Escaping from Between two Extremist Poles
I believe it is important to promote what I take to be a healthful middle ground between two dangerous religious poles that exist. On the one hand, there are those who openly, inwardly, or both, mock or simply dismiss the very ideas of God, religion, and man’s need and yearning for the two. What I call the radical atheists, e.g., Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are typified but such dismissiveness, though it is not just the radical atheists who mock and deride God and religion. On the other hand, there are those devotees of religion who are overly and non-critically zealous and accepting of religious dogma, while at the same time seemingly ignorant of the inherent fallibility of all humans.
There are, of course, exceptions; not everyone fits neatly in either pole or between. But it is my impression that the majority of people discussing religion in the public sphere, e.g., radio, TV, newspapers and magazines (those sources with the widest audience), tend to fall into one of these two groups.
Again, my concern is to promote the middle ground between these two poles. I take that middle ground to consist not necessarily of belief in God (though it by no means excludes it) but in taking religion and man’s religious yearnings seriously, while at the same time seeking to approach the issues as rationally and charitably as possible.
And with those who might claim that religion and belief in God do not fall under the purview of rationality, I would disagree for two reasons. First, insofar as there may be respects in which God and religion concern things beyond human understanding or things that are ineffable, that does not mean that reason is excluded, since we should use reason to help figure out what exactly is beyond our understanding or ineffable. Second, while there may well be limits to our understanding and to our ability to conceptualize God, that does not imply that religion and spirituality are exempt from rational and critical analysis. Again, as far as possible, reason should be used to help distinguish nonsense from things beyond our understanding.
I’ll address in the next post why I think the lack of such a middle ground in public discussions of God and religion is dangerous.
2 thoughts on “Escaping from Between two Extremist Poles”
I was raised fundamentalist, and so I’ve had plenty of experience with unreasonable faith and also with rabid skepticism. At this point, my preference is for precisely the kind of moderation that you explain. However, I find that I enjoy the fact that our profession reverses the popular tendency towards default theism. Among people who have worked through the arguments for the existence of God, it is harder to find faith consistent with reason-responsiveness. Few of the faithful would claim that their belief in God or their membership in a religious community is truth-tracking, and that is a problem worth exploring. I recognize that someone who maintains their faith in spite of the powerful arguments against it is resolutely applying her faculties to a difficult and worthy challenge. I respect thoughtful faith because of the way that the faithful recognize that they are traveling against the grain. I respect the strenuous exercise of reason there.
In our profession, believers are often a little bit sheepish about their belief. I think there’s wisdom in that sheepishness, especially because it opens just the dialogue you’ve described. That’s why, when I ask if a fellow philosopher or a potential friend believes in God, I don’t really care about the answer: I care about the reasons and motivations behind the answer. When they have the gentleness of the thought you’ve offered here, I’m doubly glad to have asked.
Thanks Josh. I would agree about the value of our profession reversing the popular trend toward default theism. However, I still find it frustrating that that reversal so often goes to the opposite extreme of dismissiveness. The root of that dismissiveness, it seems to me, is the assumption that all the arguments for god are bad, and a large part of their being bad is due to the kind of god that is argued for, namely, some all loving, all powerful, etc., GOD. Along with such a conception of god come various paradoxes, the problem of evil, and various other problems. I would love to see a serious re-evaluation of reasons for the existence of a god that tries to achieve some sort of reflective equilibrium between what we think we know about the world, what kind of god makes sense given what we think we know (including what kind of relationship between god and humanity makes sense), and the reasons one might believe in such a god.
The two posts on this blog about religious extremism are taken from a blog I had started a year ago, but never really did much with. The other main post I did then concerned possible reasons for belief in a god (not that of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.). I’ll repost it here.
Here’s the original place:
http://religiousanimal.blogspot.com/