Video Transcript: The Common Feature of Religious Beliefs

Dr. Clouser - As I promised last time, we are now raising the question, what is a  religious belief. And once we get a clear definition of that, I think it will be a lot  clearer to you how it impacts theories of reality. And that's going to be our claim  that it does. And so putting making God, the religious beliefs that controls the  theory of reality, ends up with a very different theory of reality. So what is a  religious belief? How do we know whether we're looking at a religious belief?  Take, for example, the belief that Friday will be payday, there was an ice age  about 13,000 years ago, last summer was unusually warm. And one plus two  plus three plus four equals 10. Probably none of those sound like religious  beliefs to you. But to the ancient Pythagorians, remember them from last time.  One plus two plus three plus four equals 10 was a religious truth, because  numbers were divine everything was they made everything what they are. So  the same beliefs can be religious to one person or not to another, I think one  plus two plus three plus four makes 10. But I am not inclined to think that that's  what hangs the whole of creation together, let alone that I should worship. And I  don't worship it. Okay. So let's ask ourselves, what is the essentials of religious  belief? I'm not trying to define the whole of religion, just belief, what makes a  belief religious. And when I was first assigned to teach comparative religion, I  decided to see what the scholars had to say. And I went around the different  libraries, I filled the trunk of my car with book after book after book on  comparative religion, just to read the introduction, you know, how does the  author define the field. And I found that if you go way back towards the  beginning of the 20th century, they offered specific definitions, most of which  sounded wrong to me, as though they covered some religions, but not others.  And then some other definitions covered all religions, but it also covered playing  golf or something like that. And then, when I came up to about the mid middle of  the last century, so I found that most of the scholars agree that none of those  proposed definitions worked. And so they then went to the view that it can't be  defined that religious belief, like pornography, we know when we see it, but we  can't define it, which is not very helpful. And then after that, we've got books that were the introduction said things like, well, TV, we don't know what it is. But  here's another book on it. And that failed to find that funny. We need to know  what it is or we don't know that the books on it. So I reflected more about the  major world religions and then about a lot of the ancient myths that I had read  that were religious, I looked into all the different tribal religions in Africa, in the  South Pacific, to the edges of Iceland and all kinds of stuff. And it began to dawn on me that there was something they all had in common. What they all had in  common was they all regarded something as the self existent reality that  generates everything else. I mentioned this last lecture. The self existent reality,  the reality that doesn't depend on anything, but everything else depends on it.  Of course, Christians say That's God. And Romans 1 says that people either  have the true God or a false one. They put something else in that slot of being 

what it is, everything else depends on and what we noticed last time Pythagoris  and the boys put numbers and materialists pure the purely physical matter, and  Plato had his perfections plus matter and there are lots of mix and match  combinations. But let's put this down. Let's see what what we can do. A belief is  religious. 11IFF means if and only if. It's okay. It is a belief in something as  divine, I'm going to use that term where that means self exists. It doesn't depend on anything in any way. Okay, it's a belief in something as the self existent reality on which everything else depends or not, that's not the only thing you can meet  that make it religious, it is a belief about how the non divine depends on the  divine or this is the last thing it is a belief about how humans can stand in proper relation to the Divine So, think about how Christianity is a belief about what is  self existenct, God. A belief about how the non divine depends on the divine,  God called the universe into existence out of nothing. That's how. three, it's a  belief about how humans can stand in proper relation to the Divine how's that  that's what we call God's plan of salvation. Through Jesus Christ, we  approached the divine we have make use of his offer of love, forgiveness and  everlasting life. And I have to add one more thing and that goes like this, where  for thinking about the best way to put it for you where divine means self existent, no matter how it is further characterized. In other words, when people regard  something else other than God, as the self existent reality on which all depends, they have an alternative God, they have an alternative divinity, and one that  Christians are not hesitant, say is false. So, this covers the heart of religious  belief, also how the non divine depends upon divine and then number three,  that's what we usually think of as religion. How do humans come to stand in  proper relation of the Divine, that doesn't always have to include worship, let's  get that straight right away. There are religions in which there is no worship,  Brahman Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, Shinto since there are a number of  religions in which there's no worship, so worship doesn't characterize a belief as religious. It's not that a belief is religious, if it generates worship, or inspires that  kind of reaction, it may in fact, teach that it's wrong to do that. With Theravada  Buddhism would, it's not religious, because it's a belief in a supreme being. That doesn't work either. Like once again, Brahman Hinduism and Theravada.  Buddhism don't believe there is a supreme being. And many people have called  them atheists for that. And in a strict sense, they are they don't believe there are  any gods or goddesses. What they regard as the divine reality, though, is a self  existent beingness that's in everything. It's not a person, it's not an individual,  and you don't pray to it. There's a discipline of meditation whereby you, you  strive to be absorbed into it, so as not to be reborn into another lifetime of  suffering, according to both Hinduism and Buddhism, but it's not worship,  because it's not personal. So that's why I put the last part no matter how the  Divine is characterized, in addition to being self existent reality, that everything  else it depends on, even in that's correct, and it applies to every religion. I know. 

I haven't been able to find any exception. Now. If this rested on just my reading,  I wouldn't be nearly so confident I could say to you, Well, I've ever come across  it and I've been reading this stuff for over 50 years. But that wouldn't prove that I  

hit it right. However, it turns out there are an awful lot of other people we can  add to this list, who have investigated this and come to the same definition, or  something very close to it. They recognize the self existence of the Divine, and  that that's what makes it divine. And those people go back to the ancient Greek  philosopher Anaximander, Plato and Aristotle believed the stuff that was held altl through the Middle Ages. And in the 20th century alone, is held by a whole raft  of people that you'll find listed in your book, but some of them in case you know  the names already, CS Lewis, Paul Tillich. William James, Mircea Eliade , the  comparative religion scholar at Chicago, I must have 15 names of people, all of  whom have different views of religion and hold different positions, that they will  see that that's what's going on. Think of it this way. divinity, according to this is  like an empty slot. It's the slot that's marked under the self existence reality that  everything else depends on and different. People put different things in the slot.  Or here's another way to think of it, we have a presidential election. And it's very close. And people are disagree on who that who the President really is. But they don't disagree on what the presidency is. This is the status of being divine, no  matter what somebody sticks into it. And of course, the New Testament says, If  you don't put God, if you don't recognize that God is the only one who belongs  there, then you've what you do is make divine some part of the world, you take  some aspect of the creation, you stick that in the slot. So you worship and serve  what God created instead of the Creator. That's how Paul describes it, Romans  1. So this is the definition that I intend to use throughout the course. And in  constructing a Christian philosophy as well, we're going to say, what, what  matters, the key thing to get straight first, is that only God belongs to that slot.  It's only God who's self existent. And everything else is something God made.  That's right up Colossians 1, he's made everything visible or invisible, whether  it's visible or it's invisible. It's created by God. So it covers just about everything.  Yeah. So you're saying that this is something that as a student, I do well, to get  in my head very well. But yeah, this is the way you're going to be functioning.  That's right. Okay. And what I want to show is what happens to theories of  reality, when you put other divinities in that slot. If you say, it's matter, or matter  plus logic, or, or plus mathematics, or whatever you pick, and you stick in that  slot, you get a very different theory of reality. So why would belief in God be the  only divinity belief that doesn't make a difference to the theory of reality, of  course, it does.  

Bob Zomermaand - Now when it is, for a while I was teaching at a secular  university, and they assigned me a textbook for philosophy of comparative  religion. And in that, that textbook, it talks about what a religion is chapter one, 

you know, because otherwise, the whole rest of the book makes no sense.  That's right. So what is a religion and that particular textbook worked with  something that's similar to this, but tried to boil it down further and said, religion  is any belief or activity, which ties us to that which is unseen? That was that was  their definition.  

Dr. Clouser - Well, the first part of that sounds, sounds okay. Religion, being the  word literally does mean to retie someone. It ties us to the divine. But the divine  isn't just anything not seen. I mean, we don't see from the earth. We don't see  the other side of the moon. It doesn't make the other side of the Moon gone.  There you go. That's just way too loose. It was pretty loose. Yeah, I thought so  and isn't just, in fact, a Christian would have to object to that, for two reasons.  First of all, many unseen creatures, things God has created, that are invisible, or not seen, and the other. The other thing that a Christian will find objectionable is  that God came incarnate and Jesus Christ was a real human being whom we do see. 

Bob Zomermaand - that particular definition just seemed to be read kind of  loosey goosey. Yeah, sure. But I think it was given there so that then they can go on to other stuff for sure. There on a lot of it didn't even get touched again.  

Dr. Clouser - Yeah, I know of another writer who said, well, the Divine is  anything I was he was pretty close to that. Anything we can observe, he said,  which means all laws of creation, you don't observe the law of gravity you  observe things that fall to the ground when you let go, or when you observe  things governed by the law but you don't see the law. It isn't sitting there in the  middle of the floor. So I guess that's, that's religion, too. Yeah, yeah.  

