Video Transcript: Lesson 2

Welcome back. We're going to now talk about types of definitions and how we  try to go about getting definitions all over the place, whether it's in science, in  everyday life, definitions for dictionaries, whatever, because we need to reflect  on that decide what kind of definition we need of religious belief in order to go  forward in this study. So first of all, let me say that one kind of definition is what  we call an archetype. That means we define the thing by comparing it with some the classic example of that kind of thing. Suppose we say we need a definition  of a tree. It'd probably be very hard to write out exactly the properties that all  trees have, the combination of which is true only of trees. More likely what we  do is we have in mind some classic example of a tree. Maybe a giant sequoia is  our idea of the best kind of tree. There is certainly the biggest. And then we  compare all other things to that archetype, that example, that's the prime  example of what it is to be a tree. Of course, that might lead us astray a bit,  because bonsai trees are only get to be this big when they're fully mature. But  nevertheless, that's the way a lot of people define something, if it's sufficiently  like what they think is the classic example of that type of thing. This doesn't work for religion at all, and I can tell you very briefly why, for people in Western  Europe and North America, the classic example of a religious belief is going to  be belief in God. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all agree that there is one  transcendent creator god who called the universe into existence and then offers  human beings redemption. But in the Orient, we have very different religious  traditions, particularly in India, China and Japan. They're not the only countries,  but we have Hinduism and Buddhism. Now, Hinduism and Buddhism at their  core, there are many, many varieties of each one understand, but the core  teaching, what the teachings tell by the Brahmin hindus and the Buddhist monks is that there is no such transcendent being. What is Divine is not a being named  God, who is personal, and wants interpersonal relations with human beings.  What is Divine is an impersonal something that is just being itself. It's not a  being, it's not an individual, it's the being that's in everything. And what you try to do is get yourself into a state of mind in which you can come to see that that's  true, and then achieve not being reborn after you die, but being absorbed into  the Divine. So their classic archetype, the best, best example, the most obvious  example of religion, would be that kind of being in Hinduism, it's called brahman  Atman, and Buddhism has a number of names for it, Dharmakaya, suchness,  also, one of the names in Buddhism is nothing by which it doesn't mean there's  nothing at all there. It means not a thing. It's not an object, it's not an individual.  It's beingness. Well, if that's the archetype, then belief in God isn't a religion.  And if belief in God's the archetype, belief in Brahman Atman or nothingness  isn't a religion. Either. They're too unalike. They have nothing, seem to have  nothing in common. So that's that rules out this kind of definition. There's  another kind of definition that's called nominal. A nominal definition means it's  arbitrary. Okay, for our purposes here, we're going to say that this is what this 

word means, that may not correspond to reality, that it's it's just what we're going to do here. So people may have a map and they are trying to argue in court  about a traffic accident that took place, and they're going to say, All right, I put  an arrow up here. Here's my map, here's the intersection where the accident  took place, and we're just going to call this direction north. Doesn't matter  whether it really is, but for purposes of interpreting the map, that's going to be  north, this is going to be south, and so on. But obviously that's not going to help. There are a wide variety of religions of the world. You've just got a taste of that.  When I explain just a little bit of Hinduism and Buddhism, there's also Taoism.  There are also many other religions. And just offering a nominal definition  doesn't help us sort out or tell whether a belief is religious or it's not. It's no help  whatever. What we need is what people in logic and in philosophy call a real  definition or essential these are very hard to come by, but it's what we really  need, because in an essential definition, we state the characteristics that are  true of all this group, but the combination is true of only this group. That's what  singles it out is able to define it. So if we got a real definition of a tree, it would  name all the characteristics that were true of trees. The combination, however, is true only of trees. That's hard to do, and often, even in science, we have to get  along with something less than an essential definition. There's another kind of  definition that used often in science where we can't get a real definition, and it's  called operational an operational definition just to define something by what it  will do under certain circumstances. So let's see if we can do this. An archetypal  definition of water might be the ocean. Something is water, if it's a lot like the  ocean, a nominal definition of water would be, it's it's whatever I can wash my  clothes in a real essential definition of water would be, it's H2O, it's the molecule that we get when we combine two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen atom. An  operational definition would say this stuff is water if it boils at 100 degrees  centigrade, it freezes at zero degrees centigrade. And if we do electrolysis on it,  we get hydrogen and oxygen gas at a ratio of two to one. That would be an  operational definition. That's no good for religion either. How are you going to  say that something is a religious belief, provided under these conditions, it does  this, that or the other, that doesn't even seem to apply because it doesn't apply.  Now what we need is a real definition. We need to figure out what the  characteristics are that religious beliefs have, that other beliefs do not. And that's not simple, but it's not impossible. I'm going to propose a definition you've got  your seatbelt on. There is, I think, a common element in all different religions.  And this not only includes all the major world religions, the ones I just named,  Judaism, Christianity, Islam on the one side, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, on  the other, these great worldwide religions. There are many that aren't worldwide  at all. They're smaller. They're tribal religions in Africa and the South Pacific  islands and among Eskimos and so on. There are all sorts of beliefs all over the  world, but this singles out what is common to them all. And let me put it this way,

phrase it as a question first, to ease you into this in Judaism and Christianity and Islam. What does God depend on? What does what has to be true for God to  exist? What causes God to exist? And I think you all immediately say nothing.  That's not right. God's the creator of everything else. God doesn't depend on  anything, and you'd be right. So let's do the same thing now with Hinduism,  Buddhism and Taoism. What is it that Brahman atman depends on, or the  nothingness or the Tao Well, that's a silly question. Those names are the names  of the reality that generates everything else, the that reality doesn't depend on  anything, right? And now, if we begin to pursue this, having singled that out,  we'd be. Had to look at folk religions, say the High God Of The dari, Aborigines,  or many tribes in Africa. These too are thought to be what everything else  depends on, while it doesn't depend on anything. To give a name to this  characteristic, I'm going to use the term self existent. That's not a term that  occurs in the scriptures of any of those religions, but they all say that the divine  created everything else. It generates everything else. Everything else depends  on the divine. The Divine doesn't depend on anything. And I'm going to call that  self existence. There are other names for it, probably. Speaking from the  standpoint of logic. The cleanest way to put it is this, it's what is unconditionally  non dependent in Taoism, the Tao is said to be the unproduced producer of  everything else. That's another way to put the same thing. In other words, a key  element here is that all the religions regard as divine, whatever the reality is that  is self existent and doesn't depend on anything else, and generates everything  else. So everything depends on the divine. The Divine doesn't depend now this  would even be true of some of the beliefs of North American Indian tribes there.  The Divine is called Wakan, and there's a whole realm of Wakan beings, and no  one of them created the world, but the world in which we live and we ourselves  depend on the Wakan beings who can influence and different ones of them may  have charge over whether you get good crops or a good hunt or a long life, or  whatever. So the specific ways that they're they impact humans is divided up  among them, and there may be some that don't impact humans at all  importantly, but they're still non dependent. The realm of beings is non  dependent, and the world we live in depends on that. And that's the pattern that I notice in all of them and that's what's going to serve as my definition something  is a religious belief, if it's a belief in something as the divine that is self existent,  reality that is the origin of all else. So let me, let me start by putting clearing the  board again and putting that up so that you get to copy it down or underline it in  The book. Whatever. Getting a little messy there. Excuse me for the house  cleaning chores. Let's put this up as a formal definition. A belief is a religious  belief, and this symbol means if and only if one it is a belief in something as  divine. That's term I'm going to use some religions might want to use, sacred or  holy. It doesn't matter. I don't care what you call it, as long as you realize that the divine means self existent. The self existent reality, but as the divine reality that 

