Religion and Sanity

Eight writing days till WJK Presidential deadline. I had decided not to write. But the bombings today got me going a bit, so maybe I'll fiddle a little. I don't think I can finish what I have in mind in 8 days, though. When I fall behind schedule, I'll stop.

My original project was going to be What Faith Will You Integrate? Now I'm thinking something like, Religion and Sanity: The Relationship between Reason and Evidence in Religion

Chapter One: Faith versus Evidence
Where Are We?
Rudolph Bultmann wrote in his famous article "The New Testament and Mythology," that the worldview of the New Testament was essentially mythical in character.

"The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings--the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events... It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other."<1>

Bultmann poses the question whether Christian preaching today can expect "modern man" to accept the New Testament's "mythical view of the world." His conclusion is that it would both be senseless and impossible to accept it.

"It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition--it is already determined for him by his place in history."<2>

"It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."<3>

Over fifty years on, Bultmann's impossibility seems all too possible. Technology has advanced beyond anything Bultmann could possibly have imagined, and yet the same people who use wireless laptops and cell phones often believe strongly in spirits and miracles.

Of course no one said that we humans are always consistent or coherent in our beliefs. In general, religious thinking tends to follow different rules than we use in everyday life. There are of course countless exceptions, people who have rationally integrated their religious faith with the way they think and live in other settings. Yet many people put their faith in one box and their reason in another. Sometimes without even realizing, they follow completely different rules when thinking about religion than they do in all the other areas of their life.

Accordingly, the early twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein implied that religious language was not really about a distinct being called God or about things that were real outside ourselves. Instead, he suggested that religious language was a certain type of game we play with language that guides our entire way of living.<4> The implication is that when we talk about God, we are really talking about things like our values and our fears.

In one sense, God is real in this scenario, because the idea of God affects the world and how we live. But for Wittgenstein it does not mean that a being "really" exists outside the universe. An ontological being called God could exist, but that is something we simply cannot know.<5> Wittgenstein drives a wedge between religious thinking and non-religious thinking that we cannot cross. He makes religious thinking so completely unrelated to evidence that it is not something that could ever be proven false. It just does not work that way.

Again, we could find plenty of instances where religious people change their faith because in their opinion, the "evidence demands a verdict" different from the beliefs with which they started. For many religious people, religious beliefs are falsifiable. And we should not just think of people losing their faith because of evidence. We can identify instances where individuals have converted to various religions because they became rationally convinced of their truth.

Now we currently find ourselves in the throes of postmodernism. At its extreme, postmodernism rejects absolute and stable meanings of all sorts--in science let alone in religion. Some would say that in words we have merely "traces" of meaning contingent on other words whose permanence of meaning is just as elusive as the first word.<6> Scientific paradigms are merely passing phases of history, trends that change over time not least because of social factors and the deaths of older scientists.<7>

Accordingly, religious studies departments at American universities aim at diversity among their faculty rather than at people whose views come closest to the truth. Places like Harvard or Yale would never have hired conservative evangelical Christians in the '70's, because their views were considered patently false. But now we often find such individuals in offices next to others who are devout followers of Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam. Pluralism is the name of the game, and there is no basis by which one might say any religion to be more correct than the others, let alone by which you might falsify any of them.

I do not think that we can simply dismiss the postmodern voices in our heads. Yet at the same time the world could sure use some basis for dissuading some of the forms that "religious expression" is currently taking in our world. Is there no basis on which to say that the militant jihads of certain Muslims are inappropriate? Is there no way to discourage certain orthodox Jews from a Zionism that wishes to displace certain others from their current homes? Is there no way to convince certain Christians that their attitudes and actions toward others are inappropriate?

One standard method for convincing others to modify their religious views or expressions is force. We have certain phases of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic history as examples of this approach. Of course this approach also takes a substantial toll in human life and happiness. It has never proved to be a particularly efficient way of changing people's religious perspective, although it is often very effective in terms of those who survive.

Prosperity has sometimes curbed the more disruptive elements of religion. People get "liberal" and abandon the more radical aspects of their faith. Of course this process rarely happens intentionally. And of course, religious environments of this sort often turn out not to be very religious at all. Voltaire would of course be happy with this alternative.

But can reason have anything to do with religion? On the one hand, Bultmann is correct to say that there are some aspects of our worldview that we simply cannot wish away. It would be almost impossible for me to make myself believe that the world was flat or that the sun actually went around the earth. And I would have a hard time making myself believe that all sickness was always a product of demons at work on my body.

Yet Bultmann also proceeded from any number of assumptions that in themselves are not absolutely certain. Just because things often seem to happen by what we call "natural" causes does not disprove that there are times when things happen by what we call "supernatural" causes. And just because Wittgenstein never experienced a distinct being of heavenly origin does not prove that others have not.

This book is a call for clarity on the relationship between faith and evidence. In a postmodern world, we are keenly aware of the degree to which our view of the world is a construct of our own minds. Yet it is arguably not a construct we make completely from scratch. There is data in the world, "evidence" that we glue together with faith of all kinds. Our religious beliefs are no different, even if the glue sometimes comes from a different bottle.

Evidence almost never "proves" any belief we have. Except for the fact of existence itself, all other beliefs about the world involve some degree of "faith," which is the glue that binds the evidence together. This book is a call for us to be up front about how much of our religious belief is based on data and how much is glue. I am carefully trying to assume an impossible perspective in the following pages: I am trying to be objective. However, I am of course not objective--no human is. My very examples thus far betray that I am a Christian. But my goal is to play the role of a facilitator, a consultant to people of various kinds of faith.

The question I am asking in this book is this: given the evidence, what faith is required for your particular kind of religious belief? Are you an orthodox Jew? What is the relationship between the data of the world and your beliefs? What faith must you exercise to maintain your religious viewpoint and be coherent? Are you a Christian who holds to the historic faith of the church? Do you belong to some offshoot of mainstream Christianity? To what degree is your belief system reasonable given the evidence? Are you Muslim? To what extent do your beliefs correspond to that which seems to be the reality of the world today?

Faith is persistent and often ingenious. It would be wrong to think that a person is unintelligent because he or she holds a particular belief. Indeed, it often takes an element of genius to glue certain beliefs to the evidence at hand. My goal is thus to explore the ratio of faith to evidence necessary for certain faith perspectives. I leave the choice of conclusion to you.

<1> "The New Testament and Mythology," reprinted in Kerygma and Myth, Hans-Werner Bartsch, ed., translated by Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972), 1.

<2> Ibid., 3.

<3> Ibid., 5.

<4> "Lectures on Religious Beliefs", in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief as compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor and edited by Cyril Barrett, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 53 - 72.

<5> "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent," point 7 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus.

<6> Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981).

<7> Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970).