Bob Zomermaand - So by the same name. I'm just saying, that was a textbook  you have at this university. That was the one I have deep trouble.  

Dr. Clouser - Okay, well, that's, that's another example of definition doesn't work, at least the author tried, that came into vogue, in the late 50s, and through the  60s was a can't be defined at all. That's what, that's what it shifted to. And now  it's just chaos. books, book after book continues to come out in comparative  religion, religious studies, philosophy of religion, and just about nobody is using  this. And I have no idea why, especially when in the 20th century alone, I was a  dozen or 15 people. And nobody's listening, I can understand that. This seems  to me to work very well. And not to have any exceptions, and no good objections to it. But what I want I want to do next, this is clear, is talk about the ways people have thought of the relation between a divinity belief and theorizing about, about creation, about nature, about the world around us. So I'm gonna take this off, 

copy it down, rewind the tape, if you need to be, it's going to be important,  permanently. I do my housekeeping. There are three main ways that people  have thought that theory making relates to divinity beliefs, to religious beliefs.  And I'm going to schematize those on the board so that they're clear for you.  And then I'm going to propose a different one. And you already know what that  is, it's going to be some divinity and belief or other lies at the root of and it's  assumed by every theory of reality. Now that's also true for epistemology, but  that's not our course. Right now, we're, we're going to do ontology with that  funny nickname of metaphysics. And we're going to do that and see how  religious belief impacts that. Let's see first, what the options are here. The first  is. Reason, in its theory, making capacity makes up a religious theory. This tries  to say that divinity beliefs are themselves hypotheses. People look around the  world and they say, How do I explain this or that and they invent God. So,  reason, theory making is in control. It's neutral. It's the same for all people. It's  competent beside almost anything. And one of the things some people do with  our reason is proposed divinity beliefs and this, this is a hypothesis. Remember,  an educated guess? Do I need to tell you that Christians don't believe that's  what it is? I hope not. It's not a guess we made. It's encountering God's reality  that produces belief and Christian, we encounter God in His Word, we encounter God. God's spirit among us. Many things happen is answers to prayer and so  on. This is experienced. It's not a hypothesis that we invent and propose, but a  lot of people insist this is the way it should be seen. There's another view that  says, in effect, religious belief is a very odd side of life. Some people have it and some don't. Everybody has reason, and some make theories about one thing  and some another. And there are people that hold religious beliefs. It's not a  theory of reason. But then it's not refutable by reason either it's a walled off  completely, the two Just don't touch one another, they don't impact one another  reason can't defeat religion, it doesn't propose religion. If you have it, you hold it, irrationally, you hold it. But so what you have here is a blind leap of faith, they  say. And over here are theories that we checked by reason. So this we really  know and that we only hope we know. But the two are walled off, that's the  relationship. So over here, one produces the other over here, neither impacts  the other at all. And then the most widely spread widely held view goes like this.  And here is the house of reality. House of reality has two floors, nature and  super nature. That's the upstairs. And what happens here is that nature is pretty  much autonomous, it runs somewhat the way this view sees it. Except that  religion, religious belief, relates to nature, even if nature doesn't do much for  religious belief. It does a little bit. I mean, from just looking around nature,  natural reason can prove that there is an upstairs and God's up there. But that's  it. However, the truth, the revealed truths of God sit up here. And if nature if  somebody's dealing with nature makes a theory that that's inconsistent with this  big brother comes down the stairs and check something and got to toss that 

one out. What else? So there's an interaction. But it's mostly this way. You from  just knowing nature, you can construct proofs that God exists. And they're and  they're good, and they're valid. And that's true. And that's the right conclusion.  But you can't know anything else about God you could do you don't know about  the human soul you don't know about life after death, you don't know about the  the incarnation and the Plan of Salvation. All that stuff is up here that's known by revelations from God. And that's the purpose of revelations for God's to reveal  the supernatural truths. You can't find out. But then big brother, and that means  the church that comes downstairs and kicks, little brother's butt if he proposes a  theory that's incompatible with any of that. So this is the most widely spread  view among Christians today. And I'm going to continue this. I'm going to put up  now the the few that I'm going to argue for, which is,  

Bob Zomermaand - I just wanted to ask you a question about that. Now, that the last one that you had, there's that kind of the, the view that, that in practice, it  becomes that it's the religious leader who can tell you about the really stuff  about nature? 

Dr Clouser - No, no nature is known by observation and reasoning. And List  View Christians make theories just the same as non Christians. And they  discover truth about nature. It's that super nature just checks that your theory  doesn't contradict a revealed truth.  

