Reading: What is Religion?

Chapter 2 - WHAT IS RELIGION?

Dr. Roy A. Clouser

2.1            THE PROBLEM

Defining “religion” is notoriously difficult. The word is used in a large number of ways: it is applied to rituals, organizations, beliefs, doctrines, and feelings as well as to large-scale traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Moreover, the very subject of religious belief is often emotionally charged. This sensitivity is natural since religion concerns people at the deepest level of their convictions and values.

To help minimize these difficulties, let us keep two thoughts firmly in mind as we proceed. The first is that we are not now trying to establish which religion is true or false, right or wrong. We are trying to arrive at an understanding of what religion — any religion — is. In answer to this question I will be proposing and defending what is often called a “real” definition, that is, a definition that is more precise or scientific than those employed in common speech. The second thing to remember is that the definition I will offer focuses on one particular use of the term “religion,” the sense in which it qualifies belief. Our search for a definition of religion, then, will be a search for what distinguishes a religious belief from a belief which is not religious. This is because I take belief to be the key issue, since it is religious beliefs which prompt and guide the persons, practices, rites, rituals, and traditions we commonly call “religious.”

What, then, is a religious belief? Consider the question this way. We all have literally thousands of beliefs about thousands of things. At this moment, for example, I believe myself to be the blood relative of certain other people; I believe 1 + 1 = 2; I believe next Friday is payday, that there was an ice age about 20,000 years ago, and that there was a civil war in England in the 1640s. While most people would probably agree that none of these beliefs is religious, the ancient Pythagoreans regarded 1 + 1 = 2 as a religious belief! So we need to know not only what makes one belief religious and another not, but how it can be that the same belief can be religious to one person and not to another.

 As we proceed, we must also keep in mind what any definition must do if it is to avoid being arbitrary. A non-arbitrary definition must state the set of characteristics uniquely shared by all the things of the type being defined. The way this is done is to inspect as many things of that type as possible, and try to isolate just the combination of characteristics which is true of them and only them. This is a difficult thing to do even for objects we can inspect, like computers or chairs, but it is even tougher for abstract ideas such as religious beliefs.

What makes such definitions possible is that we can all recognize things to be of a certain type prior to being able to define the type precisely. We all know a lot of things are trees, for instance, long before we perform the difficult task of analyzing the set of features possessed by all trees, but only trees. So while the process of defining starts by examining an initial list of things of the type to be defined, we need not examine all of them in order to formulate their definition. Indeed, we could not do so because we would already need to have a definition in order to decide whether to include or exclude any controversial or borderline case. So defining starts by examining a list of the things to be defined that leaves out controversial cases.

At first glance it seems an easy task to compile a relatively uncontroversial initial list of religions so as to look for a common element among their central beliefs. Virtually everyone would concede that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, along with Hinduism, Buddhism,¹ and Taoism, can safely be placed on the list. Moreover, just about everyone thinks that the beliefs in the ancient Greek Olympian gods, the Greek mystery cults, the Roman pantheon, Egyptian polytheism, or ancient Caananite belief in Ba’al were also religious. Nor does it seem objectionable that teachings which have never generated a large following can still count as religions — the ancient Epicurean beliefs and teachings about the gods, for example. In fact, there seems to be a fairly large initial “short list” of religions which further includes Druidism, the beliefs about Isis and Mithra, as well as the teachings of Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, and a host of other candidates. What, after all, could be the reason for refusing to acknowledge that these are all religions and their central tenets religious beliefs? They are (or were) all regarded as such by their adherents, and the adherents of at least the majority of them readily acknowledged others on the list to be alternative or competing religions.

But despite the availability of an acceptable list of religions, it has proven exceedingly difficult to extract any belief they, and only they, share in common. To illustrate this, let us now take a brief look at how poorly some of the most widely accepted definitions fare when applied to the traditions on our list. We will start with what are currently the most popular ideas, and then look at a few of the most influential scholarly proposals.

One of the most popular ideas is that religious beliefs are those that inspire and sanction an ethical code of some sort. In fact, many people suppose that the primary purpose of religious belief is to provide moral direction for life. Although this may sound plausible, the fact is that there are religions on our list which do not include any ethical teaching whatever. Ancient Epicureanism, for instance, made no connection between belief in its gods and moral duties to one’s fellow humans. According to the Epicureans, the gods had no concern whatever for human affairs, so a person could be morally rotten for all the gods cared. Other examples of religions with this same lack are the Japanese Shinto tradition and some forms of ancient Roman religion. To make matters worse for this proposal, there are clearly non-religious beliefs that do inspire or include moral teachings. For example, there are moral codes of honor in schools, sports clubs, armies, and even criminal organizations. This is enough to show that even if all religions did provide ethical teachings, that feature alone would not be sufficient to distinguish religious beliefs from those which are not religious.

Not all religious beliefs inspire worship, either. Aristotle argued for the existence of a supreme god he called the Prime Mover. But since he also held that it would be beneath the nature and dignity of the Prime Mover to know about or be concerned with earthly affairs, he regarded worship as futile. The ancient Epicureans mentioned above agreed. According to them, too, the gods care nothing about the world so the fact that gods exist is interesting to humans, but inspires no worship. Even in our own time, there are forms of Hinduism and Buddhism in which there is no worship.

Sometimes it is suggested that if the last two proposals were just broadened a bit and conjoined, they could form a successful definition. Suppose we take a religious belief to be one that generates ritual and/or ethics where the ritual can be of any sort rather than worship specifically? Won’t that do? The answer is, it will not. In the case of rituals it leads to the vicious circle of needing to know which rituals are religious in order to identify religious beliefs, and needing to know which beliefs are religious in order to know which rituals are. If there were a specific list of rituals generated only by religious beliefs, this could work. But there are many rituals that are at times religious and at others not: burning down a house, setting off fireworks, fasting, feasting, having sexual intercourse, singing, chanting, cutting oneself, circumcising an infant, covering one’s body with manure, washing, killing an animal, killing a human, eating bread and wine, shaving one’s head, and many more. So it seems clear that the only way to know whether a ritual is religious or not is to know what those who take part in it believe about it. If its motivating belief is religious, then the ritual may be. But without knowing whether it is done for a religious reason, even what looks like an act of prayer can be indistinguishable from fantasizing or talking to oneself. And notice that many of the rituals just cited have an ethical code conjoined to them when they are done for non-religious reasons, while others are believed to be unethical unless done for religious reasons! Rituals conducted by clubs with an ethical code or the ceremonies attending induction into an office of a company or government that has a code of ethics are examples of non-religious rituals accompanied by ethical beliefs, while the ritual killing of a human for religious reasons was considered pious by the Aztecs who otherwise regarded it as murder. I conclude, therefore, that this proposal fails. Religious beliefs are not necessarily those that generate ethical teaching and/or ritual; there are religious beliefs that lack both and nonreligious beliefs that generate both.

Perhaps the most widespread of all the popular definitions is that a religious belief is belief in a Supreme Being. Many people not only seem to think this covers all religions, but also suspect that all religions worship the same Supreme Being under different names. This is simply mistaken. Not all the traditions on our list include belief in anything that has a uniquely supreme status. What is more, in Hinduism the divine (Brahman-Atman) is not considered a being at all. It is instead an indefinite “being-ness,” or “being-itself.” For this same reason Brahman-Atman cannot strictly be called a god, if a god is taken to be an individual and personal. Buddhism also denies the divine is a being, but goes even further. For fear that “being itself” is still too definite an expression, it insists on such terms as “Void,” “Non-being,” and “Nothingness” for the divine. So although these religions believe there is divine reality, they do not believe the divine is a being at all, let alone a supreme one.

Surprisingly, some of the most widely accepted scholarly attempts to define religious belief don’t fare much better than these popular ones. One of the most influential of the past fifty years was that of Paul Tillich, who declared religious belief or faith to be identical with “ultimate concern.”² This expression is supposed to bare the bones of all religions. Tillich contended that all people are ultimately concerned about something, and the state of being ultimately concerned is a person’s religion.

But just what does it mean to be ultimately concerned with something? The most plausible way to understand the expression is to take it as referring to the state of being concerned about whatever is ultimate reality. This, though still unclear as to precisely what “concerned” means, seems to include dealing with ultimate reality in some way and so does sound like much of what goes on in religions. Moreover, there is reason to think that it is what Tillich himself intended.³ But even overlooking the ambiguity of “concerned,” there is also the problem of how we are to define “ultimate” so as to know which beliefs and concerns are about what is ultimate reality and are thus religious.

