Religion With and Without God
James A. Montanye
Religion Without God
by Ronald Dworkin
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, September 2013
Pp. 180. $17.95 cloth.
Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
by Ara Norenzayan
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, August 2013
Pp. xiii, 248. $29.95 cloth.
Religion is perhaps the most flexible concept in the history of philosophy and social science. The related concept of “rights” follows closely behind. Few other concepts track so closely the socialization of human life on planet earth.
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Religious beliefs abounded in the ancient world. The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (ca. 600 BCE) imagined that “all things are full of gods.” Early religious practices honored, worshiped, and propitiated these unseen forces. Centuries later, as the historian Charles Freeman notes in The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003, 68), “Religious practice [in ancient Rome] was closely tied to the public order of the state and with the psychological well-being that comes from the following of ancient rituals. Religious devotion was indistinguishable from one’s loyalties to the state, one’s city and one’s family.” Religion did not develop a truly moral dimension, however, until Christianity introduced a method for perfecting oneself to be become like god, a high goal that remains a cardinal tenet of the faith. Still later, as the philosopher John Passmore noted in The Perfectability of Man (1970, 155), “such moral guide books as The Whole Duty of Man [by Samuel Pufendorf, 1673] gradually shifted their emphasis. Man’s primary duties for seventeenth-century moralists are directed toward God, for their eighteenth century successors toward man. The very word ‘bienfaisance’ had to be invented in France to convey the new moral attitude.” With this transformation, individual perfectability entailed finding the efficient path to social harmony and private prosperity, and was attainable by theists and atheists alike. Commenting on these shifting religious foundations, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer lamented, in Letters and Papers from Prison (1997, 278), “[w]e are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’” Bonhoeffer ultimately found solace in the seemingly odd notion of Christianity without religion.
Western religions are viewed today as comprising institutions and practices that encourage individual trust, cooperation, and economic exchange, all of which foster social cohesion and relatively peaceful coexistence. Within this framework, god and state are closely substitutable forces. The classicist Alan Bloom, in Giants and Dwarfs (1990, 227–228), interpreted Rousseau’s notion of the social contract accordingly: “To succeed, [a politician] must charm men with at least the appearance of divine authority to make up for the human authority he lacks and to give men the motives for submission to the law that nature does not provide. He not only needs authority from the gods; he must establish a civil religion that can support and reward men’s willing the common good.” While church and state remain essentially divided by the proverbial “high wall of separation,” religion and state have become fused.
In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942, 5), the distinguished economist Joseph Schumpeter characterized twentieth-century Marxism as a religion, observing that it is “first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. ... it belongs to that subgroup [of ‘isms’] which promises paradise this side of the grave.” As much can be said of other Western civil religions; for example, Fascism, National Socialism, Zionism, Progressive Liberalism, and American Democratic Fundamentalism (Montanye 2006). The literary and social critic Harold Bloom notes in The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (1992, 15–16) that “[the West’s first] war against Iraq ... was a true religious war, but not one in which Islam was involved spiritually, on either side. Rather, it was the war of an American Religion (and of the American Religion abroad, even among our Arab allies) against whatever denies the self's status and function as the true standard of being and value.” The biologist E.O. Wilson nailed the overarching point in On Human Nature (1978, 3): “Religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners. Marxism and other secular religions offer little more than promises of material welfare and a legislated escape from the consequences of human nature. They, too, are energized by the goal of collective self-aggrandizement.”
The economist Robert Nelson has extended religious thinking far beyond Rousseau’s concept of civil (secular) religions. In Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991) and Economics as Religion (2001), Nelson chronicles the spiritual foundations of economic beliefs, from antiquity to modernity as they emerged from the competing Roman and Protestant intellectual traditions. Nelson’s message is that economics and environmental institutions, like theocentric religions, are belief systems built upon value assumptions. These systems give rise to fideist cults that grow up around the ideologies and revelations found in authoritative scriptures authored by all-to-human individuals. Economics qualifies as a religious belief system by Nelson’s lights (1991, 235) because it rests upon an unwavering faith in the theory and promise of economic efficiency.
“In truth, the market mechanism has never been analytically demonstrated to be the most efficient means of producing and distributing the resources of society, when all costs—including information costs, search costs, costs of wasted resources due to failures, and other trial-and-error costs—are taken into account. Neither, however, has any other economic system ever been shown to be superior to the market. At the level of economic theory, the issue remains almost entirely unresolved. Indeed, it is more obscured than illuminated by most existing economic theory. It is only at the level of practical economic experience that a verdict in favor of the market seems to stand on firm ground.”
