Taught By Professor Tyler Roberts, Ph.D., Harvard University,
Grinnell College)
Published by The Great Courses
Scope
With the rise of the Christian right and militant Islam has come a rise in vocal atheisms warning us of the irrationality and violence inherent in religion. Sam Harris’s recent The End of Faith is a much -- lauded contribution to this chorus. Although deeply problematic, the book highlights four issues to explore in the remaining lectures: religion as a cause of violence, the possibility of religious “progress,” the capacity of religions to acknowledge the truth of other religions, and the relation between faith and scientific reason. This lecture examines the first two. How do we identify the historical causes of something like the Holocaust? What weight do we assign, respectively, to Christian anti-Semitism and Enlightenment theories of race? And can we argue that the work of a Barth or a Schtissler -- Fiorenza represents an advance in religious thinking, or do they simply represent religious capitulation to modernity?
Outline
Over the course of these lectures, we have examined numerous religious approaches to the question of faith.
A. In the Enlightenment, some philosophers and religious thinkers, for example, Locke and Kant, argued for a rational, moral faith. Schleiermacher argued for a religion based in experience.
B. In the 19th century, Christians and Jews articulated a variety of liberal perspectives that, in one way or another, meshed the thinking of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
C. In the 20th century, such thinkers as Barth and Rosenzweig turned to a vision of revelation critical of the religious thought of the Enlightenment and the 19th century.
II. The entry of conservative political forms of Christianity and Islam onto the world stage in the 1970s has led some scholars and cultural critics to raise questions about the dangers of religion in the modem world.
A. Especially since the events of September ll, 2001, a rash of books and articles have been written that some refer to collectively as the “new atheism.”
B. Exploring some of the arguments made in these texts gives us the opportunity to consider the question of atheism and suspicion today, which in turn, can allow us to consider some of the most important issues religious thought needs to address in our contemporary situation.
C. Two questions will organize the rest of the lectures in the course:
1. Is religion rational?
2. Does religious faith lead to intolerance and, thus, to violence? '
III. Sam Harris is an uncompromising critic of religion whose position can best be summed up in his own words: “Religious faith represents a so uncompromising misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity.”
A. Harris’s basic points are as follows:
1. The first prong of Harris’s argument is that religion is essentially irrational fundamentalism and that modernist religious thinkers are caught in an untenable position between this irrationality and modern reason.
2. The inherent intolerance of religion leads to violence.
Religion is the cause of much of the violence that afflicts the world today. The second prong of Harris’s argument is that religion is not simply irrational but inherently dangerous.
B. Harris fails to think historically enough about religion, and as a result, he takes modem fundamentalism and its literal interpretation of Scripture as the essence of religion without realizing that, as we have seen in This course, fundamentalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon.
IV. Let’s turn briefly from the question of the rationality of religion to consider the question of the rational study of religion through Daniel Dennett’s 2006 book, Breaking the Spell.
A. One of the key points Dennett makes is that we can only really understand religion if we examine it in the same way that we explore and study any other human phenomena.
B. But to say this is to threaten to break two spells -- first, the religious spell, and second, the taboo against thinking of religion as a natural phenomenon among many.
C. Dennett’s project is twofold. First, he seeks to give an account of how religion emerged as the powerful form it is today. Second, he wants to evaluate whether religion is good or bad.
D.He is correct when he says that many have refused to break the taboo against the naturalistic study of religion, but he ignores the religious thinkers we have discussed who have shown great willingness to direct the hermeneutics of suspicion to their own religious traditions.
E. We should note that this fits very well. with Bar1h’s criticisms of religion, of those who, as Dennett puts it, believe in belief as opposed to believing in God.
V. If we are to carefully and reasonably study religion, it seems that we should start from the idea that religion has taken many forms over the course of human history -- some have been intolerant and violent, and some haven’t; some have been open to philosophical reason and critical thinking, and some haven’t. Like other human endeavors, human religiosity is always mixed with the best and worst that human beings have to offer one another.
Suggested Reading:
Dawkins, The God Delusion
Harris, The End of Faith.