Tillich identifies the ultimate with “the holy” and “the divine,”⁴ but of course that is not much help. (What do those terms mean?) However, he does add that what is truly ultimate — the only right object of ultimate concern — is “being-itself,” or “the infinite.”⁵ Moreover, he makes it clear that whatever is infinite in his sense must be unlimited in such a way that there could be nothing distinct from it. He thinks that if someone were to say that God is ultimate but also believe that the universe is a reality other than God, that person would be inconsistent. For were there anything other than God, God would then be limited by what he is not and thus would not be infinite and so not really ultimate. The result of this, Tillich says, is that anyone ultimately concerned with that sort of god (a god who is a being rather than being-itself) would be putting his or her trust in something which is not really ultimate and would therefore have false religious belief (he calls it false “faith”).⁶ 

But by understanding “ultimate” in this way, Tillich’s definition of faith turns out to be too narrow. Rather than finding a common element to all religious beliefs, Tillich lapses into prescribing his version of what true religion is. Thus he fails to give a meaning to “ultimate” which can allow for false as well as true religious belief. For if religious faith is being concerned about the ultimate only in his sense, then anyone whose concern is with something taken to be ultimate but not infinite as he understands “infinite” would simply have no religious belief whatever. Tillich has therefore actually defined faith so that only his idea of true faith is faith at all. So whether his idea of true religion is right or wrong is beside the point just now, because it is a fact that there are religions which do not believe anything to be ultimate in his sense of “infinite.”

Tillich was, of course, aware of this objection but he failed to realize that it is lethal to his definition. He tried to sidestep its significance by suggesting, as I indicated above, that the religions concerned with something that is not infinite in his sense intend their concern to be for that which is infinite but fall short. His sidestep amounts to saying that true religion is concern or belief which succeeds in being directed to the infinite, while false religion is concern which intends to be directed to the infinite but misses. But this just will not do. For the theistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — hold to the doctrine of creation found in Genesis. They do not therefore intend to believe in anything that is infinite in Tillich’s sense. Instead, they quite deliberately believe in God the Creator who is distinct from the universe He created. They hold that the universe depends on God for its existence because God brought it into being out of nothing, not that it is part of God. Thus, “ultimate concern,” as Tillich defines it, is not a characteristic of these religions and so is too narrow to be the essential definition of all religious belief.

Another influential scholarly definition is this:

 In other words, whatever is believed to be of unrestricted value is therefore regarded as the precise core of religious belief. This definition appears more plausible than it really is because of the way we sometimes speak metaphorically of a person’s obsessions as his “religion.” For example, we call a sports fanatic’s devotion to his favorite sport his religion because of the way that devotion is like the religious devotion of a saint or a prophet. But the fact that the fervor or dedication of a sports fanatic is like that of a saint won’t make a sport a religion any more than it will make a religion a sport. And that point aside, there are even better reasons to think this definition is just not right.

For one thing, there are polytheisms in which there are gods who are little valued or even hated.⁸ If religious belief were identical with belief in what a person values most, then belief in these gods would have to be non-religious! But if belief in a god isn’t a religious belief, what is? Here, and in all that follows, I will take it as a rule in need of no defense that any definition that makes belief in a god to be non-religious has thereby discredited itself.

Such polytheisms are not the only counter-examples to this proposal, however; Christianity is one also. For while it is surely true that what is of supreme value is an important part of Christian teaching, the proper ordering of values is presented in the New Testament as a result of belief in God rather than as identical with it. What a Christian is admonished to value above all is God’s favor: the kingdom of God and the righteousness he offers to those who believe in him (Matt. 6:33). But the New Testament also stipulates that to please God one must first believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6). Clearly, then, if belief that God is real and trustworthy is a precondition for valuing God’s kingdom and favor above all else, then belief in God can not be the same as the valuing that results from it. In short, God, in Christian teaching, is not a value but the Creator of all values. And the proper relation to God is for us to love him with our whole being, not merely to value him. Thus it follows that Christianity is another counter-example to this proposal since defining religious belief as belief in whatever one values most would make the Christian belief in God to be non-religious. (Of course, this is not to deny that what people value most is often an indicator of what they regard as divine. But the fact that one’s highest value can reflect a religious belief doesn’t show it always does, let alone that religious belief can be defined by it.)

Although there isn’t the room here to examine a large number of other proposals,⁹ I don’t think it’s necessary since so many scholars of religion now agree that none of them succeeds and some have even concluded that no precise definition of religious belief is possible.¹⁰ As a result, the prevailing view these days is that religious beliefs have only “family resemblances” rather than any defining features common to them all. To appreciate why so many thinkers feel driven to say that, consider the obstacles to forming a real definition. Suppose, for example, we were to reply to them that every religion is characterized by a belief in something or other as divine. That seems true enough but not very helpful; it simply shifts the problem to defining “divine.” How, they would ask, are we to locate a common element among the ideas of divinity found in only the major world religions of the present? What common element is shared between the idea of God in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, the Hindu idea of Brahman-Atman, the idea of Dharmakaya in Mahajana Buddhism, and the idea of the Tao in Taoism? To isolate a common element among these seems daunting enough, but even if we could do it we would then have to locate that same element in the ideas of divinity found in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Palestine, and Greece; the divinities of China and Japan, of the Pacific islands, of Australia, of the Druids, and in the tribal religions of Africa and North and South America. Isn’t it obvious, they ask, that there is no common feature to the divinities of all these traditions? Posed in just this way, I would have to agree with the negative answer their question anticipates. The putative divinities compared are, indeed, so diverse as to have no common characteristic.

But before we give up on a precise definition, it is worth asking whether the list whose teachings are being compared is as innocent as it’s being taken to be. Granted, the beliefs represented on the list are all prima facie religious, but are they religious in the same sense? Could it be that the list conceals a shift in the meaning of “religious” for the beliefs being compared? To be more specific, I’m asking whether it’s possible that some beliefs on the list are religious in a sense that is basic to others on that list, so that the others are religious only in a secondary sense. If so, the list has failed to distinguish beliefs that are religious in a primary sense from those that are religious only in a secondary sense, and this could be the cause of the failure to obtain a precise definition for the entire list.

Now there are at least two senses in which one belief may be primary with respect to another. One is a noetic sense, that is, a sense that concerns the order of our beliefs. In this sense one belief is primary with respect to another when it is a necessary presupposition to the other, such that no one could hold the secondary belief without already holding (or assuming) the primary belief. The other sense of primacy is ontic, that is, it concerns the order of reality. In this sense one belief is primary with respect to another when the object of the secondary belief is taken to depend on the object of the primary belief for its reality. In each sense, then, what is “primary” is a necessary precondition for what is secondary. In the first case, the primary belief is necessary to hold the secondary belief; in the second case the object of the primary belief is held to be what generates the reality of the object of the secondary belief.

My worry, then, is whether the short list of religions we started with is in fact an admixture of secondary as well as primary beliefs. If so, it may well be the case that the quest for a precise definition has been surrendered prematurely. For it could be that the primary religious beliefs do have defining common characteristics that the secondary religious beliefs do not share, leaving the entire list with only family resemblances.

Consider the following analogy to this point. Suppose we wanted to define what counts as a school, and we tried to do that under the description “educational organization.” Guided by that description we compiled a list of as many sorts of schools as we could think of, but also included in our list the parent-teacher associations (PTAs) formed in many communities as auxiliaries to their local public elementary schools. Suppose we then tried to form a precise definition of a school only to find there are no features shared by all the organizations on our list. The reason would be that although there are common features shared by a kindergarten, an elementary school, a high school,  a college, a university, etc., these features are not true of PTAs. But PTAs are clearly educational organizations only in the secondary senses of that term. There can’t be PTAs unless there are schools, and we can’t believe that we need a PTA or form beliefs about what it should do to support a school without believing we have a school and without beliefs about what the school’s needs are. It is clear in this case that our failure to come up with a precise definition of a school would be the result of our listing an organization that is educational only in the secondary sense of supporting schools, along with organizations that are educational in the primary sense of delivering education to students. For while all schools have the common aim of providing education, exhibit the same general internal relationship between instructor and student, and operate with the same notion of authority based on the expertise of the instructor, PTAs do not share any of these features. Thus it would be our failure to distinguish between the primary and secondary senses of “educational” that would have led to the false conclusion that there is no precise definition of a school.

