Reading: Notes Chapter 2

1.    Some scholars doubt whether Buddhism is a religion since Theravada Buddhism teaches there are no gods. But since most Buddhists do believe in gods, I will — for now — include only the non-Theravada versions of Buddhism as religions.

2.    Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, 11-55. Also see his The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), 1-40.

3.    Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 10, 76-77, 96. But compare also his Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 211.

4.    Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 13.

5.    Ibid., 13, 14. Also Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 237. It should be mentioned that the latter passage first denies that God is infinite but then speaks of his infinity. I don’t know what to make of that, but it does seem that most of what follows continues to view the divine as whatever is infinite in the senses of being both unconditioned and all-inclusive.

6.     Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 12. Stripped of its insistence that ultimate concern must be for that which is infinite in his sense, Tillich’s definition is so close to the one I defend that I later list him as supporting it. It embodies the same basic insight and, as he admitted to me, is derived from the same comment of Luther that put me on to it — the comment cited below in note 22.

7.    T. W. Hall, ed., Introduction to the Study of Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 16.

8.    For example, the Dakota evil Great Spirit. See James Fraser, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 308. Plato’s view is also an example since he insisted on an evil world soul as well as a good one (Laws 10, 896).

9.    Here are a few more. Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion as “the sum of all higher feelings,” especially feelings of dependency (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers [New York: Harper & Row, 1958], 45-6, 85). But surely religion can’t avoid belief, and all beliefs have a conceptual component as well as a feeling component. On the other hand, Schleiermacher also spoke of dependency on “the absolute” as the core of religion, which fits perfectly with the definition I will defend (but without agreeing with his identification of the Absolute with the universe). William Tremmel, in order to avoid the difficulties of an essential definition, offers instead what he calls a “functional” definition: a definition of “what religion does” and of the experience that lies behind it (Religion, What Is It? [New York: Rhinehart & Winston, 1984], 7). Unfortunately, his description of religious experience fails to distinguish it since he describes it only as an experience of “great worth and satisfaction — even ecstasy.” That, however, could just as well apply to winning a sports event, being cheered for a performance,  or a sexual orgasm. Moreover, the actions he specifies as motivated by religious belief equally fail to distinguish them, since they are described as what people do to deal with what is “horrendous,” “non-manipulable,” and “life negating,” and as actions by which they try to overcome their “sense of finitude.” This sounds wrong in every respect. People at times deal with what is horrendous by psychotic withdrawal, drugs, and suicide; and they at times deal with what is life-negating by wild living or crime. And while Hinduism and Buddhism teach that by achieving Nirvana our finitude is absorbed by the Divine infinity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam deny that people will ever be anything but finite creatures, distinct from God. Still other thinkers get the right definition but make additions to it that render it partly false. Joachim Wach, for example, says religion is “a response to what is experienced as ultimate reality . . . that which conditions all . . . which impresses and challenges us” (The Comparative Study of Religions [New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], 30). The first part sounds right but the definition falls away at the end: horse races and puzzles can challenge and impress us. Likewise, the “paraphrase” offered by Hans Kung is also partly right but partly not. It’s off when he says religion is “a social and individual relationship. . . . With something that transcends or encompasses man and his world” (Christianity and the World Religions [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986], xvi). This is too narrow a definition because many pagan religions do not regard the divine as either transcendent or allencompassing, as will be explained in the next chapter. Kung goes on to say, however, that the reality which is the object of religious belief is “always to be understood as the utter final, true reality. . . .” That, I shall argue, is exactly right.

10.     For example, W. C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), esp. xiv, 11-14, 141-46.

11.      G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 10-18, 24-31; W. Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 10.

12.      G. F. Moore, History of Religions (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), vol. 1, 209-10.

13.      Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 10-21.

14.      E. B. Idowu, African Traditional Religion (London: SCM Press, 1973), 135. See also Geoffrey Parrinder’s “The Nature of God in African Belief,” in The Ways of Religion, ed. Roger Eastman (San Francisco: Canfield Press), 493-99; H. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1955), vol. 2, 316; and B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 19, 20, 76-79. Also A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion (London: Penguin, 1962), 45; and M. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).

15.     Jaeger, Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers 31-32.

16.      T Dantzig, Number, The Language of Science (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1954), 42.

17.      Aristotle not only held to the divinity of forms, but also regarded matter as having independent existence. Thus he was a religious and metaphysical dualist (Meta. 1042a). In addition to the thinkers already cited, Thales held the divine to be “that which has neither beginning nor end” (Jaeger, Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 29); while Anaximander said it is whatever is “unborn, imperishable . . . and all-governing.” (See Aristotle’s Physics, 3.4.203b14.)