Nelson’s point casts doubt upon the rationality of economic theory, and also upon the reasonableness of rationality in general.
Nelson (2001, 8–11) claims furthermore that economists’
“most important social role has been as preachers of a religion with the special character that it acts to uphold the normative foundations required for a rapidly growing modern economy. ... Like some priests of the past, some economists are motivated in practice by the opportunity for private gain—for cushy university appointments, lucrative consulting contracts, or other personal benefits. Yet many economists have been sacrificing and continue to sacrifice monetary gain in the pursuit of religious truth, in this case the truths of economic efficiency and the path of material progress in society. ... Society will always require the services of some kind of priestly class, economic or otherwise, in order to assist in fending off widespread rent seeking and other multiple forms of opportunism that always threaten the bonds of social cohesion.”
In The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion v. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (2010, xi), Nelson endorses the broad definition of religion offered by the theologian Max Stackhouse: “a comprehensive worldview or ‘metaphysical moral vision’ that is accepted as binding because it is held to be, in itself, basically true and just, even if all dimensions of it cannot be either finally confirmed or refuted. [Religion in this sense] is functional: it provides a framework for interpreting the realities of life in the world, it guides the basic beliefs and behaviors of persons and it empowers believers to seek to transform the world in accordance with a normative ethic of what should be.” This characterization, like Schumpater’s view of Marxism quoted earlier, excludes relatively little from religion’s substantive orbit. It also fits snugly with Søren Kierkegaard’s conviction that all politics (and political economy) ultimately reduces to religious beliefs. No wonder then that modern theologians “speak publically in the languages of economics, natural resource management, conservation biology, ecology, sociology, administrative science, and other forms of official policy discourse” (p. x).
Against this background, two new books merit close consideration.
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The first work, Religion Without God (2013), is by the distinguished philosopher and humanist Ronald Dworkin. This slim, posthumously published volume describes the authors vision of religion as “a deep, distinct, and comprehensive worldview: it holds that inherent, objective value permeates everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human life has purpose and the universe order” (p. 1). These beliefs manifest themselves as a “fundamental religious impulse [what Calvin called a sensus divinitatus] that had manifested itself in various convictions and emotions. ... [and have] generated two kinds of convictions: a belief in a supernatural force—a god—and a set of profound ethical and moral convictions” (p. 146). For Dworkin, “A belief in a god [e.g., the bearded, personal Sistine God of Christian theology] is only one possible manifestation or consequence of that deeper worldview” (p. 1). He opposes the desire among theologians and philosophers of religion “to reserve ‘religion’ for theism and then to say that ... others are [merely] ‘sensitive’ or ‘spiritual’ atheists” (p. 5). He declines as well to equate religion with the supernatural, and also with fixed notions of the right and the good. Instead, Dworkin claims that religion is an “interpretive” concept with many possible meanings and implications, not all of which entail a belief in a god or gods. He argues that “life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty [are] paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life” (p. 11). At bottom, “What divides godly and godless religion—the science of godly religion—is not as important as the faith in value that unites them” (p. 19).
Not all philosophers of religion will accept Dworkin’s argument. For many, a “Sistine God” remains religion’s defining ingredient. The philosopher (and believing Christian) Alvin Plantinga argues, in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible (with Daniel Dennett, 2013, 17) that an expansive “worldview functions as a sort of myth, in the technical sense of that term: It offers a way of interpreting ourselves to ourselves, a way of understanding our origin and significance at the deep level of religion. It tells us where we come from, what our prospects are, what our place in the universe is, whether there is life after death, and the like. We could therefore say that it is [merely] a quasi-religion.” We also might consider it as being rational pragmatism, or else fret, as John Locke did, that removing God from religion would dissolve all, leaving behind a toxic residue of destructive secularism. Or more simply, we might reject as self-defeating any worldview that would embrace (say) gangsta-rap culture as religion.
Dworkin’s conception of religion as being something deeper than theism leads him to consider whether there exists “any special interest that people have because they believe in a god that they would not have if, like Einstein and millions of others, they subscribe to a religion without god” (pp. 111–112). Doubting that any such interest exists, Dworkin argues for a general and overarching civil “right” that is more encompassing than the conventional Western “right” of religious liberty. Dworkin defines this concept as a “general right to ethical independence” (p. 132). The matter of how this “right” would be exercised and enforced within pluralist societies is left unresolved (See Montanye 2011).