Whether this is what has happened in the case of “religious belief” is a question worth pursuing just because so much is at stake. So we need to re-examine our initial short list to see whether, within the same tradition of thought and practice, some of the beliefs on our list exhibit either dependency on other beliefs, or whether the objects of some of those beliefs are thought to depend on the objects of still other beliefs. Should this turn out to be the case, we can then remove the secondary beliefs from the list and re-examine the primary beliefs to see if they really have only family resemblances or whether they share some defining characteristic(s) after all.

2.2            A RESOLUTION

Out of what we have seen so far, one thing seems clear: all religious traditions center around whatever they believe to be divine, but they disagree widely on what is divine. For example, the divine is variously believed to be one transcendent creator, two ever-opposing forces, a large number of gods, being-itself, Nothingness, etc. It is this great divergence of belief that brings to grief the definitions just reviewed, and which has driven many thinkers to despair of ever capturing a common element to all religious belief. So, in accordance with the distinction drawn at the close of the last section, I now want to inquire as to whether any of the beliefs on our short list is religious in a secondary rather than a primary sense.

The answer can only be, “yes.” In many polytheistic traditions there are accounts of how the gods came into existence. This means that the divinity of such gods is clearly regarded as derived and secondary as compared to whatever is divine in the sense of having unconditional reality and accounts for their origins (from now on I will call this the status of being divine per se). Take, for example, the account of the gods of ancient Greece as found in Hesiod and Homer. In Hesiod’s account, the natural world in an undifferentiated state is what just is; it exists unconditionally and gave rise to everything else after it generated a gap between the earth and the heavens he called Chaos. Following that initial change, all other specific forms of existence were generated including the gods. According to Homer the primordial reality was Okeanos, a vast expanse of watery stuff from which arose all else including the gods. Despite their differences, then, both accounts agree that the gods are dependent on a more basic reality so the gods are themselves derivative realities.¹¹ This is why no one of them — nor all of them together — could be called “creator” in the sense that God is in Genesis. Moreover, the gods are not only secondary divinities because of their ontic dependency upon something else that is divine per se. They are also secondary in the noetic sense, since the beliefs about them depend upon the belief in Okeanos or Chaos. For no individual being could be believed to be a god — that is, a being with more divine power than humans possess — unless it was already believed that there is a per se divine source of all other things which confers varying degrees of power upon them.

The same is true of the myths of ancient Babylonia. In them, too, the gods acquire their divine status and power derivatively. For according to them,

In still other traditions the gods are beings with more power than humans. This is true of the Shinto tradition, for example, in which the divine per se is called “Kami.” In still others a divine power permeates all things but is concentrated in particular objects, places, or humans. The ancient Roman notion of Numen, the Melanesian idea of Mana, and the American Indian beliefs in Wakan or Orenda are instances of this.¹³ The same point has been noted about a number of African religions. Even though some of them believe in a supreme god, they maintain that belief in a different way from that of biblical theism, a way one writer has dubbed “diffused monotheism” because here we have a monotheism in which there exist other powers which derive from the Deity such being and authority that they can be treated, for practical purposes almost as ends in themselves.¹⁴

It is not necessary to single out every case of secondary belief on the short list, since what is important is not how many of them taint the list but that the list is tainted. It has been forcing us to compare beliefs in divinities supposed to be divine per se, with divinities that are believed to owe their existence and superhuman powers to the divine per se; and we have been comparing beliefs which depend upon others as their presupposition to beliefs which are basic. No wonder we have found no common defining characteristics among them!

So what happens if we now remove from our short list all the divinities that are divine in a secondary sense? Won’t an essential definition of the remaining primary divinity beliefs still pose a daunting task? Surely the answer is “yes.” And for that very reason I now want to propose a way of looking at the remaining putative divinities that may help us to focus on what may be common to them all. The proposal is that we think of what may be common to the various primary divinities as the status of divinity, on the one hand, and distinguish that from the specific description of whatever is believed to occupy that status, on the other hand. This is a heuristic device, of course. There is no absolute difference between a thing’s status and its properties; its status surely is one of its properties. But trying to think in this way may help keep us from slipping back into assuming one or another of the definitions we found to be false earlier. It will help focus us on what it is about any alleged divinity itself that makes it divine per se, rather than reverting to focusing on how else humans may regard it (as object of worship, e.g.).

Let me explain this focus by using another analogy. If someone were to ask the question “Who is the president of the United States?” we could quite properly respond in either of two ways. One way would be to describe the person who presently holds the office of president. The other way would be to say that the president is the person who has the following duties and powers, and then go on to describe the office of the presidency. The difference between these two ways of answering the question “Who is the president?” is like the difference between the two ways we can answer the question of the meaning of the term “divine.”  We  may ask “What is divine?” meaning that we want   a description of what it is that has the status of divinity. Or we can take the question to ask for a definition of that status, irrespective of who or what is believed to have it. The difference is important. If there were a presidential election so close that people disagreed as to who had won it, they would then also disagree about the description of the person who was elected to the office. But they would all still agree about the office for which the election had been held.

So the question is: is there anything that can, in a parallel way, be distinguished as the status of per se divinity? Is it possible that although the ideas of what has divine status are so diverse as to appear to have no common element, there is still common agreement among all religions as to what it means to be divine? If this were the case, the wide disagreements among religions would still be important. They would be disagreements about the correct identification of who or what has divine status, but they would still leave intact the universal agreement on what it means for anything to have that status.

Now this is exactly what I find to be the case! For I have never found a single religion that fails to hold the divine per se to be whatever is unconditionally, non-dependently real.

Please do not misunderstand this point. I am not saying that there are no disagreements whatever about what having divine status means. There are. But they are all disagreements about what else is taken to be true of divinity over and above non-dependence. So even though people may argue about the status of divinity per se, I’m saying that in fact they all agree on non-dependence and only non-dependence. Neither does this mean that every myth or scripture or theology has used the expression “non-dependence” or a synonym for it. Many do, but not all. Some writers speak of the divine as “self-existent”  or “absolute” or “uncaused and unpreventable,” or “just there,” for instance.

But others simply trace everything non-divine back to an original something the status of which is not emphasized or not explained. In such accounts the original something is therefore left in the role of having non-dependent reality by default: there is nothing it is said to depend on while all else is said to depend on it. Thus it is tacitly awarded non-dependent status. So no matter how little emphasized or tentatively held this point may be, the divine is still being treated as non-dependent so far as the account goes.

This definition seems to me to succeed while no other does. For openers, it can account for a common element among the beliefs in God, Brahman-Atman, the Dharmakaya, and the Tao, which was the brief list that appeared so daunting earlier. Moreover, I find it also covers all of the following primary divinity beliefs: the Nam in Sikhism, Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd) in early Zoroastrianism or Zurvan in its later development, the soul/matter dualism of the Jains, the high god of the Dieri Aborigines, the belief in Mana among the Trobriand Islanders, Kami in the Shinto tradition, the Raluvhimba of the Bantu religion, the Void, Suchness, or Nothingness found in various forms of Buddhism, and the idea of Wakan or Orenda found among various tribes of North and South America. It also holds for the ancient Roman idea of Numen, for Okeanos in the myths of Homer, and for a host of other ideas. Or, to be more precise, I should say it covers every religious belief I know of with respect to its belief in something as divine per se rather than in something that is divine in only a secondary sense.

That last remark might invite the rejoinder that my reading of religious traditions, though wide, can’t claim to be exhaustive, so that my definition may not be based on a sufficiently large empirical basis. To that I reply that the definition does not rest upon my reading alone. I discovered, after working it out, that this definition is not new but has had many advocates. It is based, therefore, not on my investigations alone, but on the cumulative reading and experience of many thinkers, a few of which I am about to cite.

To begin, virtually all the pre-Socratic philosophers conceived the status of divinity as being that which does not depend on anything else for its own existence, and they then hotly debated just what reality or realities have that status.¹⁵ The Pythagoreans are an example. For them the divine reality was numbers because they thought the objects of our ordinary experience are comprised of numbers and the relations between them. That is, they believed all things are made of numbers. In their view, the number combinations that form objects come into being and pass away, but the numbers that combine to form them are utterly independent and eternal. Both the status of divinity and the ascription of that status to numbers are beautifully expressed in one of their prayers, a prayer to the number ten:

 Here the divine status of numbers is expressed as their being changeless and “the root and source” of all that changes. I take this to mean that all else depends on numbers, while they do not depend on anything whatever. (It’s in this sense that the Pythagoreans thought 1 + 1 = 2 was a religious belief, as was mentioned earlier.)