18.     W. E. Albright has pointed out that the holy, proper name of God which he revealed to Moses (YHWH) in Exodus 3:14 means “the one who causes to be.” See From the Stone Age to Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 15-16. The prophet Isaiah makes the same point another way. He quotes God as saying “I will not yield my glory to another” (Isa. 48:11 NIV). Earlier Isaiah had already specified what the glory is that God won’t abide having attributed to anything else (Isa. 6:3): “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Although this is a familiar passage that has long been part of the Christian liturgy, some scholars (J. A. Alexander, e.g.) have pointed out that the last clause would be more accurately translated as “the fullness of the whole earth is your glory.” In other words, as Creator, the one on whom all else depends, God’s glory is to fill the earth with creatures. Thus to believe anything else to be what everything in earth depends upon is to have a God surrogate that robs God of his glory. The New Testament makes the same point. Romans 1 speaks of all humans as either believing in God as Creator or as turning “the truth about God into a lie” by substituting “something God created” as creator. And Gal. 4:3 and Col. 1:17 and 2:8 contrast the famous four elements of ancient Greek metaphysics (earth, air, fire, and water) to God and insist that the cosmos depends on God in Christ, not on the elements.

19.      For example, Rev. 4:11: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God to receive glory, and honor and power, because you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” And 1 John 4:19 puts our love of God on the basis of our having received his love: “We love him because he first loved us.”

20.      This is the real import of the biblical remark: “The fool has said in his heart ‘there is no god’ ” (Ps. 14:1). Contrary to the way Anselm took it, this does not mean that an atheist contradicts himself but that anyone who thinks he has no god (divinity) is self-deceived.

21.     Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, xiv, 3.

22.     “As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God” (from the “Larger Catechism” in the Book of Concord [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959], 365). See also the Lectures on Romans in the Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), vol. 15, p. 23.

23.     See Bouquet, Comparative Religion, 37; Dooyeweerd, New Critique, vol. 1, 57; N. K. Smith, The Credibility of Divine Existence (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967), 396; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1929), 31-34; Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 23-25; C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: MacMillan, 1948), 15-22; Will Herberg, “The Fundamental Out- look of Hebraic Religion,” in The Ways of Religion, ed. R. Eastman (New York: Can- field, 1975), 283; Robert Neville, The Tao and the Daimon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 117. Tillich, Kung, and Wach also endorsed the essential point of this definition despite conjoining questionable additions to it. (See notes 6 and 9.)

24.     M. Nilsson, History of Greek Religion, 72.

25.     This is why Buddhism alone of the major religions has no creation account. See the remarks of Neville in The Tao and the Daimon, 116.

26.      Some critics have suggested that Buddhism does not have an idea of divinity as I have defined it. This is simply mistaken. In the famous dialogue of the Buddhist scriptures called “The Questions of King Milinda” we find this: “One can point out the way to the realization of Nirvana, but one cannot show a cause for its production. And what is the reason for this? Because that dharma, Nirvana, is unconditioned. . . . It is not made by anything . . . it is something that is” (The Buddhist Scriptures [Baltimore: Penguin, 1968], 159). The Pali Canon (Udana 8.3) also asserts that Nirvana “is without any foundation, without development, without foothold.” Commenting on this, Lambert Schmithausen points out that “some passages even speak of Nirvana as a transcendent metaphysical state or essence. . . . According to these passages there is a metaphysical reality . . . which is also called Nirvana and pre-exists the Nirvana that is a spiritual event” (Kung, Christianity and the World Religions, 301, 327). Perhaps the teaching that comes closest to sounding like a rejection of my definition of “divine” is the teaching of Nagarjuna, a master of the Shunyavada branch of Buddhism about 1,800 years ago. His emphasis on referring to the divine as the “Void” and his claim that even the dharmas are “empty of reality” have led some to take him to be a total ontological nihilist. But the fact is, he never said any such thing. His claim was that individual things have no reality in the sense that they have “no essential nature of their own, and are thus impermanent. . . . They arrive in and vanish from the world of appearances in keeping with the law of ‘dependent origination.’ ” (See Heinz Beckert, “Buddhist Perspectives,” in Christianity and the World Religions, 363.) This contrast between what is changeable and dependent and what is not, presupposes the definition of “divine” that I’m defending. The same conclusion has been reached by other scholars as well, such as David Dilworth in “Whitehead’s Process Realism, the Abhidharma Dharma Theory, and the Mahayana Critique,” International Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1978): 162-63; and Robert Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 116. In general, the Buddhist view rejects ontological nihilism. Consider the following from The Sutra of Hui Neng, trans. Wang Mou-lam (Phoenix: H. K. Buddhist Book Distributor Press, 1982):