Lilla, The Stillborn God.
McGrath, Dawkins’ God.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why does Sam Harris believe that real religion is inherently intolerant?
2. According to Daniel Dennett, what spells do we break when that we study religion in the same way that we study any other human phenomena?
Lecture Thirty-Three -- Transcript
New Atheisms
Over the course of these lectures, we’ve examined numerous religious approaches to the question of faith. In the Enlightenment some philosophers and religious thinkers -- for example, Locke and Kant -- argued for a rational, moral faith. Schleiermacher, at the beginning of the l9th century and influenced by the Pietists, argued for a religion based in experience, As the l9th century progressed, Christians and Jews articulated a variety of liberal perspectives on their religions that in one way or another meshed Kant’s emphasis on religious morality, Schleiermacher’s experientialism, and Hegel’s historical consciousness. This liberalism, as we’ve seen, sparked a reaction as later in the century an emerging Fundamentalism argued for a faith grounded in the inerrant word of scripture and the need to reconstruct Western society on this scriptural basis.
In the 20th century, some continued to support liberal theology, and the Fundamentalists became more and more critical of the secularization of Western society and dominant forms of modernist Christianity. Others, however, such as Barth and Rosenzweig, turned to a vision of revelation critical of the philosophical autonomy and human-centered religious thought of the Enlightenment and the 19th century. As the 20th century unfolded, some religious thinkers became critical of what they saw as theological otherworldliness and so sought to ground faith in an immersion in the world that finds God in, and through, the turn to suffering and marginalization. This idea was taken up by postmodern religious thinkers, who defended a strong concept of revelation understood not as the reception of propositional knowledge about God, but as a kind of opening to new possibility that draws us out of our self-centered world in engagement with others.
Finally, returning to the question of Fundamentalism, in the last lecture we saw a faith grounded in strict adherence to a concrete revelation -- for Christians, the inerrant scripture; for Jews, the written and oral law; for Muslims, the Qur’an and the Sunna -- and this turn to this pure source in each of these traditions dictated specific rules for all aspects of life. At about the halfway point of these lectures, Feuerbach and the masters of suspicion interrupted our exploration of faith with their hermeneutics of suspicion through which they dismissed religious faith as illusory, self deceptive, and dangerous. Since our lectures on those figures, though, we’ve focused primarily on how the hermeneutics of suspicion was appropriated by certain 20th-century religious thinkers.
But now, as we enter the final lectures of the course, I want to return to the question of anti-religious suspicion -- to criticisms of religion leveled by secular thinkers, who -- like Marx and Freud especially -- believe that human beings are better off without religion. I want to do this for two reasons. First, in the past 20 years and especially since the 9/11 attacks by Islamist terrorists, a hard-hitting “new atheism,” as some have called it, has entered onto the American scene of the academic and popular press, where we find book titles such as The Goa' Delusion by the biologist Richard Dawkins, who has been writing against religion since the late ’80s; The End of Faith, the much -- lauded book by Sam Harris; Why God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the cultural critic Christopher Hitchens, who also has just recently published The Portable Atheist. This new atheism is an interesting phenomenon, and I want to explore it from a couple of different angles in this lecture.
But the other reason I am turning to these criticisms of religion at this point is that the new atheists raise questions that I think are on a lot of minds today, and that all of us who study religion or practice some kind of religious faith need to grapple with. They also are questions that, in one way or another, have been with us all along in this course, but are today being posed with new vigor. There are two questions that l’m particularly interested in and that will organize the rest of the lectures in this course. First: Is religion rational? Second: Does religious faith lead to intolerance, and thus to violence?
In this lecture I want to discuss the way Sam Harris asks these questions, and then in the final three lectures of the course I want to ask them again-considering them in light of some of the ideas we’ve discussed in this course, and in light of some contemporary discussions and debates. I’ll spend about half this lecture on Harris and these questions, and then I want to conclude this lecture by turning to the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his proposals for submitting religion to scientific, naturalistic study.
Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2005 PEN Award for Non-Fiction. It was lauded in review after review for its courageous attack on what one reviewer called the “dangers and absurdities of organized religion.” Harris’s fundamental position can best be summed up in his own words. He writes: “Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity.” This word “uncompromising” in this passage is a crucial one in ways, I think, that are both intended and not intended by Harris. It’s intended because Harris views religion, in its essential aspects, as a form of Fundamentalism. That is, what Harris calls “genuine religion” is religion that is so uncompromising in its adherence to a literalist reliance on scripture that it commits the religious to beliefs that are not supported by evidence and so simply cannot be justified in terms of modem rationality.
There is, then, a sharp, indelible line that Harris draws between the modern secular world-View and religion -- and for Harris, religion here, then, is inherently premodem and irrational, and it’s grounded in a propositional view of scriptural revelation. What about all the modernist and postmodernist religious thinkers we’ve been exploring in these lectures who don’t fit into either category of modem secularist or premodem Fundamentalist? Harris certainly recognizes that many efforts have been made by religious thinkers to think and live religion in modern or postmodern terms-he calls these folks “religious moderates”-but he thinks that their faith is not “genuine” religion, but rather a kind of impossible hybrid of religion and modern secularism. Two quotes from Harris; first: “The moderation we see among non-Fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.” A second quote
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance -- and it has no bona tides, in religious terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism By failing to live by the letter of the texts while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
So, these so-called “religious moderates,” according to Harris, have been forced by some degree of intellectual honesty to compromise scriptural faith and have accepted “secular knowledge.” It’s not so much that they are necessarily ignorant of scripture, but that secular knowledge has forced them to ignore or reject aspects of the scriptures with which they’re just not comfortable.
I want to note three things about the ideas Harris expresses in these passages. First, he claims that, compared to Fundamentalists, “religious moderation” has no “bona tides,” as he puts it -- it’s not, as I’ve already indicated, genuine religion. Second, this claim depends on the assertion he makes that “faith has not evolved” -- which, in addition to following from his claim that true religious faith is literal adherence to scripture, means also that we should not consider traditions as processes of reasoning about faith, or that engagement with the world can produce new insights about faith that might lead believers to reinterpret or even downplay aspects of their scriptures. So, the first prong of Harris’s argument against religion is that religion is essentially irrational Fundamentalism, and that modernist religious thinkers are caught in an untenable position between this irrationality and modem reason.
But note the third point about these passages. Religious moderates, according to Harris, “tolerate” the Fundamentalists and in doing so betray both faith and reason. This brings us to the second prong of Harris’s argument -- that religion is not simply irrational, but is inherently dangerous. This danger can take terrible forms, such as terrorist attacks, but the problem is not simply with violent extremists-but, rather, inheres in the very source of religious faith, according to Harris. Central to the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on Harris’s reading, is the claim that God has blessed those who believe in his word, but not anyone else. So, the Jew believes that the Jews are chosen people, the recipient’s of God’s blessing, and that no other group has received this blessing. Christians and Muslims have their own version of this kind of exclusivistic belief. What this means for Harris is that those who are genuinely religious are inherently intolerant of other religious people and of those who are non-religious.
All religions [Harris writes] are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers is not an attitude that God endorses. While all ,faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, [cooperation between different religions] the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error, or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.
It’s this intolerance that leads to religious conflict and religious violence as these real believers try to, and feel completely justified in, imposing their religious views and institutions on others. As Harris points out here, this can be done in good conscience if it is believed that salvation is at stake, and so we do hear in these various religious traditions the idea that God wants us to impose our religion on you for your sake because this way you’ll be saved -- right? To the extent that moderation gives religion a good name, for Harris, it does us all a disservice-more, it is itself dangerous because it puts obstacles in the way of clear-sighted, rational examination of religion and so prevents us from seeing how dangerous religion really is.
Before, I said that Harris’s use of “uncompromising” to describe the way religious people use their minds was significant in ways that Harris had not intended. It’s significant, I think, because for all his claims about religion’s irrationality -- some of which do hit their target -- Harris’s own failures to think carefully about religion leave him as a kind of mirror image of the Fundamentalists he attacks.