For Plato it was not only numbers that are divine, but entities he called “Forms.” He explicitly says that these are “self-existent”(Tim. 50 ff. and Phil. 53-54), and also refers to them as “gods” (Tim. 37). Aristotle, too, is about as explicit as possible on what it means for something to be divine when he says:

 Notice that the divine is here characterized as whatever is able to exist independently from everything else, even though Aristotle adds that it is also changeless — a point not universally shared. He shortly after adds that being the “first and most dominant principle” means that it is “prior to” all else in the sense that all else depends on it.¹⁷

This view was not confined to Greece, however, as several Bible writers make assertions that seem to presuppose or entail it. One of these is nothing less than the most basic teaching about God, namely, that he is the creator of everything other than himself. This entails that he is the one on whom all else depends for existence while he does not depend on anything for his existence.¹⁸ Of course, God also has the status of being redeemer or savior, and of being the only one deserving of worship. But Bible writers regard God’s creatorship as fundamental. It is because he is creator that God can guarantee to redeem all who believe in him, and it is because he is redeemer that believers owe him adoration and thanks.¹⁹

Other biblical teachings also appear to presuppose this definition. One is the way some writers speak of having a false god or “idol.” For although many people today think of having a false god only as having a substitute savior or object of worship, Bible writers did not call something a false god only because it was worshipped (e.g., some of them refer to greed as idolatry). Rather, they call anything a false god or an idol if it in any way replaces the true God. From this point of view, therefore, having a substitute creator is every bit as much  a false god as having a substitute savior. This is crucial for understanding the way Bible writers everywhere assume that all people are innately religious — that everyone has either the true God or an idol. For if being religious means only believing in something as savior or worshiping something, then it would be clearly false that all people are religious. But if it includes replacing God with something believed to be the non-dependent reality on which all that is not divine per se depends, then it is not at all clear whether anyone can avoid every such belief.²⁰

During the Middle Ages, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and philosophers tended to lose the distinction between the status of divinity and its occupant — for good reason. Since all three religions accepted the transcendent Creator as the only divinity, the independent existence which other ancient thinkers had seen as defining the divine status was quite naturally thought of as an attribute of God. But notice that they did not take self-existence to be merely one more among many attributes God possesses. Instead they insisted that it is what is essential to God; God, they said, is the Being whose essence is existence. So they, too, recognized God’s unconditional non-dependent reality as the essential characteristic of His divinity.

And although the Reformers of the sixteenth century had many criticisms of medieval theology, they had no quarrel with that point. Both Luther and Calvin affirmed God’s unconditional reality. “There is nothing so proper to God,” says Calvin, “as eternity and self-existence.”²¹ And despite the fact that in theism there is no difference between the ontic status of divinity and the status-holder, Luther went a long way toward restoring the distinction — which is so helpful in understanding non-theistic belief.²²

Finally, in the past century alone this definition of (primary) religious belief has been recognized again and again by a number of distinguished thinkers including: William James, A. C. Bouquet, H. Dooyeweerd, Hans Kung, Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, N. Kemp Smith, Joachim Wach, C. S. Lewis, Will Herberg, Werner Jaeger, Pierre Chaunu, and Robert Neville, to name but a few.²³

This, then, is my reply to the suggestion that my essential definition of religious belief is not based on a sufficiently wide empirical base. I think it powerful evidence that all these people, despite their widely varied times, cultures, languages, walks of life, and convictions about the further description of exactly what has per se divine status, all agree with the definition I formulate as follows:

 Now although I find this definition captures the essential core of religious belief in its primary sense, it does not yet allow for beliefs in realities thought to be divine dependently rather than per se. Nor does it cover still other beliefs that also deserve to be called “religious” in yet other secondary senses. One such sense is that a belief may be about how the non-divine depends on the divine, and another is that a belief may be about how humans come to stand in proper relation to per se divinity. Such secondary beliefs must also be accounted for by any adequate definition since it is they that constitute the lion’s share of the belief content of most religious traditions. For example, while Hinduism teaches that Brahman-Atman is the non-dependent reality which encompasses all there is, it also includes beliefs about Karma, reincarnation, and various ways of achieving unification with Brahman-Atman. Christianity, too, does not end its teaching with the doctrine that God the Creator does not depend on anything in any way, but includes beliefs about God’s covenant with humans, God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, and the resurrection of believers to eternal life. Put more generally, the point is that the essential core of divinity is never all that’s thought to be true of whatever has that status. The essential core of divinity is therefore like an empty slot into which various ideas of what occupies the slot are inserted, and a fuller description of what occupies the slot is also conjoined to other beliefs, especially beliefs about how to stand in proper relation to the divine.

The simile of an empty slot should not, however, be misunderstood to suggest that a primary belief about what occupies it has temporal priority with respect to the secondary beliefs attached to it. It is not the case that people first locate the empty slot and then look for the right description of its occupant(s). Rather, it is religious experience that is the source of both beliefs simultaneously. The experience that is taken to reveal what is divine per se always yields some broader description of it over and above the mere status of divinity — even if that description is largely negative (as in Buddhism, e.g.). For that reason every belief in divinity per se arises in conjunction with an idea of how the non-divine in fact depends upon the divine, and an idea of how people can come to stand in proper relation to the divine. Thus religious experience is crucial here because, generally speaking, ideas of how to properly relate to the divine are not rationally deduced from the description of what is divine per se, nor are they purely historical accidents; rather, both are derived together from religious experience.

To be complete, therefore, our definition must be expanded as follows. A belief is a religious belief provided that:

Two remarks are immediately called for. The first is that while I have called the beliefs defined in (2) and (3) above “secondary beliefs,” that was not intended to diminish their importance. As I was saying just prior to the expanded definition, they are secondary only in so far as finding an essential definition of religious belief is concerned but not in actual religious life and practice. In actual life and practice the teachings about what is divine per se are always embedded in secondary teachings of types (2) and (3), and those of type (3) are supposed to make it possible for humans to acquire the full realization of true human nature. I have already made the point that type (3) beliefs are not deduced (nor thought to be deducible) from the description of what has per  se divine status. So it should be noticed here, by contrast, that the relation of type (2) beliefs to those of type (1) is often a mixture of logical implication and religious experience. This is because the description of what has per se divine status can’t fail to have some implications for a view of human nature, happiness, and destiny.

The second remark is that it should now be clear why and how including beliefs in gods that are not divine per se ruined the short list of beliefs used  to attempt an essential definition of religious belief. These beliefs can now be seen as genuinely religious but only in a secondary sense, despite the fact that many of the traditions in which they occurred paid almost no attention to what was held to be divine per se.²⁴ The gods in these traditions got the whole focus of attention because they were the only way humans could relate to divinity per se, that is, indirectly. It was precisely because of their enormous practical importance that beliefs in such gods served to obscure what was essential to divinity per se. At the same time, this failure also resulted in not taking seriously enough the obvious meaning shift the term “god” acquired depending on whether it connoted what is divine per se, as it does in Theism, or whether it connoted a reality that mediates the divine per se by possessing more divine power than humans, as it does in polytheism.

2.3            SOME CLARIFICATIONS

Distinguishing the primary from the secondary senses of religious belief now equips us to avoid other sorts of confusions often made with respect to religious beliefs. One of these is the way people often call a belief “religious” when it is neither a primary nor a secondary belief, but is merely altered or influenced by one. Take, for example, the belief of Jews and Christians that slavery is wrong. This conviction is not part of the Judeo-Christian idea of God, nor is it explicitly stated in the Torah, the Prophets, or the New Testament. But when Jews and Christians have examined the institution of slavery in the light of their primary and secondary religious beliefs, they have almost universally come to reject it as incompatible with the perspective on social justice engendered by those beliefs. Such influence was indirect enough that in some places it took a long time for this perspective to take effect. My point here is simply to warn that when people see such a connection between a religious teaching and another belief, they frequently tend to overstate it and identify the belief so influenced as itself a religious belief. (This actually happened during the antislavery movement in the United States.) But while the influence of a religious belief on non-religious beliefs can be very significant, it is still conceptually important not to confuse the two; a belief is not itself a religious belief just because it is influenced by one.

