beyond the polarity of being/nonbeing)—as if it were a supranatural infinite person after all—with all the human traits of thinking, planning, knowing, willing, loving, forgiving, working out huge purposes for every element of the cosmos and history, and so forth, in supranatural personal capacities—which contradicts the idea of its incommensurable attribution or ultimacy or infinity, its definition as not “a being.” Is it any wonder that some influential medical doctors are unaware of the self-contradictions of much modern theology—so still posit a supranatural being such as God of “love” or “design” “outside time and space” in this post-Copernican, post-Darwinian, post-Hubbell world?
Even if the Absolute were recognizable to frail, finite humans, there remain two questions: (1) in what form would that recognition occur, and (2) how would humans be able to speak of it? In very ancient times, religious people divined “signs,” sought out “oracles” at Delphi or other locations, intentionally went to “incubate” or sleep at an alleged holy site to try to get some vision, rolled sacred bones, and utilized a multitude of other forms to try to discover the “will” of their anthropomorphized deity. Not every claim was acceptable, and once religious groups formed around a particular alleged deity, they quite often legislated that anyone practicing other methods of contacting the divine should be put to death. So the prophets who dared to quote their deity with a “Thus says Yahweh” or the equivalent, were already one step more definitive than the priests who had to offer up sacrifices and look for some “sign.” But gradually, in most religions, the preferred deity actually “spoke.” How did people understand? Is it natural that the deity spoke only in their single language, so the revelation was limited to that specific culture?
In many religions, one sacrificed one’s best animals, if not one’s best children, to get the attention and favor of the deity, as obedience to the “revealed will” of this god, that is, to make contact with that which was later considered Absolute. But how did the people know what these gods required?24 Finally, each religion eventually had its oral and written traditions, not mere stories, but often a deep philosophizing that made it sound like a man was speculating, such as in the Rig Veda, but sacrality protected these possessions of the priests, forbidding the common person even to view sacred scriptures.
So how does a finite, contingent, human being in process not only recognize, but also speak with, about, or relate to this Absolute? With mythology? With historical claims? With symbols? With mere emotions? With poetry? With silence? “Theology” implies that one knows enough to speak about the “logos” of “theos.”25 How? In what form, what language? Or is silence the only response? So what are people seeking in “religion”?
Religion’s Search for “More” Life: Character and Reward
Whether people are religious or completely nonreligious, most want “more life” or at least a better life than they presently experience. The expression “MORE life” was a quotation the famous American philosopher, William James,26 repeated from a “Prof. Leuba,” one he thought aptly elucidated the desire of religious people whose descriptions of their religious experience James had spent so long examining in order to present his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901–1902, which were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. These people all wanted “MORE life” and were persuaded that a major element of their lives was so “wrong” that it prevented their attaining that better life. It was not just quantitatively “more” life they sought. They wanted a “better” life, in most cases with the suffering and problems extracted, as the reward of reshaping their character. At least they thought they wanted these removed.
They also became persuaded, either through being born with this positive offsetting idea or by being “converted” to the idea, that their powerlessness to change that which was “wrong” with their lives could be exchanged for a better life if they could just access this higher Spirit, which links humans to itself. Otherwise, he noted, they do not seem to really care about this “God” at all—He is simply something to “be used” to get “MORE life.”27 James finally concluded that this “higher” power of Spirit need not be “God” or “Absolute,” but anything or person that enables one to “take the next step.”28
Alfred North Whitehead, in his Religion in the Making, emphasized that “[r]eligion is what the individual does with his own solitariness . . . if you are never solitary, you are never religious.”29 He further said that religion “is the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things” (Ibid). It is “force of belief cleansing the inward parts. For this reason the primary religious virtue is sincerity, a penetrating sincerity,” to shape one’s character sufficiently to find this better life. “Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape” (15). This does not mean there are no social dimensions to it, but that what it should produce is “individual worth of character” (17).30
“Character” may involve what one thinks, but it ultimately has to do with ethics, how one actually relates to others. So if it comes from an inner determination of one’s will, it is not “character” unless it manifests itself in one’s acts with regard to others and the world in general. Whitehead’s understanding also seems to imply that if the motivation to shape one’s character does not come from within one’s inner will, it would not be moral, but mere subservience.
Yet even religion cannot guarantee these good relations or ethical behavior, despite its apparent focus on character. Whitehead insisted that religion is inherently ambiguous; it may be a very good influence or it may be very evil. He further conceded that this religious solitariness necessarily involves social dimensions, which at times can be very inclusive and not discriminating between peoples, while at other times confining to a select group vis-à-vis all other competing groups. In its rationalizing process, he notes, religion expands beyond a mere concern for the tribe or religious community and shows a world or universal consciousness. In the latter, it can still be exclusive, but whether it is regarding the group that embraces it or not, it still proposes to shape people’s character. This, of course, is not unique to religion. Most people come to realize that to find relationships meaningful, they must manifest a character conducive to that.
Whitehead suggested that religion manifests itself in four different ways—ritual, emotion, belief, and rationalization. He thought these were sequential historical stages though often overlapping mixtures (18). Many scholars who have posited different descriptions of the development of “religion” among cultures have admitted that the earlier forms were less rational than the much later developments and understandings, whether one follows Whitehead’s scheme of specific stages or even Hegel’s earlier idea of the development from “representation” to “pure concept.” This general admission is obvious enough, that a religion usually becomes more rational the longer it exists. But this does not imply an inevitable conceptual development, nor that all irrational ideas are left behind, nor even that there is a parallel development during a certain era between geographically separated and different religions. While Karl Jaspers and others have noted eras of tremendous ethical/religious ferment (he called such periods “axial”) such as the middle of the first millennium BCE—the Upanishads’ monism, the Krishna devotional form of salvation, the emergence of Buddhism, the classical prophets in ancient Israel, and great thinkers in Greece—they did not have similar messages at all. So to speak of a period of a more intense rationalizing process does not in itself suggest any specific ends or uniformity.
This introduces the whole issue of a reasonable “philosophy of religion,” which is aware of the differences in actual religions throughout the world as well as the historical changes that occurred within any apparent single religion, so that a religious person’s approach to religion should be both comparative or elucidating rather than merely justifying. The plethora of religions recognized today in “comparative
