the importance of religion in current society, it would be Prof. Smith. He compares Western Enlightment thought of the past three centuries against the thousands of years of religious thought and finds the former lacking. Science is very good at describing and manipulating the physical world but lacking in establishing values and meaning. Smith is very well acquainted with both science and religion, having taught at several of the leading scientific universities in the world, and taught comparative relgions for four decades.

Smith is also no Bible-thumper, i.e. promoting a parochial religious view of the American variety. Instead he distills the important lessons of all the established and folk world religions, and recognizes their limitations in describing the physical world and dated societal mores.

I found the book a little choppy, meandering and digressing through metaphors. However, the book is without parallel in presenting the essence of the religious point of view. It is the seminal reference whether you are for or against the role of religion in modern society.

Furthermore, I recommend attending a lecture by Prof. Smith should the occasion ever occur on one of his book tours or at a religious studies conference. Prof. Smith is a very clear and spell-binding speaker. I had the priviledge of taking one of courses decades ago, one of the best in my life.

In Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, Huston Smith argues the human heart seeks answers to questions left unexplained by the Modern worldview.

Raised by missionary parents in China and a professor at M.I.T., Syracuse University and U.C. Berkeley, among others, and his World's Religions serves as the standard introductory textbook for college religion courses Smith is in a unique position to pass judgment. Human beings, he posits, have allowed themselves to become so obsessed with the answer to life's fundamental questions that they have written science a blank check for what constitutes knowledge and justified belief. As a result the world is experiencing a spiritual crisis.

The culprit is not science. We have constructed a worldview tunneled by scientism, higher education, the media and law. As Smith looks to the future, he sees "the light at the end of the tunnel" - a time when science and religion peacefully co-exist. While acknowledging the science's importance, human beings ultimately flourish, he argues, when they seek the answers to life's ultimate questions -- What is the meaning of life? Why do pain and death exist? What is reality?

Religion recognizes the gulf between these questions and their answers. Humans being never waiver in their conviction that these questions have answers, religion motivates them to continually seek the answers.

I liked the book. The author states his case in a simple, direct manner. Style questions, such as whether Smith quotes from other authors are too long or not, are not important to me. Smith makes his case in a witty, personable and, in my opinion, persuasive manner.

Smith's "Why Religion Matters" is the best book I have ever read on the importance of religion in our societies, and its conflict with our current world-views such as post-modernism and scientism. With no apologies, Smith addresses such notables as Chomsky and Gould, attacking the assumptions of the standard "science is about this, religion is about that" arguments. Particularly, Smith challenges the implicit assumption that only science deals with facts.

Smith also addresses how scientism (not science, which is the study of the physical world, but 'scientism', which is an unflagging faith in science) has invaded our political and educational structures to such a degree that it is hardly even questioned.

This is an excellent work on the conflict of science and religion, and does a wonderful job of backing up its title. I have been thinking about this book almost non-stop since I finished it several days ago. It was that important and that good. Sometimes, the book appears to be a bit rushed and meandering, but the message remains lucid and direct. My highest recommendations.

Actually, this is not a bad book; I could have given it 4 stars. What it says, it says pretty solidly. But I just didn't find this book saying much to me, at least not much of anything new.

My main qualm: a *substantial* portion of this book is grabbed, paraphrased or quoted directly, from other books. To wit: each of the five chapters detailing the post/modern tunnel begins by explaining another book, the *flagship* book chosen for that chapter (that is, 5 chapters, 5 flag books); the first third of each of these chapters is devoted to explaining the flag book; the rest of the chapter *then* explains the signifigance of the work and its relation to his book's thesis; but then most of this explanation consists of (lengthy) pulled quotes, and some personal anecdotes. And while the quotations and stories are interesting, I found their illustrative merit to be very disproportional to the space alloted to them.

There are also more than a few "aside" anecdotes not meant to prove any point, but merely to vent, or sometimes amuse. Again, the stories are fun and add a nice personal touch; but their frequency (and length!) only strengthen my impression that this book does not dig as deeply as I (personally) might have liked.

I like Smith, and as I said, this is not a *bad* book, taken for what it is. A better title might have been "INTRO TO why religion matters," suitable perhaps for those so comfortable in the postmodern, scientism-istic "tunnel" that it hasn't yet occured to them that religion *might* matter. For those who already suspect that religion does matter, it's still at least worth a skim.

Looking over the three ages of our world, Huston Smith would like to preserve the best of each: the social justice of postmodernity, the science of modernity, and especially the transcendent worldview of premodernity. He criticizes the widespread notion that science explains it all and that what science cannot explain isn't true. He notes that such scientism has marginalized religious values, as have our academic culture, journalism, and the legal field. These four enclose us in darkness, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The limitations of science are becoming more apparent, and science more mystical. There are stirrings of new vision here and there as a postmodern critique shows that scientism does not provide the answers we seek. We seem to be destined for a higher truth, born with a taste for the transcendent and with a need for a world view that has room for the transcendent. We are drawn to it, and we neglect it as individuals and as a race at the peril of losing our happiness and humanity. Smith envisions a unified, hierarchical order of various degrees of being, and another hierarchy of four sensibilities (atheist, polytheist, monotheist, mystical) that mark our ascent to ever great levels of insight. Smith, of course, is well known and respected around the world. He speaks out of an unequaled background in world religions. But this is a conversational book aimed at the general public, very reader friendly indeed. It paints its picture in broad strokes, anecdotes, personal confidences, and often with the merest indications of arguments, rebuttals and proofs rather than with academic or metaphysical precision. It also has a choppy conversation roughness rather than a more polished written style. But Smith is witty, personable, and charming. One feels one has spent an evening or two with someone who is interested in everything, read most of what's worthwhile, thought about it all deeply, and is eager and delighted to share his experiences and concerns with any and all.

Huston Smith has written a needed, if admittedly popularized, account of an intellectual conflict central to our age, the heritage of Plato vs. that of a reduced and distorted Nietzsche. A faith in science's pragmatic and hence suitable way of looking at the world, Smith shows,has been illogically enlarged into the sole, exclusive way of looking at the world (scientism, not science) with the consequence that postmodern man has unwittingly returned himself to the manacles and blinkered vision of the prisoners Plato long ago identified as cave-dwellers needing a liberator. Smith provides us prisoners welcome reminders that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our scientism.