Please also notice that there is nothing about this definition that requires there be only one divinity per se. In many religions there are two or more divinities, and they can be thought to relate to one another and to the non-divine world in a variety of ways. For example, there may be something, X, that is regarded as being unconditionally real. But there is no reason this belief couldn’t be conjoined with belief in two other realities, Y and Z, neither of which is unconditional in itself but which together form a second unconditional reality. In that case, X and YZ would each be regarded as divine per se, and such a belief would amount to a dualistic religion in which one of the two divine principles is itself subdivided. Moreover, there actually are religions which believe in a whole realm of beings each of which is considered to have unconditional, non-dependent, existence, and I see no logical incoherence in such a position. And of course there could be an unlimited number of individuals believed to be divine in a secondary, dependent sense.

Moreover, where more than one per se divinity is believed in, it is possible to think of the dependency of the non-divine on the divine in any of several different ways. For example, a religion could teach that one part of the non-divine world depends on one divinity, while another part depends on another divinity. Or a religion could teach that a part of each and every non-divine thing depends on one divinity, while the rest of each non-divine thing depends on the other divinity. So while the sum total of what is not per se divine always depends on at least some part(s) of what is divine, the ways of parsing the dependency of the non-divine on the divine can be highly varied. I will spell out the most widely held of these “dependency arrangements” in the next chapter. The way this definition allows for variations in the divine/non-divine dependency arrangements also serves to explain a point that is troubling for other definitions. I mean the fact mentioned earlier that there are religions which believe in divinities upon which little or nothing of our everyday world depends. In these religions something is regarded as divine but is not esteemed or worshipped by its believers because it is either idle with respect to their lives, or feared, or even hated. We already noticed some traditions in which there are gods who are thought to be the source of evil, for example. In such cases, if “divinity” is used as a term of honor, such gods may even fail to be referred to as divine. But that will not change the fact that they are being regarded as divine in one of the senses defined above, and so it won’t alter the fact that belief in them is religious. Once again: what makes something divine is not whether it is personal, or good, or loved, or worshiped. It is whether it is regarded as unconditionally real or as having more divine power than humans. And this is so even if a divinity is not honored (think of the remark in James 2:19 that even demons believe in the existence of God though they fail to love or serve him). At this point it is sometimes suggested that perhaps not all religions have a dependency arrangement. Are there not religions which teach that everything is divine? In that case wouldn’t it be true that there is no non-divine reality to depend on the divine? For example, there are people who say they believe “all nature is god and all god is nature.” And don’t Hinduism and Buddhism teach that there is really only the divine?

Before going ahead with my answer, I want to say that even if this were true it would not really be an objection to my definition of religious belief. According to the definition, something is regarded as divine per se if it is accorded utterly non-dependent reality whether or not other things depend on it. The reason the issue of dependency arrangements comes up in the discussion is that most religious beliefs do acknowledge there is non-divine as well as divine reality, and use that dependency both as the explanation for the existence of the non-divine and also as a contrast which helps to identify the divine. So even if someone were to propose the wildly bizarre position that each and every thing in the universe is self-existent, thus making everything whatever divine, that would not expose any weakness in my definition.

The reason I say that denying any non-divine reality whatever is implausible is because it is so patently obvious that the things we observe every day can come into being and pass away. All such things, events, and situations, are therefore directly experienced to be non-divine. So if someone were to believe that there is nothing other than the natural universe (thus making it divine since there’d be nothing for it to depend on), that person would still have to admit that the things we observe in the universe are not divine. That is why such a belief would still call for an idea of how the individual, non-divine things in the universe depend on the (divine) universe as a whole. And this idea would amount to a dependency arrangement.

In Hinduism and Buddism, however, the obvious non-divinity of individual things in our ordinary experience is said to be Maya, or illusion. So these traditions do come close to denying any non-divine reality. But notice that calling something “illusion” doesn’t get rid of it entirely; it’s simply a way of saying that it isn’t what it seems to be. For there to be an illusion, there still has to be something that isn’t what it seems to be. So drawing the distinction between the illusory world and the divine reality still leaves the dependency of Maya on the divine to be explained. Hinduism explicitly addresses this problem by teaching that Brahman-Atman generates the illusory world, while Buddhism avoids the issue on the ground that it is spiritually unhealthy to think about the illusory world at all.²⁵ But neither the person who takes the universe as a whole to be divine, nor the Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Maya, poses any difficulty for the definition I’m defending.

Quite the contrary, our definition can now be used to settle the issue noted earlier of whether Theravada Buddhism is in fact a religion. A number of scholars have doubted this because Buddha once remarked that he did not know or even care whether any gods existed, and because the Theravada tradition continues that same attitude. Nevertheless, on our definition, Theravada Buddhism is confirmed as a religion — even despite the fact that some Theravada Buddhists themselves have said their belief is not a religion. For surely none of them would say that the Nothingness into which they will all be reabsorbed (the state of Nirvana) depends on anything whatever. Nor would they allow that the state of Nirvana is literally nothing whatever; rather, it is the state of “unspeakable bliss.” In addition, Theravada Buddhists agree that they are engaged in their disciplines and meditations for the purpose of attaining the right relation to the divine, since that right relation is the state of Nirvana. Apparently, then, the Theravada disavowal was motivated by the popular Western belief that a religion must include an individual deity and worship, while they deny both.²⁶

2.4            REPLIES TO OBJECTIONS

The first objection I usually hear to this definition is the discomfort it produces merely by its difference from the ordinary ways people use the terms “religious” and “religious belief.” After all, on my definition it turns out that ethics and worship are not essential to religion.

I can readily understand why this can be disturbing, but must remind you that essential definitions almost always produce such discomfort. Consider the example of whales. Many years ago they were defined as fish. The reasons for this were that they were shaped like fish, lived in oceans like fish, and swam like fish. But after more became known of them, they were redefined as mammals. It was learned that they are warm-blooded, lack gills and breathe air, bear their young alive and nurse them. So despite their fishlike tails and fins, and despite the fact that they live their lives in water, they have more in common with mammals than with fish. Perhaps that was disturbing to some people when it was first put forward, since it means that whales’ bodies have more in common with human bodies than they do with the bodies of fish! But precise definition aren’t wrong just because it is disturbing or because it’s not what we already thought was true. We form them in order to learn more about what we’re trying to define, and that can also mean correcting something we’d mistakenly thought to be true. And there are now as good reasons for accepting (primary) religious belief to be belief in something as divine per se, as there were for redefining whales as mammals.

Keep in mind, too, that whenever we try to define a type of things precisely, the definition almost certainly leaves out many features we regularly associate with things of that type. When we think of trees, for example, we usually think of their foliage. But that is not part of the definition of a tree; some trees have no leaves at all. Similarly, there may be features of things we do not usually think are important but turn out to be among the defining features of their type. It is true, of course, that pre-scientific definitions can have genuine practical value in everyday life. I’m not proposing they all be abandoned. I’m only saying that scientific definitions may serve to refine our ordinary notions of things and afford us a greater precision that ought not be rejected just because the more precise definitions differ from our ordinary notions.

The second point to be made about this objection is that it stems from the fact that in Western culture most people’s ideas of religion are derived from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. In one sense that is quite understandable. It is only reasonable that (at first) we think of religious beliefs in ways derived from those we are most familiar with. But it is not reasonable  to insist that all religious beliefs must be like those we are familiar with after we are confronted with others that are quite different. This point is especially pertinent to the objection that the definition defended here does not include worship as essential to religious belief. Many people have made such a strong association between religious belief and worship that they want to reject this definition of “divine” for that reason alone. All I can say to that is to remind you that there are religious beliefs embedded in cultic traditions which practice no worship, such as Brahmin Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism.

The case of Theravada Buddhism is also instructive for the issue of whether it makes sense to say that a person may be an atheist but still have a religious belief. We have already seen why people who believe, say, numbers, or a nonindividual and impersonal reality, to be non-dependent have a religious belief every bit as much as a person who is devoted to a personal God or gods. And we have seen why the hallmark of a genuinely religious belief is not whether the object of belief is like the divinity of the religion a group of people is most familiar with. People under the spell of that mistake often take beliefs such as materialism to be the very reverse of religion. But that is not even plausible on this definition — and not only because of this definition. In the ancient world there were Greek mystery religions in which the divine was believed to be “the ever-flowing stream of life and matter.” And there is still a form of Hinduism in which Brahman-Atman is identified with matter. Nor can it be objected that materialists are almost always also atheists. It should be clear by now why many people may rightly call themselves atheists but still have a religious belief. In the strict sense, “atheist” means “no god,” and is the denial that either the biblical God or any other gods exist. But our definition has shown why someone who believes in anything whatever as non-dependent has a religious belief whether that is in a god or not. In this respect being an atheist is like being a vegetarian. If I know someone is a vegetarian I know what that person doesn’t want to eat, but not what that person does want to eat. Just so, if I know a person is an atheist I know what the person doesn’t believe to be divine, but that tells me nothing about what he or she does believe to be divine. (“Atheist” in the broader sense of denying that anything whatever is divine per se is a position I will show to be incoherent in the next chapter.)