More specifically, Harris fails to think historically enough about religion-and as a result, he takes modem Fundamentalism and its literal interpretation of scripture as the essence of religion without realizing, as we have seen in these lectures, that Fundamentalism itself is a distinctly modem phenomenon, a product of the 19th century. This l9th-century Fundamentalism is itself deeply ahistorical -- that is, it takes its own view of scriptural inerrancy as somehow the original view of the Bible when, in fact, Christians from a very early point in the tradition were reading the Bible in much more complicated ways
So, Harris’s ahistorical effort to reduce all religion to a single essence shaped by one form of religion reflects what I would call 'a kind of “secular Fundamentalism.” To make his argument, he, like the Fundamentalists he criticizes, ignores a vast amount of historical and conceptual complexity and paints the world in black and white. The fact that Harris does not think historically enough means that we need to give careful scrutiny to his two major claims about religion: first, that it is inherently irrational; and second, that it is inherently intolerant, and even violent.
We’ve seen in this course that in the modern period there has been a deep, extended discussion of the rationality of religion-and that a range of positions on this issue have been articulated. Harris is certainly right in noting that modern conceptions of reason have put new challenges to religious faith and religious traditions -- but, as I’ll discuss in a little more detail in the next lecture, Christians and Jews have been grappling with questions of reason and faith throughout their traditions. Given the debates we’ve discussed and this broader historical context, it becomes very difficult to accept at face value Hanis’s idea that religious thinkers have not carefully engaged questions of reason and used reason to develop their faiths. We’ve also seen in this course that many of the major religious thinkers of the modern Wes -- from Kant and Schleiermacher, to Rosenzweig and Rahner -- have thought carefully about the relations between different religions and in ways that should at least lead us to think twice before assuming that religious faith is inherently intolerant. We’ll have the chance to think again about this question in the last two lectures of the course.
Before moving on to these questions, I do want to move from the question of the rationality of religion to consider briefly the question of the rational study of religion. I want to do this by considering Daniel Dennett’s 2006 book Breaking the Spell. Dennett has a lot of sympathy for writers such as Harris, but he doesn’t use the word “atheist” very often. He does call himself a “godless philosopher” -- and those are his words-but he also says that it’s imperative, in examining religion, to make a real effort to understand those he is studying. At the same time, and rightly I think, he does say that to understand someone is not necessarily to agree with them. Further, and this is one of the key points Dennett makes in his book Breaking the Spell, we can only really understand religion if we examine it in the same way that we explore and study any other human phenomenon. But to say this is to run up against some resistance, to threaten to break two spells that some argue should not be broken.
The most obvious of these is the religious spell, and so Dennett considers the question whether scientific and historical efforts to understand and explain religion might weaken or destroy religious belief in the world. For Dennett, if it turns out that religion is a destructive force in the world, its spell should be broken -- but he also doesn’t want to prejudge that issue and is aware that subjecting religion to scientific study might have an adverse impact on religious belief. At the same time, he does think that there are some good reasons for suspecting that religion is a bad thing, a cause of violence and ignorance, and that the only responsible thing to do in that situation is to inquire into the origins, functions, and effects of religion. Again, he doesn’t claim to know that the religious spell should be broken, and he doesn’t rush to prove that it is the case, but he does think we have to ask the question. He’s setting up these questions in a very careful way. At this point, though, another spell comes into question. Dennett describes this spell as “the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”
Dennett makes a crucial point in identifying this taboo, one that numerous scholars of religion have been struggling against for many years. The taboo exists, and it takes many forms. It often takes the form of a political or a multicultural argument in something like: “You have no right to question or study my beliefs in a way that might cast doubt on them.” It can take the form that I see very often in my classes at Grinnell when a student says that we can’t define religion -- much less examine it academically -- because it’s so personal and ineffable that we really can’t talk about it. Or it can take the form argued for by some scholars of religion, perhaps most famously by Mircea Eliade -- whose method of religious studies was formative for the field in this country in the ’50s and ’60s.
