Religion as a Form of Hope: Reflections by a Lifelong Agnostic
Goodheart, Eugene
ARTICLES Religion as a Form of Hope Reflections by a Lifelong Agnostic EUGENE GOODHEART It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion. Because for most of my life...
...Tocqueville speaks of religion as a form of hope, implying that there are other forms of hope, for instance, the secular hope for a just and harmonious world...
...The difference between religion and the arts is that for religion in its dogmatic manifestations the question is answerable, if not necessarily convincingly, whereas for the arts it remains controversial or unanswerable, though necessary...
...Lucidity is simply not enough, for it is addressed to the mind and not to the heart...
...Again, the disadvantage of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Heraclitian hostility to any idea of continuity...
...It is a salutary warning, but it should be accompanied by concern that the state unchecked by civil institutions like churches can become a tyranny...
...Would he say that he had committed “a sort of moral violence” upon himself...
...and Bishop Desmond Tutu...
...By contrast, Enlightenment deism affirms intelligent design against the Christian view of the incommensurable mystery of God...
...I begin with Alexis de Tocqueville’s comment from Democracy in America: Alone among all the beings, man shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist: he scorns life and fears nothingness...
...Moreover, in assuming that a science of society, a product of Enlightenment thought (see the scientism of Comte and Marx) was possible, it has provided tyrants with an ideological justification for tyranny...
...Neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have in effect revived the Enlightenment dream of a world free of all religious “superstition...
...But the claim that there is something that cannot be explained by materialism does not, indeed should not, prevent the natural sciences from proceeding on materialist assumptions, so long as they resist the temptation to claim that science can explain everything...
...Only by a kind of aberration of the intellect and with the aid of a sort of moral violence exercised on their own nature do men stray from religious beliefs...
...Imagine the civil rights movement in America and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa without the religious inspiration of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...
...The functioning of consciousness, as distinguished from its origin, cannot be reduced to natural selection...
...Lilla notes that “Hegel agrees with Rousseau: philosophy can perhaps understand a society, but it can never create one...
...He is the author of many books of cultural criticism as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew...
...Militant atheism and religious fundamentalism have certainty in common, which tends to support coercive behavior...
...No, but we need to acknowledge that the emergence of consciousness, with its capacity for intellectual creation and spiritual aspiration, is still something of a mystery...
...Rousseau tried to show that man needs religion, at the core of his being because that core is moral….[A]ctions relate to something higher than themselves...
...Utopia is a secular paradise, which, as Tocqueville knew from his knowledge of history and human nature, turns into dystopia (not his word...
...When an Enlightened politics allows for religious freedom, it may actually promote religious life...
...In The Moral Minority, Brooke Allen reminds us that the founding fathers were deists or perhaps atheists disguised as deists...
...In The Life of the Mind, Arendt argues persuasively for the distinction between brain and mind...
...Allen notes John Adams’s opposition to Enlightenment utopianism as well as religious orthodoxy...
...In The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, Mark Lilla shows how powerful the role of religion in society has been throughout history...
...Evolutionary theory affirms a mindless, arational force as the cause or motive of plant, animal, and human development...
...As conditioned beings, we can only hope to modify and reshape conditions, but not recreate ourselves ex nihilo (out of the abyss...
...There is little in the neo-Darwinian view that can explain how the social, cultural, religious, and political activities of human beings emerge from natural selection, despite the ideological insistence that it does...
...What I find particularly interesting in Allen’s exposition is the consequence, intended or not, of the separation of church and state, “an explosion of thriving sects just as free-market capitalism is creating an explosion of new wealth...
...In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume sets up a trialogue among a deist who believes that the world (the universe, the cosmos...
...Who experiences their child’s conception and birth without apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity and fatality in a language of “continuity...
...Their openness to arguments on either side seems very much in the spirit of democracy...
...If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity...
...What has provoked me as an agnostic to defend the existence of religion (without embracing it...
...It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought things we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is formed...
...The sentence is the very model of ambivalence, beginning as it does in a spirit of enthusiasm for human aspiration beyond the material only to end in a vision of religious oppression...
...I think Musil is on to something when he assigns the word to what remains after we have achieved everything that we set out to achieve...
...In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between thinking and cognition...
...None can doubt that it was only the idea of this other god [the monotheist god of Moses] that replaced Jahve that enabled the people of Israel to surmount all hardships and to survive until our time...
...is the product of intelligent design, an orthodox believer in the incommensurable mystery of creation, and a skeptic who makes trouble for both views...
...an invincible inclination leads them back to them...
...Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such...
...I think it is certainly true for religion as well as “works of art,” where, for instance, the question of why we suffer is a recurrent one—recurrent because no answer, however interesting and moving, is finally satisfactory...
...What profanation of the grandiose multiformity of human life we commit if we recognize as sole motives those springing from material needs, from what sources certain ideas, especially religious ones, derive the power with which they subjugate individuals and peoples...