For those who find this point objectionable the main obstacle seems, once again, to be the assumption that a truly religious belief would have to result in worship even if it was not promulgated by an organized group dedicated  to that divinity belief. And surely there is good reason for the strong association of worship with religious beliefs. Feelings of awe and respect seem to be natural human reactions to experiencing something as divine per se, and worship is a natural expression for such feelings. Nevertheless, there are — as we have already seen — traditions that eschew this natural tendency. The reason this makes sense for them is a simple one: worship is surely appropriate when the divine is thought of as personal (or personified). In that case expressions of gratitude, for example, would be part of a personal relationship. But Theravada monks and Brahmin priests do not believe the divine is personal, so they do not worship. Similarly, the materialist who regards physical matter as self-existent may not be induced by that belief to pray to subatomic particles or sing hymns to force fields. Nor will a modern rationalist who regards, say, mathematical laws as self-existent be inclined to develop a liturgy of Quantitative Adoration for their worship — although the Pythagoreans did just that, as we have seen. Nevertheless, these beliefs ascribe to matter or mathematical laws, respectively, the same non-dependent status that a Jew, Christian, or Muslim ascribes to God, or a Hindu attributes to Brahman-Atman. Rather than having no religion at all, such people simply have a very different idea of what is divine, an idea that makes worship seem inappropriate.

Since this last point has such far-reaching significance for the relation of religious belief to theories, and thus to the main thesis of this book, I have only introduced it here and will return to deal with objections to it in a separate section at the end of this chapter.

Another reservation that has been raised about this definition is the worry that taking primary religious beliefs to be the right focus of attention may amount to reducing religion to something mental. It could thus devalue worship and other practices which are as real a part of religion as belief is. And some objectors go so far as to suggest that starting with belief as the key issue is mistaken because it rules out the possibility that religion may be studied by, say, a historian or sociologist.

First, I must say that this is not really an objection to my definition. The definition could be right even if it’s correct that focusing on it could run the risk of devaluing other sides of religious life and practice. Nevertheless, the definition is, as I see it, innocent of this charge. It does not reduce religion to something mental, if “reduce” means that religion is restricted to the mental. I do contend that it is only humans that are religious in an unqualified sense, and that it is their per se divinity beliefs which comprise the primary manifestation of that qualification. All other things which can be called religious are so in a sense derivative from the religious condition of human nature as expressed in per se divinity beliefs. But this does not mean there are no non-mental things that acquire genuinely religious significance in relation to those beliefs and the people who hold them. For this same reason, it is also not true that my definition rules out historical, sociological, or other types of studies of religion. What the definition does show, however, is that for these studies to succeed, we need to be able to recognize which beliefs are religious, and how historical events or social groups relate to them. For unless we are able to distinguish   a religious from a non-religious belief, and unless we can then discover the content of the religious belief held by the people participating in the practices or institutions we want to study, we can never be sure of whether a particular practice or institution is religious or of precisely the sense in which it is (think again of the large number of practices cited earlier that can be religious or not). The fact that we are sometimes able to infer that certain practices or institutions are religious even when we can’t discover the beliefs that underlie them, does not count against this last point. At times we can indeed infer that certain actions are worship even though we are observing people whose customs are strange and whose language we do not speak. But we can do this only because of the likeness between their actions and the actions of others which we already know to be worship. Thus it is still true that we can recognize practices or institutions as religious only by knowing their relation to primary or secondary religious beliefs, whether we know of them directly or infer them by analogy. For these reasons, I find not only that my definition doesn’t impede sociological or historical studies of religion, but that it alone makes it possible for us to know when a practice or institution qualifies as a specifically religious one. To see how it does this, however, it is important to keep in mind we are still speaking here of whether or not a practice or organization is religious because it is qualified by a type (3) secondary belief (as mentioned already, only people and their type (1) divinity beliefs are religious in the primary sense).

In this sense, an institution or practice is religious if its  central purpose  is to aid people to stand in the right relation to the divine. Thus a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple would be specifically religious institutions. So would a campground run for the religious improvement of those who attend. Likewise, prayer, fasting, sacrifice, or the celebration of a holy day would all count as religious practices if done for the same reason. By contrast, a family, school, business, or government, even if run differently owing to the influence of a religious belief, is not a religious institution.²⁷ A school which includes the study — even advocacy — of a particular religious belief is certainly under religious influence, as is a government which outlaws polygamy or a corporation which gives employees a certain holy day off. Such influences would not be sufficient to make those organizations count as specifically religious ones, however, since in each case the central purpose of those institutions remains to educate, to govern, or to make a living, rather than to aid people to stand in right relation to the divine. It is in this way my definition is able to supply an important interpretive key for historical and sociological studies of religion.

With these replies to criticisms, can we now say that the definitions offered for primary and secondary religious belief, and for divinity per se, have been proven beyond a doubt? That, I think, would be claiming too much. Very few definitions can be conclusively proven. So the question should be: have the definitions defended here been established as having an overwhelming preponderance of evidence in their favor, to be better than any other, and very likely correct? I must confess to thinking this is so. I know of no religious tradition to which they do not apply, and neither did any of the other thinkers who have held this view. Nor can I think of any clearly non-religious belief or teaching which the definitions would improperly class as religious (which is the point I promised to defend in more detail at the end of this chapter). Therefore, I maintain that the definition of religious belief defended here is the best way to understand religious belief, and will take it to be correct in all that follows until and unless it can be shown to be faulty.

2.5            SOME AUXILIARY DEFINITIONS

At this point the most important terms used in association with religious belief which are still left unclarified are “faith” and “trust.” In offering clarifications of these terms I will again be concerned with the ways they are used of beliefs. And I will take the position that a belief is aninnate or acquired disposition to trust a concept of some state of affairs to correspond to what is in fact the case, and to think, speak, act, or hold other beliefs in ways which trust the linguistic statement of the concept to assert what is in fact the case.

Having said that, it should be noticed that I just used “trust” in a broader sense than it is ordinarily used in English, because I used it to apply to all beliefs. According to ordinary usage, however, the word “belief” has broader application than either “trust” or “faith,” since the latter are only used in connection with beliefs regarded as desirable. Thus it is quite usual for someone to say, e.g., that he believes his medical report will be bad or that she believes she is about to be fired, but it would not be ordinary usage for someone to say that he trusts his medical report will be bad or that she has faith she is about to be fired. In addition, “faith” and “trust” are also usually restricted to beliefs which manifest a strong personal reliance on what is believed, which is yet another characteristic that does not arise in connection with every act of belief. For example, I believe there was an ice age about 20,000 years ago without personally relying on that belief in any way that makes a practical difference to me. So it must be specified here that in the circumscription of “belief” offered in the last paragraph, I was not retaining these restrictions on “trust” so often found in common usage. Instead I used it to mean our reliance on a concept as true, whether or not we regard what is believed to be desirable. For this reason per se divinity beliefs, whether or not regarded as desirable truths, will all turn out to involve trust as I use that term. And, of course, they one and all have hugely important practical results for the lives of those who believe them.