As Dennett notes, Eliade believed that to try to explain religion naturalistically was to “reduce” it to something non-religious -- to social, or biological, or historical causes -- and so in doing so to miss the heart of religion, which is what Eliade called “the manifestation of the sacred.” We’ve seen that the naturalistic study of religion in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud has been around for a long time, but it is the case that in academia, in the study of religion, it’s only been in recent decades that this taboo has been broken in a big way. So, this project of carefully studying religion in a scientific or a naturalistic way does, in many respects, remain in its infancy. We do still see a division in the field between those who aim their scholarship at the appreciation of religion and those who seek to explain religion in naturalistic terms.
Dennett clearly favors the latter, and he tries to further this project through his own favored approach, evolutionary biology. With respect to his arguments about evolutionary biology and more generally with respect to his questions about naturalistic study of religion, there are complicated questions to raise about the limits of this approach to religion -- for all the scientific explanations in the world, no matter how well supported by experiment and evidence, they can’t prove in any final way anything about that which people claim is non-natural or transcends nature.
Science can tell us about natural things, but it must remain silent, in the end, regarding that which is claimed to be above or beyond nature. This is one reason why scientists say that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory since, in the end, it appeals to non-natural causes that by definition can’t be tested empirically. So, there are limits to the scientific approach to the study of religion, or the naturalistic approach. But still, we need to keep two things in mind. What science can do is offer naturalistic explanations for any and all religious phenomena in ways that seem so exhaustive and so persuasive to many that non-naturalistic explanations or accounts seem superfluous. Dennett, himself, is clear that such explanations are enough for him to conclude that there is no God.
More important, in my view, is the fact that whatever else religion might be, it does take place in the world -- it does involve behaviors that can be observed and, in many respects, explained and evaluated. So, there is a place for the kind of study of religion that Dennett is recommending. Since, as Dennett puts it, for so many people nothing matters more than religion, these kinds of behaviors and effects should be examined. Dennett’s project is thus two-fold. It’s, first, to give an account of how religion emerged as the powerful force it is today in and through the evolution of human beings, and he acknowledges that at this point his account is exceedingly sketchy, though not unpromising. The second part of the project is to evaluate whether religion is a good or bad thing.
As Dennett points out, we should not make the mistake of assuming that just because at some point in human evolution it was evolutionarily advantageous for human beings to think and behave in ways that led to the creation of religion, it is not necessarily the case that the final product that we have before us today is good for us. Thus, one of the final chapters of his book is called “Toward a Buyer’s Guide to Religions,” which essentially poses the question: Is it worth it? Or, as Dennett puts it: “Are people right that the best way to live a good life is through religion?” Or, again: “What are the pros and cons of religion? Is it worthy of the intense loyalty it has inspired in most of the people of the world? Does religion make us better?” Dennett clearly sees this question as involving a long-term project, and at this early point his questions and conclusions are modest ones. So, heinquires into the health benefits of religion and concludes that the verdict is mixed, and he -- in a very preliminary way-inquires into whether religion helps make people more moral and concludes that that’s probably unlikely. He also agrees with Harris that religious moderates must take more responsibility in bringing to account violent religious fanatics -- though, unlike Harris, he does not make a judgment on whether religion is inherently intolerant or violent.
Dennett is no doubt correct when he says that many scholars, believers, and others have for a long time refused to break the taboo against the naturalistic study of religion. But one group he ignores are the religious thinkers I’ve discussed in past lectures who have shown great willingness to direct the hermeneutics of suspicion to their own religious traditions. To cite two, Barth calls religion “unbelief” and the liberation theologians condemn the Catholic Church for its complicity in the oppression of the poor. Obviously, these thinkers ultimately defend belief in God, but they also will point out that it is precisely because of their faith in God that they feel able-indeed compelled-to criticize religion, to call it to account for the ways in which it can distort and damage human life. This speaks directly to one of Dennett’s more interesting arguments.