27.     Saying that a social organization has a central purpose assumes the development of differentiated organizations. Where the only social group is a tribe, for example, then it may have no one central purpose but may encompass the purposes now served by state, religious institution, school, extended family, etc. Moreover, even where organizations are differentiated, it is possible that one and the same person or group of people can act as, say, both a religious and a political authority. That doesn’t show, however, that the same institution can be both religious and political simultaneously. Rather, it shows that the same person or group can be the ruling authority in both institutions, acting sometimes in one capacity, sometimes in the other. Thus the fact that there can be a monarch who also heads the religious institution or the schools of a society, will not make the state the same as a religious institution or a school. Each organization will still retain its distinctive purpose.

28.     Nicholas Wolterstorff has offered insightful comment on the variability of feelings of confidence vis-à-vis what is seen as objective truth in his comparison of Locke and Calvin. See “The Assurance of Faith,” Faith and Philosophy 7, no. 4 (Oct. 1990): 396-417. See also William James’ remarks in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 258.

29.      For example, H. H. Price, “Belief ‘In’ and Belief ‘That’,” Religious Studies 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1965): 5-27. Following the practice of the Bible writers, I will not be using “faith” or “trust” for belief that God is real. They use these terms only for the reliance one puts in God’s promises, never for the fact of his existence. The latter is always referred to as “knowledge.” See esp. Deut. 4:35, 1 Sam. 3:7, Ps. 46:10, Isa. 12:2, 1 Tim. 4:3, John 6:69, 10:38; 1 John 2:3.

30.     Wilfred Cantwell Smith has long taken the position that all religions are equally efficacious in bringing people into right relation to the divine despite the fact that they give contrary accounts of what has divine status; see his The Meaning and End of Religion. John Hick has defended the same position in An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). I have three comments. First, it is noteworthy that even for Smith and Hick the beliefs of the various traditions cannot all be true; they admit that is impossible. What they contend is that all people experience the same Divine Reality but then conceptualize, explain, and theorize differently about that Reality. Their position is that although the conceptual overlays disagree, that fact doesn’t matter for anyone’s ultimate destiny. A serious difficulty with the Smith/Hick proposal is that it is simply not true to the reports of religious experiences given by those who have them. As William James shows in Varieties of Religious Experience, it is the experiences themselves that differ, not merely the subsequent interpretations placed upon them. Moreover, the issue of truth cannot be so easily dismissed. Either the divine and our proper relation to it are as we conceive them to be or they are not, and every religion insists that it is crucial for people to be correct rather than wrong on those issues. By denying this point, Smith and Hick are asserting that all the world’s religions are in fact false but that this doesn’t matter to anyone’s ultimate destiny. Thus they have actually invented a new religion that disagrees with all the others rather than provided a way to reconcile existing religions.

31.      Biblical writers themselves insist on this point. They maintain that other religious beliefs are ascribing the status that belongs only to God to something other than God (see Isa. 42:8, 44:6; Rom. 1:25). What all religions (and all people) see at least dimly is that something is divine. That is what Calvin called the “sense of divinity” in all humans, which has been in a deformed state since the Fall into sin. A similar point is often made in other religions in favor of their divinity beliefs as opposed to belief in God.

32.     The same holds for other “isms” in theories of reality. Positivism, for example, takes sensory perceptions to be divine instead of matter. As Ernst Mach put it, “The assertion, then, is correct that the world consists only of our sensations. In which case we have knowledge only of sensations” (The Analysis of Sensation, in J. Blackmore’s Ernst Mach [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972], 327 n. 14).