There is at least one trait possessed by religious trust, however, which is not true of non-religious trust. This is that the religious trust in something as divine per se always takes its object to be unconditionally reliable whereas non-religious trust is usually exercised with the reservation that its object is conditioned by circumstances which could affect its reliability. To rephrase the quote from Luther cited earlier: whatever our heart clings and entrusts itself to as unconditionally trustworthy is really our God (our per se divinity). This cannot fail to be right given our definition of “divine.” For nothing could be unconditionally trustworthy unless it had unconditional reality. Thus regarding anything as unconditionally reliable presupposes that it is divine in the sense proposed by our definition. And this remains the case whether or not a believer’s subjective feelings of confidence do or do not correspond to the unconditional status believed to be possessed by the object of his or her trust. It is always possible for people to feel less confidence or more confidence than is actually warranted by the object of their trust.²⁸

With these clarifications behind us, we may now notice some finer shades of meaning acquired by the terms “faith” and “trust” when they are used of religious beliefs. One of these is the difference between them depending on whether they are followed by the word “that” or the word “in.” For example, we at times speak of trusting that God will help us and at other times of having faith in God. Granted that these two meanings are closely related, there still seems to be some difference between them.²⁹

As I see it, faith or trust “in” something is the more basic expression, used to signify trust in its central meaning: openhearted acceptance of, and reliance on, what is believed. On the other hand, faith or trust “that” something is the case is an expression which is used with respect to belief which has undergone reflective judgment. It is faith whose content has been analyzed and given a conscious articulation; it takes the form of a statement of just what is being relied on. In the religious sphere, then, “faith that” God will do such and such is often a reflective consequence of our “faith in” God as reliable. I do not mean to suggest, however, that faith or trust “in” is at odds with faith or trust “that.” Since humans cannot help thinking about that which they trust, all trusting has an element of reflection — just as all thinking has an element of trust. So, too, religious “faith in” inevitably becomes also “faith that”; the two elements never exist in isolation. Nevertheless, the two expressions are useful because they allow us to distinguish those two elements and to refer to them separately if we wish.

Closely associated with the difference between belief “in” and belief “that” is the difference between “faith” and “trust” when they are used to refer to the act or to the content of belief. It is “faith” in the sense of the content of belief which occurs in such expressions as “the Christian faith,” “the Jewish faith,” and so on. In this sense “faith” is equivalent to “creed.” This distinction is helpful as we often need to be clear about whether we are talking about an act of trust or a statement of what is trusted. But once again it must be kept  in mind that what is being distinguished here are components of all beliefs, components which never really exist in isolation.

Having now defined the most important terms for our discussion of religious belief, I want to dispel a possible misunderstanding which might arise from the way I spoke of people “regarding something as divine.” I did say that whatever someone believes to be non-dependently real is thereby believed to be divine per se by that person. This way of speaking was not intended, however, to suggest that every idea of what is divine is equally right so that all such beliefs are equally true. The mere fact that someone regards something as utterly nondependent does not make it so; a person’s per se divinity belief may be ever so pious, fervent, and sincere, but still be misplaced and false.

It is important to remember in this connection that the definition of religious belief was a definition of the status of divinity per se. That was the only thing I found all primary religious beliefs to agree upon. Despite this agreement, religions are still very far from agreeing upon the further description of what has that status, or upon how the divine relates to whatever is not divine, or how humans come to stand in proper relation to the divine. Where there are incompatible ideas about these issues, the laws of logic guarantee that they cannot all be true. It cannot be true, for example, that only God as revealed  in the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran is divine, but also be true that it is Brahman-Atman that is divine. That could only be the case if “God” and “Brahman-Atman” were different names for the same reality, rather than for different putative realities accorded the same unconditional status. And since God is an individual person who is distinct from all else while Brahman-Atman is neither, they cannot be the same reality; it is logically impossible that the universe is entirely distinct from the per se divinity it depends on (as in the case of God) but also true that the universe is in toto part of the divinity it depends on (as in the case of Brahman-Atman). That could only be the case if “distinct from” and “part of” were synonyms. Thus it is not the case that the biblical God is the God of which all other religions are dimly aware, but about whom they know less or make mistakes.³⁰

In sum, logic requires that religious trust can be either well-placed or misplaced as can non-religious trust, and that beliefs about the divine must — as must all other beliefs — be either true or false but cannot be both at once. It follows, therefore, that when two beliefs disagree about what is divine, one  or both of them must be (at least partly) false. In the next chapter we will   see this more clearly when we use the definitions developed here to distinguish the types of dependency arrangements that have arisen in several of the world’s major religious traditions relative to their per se divinity beliefs. As that project proceeds it will become apparent that although there are strong similarities among traditions holding the same type of dependency arrangement, those which hold to different types of these arrangements are hopelessly incompatible. Far from being different paths up the same mountain, they do not agree on which mountain to climb.³¹

2.6            ARE ALL NON-DEPENDENCE BELIEFS RELIGIOUS?

This is the point I introduced earlier and promised to return to. It deserves separate treatment both because it is crucial to my central thesis, and also because it is bound to be the most contested point for those who wish to contend that religious belief need play no role whatever in theory making. The objection is that even if the definitions offered above are correct, and even if they make an important contribution to religious studies, nothing said so far warrants the conclusion that all beliefs in something as unconditionally real need be religious. “After all,” it may be said, “all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs. So too, primary religious beliefs may all be beliefs in something as non-dependent without it being true that all such beliefs are religious. And surely they are not! Aren’t there theories in both philosophy and science that clearly teach or assume something to be non-dependent? But surely these beliefs are not religious, and any attempt to make them so by simply defining them that way is nothing more than a cheap trick.”

Now I realize that many people have such a strong antipathy to religion that nothing I could say would ever persuade them that it is important to theories or anything else. I vividly recall the time one of my graduate school classmates said, “Show me any belief I hold that’s religious in any sense and I’ll give it up on the spot!” Nevertheless, the weight of argument is overwhelmingly on the side of the claim that all beliefs in anything as unconditionally non-dependent are in fact religious.

First of all, there’s the obvious point that whatever anyone takes to be non-dependent reality plays the same role in the entire complex of his or her beliefs that divinity beliefs do in religions. For whatever is believed to be nondependent per se is also given some further description, and that description carries implications that are type (2) or (3) secondary religious beliefs as they include beliefs about human nature, happiness, and destiny.

Take the example of philosophical materialism. It proposes that reality is ultimately physical, so that everything is either matter or dependent on matter.³² Far from being the opposite of a religious belief, this is itself one possible idea of what has divine status. Recall, in this connection, the examples given earlier of several religions that held, or do hold, matter to be divine per se. Just what is the difference between modern materialism’s ultimate reality claim and the ultimate reality claim found in these religions? I find no significant difference at all. Each implies the same general view of human nature, each sees human destiny the same way, each has the same implications for values, and each has the same general view of human happiness.

This point usually provokes several replies. The first is that the religious traditions append to their idea of ultimate reality a set of type (3) secondary beliefs about how one should conduct one’s life in order to stand in proper relation to the divine, while theories of philosophy and science are interested in explaining the world around us not in putting us in right relation to the divine. In other words, this reply proposes that a belief can’t be religious simply because it’s a belief in something as having non-dependent reality, but is religious only when it is conjoined to some type (3) secondary beliefs beliefs about how to stand in proper relation to the divine so as to receive personal benefits not otherwise obtainable. And, it could be added, since I already admitted that having both type (2) and type (3) secondary beliefs is common to all cultic religious traditions, I can’t now hope to get away with ignoring the type (3) beliefs.

This reply touches on an important truth while at the same time falling into an important error. The element of truth is that it would, indeed, be a mistake to ignore the fact that in religious traditions some type (3) secondary beliefs are always conjoined to any primary religious belief. The error is to suppose that any idea of ultimate reality really can avoid generating both types of secondary beliefs whether it arises in a theory or in a religious tradition. Let’s stay with the example of materialism. Just as with the secondary beliefs of religious traditions, materialism delimits a distinctive range of acceptable ideas not only of human nature and destiny, but of what can and can’t be done to improve the human condition. Doesn’t materialism require a distinctive view of human values and happiness which is offered as the proper way to live in the light  of its alleged truth? Doesn’t it require, e.g., either that there are no real value properties in the world or that they are all physically determined? Have not the major proponents of this position made much of the way it “liberates” us from all its allegedly false alternatives and so yields benefits for our lives not otherwise available? Of course, this does not apply only to materialism; any and every idea of ultimate reality will carry with it the equivalent of type (2) and type (3) secondary beliefs. In that respect, none differs at all from any other, and certainly they do not differ depending upon whether they occur in cultic religious traditions or in theories.³³

Nothing just said is intended to deny there are real differences between a theory and a religion, however. In theories, divinity beliefs are used to construct explanations in which they become the basic assumptions guiding the formation of hypotheses. Religious traditions, by contrast, emphasize bringing their adherents to the actual acquisition of a proper relation to the divine in order to obtain present happiness and (often but not always) an ultimate destiny not otherwise obtainable. That’s an important difference, but it’s a difference of emphasis not exclusion. Divinity beliefs occurring in religious traditions are also used to provide explanations, and — as I’ve been saying — theories can’t avoid implications for the personal attitudes and conduct of those who believe them. The vast majority of philosophers have not only admitted this point, but have gone to pains to point to the personal benefits of their theory’s idea of ultimate reality. They have been anxious to show that their theory does indeed have concrete results for guiding our lives. Theories in the social sciences do the same. It’s the theories of the natural sciences that often seem uninterested in personal benefits to their adherents (beyond knowing the truth). But that surface disinterest will be irrelevant to my claim about the religious control of theories if even theories in the natural sciences can’t avoid presupposing some idea of ultimate reality — which is exactly what I will be showing in the chapters that follow. For if theories in the natural sciences cannot avoid pre-supposing a view of ultimate reality, then they too carry implications for the personal lives of their adherents whether they spell them out or not.