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Dworkin notes that theocentric religions entail “a god who imposes judgment from on high,” and he wonders rhetorically “why should a last judgement be desirable at all?” (p. 152). One possible answer is offered in a book the social psychologist Ara Norenzayan titled Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013). Norenzayan argues in part that “Belief in certain kinds of supernatural watchers—Big Gods—is an essential ingredient that, along with rituals and other interlocking sets of social commitment devices, glued together total strangers into ever-larger moral communities as cultural evolution gained pace in the past twelve millennia” (p. 10). His supporting argument proceeds along the path of a still-controversial bit of scientific theory regarding the role of social groups in the process of biological evolution by natural selection, an issue first broached by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man (1871), and subsequently adopted, mutatis mutandis, by the sociologist Emile Durkheim and his disciples. By Norenzayan’s lights (pp. 8–9):
“Believers who feared [‘watchful Big Gods with interventionist inclinations’] cooperated, trusted, and sacrificed for the group much more than believers in morally indifferent gods or gods lacking omniscience. Displays of devotion and hard-to-fake commitments such as fasts, food taboos, and extravagant rituals further transmitted believers’ sincere faith in these gods to others. In this way, religious hypocrites were prevented from invading and undermining these groups. Through these and other solidarity-promoting mechanisms, religions of Big Gods forged anonymous strangers into large, cohesive moral communities tied together with the sacred bonds of common supernatural jurisdiction. ... These ever-expanding groups with high social solidarity, high fertility rates that ensured demographic expansion, and a stronger capacity to attract converts grew in size often at the expense of other groups. As they spread, they took their religious beliefs and practices with them, ultimately culminating in the morally concerned Big Gods of the major world religions. ... [By comparison, t]hose societies with atheist majorities—some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world—climbed religion’s ladder, and then kicked it away.”
In other words, Big Gods arose because they produced outcomes that are (or once were) socially, biologically, and economically efficient. Psychological and sociological explanations of religion thus have intrinsically strong links to programs in “behavioral economics” and “religion and economics,” and also to brain imaging work in neuroeconomics and neurotheology.
The idea that belief in Big Gods contributes to social order and cooperation is not a new one. An article by the economist Dominic Johnson, for example, explored this possibility in a 2005 article titled “God's Punishment and Public Goods: A Test of the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis in 186 World Cultures” (Human Nature 16[4]: 410–446). Johnson’s directly empirical effort richly supports the “high gods” thesis, but admittedly is not dispositive. Norenzayan’s work, by comparison, relies largely on social statistics and experimental results gleaned from various branches of psychology. His evidence appears (to this relative layman) to be on point, well interpreted, often surprisingly counterintuitive, and not cherry-picked, but also not dispositive. The author gives a candid account of apparent anomalies; for example, the fact that “Denmark and Sweden, the world’s least religious societies, where overwhelming majorities do not believe in God, are also the ones topping international rankings of rule of law, low levels of corruption, high levels of cooperation and trust, and generally high levels of societal well-being. To be clear,” he explains, “just as religion is not the only source of prosociality, supernatural monitoring is not the only source of prosociality in religion” (p. 75). He similarly notes that “the United States, which is characterized with both high levels of rule of law but also high levels of atheist distrust ... is an outlier” (p. 90). In still other contexts, he shows religion to be both “arsonist and the fire department” (p. 188). The book’s final chapter addresses the existence of large-scale cooperation in the absence of Big Gods playing an oversight role. As Norenzayan suspects, and as the overarching history of religious flexibility suggests, Big Gods may have been more important in centuries past than they are today; a passing phase in the earth's socialization process.
Norenzayan’s theory concerning the causes of efficient social behavior casts god somewhat awkwardly as the creation of rational man. This is not altogether unreasonable, but a bit more clarification and argument would be helpful. A naturalistic counter-explanation, for example, might ground god and religion upon the interplay between economic resource scarcity and the forces of biological natural selection (Montanye 2013). Exploring religion more fully from the individual actor’s (versus group) perspective also could prove insightful. These quibbles aside, however, Norenzayen’s book remains a worthwhile read.
References
Montanye, James A. 2006. The Apotheosis of American Democracy. The Independent Review 11(1): 5–17.
———. 2011. Property Rights and the Limits of Religious Liberty. The Independent Review 16(1): 27–52.
———. 2012. Morality, Altruism, and Religion in Economics Perspective. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 20(2): 19–44.
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