...So, she argues, it is a travesty of justice for the judicial strict constructionists (so called), who are a virtual majority on the Supreme Court, to undermine the separation of church and state...
...I am not a believer, and I do not think of my disbelief as a result “of moral violence exercised on [my] own nature...
...The first sentence reads like an anticipation of existentialism— with its confrontation with the abyss (“a natural disgust for existence”) and its drive to transcend it...
...Why was I born blind...
...he had a secularized Calvinist view of the depravity of human nature...
...They are of course incapable of seeing the fanatical motes in their own eyes...
...Of course, the brain is subject to change as a result of aging (in a positive direction as it matures and in a negative as it grows old or diseased or subject to accidents), but that is quite different from changes produced by and on the mind in the areas of politics, art, social development, and religious experience...
...Commit it to the flames...
...What it needs to resist, and what the founding fathers succeeded in resisting, is the inclination to establish reason as a substitute religious ideal and to anathematize all other religions...
...At the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc...
...It was a faith that did not survive disillusionment...
...Politics, society, religion, literature, and the arts are after all in part the result of, yes, intelligent design (a misconceived conception only when applied to origins...
...Is this true...
...it cannot satisfy religious appetites...
...Moreover, he betrays an admiration for the sustaining effect of religious belief in the survival of the Jewish people, his people...
...When scientists philosophize about the world, they resist dualisms between brain and mind, matter and spirit, as if to allow them would undermine the scientific enterprise...
...The brain, the tool of the mind, is indeed no more subject to change through the development of new mental faculties than the human hand is changed by the invention of new implements or by the enormous tangible change they effect in our environment...
...thinking is the search for meaning...
...Evolutionary theory based on the fossil record has established with a high degree of probability the role of natural selection in the origin of species...
...See his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses...
...The idea endorsed by the orthodox believer and tentatively by the skeptic is that creation is a result of vegetative generation...
...In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil remarks, “The most peculiar of all the peculiarities of the word ‘soul...
...Modern science, an offspring of the Enlightenment, has made enormous progress in curing diseases and prolonging life, but modern political and social history has also been one of unparalleled violence, a result in no small part of the contribution science has made to technological development...
...Of course, many of the philosophes were deists, but their deism conflated creation with the creator, and whatever hope they felt was directed toward the possibility of establishing an earthly paradise...
...Lilla’s lucidity is an impressive exposition of a history of religion as an informing power of most, if not all, societies, but it does not provide a sufficient answer to it...
...Natural selection may indeed have produced the human brain...
...ARTICLES Religion as a Form of Hope Reflections by a Lifelong Agnostic EUGENE GOODHEART It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion...
...Yet I find this passage from Tocqueville compelling...
...Tocqueville did not know existentialism, but he did know the Enlightenment and its animus against institutional religion...
...Those who supported the French and Russian revolutions were inspired by a faith that human beings could transcend their irrational and selfish impulses and achieve universal liberty, fraternity, and equality...
...But the burden of his book shows how weak Enlightenment lucidity is against religious orthodoxies...
...What this shows is that the Enlightenment is not necessarily an antidote to religion...
...But the mind of man, its concerns and its faculties, is affected both by the changes in the world, whose meaningfulness it examines, and perhaps even more decisively, by its own activities...
...Where it founders and in foundering compensates by becoming stridently ideological is in its attempt to explain all human achievement in evolutionary terms...
...Why, one might ask, does one persist in asking questions that one knows are ultimately unanswerable...
...Arendt’s extreme formulation points to a certain absence of spiritual imagination in positivism...
...The problem then is in the gap between natural selection and the activity of a creature capable of conscious activity...
...This is militant rationalism, not reasonableness...
...He can’t succumb, given his view that the human condition is incorrigibly neurotic...
...But the puzzle remains: how did consciousness and reason, which the human brain makes possible, emerge from vegetative generation...
...Cognition (science...
...They have, in fact, gone beyond Enlightenment deism to an open declaration of atheism, grounded in the seemingly paradoxical view that the creation of a species possessed of the faculty of reason is the result of mindless natural selection...
...Agnostics put up with uncertainty and doubt...
...These different instincts constantly drive his soul toward contemplation of another world, and it is religion that guides it there...
...Worldly fulfillment turns out to be an illusion, for some need remains that our achievements and pleasures cannot satisfy...
...I say “intended or not,” because of my doubt that this is what Jefferson and Madison had in mind...
...The evidence of Tocqueville’s life does not make him out to be much of a believer...
...The world has had more than its share of the tyranny of stateimposed religious fundamentalism and militant atheism...
...The separation of church and state protects against both theocracy and secular utopianism that would do away with religion...
...The prevalence of fundamentalism in various forms, particularly in its fanatical and murderous manifestations both in the developed and the developing worlds, would seem to be a caution against the embrace of religion...
...As people get older they become “aware of something for which they urgently need a name they cannot find until they finally resort, reluctantly, to the name they originally despised...
...Even Diotima and Arnheim were shy of using it without a modifier, for it is still possible to speak of having a great, noble, craven, daring, or debased soul, but to come right out with ‘my soul’ is something we cannot bring ourselves to do...
...is that young people cannot pronounce it without laughing...
...Should we then dismiss what Tocqueville writes as hyperbole...
...Religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual…” He differs from the neo-Darwinists, who show only contempt for religion, because he does not succumb to the radical Enlightenment illusion that religion can be eradicated...
...Lilla writes from an Enlightenment perspective: “We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by the light of revelation...
...We need also to remember that Freud thought of his own achievement as comparable to that of Moses...
...Religion works on hearts and minds through feeling and thought, while philosophy works through thought alone...
...Hume excoriates the Bible in the following manner: “If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number...
...If the Enlightenment led to Darwin’s freedom to formulate a science hostile to religious orthodoxy about the creation, it also, in its pre-Darwinian manifestation, viewed creation as the product of a rational deity...
...Because for most of my life I thought of myself as an atheist (and in certain moods still do), I never imagined that I would find myself a defender...
...is the search for knowledge and truth...
...But illusion for psychoanalysis is psychological reality, and he addressed the subject with the kind of seriousness missing in the neo-Darwinian approach...
...Many human beings, even highly educated ones, do not live their lives with the continuous consciousness that they are in pursuit of meaning and purpose, but meaning and purpose would seem to be implicit in their moods of depression, when they suddenly stop and wonder what their lives are about...
...Disbelief is an accident...
...Experience tells us, as Arendt points out, that the mind has what the brain does not have, a changing history affected by the outside world...
...Moses and Monotheism is the work of an ambivalent imagination...
...At the end of Hume’s essay, the skeptic sides somewhat reluctantly with the rationalist position that favors intelligent design...
...Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion...
...Can one live contentedly and “meaningfully” without religion...
...But scientists and philosophers of positivistic disposition who declare themselves atheists may dismiss the unanswerables as nonquestions and yet, pace Arendt, continue to be able to answer the answerable questions...
...First is its legacy in literature and the arts and, second, the tone deafness of neoDarwinians who see nothing in the religious life except superstition and fanaticism...
...faith alone is the permanent state of humanity...
...For the godless existentialist (there are also religious existentialists), transcendence means a kind of self-creation, which from a religious perspective is blasphemy or heresy...
...Why is my best friend paralyzed...
...Why is my daughter retarded...
...Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University...
...Sigmund Freud was an atheist who regarded religion as “illusion...
...Neo-Darwinism rejects both intelligent design and mystery by affirming natural selection...
...The empirical answer is, of course, “yes...
...The great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence...
...Reinhold Niebuhr says somewhere that although theology makes bad science, science makes bad theology...
...The great merit of traditional religious worldviews (which naturally must be distinguished from their work in the legitimation of specific systems of domination and exploitation) has been the concern with man-in-the-cosmos, man in species-being, and the contingency of life...
...An advantage of religious faith in its orthodox versions is that it can survive all worldly disillusionments, because of a belief in or hope for “another world...
...The religious attempt to explain...
...Who were the last to have burned the books...
...Does this mean that we have to abandon natural selection as a cause or explanation of the origin of species...
...Certainly, the Enlightenment fostered this kind of hope, though the history of its realization is for the most part one of disappointment...
...Finally, what marks Freud off from the neoDarwinists is his hostility to reductionist materialism and his identification with the human aspiration toward abstraction and spiritual fulfillment...
...Benedict Anderson, a historian with Enlightenment and Marxist sympathies, turns out to be an eloquent witness for the religious imagination against its detractors in the camp of scientific progress...
...Philosophers have generally argued for its necessity...
...Religion therefore is only a particular form of hope itself...
...Thomas Paine speaks of “human inventions [that is, institutional religions] set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit...
...In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation...
...The religion that oppresses is also the religion that “kept alive…a tradition” that sustained a people...
...Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy reminds us that the Enlightenment did not so much reject religious feeling as displace it to the earthly realm...
...Hume may be speaking metaphorically here, but the spirit of the statement is tyrannical...
...Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning fact and existence...
...The authors of our Constitution advocated the separation from a fear of the detrimental effect an established church might have both on political life and religious liberty...
...The extraordinary survival of thousands of years of Buddhism, or Christianity or Islam [Judaism oddly not mentioned] in dozens of different formations attests to their imaginative response to the burden of suffering—disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death...
...Even Hobbes, who saw religion as “destabilizing to any decent order,” acknowledged that “it appeals to inner spiritual experience and conscience...
...It may be because as creatures possessed by a need for purpose and meaning in life we simply cannot resist the impulse to ask these questions...
...Like the neoDarwinists, Freud views religion as a pathological condition...
...That question requires a nuanced answer...
...I refer rather to the attachment to certain words (god terms) that define our humanity, for instance, the word “soul...
...Even for unbelievers, the language of religion is inescapable, and by that I don’t mean to include reflexive remarks such as, “God help us...
Vol. 56 • October 2009 • No. 4