To be more specific, in later chapters I will argue that all theories are regulated by some per se divinity belief either directly or indirectly. The direct regulation occurs when a theory contains a claim about the nature of reality, since (I will argue) every view of the nature of reality can’t fail to include or assume an idea of ultimate reality. The indirect regulation occurs when a theory doesn’t explicitly contain a view of the nature of reality, but can be seen to presuppose some such view. So if no theory of philosophy or the sciences can avoid including or presupposing a view of the nature of reality, then no theory can avoid including or presupposing some per se divinity belief.

Thus, my answer to this first reply is to agree with it. It doesn’t matter to my definition whether a belief in something as ultimate reality is religious all by itself or only when conjoined with beliefs about human nature, destiny, values, and the right conduct of life. Even if that’s true, beliefs in something as ultimate reality will all turn out to be just as religious when they occur in theories as when they occur in religious traditions.

A second reply against this position is to say that neither core beliefs about ultimate reality nor secondary beliefs are religious if they are accepted on rational grounds rather than on faith. If they have reasons and arguments for them, such beliefs are to be reckoned as philosophy or science and are not religious at all. It is only when they are taken on faith that they have truly religious import. Unlike the first reply, this one wants to immunize theories from religious influence not by a difference in their content, but by a difference in the grounds on which their contents are accepted.

But, in fact, reasons and arguments are not confined to philosophy and the sciences. There have been many arguments offered by religious thinkers and theologians. For example, there are arguments to prove the existence of God and to critique alternative divinity beliefs. And that is fatal to this reply. For  it requires that anyone who accepts such an argument would thereby have a belief in God that is non-religious! But, as I said earlier, any view that has the result of making belief in God (or a god) non-religious has discredited itself. Besides, this objection certainly seems to ascribe divine status to the principles of reason and thus itself to be based upon a religious belief. For surely there can be no arguments or reasons for the reliability of reason that could avoid using reason to do so and thus beg the question!

Nor are these the only reasons why this proposal doesn’t work. Notice that it presents us only with the options that a divinity belief can be either based on argument or accepted on blind trust. Now the fact is that no religion I know of has ever asked anyone to believe it on blind trust. All alike insist that people must have the experience of seeing it to be true for themselves. So why think that argued reasons and blind trust are the only options? Both with respect to religious belief and to non-religious beliefs, these are surely not the only options. Many of our beliefs are based on direct experience and so are neither derived from other beliefs by argument nor accepted on blind trust. For example, you are now reading these words. Your belief that you are reading them is not based on other beliefs from which you infer that you are reading them, but it’s not blind trust either. And many thinkers have held that divinity beliefs are accepted in a similar way. The distinguished philosopher Paul Ziff once described his materialism that way. He said, “If you ask me why I’m a materialist I’m not sure what to say. It’s not because of the arguments. I guess I’d just have to say that reality looks irresistibly physical to me.”³⁴ And that, remarkably enough, is exactly what John Calvin said about his belief in God:

 In later chapters I will return to this point indirectly by presenting reasons for thinking that there can be no theoretical justification for attributing independent existence to the various candidates for it that have been advocated by so many theories (rational laws, matter, sense perceptions, etc.). If that is right, then either every such belief accepted by a theory is sheer mistake or blind faith, or there is experiential ground for them — as Calvin, Ziff, and so many others report.

I have made a detailed case for the experiential ground of religious belief elsewhere and there is not the room to repeat all that here.³⁶ All I can do for now is point briefly to the way experiencing something as divine per se is a better explanation than any other for the universality of religious belief among humans in all times and places. People have always been drawn to the question of their origins, not just in the sense of what processes produced them but also (and mainly) in the sense of what they ultimately depend upon. That is why I have been speaking of the only unqualified sense of “religious” as  an existential condition of human beings. It is the condition of the whole human, not just of thought, or feeling, or will, etc. Its primary manifestation is a per se divinity belief, but even that derives from the innate impulse of humans to direct themselves toward the ultimate reality upon which they and everything else depends, and to understand their own nature and the right conduct of their lives in the light of whatever they take that ultimate reality to be.³⁷ Even without thinking up arguments, people have always instinctively formed such beliefs. So while there is little doubt that they at times invented specific gods as bearers of divine power, they would — as I pointed out earlier — already have had to believe something to be divine per se in order to do that. So although specific gods may have been inventions, religion as a whole was not. It arose from people discovering in their experience something that “just looked irresistibly” non-dependent. If this account is right, divinity beliefs can be “basic” beliefs — beliefs not derived from other beliefs.³⁸ In that case they are neither blind faith nor based on arguments, so the reply collapses that they are nonreligious when argued for in theories. Furthermore, if beliefs about ultimate reality are not capable of theoretical justification (as I shall argue later), and if they are instead the products of direct experience (as I shall premise here having argued for it elsewhere), then the arguments that are proffered in theories are merely consequences, rather than the real ground, of those beliefs.

Meanwhile, the view that divinity beliefs are based on experience is a defeater for the claim that a belief is non-religious if argued for — even for those who may wish to disagree with it! The reason is that the very possibility that the real ground of such beliefs is experience not argument makes the claim inconclusive. The very fact that there is a prima facie plausible account showing those beliefs to be grounded in experience rather than blind faith or argument means it’s not enough just to say that those are the only options. For those to be the only options, arguments would first have to be given to defeat and dismiss religious experience as their real ground. But no one has yet ever come within miles of doing that, and I see no likely prospect anyone ever will. I conclude, therefore, that this second reply to my position is simply not successful.

Finally, consider the objection that my case for the religious nature of beliefs about ultimate reality might just as well be turned around in favor of the philosophical character of religious belief. Why not, it is said, start by surveying philosophical theories instead of religions and find beliefs in something as ultimate reality to be common to theories of reality and knowledge? Then the conclusion could just as well be that religions all share a philosophical assumption as it could be that theories have a religious one. Doesn’t that undermine the case for religious regulation of theories?

My answer to this has two parts. The first is to say that there is an important sense in which I am not arguing for the term “religious”; if someone insists on substituting another term, say, “ultimate reality beliefs,” it won’t make any real difference to my central thesis. For if, as I will argue, such beliefs exercise an unavoidable regulatory influence in all theories, my case will not be altered merely by giving them a different name. My central thesis can just as well be stated as the claim that it’s the same sort of belief that regulates theories as is essential to religions, that these beliefs are incapable of rational justification, and that they arise in human experience independently of theories and so are not derived from them. That being so, nothing truly important about my central thesis would change no matter which term is used for them.

That said, however, there is still a legitimate question as to the most appropriate term for such beliefs. Is “metaphysical” just as good as “religious?” That is surely an odd and unpersuasive proposal. For if beliefs in something as nondependent not only arise in pre-theoretical experience and are incapable of the kind of justification we seek in theories but have also existed among humans at all times and places regardless of whether metaphysical theories did, what on earth could be the reason for now calling them by the name of a certain kind of theory?

To see the force of this answer, suppose for a moment that the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose no such beliefs had existed outside theories but had arisen only in the course of elaborate, abstract systems of metaphysics. Suppose that cults then arose which advocated that the independent realities proposed by those theories be worshipped in addition to being employed in explanatory theories. Would it now be convincing to insist that ultimate reality beliefs are really religious rather than metaphysical? Wouldn’t the opponents of religion consider that outrageous? Wouldn’t they say that since those beliefs arose in philosophy it is an arbitrary piece of imperialism to claim that they should now properly be called religious? Wouldn’t they say that attempting to regard such beliefs as grounded in immediate experience is unconvincing in the face of the fact that they originated as postulates of metaphysical theories that were accepted because of arguments? I think they would say exactly that, and that they’d be quite right to do so. But since the shoe isn’t on that foot, I find these same reasons to be compelling in favor of holding “religious” to be the appropriate term for such beliefs whether they occur in theories or not.