Bob Zomermaand - So it's about contradiction, contradiction.  

Dr. Clouser - Okay, so that's where the church authorities come in, because  somebody's got to do that. So they sit and look at the theories and they decide  whether they need to butt in and say, give it up. And there's a notorious case of  this. Of course, it's just a beaten to death, which is that when Galileo proposed  that the Earth goes around the sun rather than the other way around, Bishop  Bellarmine said, No, you can't say that. You have to recant it. And Galileo had a  wonderful answer, the habit, the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the  heavens go. And I think that's exactly right. In that case, the church made him  recant it. They didn't treat him nearly as badly as some of the some people  make out. Actually, the two guys knew one another and had for a long time.  They, they spent socially they were friends. But Bellarmine said, Well, I'm a  bishop, and I've got to think that scripture was inspired by God. Of course, we  do believe that. But that doesn't mean that the Bible is there to tell us how to  heaven. It's not there as a book of astronomy, biology, geology, it's a book of  redemption. It's a history of God's redemptive contact with the human race. And  we we actually are not doing it a favor by trying to read other stuff into it. So lI  think Galileo got that one? Right. 

Bob Zomermaand - Okay, can you give me some example of your second one?  Where the religious, the blind leap of faith?  

Dr. Clouser - Yeah. Well, I think that expression is associated with Kierkegaard  largely. And Kierkegaard says a lot of things that that sound exactly like this.  Belief in God has nothing to do with reason. It's to reason that looks absurd.  That's one of his favorite characterizations of the term that he uses a lot. And so  I explained that in my first book, and I use Kierkegaard as a great example. And  a number of scholars whose specialty is Kierkegaard wrote to me and said, You  quoted him, right. And he does say that, and it sounds like this is what he's  saying. But actually, if you if you do a more careful study, and you see how he  used terms, he holds the view you're advocating. So I left it in the book, as an  example. And I have a footnote that says, some Kierkegaard scholars corrected  me about this and told me he really held the view that I do. But it doesn't sound  that way. That's still what he did say is the perfect example. It's completely  walled off. There are other more contemporary examples. So I can give you  Stephen Jay Gould, who was a prominent biologist in the 20th century, and was  talking about biology and the theory of evolution and things like that, when it  came to relating it to religion. He said, the two camps have anything to do with  one another. They don't contradict each other. They're entirely different realms.  One is, what happened here on Earth, the other has to do with God and the  supernatural and so on. And they just don't even they can't even conflict.  

Bob Zomermaand – Oh so not only do they not conflict, they can't  

Dr. Clouser - They can't conflict. They can't confirm. They can't do anything to  each other. Okay? It's good. They're so separated. Yeah, that's right. So he  called them two independent realms of magisterium, of teaching. Okay, and  there's no overlap. Okay, so given all this, what are we going to propose? What  is it that Dooyeweerd pursues in constructing a Christian philosophy that's going to look like this. Now that we know what a religious belief is, that it's a divinity  belief, right? I can't just say religious belief. Baptism is a religious belief. So is  circumcision, so is observing a holy day, that's what we're talking about. We're  talking about what's at the heart of every religion. And what's at the heart of  every one is a belief in something is divine, and it wants to tell us how we can  attain proper relations of the Divine. So this is the way I'm going to say this is the reverse of this is some religious belief or other, whether that's in the true God or  the full or a false one, that determines how reason makes theories. It's going to  do that, because putting something other than God in the slot of the uncreated  Creator of all else, and let's see, called it in Dallas, and called the unproduced  producer of all else. That's going to make a very big difference to how we do our

theories. And I'm going to say this in advance, that does not mean that if you're  a Christian, and you read scripture, and you pray, you'll think of a hypothesis of  Adams. Or you'll think about another hypothesis, that goes another way is ego,  super ego, or whatever the whatever the proposals are, that's not it, it won't  

hand you the guess that a theory makes. What it will do is require that any  guess have a particular kind of nature, namely, same nature as the Divinity  belief. So if a materialist makes a hypothesis that he's consistent, the hypothesis is going to be something purely physical. For example, and we're going to say  that, because God transcends the world has brought into existence, all those  different kinds of properties that I was pointing to before they become fields of  study, that God transcends them all and isn't identical with any one of them. So  you don't put any event into this slot. So the divine isn't the mathematical or the  physical, or the spatial, or the logical, or any mix and match combination. Those  are all created by God. And that's the way it's going to make a very big  difference in a big impact. Why don't we stop here for now, because this is a lot  to take in. So think it over