In his discussion of the evolution of religion, Dennett sees a major turning point in the transition from what he calls “folk religion,” which was based on belief in spirits and divination, to organized religion -- in which people became stewards of the ideas and beliefs that had emerged in their culture. This, on Dennett’s account, is the dawn of institutionalized religion -- the dawn of an era in human history when religious specialists, guardians, or stewards of these institutions emerged as powerful social figures. On Dennett’s reading, this institutionalization of religion brought with it a need to protect religious ideas and rites -- upon which the institution depended-from skeptics and critics, and this led to an emphasis on creeds and inquisitions, secrecy and arcane knowledge, on Dennett’s account. The key to all of this, for Dennett, is that there was a corresponding shift in the nature of human belief-a shift from belief in whatever supernatural agents or forces a particular group of people had developed over time to belief in the religious system that had become institutionalized. What we get now, Dennett says, is not belief in a God or gods, but belief in belief -- that is, belief in the institution, or belief in religion itself.
Whether or not Dennett’s evolutionary account of religion is accepted, this is a fascinating hypothesis, but we should note that it fits very well with Ba1th’s criticisms of religion as unbelief -- and with the religious perspectives of a number of the 20th-century thinkers We’ve discussed in recent lectures. Barth is critical of those who believe in their religion -- or, as Dennett puts it, believe in belief-as opposed to believing in God. For Barth, as we’ve seen, to believe in religion or to believe in Christianity is to substitute something human for God-and it’s to point to a phenomenon that we have to consider carefully as we engage in the kinds of critical questioning of religion that we see in Harris and Dennett.
It’s remarkable today, when one looks at religious discourses or other kinds of accounts of religious belief, how often one finds the idea expressed by religious and non-religious people alike that people believe in religion -- believe, for example, in Christianity or Judaism rather than believing in the Christian God or the Jewish God. What this shows us is the way in which religion, like many other elements of human culture, becomes a marker of identity-a way of establishing, confirming, and securing one’s place in the world. There’s certainly something right and important about this, for religion is a communal phenomenon -- a way in which people establish connections with each other and give shape to their lives. We’ve seen in thinkers such as Buber and Levinas that for some religious thinkers, God is to be found in, and through, our relations with others.
But the point that thinkers such as Barth and Tillich are making with their very strong emphasis on God’s transcendence, or that liberation theologians are making in their concern for the marginalized and the dehumanized, or that Bonhoeffer and Vattimo are making with their emphases on religion -- less Christianity and secularization, or that Ricoeur is making with his embrace of the hermeneutics of suspicion is that faith in God, as opposed to faith in religion or belief in belief; is always also forcing us to think critically about the bounds of identity and community -- about the way we create places for ourselves in the world that prevent us from being truly open to the new and to the other. For these thinkers, faith always involves the challenge to find one’s self not only in the human constructions by which we try to secure the world, as important as they might be, but in the divine force that transcends all these human constructions.
In conclusion, I should say that here I want to avoid falling into the kind of trap that I think Harris falls into. Harris makes some excellent points about the danger of religion, but for some reason he feels the need to argue that these dangers he sees go to the very heart of religion itself-that these dangers point us to something wrong with the very essence of religion, and that all those forms of religion that don’t exhibit the dangers he’s worried about aren’t genuine forms of religion at all. When I invoke Barth, and Tillich, and Rosenzweig, and Ricoeur, and the dynamic of faith and suspicion that I’ve been talking about in these lectures, I don’t want you to think that I am arguing that this represents real religion and that other forms of religion are false or in some way less than genuine.
It seems to me that if, with Harris and Dennett, we are to carefully and reasonably study religion, we should start from the idea that religion has taken many, many forms over the course of human history, and some of these forms of religion have been intolerant and violent, and some haven’t been. Some have been open to philosophical reason and critical thinking -- others have not. I’ll explore these questions further in the next three lectures, but I’ll finish this one with the suggestion that human religiosity, like other human endeavors to understand and shape the world, from politics to philosophy, are always mixed with the worst and the best that human beings have to offer one another.