produces all else. Okay, now that's our that's what as far as we've gotten so far.  But that's not the only only part of the definition. There's more, because beliefs  can be religious. Besides being a belief in something as divine, if they're about  how the non divine relates to the Divine, that's still a kind of religious belief. In  other words, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the non Divine is the cosmos.  The universe. God calls that into being, and it remains dependent on God at  every moment, in every respect. That's one idea of a relation of the non divine.  Of the divine in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, the divine permeates the  world and is the world insofar as it's real at all, and everything about the world in which we live that doesn't look as though it's self existent is just an illusion,  because it really is self existent, the Divine is all there is. So that's a second kind or a belief. Second kind of belief, a belief in how the non divine really relates to,  that is depends on the divine. And now that's not, that's not all to there is to the  definition, either because there's another sense or three, and this is what we  usually think of as religion. So if this third one wasn't in it, this would be totally  inadequate. It's a belief about how humans can stand in proper relation to the  divine. And that's what we usually think of as the practice of religion, the  organizations and traditions and teachings, the customs, the rites, the  sacraments, the rituals that religions teach and promote are all done in order to  help humans stand in proper relation to the Divine, and that implies that they  can also stand in improper relation. There's something to be gained by knowing  the proper relation to the divine reality on which everything depends. So the  third is it's a belief in how humans can stand in proper relation to the Divine  Reality. Now, when I came on this definition a long time ago, it was after being  assigned to teach a comparative religion course, and I thought that the first thing I ought to do in that course is define religion so that we know what it is we're  studying about. And to do that, I started to I visited local libraries, and not only  the library of the college where I was teaching, but other other universities and  libraries. And I got all the books I could in comparative religion, and I just read  the introduction, what's what's this book about? And I found that the older ones,  the ones from the late 1800s and early 1900s all said the Divine is this, and they didn't all agree. Some said it's this, it's x, it's y, no, it's z, no, it's then. As we got  more toward the middle of the last century, around the 40s and so on, the 50s,  we got people writing books saying, just combining all those suggestions  religious belief is X or Y or Z, they put them together, but lumping them together  didn't help. There still were obvious religions that didn't fit the definition, and the  definition fit things that obviously weren't religions. So around the late 50s and  on the 60s and 70s. We got a whole switch in the field. People writing said it  can't be defined at all. That's how we're going to get out of this. We're just going  to say that it's like pornography. We're going to say we can't define it, but we  know it when we see it. That's the Supreme Court said once about pornography, so put religion bad company, but all the same, it seemed to me, get them out of 

difficulties. Problem was they continued. Went ahead to write a book on  comparing religions. If they don't know which things are religions, how do they  know which ones to compare? So I was very puzzled about this. And it seemed  to me that after I noticed this common core to all the religious beliefs that I had  seen it before, and I checked again and found that I was right. I had seen it  before I came up with it, but it's not original to me. People had come up with it  before me. In fact, long before me. One of the ancient Greek philosophers,  Anaximander, had stated this somewhere around 600 BC. Aristotle copied him  on that Plato and Aristotle agreed. Here's the way Aristotle put it. Puts it he's  wondering in his work whether it's possible to get a science of the Divine. And  he gives a bunch of objections to it, and then he tries to show that the objections don't win. Therefore he says about that which can exist independently and is  changeless, there is a science. And if there is such a kind of thing in the world  here, surely must be the divine, because this is what's immortal and  indestructible, as Anaximander and most of the natural philosophers maintained. So that was an old tradition. By Aristotle's day, it was he came 300 years after  Anaximander. And I wondered what had become of it, and I found, as I pressed  it, that all over the ancient world, everybody accepted this definition. This is what the Divine is. They did not agree on how to describe the divine reality.  Understand. They disagree. They disagreed on who or what was divine, but they all agreed on what it meant to be divine. That difference is a lot like the  difference between what would happen in a close election, presidential election  in the US, there might be two candidates, and there would be real disagreement as to which one won the election and which one becomes the president. But  there's no disagreement about what the presidency is, the Office of the  President. Everybody agrees on who occupies it. They don't agree on and that's  largely what we have here. There's worldwide agreement on what it means to be divine, and worldwide disagreement on what it is that is divine, what it is that  fulfills that office. I wondered what became of it, and I found that in the ancient  world, this definition of divine was held by just about everyone, with no one  dissenting, that it was held through the Middle Ages, and that it was only in fairly recent times that it sort of dropped off the map. In the 19th, 18th and 19th  centuries, it seemed to disappear. But by the early 20th century, there was a  large group of people who were experts on religion, either comparative religion,  philosophy of religion, theology, who all agreed with this definition, and yet it still  does not hold. It does not prevail today in religious studies, most people don't  know of it, and when you present it, they say, No, that can't be right. And they  give objections. We're going to look at some objections in our next segment, but  I found and just off the top of my head, here are a few, in case their names are  familiar to you. CS, Lewis, Paul Tillich, Hans Kuhn, the Catholic philosopher of  religion, Norman, Kemp Smith, Marcea Eliade, great comparative religion  scholar at Chicago, and a host more. There are about 15, 16, very prominent, 

famous people, all whom held this advocated it and still doesn't prevail in  religious studies. What still prevails is, well, we can't define religion, so that's a  major disagreement for me. I think that's false. And we'll take another break  here, and you can digest this, and we'll come back and look at the objections to  this definition, and I'm going to argue that the objections fail. That won't surprise  you.