J. S. Mill, on the contrary, did try to take the explanation back one more step. When asked what causes sensations, Mill replied that they are the product of what he called “the permanent possibilities of sensation,” and he regarded these mysterious entities as metaphysically ultimate: “There exist in nature a number of permanent causes which have subsisted . . . for an indefinite and probably enormous length of time. . . . But we can give no account of the origin of the permanent causes themselves. . . . All phenomena without exception which begin to exist, that is, all except the primeval causes, are effects either immediate or remote of those primitive facts or some combinations of them” (Philosophy of Scientific Method, ed. E. Nagel [New York: Hafner, 1950], 202-3). These mysterious entities are thereby left by default in the status of divinity since they exist unconditionally so far as the account goes. Or consider Jacques Derrida’s comment that fundamental to his view of reality is its “aneconomic” moment which  is announced to him, which sweeps down upon him and seizes him in the form of an injunction that never leaves him, and is “what is most undeniably real ” (Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 134). Likewise, Richard Rorty, despite the fact that he insists that we should “try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as quasi-divinity, where we treat everything — our language, our conscience, our community — as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be, in Freud’s words, to ‘treat chance as worthy of determining our fate’ ” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 22). Notwithstanding this admonition, Rorty commits himself to specifying a basic nature for this contingency which amounts to a religious belief! For while all (other) beliefs are relativized to practical needs, the independence of physical/biotic reality and Darwinian evolution are taken by him to be true in precisely the sense he denies anything can be known to be. For he aligns himself with pragmatists who “start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment —    doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain” (“Relativism: Finding and Making,” in Debating the State of Philosophy, ed.

J. Niznik and J. Sanders [Westport London: Praeger, 1996], 38). Thus his basis for insisting that no (other) beliefs can never be known to correspond to reality is his own belief that biological evolution does. (See also my article “A Critique of Historicism” in Crítica 29, no. 85 (April 1997).

33.     In the other direction it could be objected that type (3) beliefs are not common to all religions. After all, the Epicureans believed in many gods and Aristotle believed in one god, but in neither case were any type (3) beliefs conjoined to those beliefs.

It must be remembered, however, that those gods were all divine in only a secondary sense. For the Epicureans it was atoms in space that had per se divinity, while for Aristotle it was forms and matter. And in both cases their per se divinities were accompanied by not only type (2) secondary beliefs, but also beliefs of type (3).

34.     The comment was part of a lecture on the philosophy of language at the University of Pennsylvania in March of 1962.

35.      Institutes of the Christian Religion I, vii, 2. Cf. also the experience of Alister Hardy: “It was while listening to a sermon in St. Mary’s that I became convinced of the reality of God. Emotion was at a minimum. . . . The sense of being convinced was not basically intellectual either. It was just that I knew the preacher was speaking the truth” (The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979], 100). Tillich has also noted that the widely accepted notion of “faith” as belief without evidence is not a correct description of the experience on which belief in God is grounded. He says that this mistaken view of faith sees it as “an act of knowledge with limited evidence and that the lack of evidence is made up for by an act of will. . . . This does not do justice to the existential character of faith.” He then adds: “The certitude of faith is ‘existential’ meaning that the whole existence [of the believer] is involved. . . . [It is] certainty about one’s own being, namely . . . [its] being related to something ultimate or unconditional” (The Dynamics of Faith, 34, 35). He then also speaks of this as the experience of being “grasped by” the truth, rather than as being a matter of choice (p. 37).

36.      Knowing with the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God (Eugene, Or.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007). Since the claim that per se divinity beliefs are grounded in religious experience is subject to a wide diversity of misunderstandings, here is a brief sketch of the position I defended in Knowing. “Religious experience” is taken to mean any experience that generates, deepens, or confirms a religious belief. It is not, therefore, limited to unusual or strange experiences such as voices, visions, mystical union with the divine, or miracles. Such relatively rare experiences are in fact dependent for their significance, I argue, on the experience of direct truth recognition — the sort of experience referred to in other contexts as intuition of the self-evidency of the truth of a belief. Such direct experience of truth attaches, I contend, to ordinary experiences (such as simply reading scripture) as well as the more unusual experiences. (Compare the quote from Hardy in the previous note.) I defend this, first, by showing that the traditional restrictions on genuine self-evidency are bogus: there are not and cannot be any justification for the claims that a belief is self-evident only if all rational people experience it as such (as Descartes and Locke insisted), or that self-evidency at- taches only to necessary truths and produces infallible beliefs (as Aristotle held). At the same time, however, there are no good reasons to doubt that intuitions of self-evidency, like perception and reasoning, are reliable sources of truth. I then argue that, under the right conditions, self-evidency with respect to divinity is in the same epistemological boat with the self-evidency of logical or mathematical axioms. The account is thus a defense of the position taken by Calvin in the quote referenced in the previous note, and also by Pascal, who put it this way: