-William James, 1902
As I have engaged in debates on theism, I have been fascinated by the existence of theology. Believing in religion is bad enough, but to make a career of offering up absurd rationalizations and hairsplittings in its defense, in tomes of unread pablum, is surely worse (Ed note- and who, exactly, do you think reads this blog?). There are many sub-disciplines of theology of varying delusion, ranging from church history, biblical exegesis, and historical criticism, to the apologetics and dogmatics (even pneumatology!) that I focus on here.
My model of religion (following Carl Jung and William James, and consistent with contemporary evidence) is that it expresses vital psychological dynamics generated by the unconscious, which has personal, cultural, and universal components. The unconscious does not need to template itself to reality as the conscious mind does- it fantasizes, wishes, and dreams (and motivates). It is free from constraints of time and space, generating inchoate ideas of the supernatural. Religion is the practice whereby people coordinate their inner worlds into numinous social, philosophical, ethical, artistic, and therapeutic communities, seizing on key symbols to express the inexpressible.
If this were all, it would not be so bad, but the typical practice is to believe that the symbol is not a symbol, but is real- that divinity is not a metaphor but the personal description of a prophet, that the father in heaven is not a symbol of transcendence and life, but an actual ruler, comforter, and judge, and that the world itself, instead of being what it is, is something else, created by the father figure and destined to some apocalyptic end, hopefully imminent, followed by personal immortality. Religions make supernatural phenomena a focus- even a test- of adherence, bonding members by communal dreams. These projections of the unconscious are natural and numinous, but of course have nothing to do with outer reality. Indeed their whole power comes from their disagreement with outer reality- the more preposterous the better, as exemplified by miracles.
This error is carried to great lengths by those who devote their waking moments and mental energies to justifying the dreamscape that is religion, posing putatively rational arguments and sophistry of all kinds to ward off the suspicion that their emperor not only has no clothes, but no reality at all. Since all honest theists acknowledge that the mystery of faith is at its root inexplicable and irrational (gloriously so), it seems odd that there is a class of people employed to find just the opposite. Strange, but humans come in different kinds, and some operate on a more conscious, ego-driven level than others, feeling the mystic impulse, (one hopes), but unwilling to give up reason. They must find ways to rationalize the irrational, to square the circle.
One simple sign of the oddity of theology is its parochial nature. Science, art, and technology are international- one discovery is the world's discovery- universally appreciated, applied, and added to the growing corpus. No special efforts at ecumenical science need be hammered out across fractious borders. Religion, on the other hand, has as its criterion traditions of psychological symbolism that are often recognizable by all, but are also culturally specific, sometimes requiring prodigious feats of indoctrination and credulity. It is all too easy for one tradition to dismiss the absurd beliefs of its rivals, a very modest skepticism being sufficient to render biting, dismissive, and accurate critiques. How odd, then, that the beam in one's own eye should be so invisible!
Yet so it is, and schools of theology of all kinds press on to organize, categorize, and systematize what is inherently artistic and irrational- what should never have been taken literally in the first place.
Incidental links:
A philosophy podcast interviews theologian (or possibly ex-theologian!) and fellow-biophilic Don Cupitt, apropos of this blog entry.
Roger Ebert reviews Ben Stein, ID, and Expelled.
PS: Apropos cartoon
A couple more quotes from William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience:
A couple more quotes from William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience:
I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any of the other wider affairs of life, in which our passions our our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it can not now secure it.
The pivot round which the religious live, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in this private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
