but instead, quickly reaches the point in which it stresses “mystery,” or “faith,” that “God’s ways are above human ways,” that “faith” is more valuable than reason since “faith” can weigh divine matters which reason cannot.
The scientific process has often exposed religions’ metaphysical and supranatural claims as simply being a positing of an Absolute, which has no foundation and/or contradicts science’s empirical findings—or at least as being too secretive and subjective to be tested. Religions of the West, familiar with the pre-Copernican understandings of ancient people, found Copernicus’ heliocentric galaxy blasphemous. When the chasm becomes obvious, many religious people will take this second alternative to preserve the ancient religious claims and try to emphasize that clashing scientific or historical data are also theory or simply an arbitrary act of a negative faith.35
The question seems to be, given any particular place in history, can a religious person find the “MORE life” they are seeking, and what about the nonreligious? This is the project of this book, whether religions’ divisive absolutes will become such a problem that they will interfere with the process of humanization or even obliterate what we know as humanity. This requires an examination of basic presuppositions where people do not explicitly say what they mean by “more” life.36 If most religions are presently within a stage of “rationalization,” is the prospect of “more life” only for the most rational of those believers, or does it also include the least rational or educated?
Is Autonomy a Realistic Goal for Religions?
Although the only concern in this book is to address the absolutized metaphysics of religions, of course, they all have morality attached to the metaphysics. The question must be asked whether a religious person can really expect to be autonomous in any sense, either within the metaphysical or moral aspects of the religion. In the twentieth century, theories of moral development in children and then in adults, were articulated by Jean Piaget and later by Lawrence Kohlberg. The latter is remembered for his delineation of six stages of moral development ranging from one’s response out of fear to a stage in which one could autonomously universalize a principle.37 The fifth stage was the stage of morality based on a voluntary social contract. The point was not to arrange these stages in a hierarchy of actual value, but to suggest that the higher stages were stages of abstraction, which were achieved the least. They were also thought to be stages in which one could expect the person’s behavior to be most consistent with the person’s moral understanding because they were stages of autonomy or mutual voluntary agreement and generalization. So they would involve the least cognitive dissonance. Kohlberg, however, concluded that most adults settle only into the middle rungs of the six stages, in which one is no longer operating primarily out of fear, but more on the results to be achieved for self and others.
Kohlberg’s highest stage of doing what was considered “right” simply because it was right and could be universalized, is the stage or morality of which philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote. Because its conception of the “good” or “right” is based on no results or teloi, it is not a hypothetical good or self-centered good, but a “categorical imperative.” It has no contingent purpose but only that of universal and apodictic duty.38 Kant’s position was that the things of which religion speaks are not capable of being subjected to the empirical data and logical proof that pure science needs. The categories of judgment do not fit with religious ideas. For Kant, then, the importance of religion is its postulating of freedom and responsibility and thus pointing to a necessary moral imperative that is universal among humans.
In his famous Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 39 Kant analyzed almost the entirety of Christian doctrine from this moral standpoint. While he felt the universalization of the moral principle was able to be comprehended by even nonreligious people, he also recognized that many will likely continue to need symbols or institutions that help them uncover that moral duty one has to society. Therefore, he condemned neither the religious nor the secular nor even atheism but said that all could get to the same point in feeling one’s duty. But that would require the religious people realizing that religion’s primary purpose and effect is in its motivating morality rather than in sketching some metaphysical or supranatural stories or myths that have no bearing on morality or even violate any reasonable morality by insisting on such practices as sacrificing lives to God. It would also require their rational sense when it came to sorting through the religion’s ethical examples and commands. He emphasized autonomy to such an extent that it revealed his primary interest in political philosophy, for which his “Three Critiques” simply laid the groundwork, rather than in some idea of “religion” as a justified (because moral) hope for a “virtue worthy of happiness.”40
That sense of duty fits with what Whitehead suggested, a need for building good character, an inner impulse to shape one’s attitude, and therefore also one’s relation to others. In Kant we confront two more considerations: (1) that becoming autonomous, even morally responsible within society, is part and parcel of being “enlightened” or maturing, thinking for oneself, and (2) that although ideas, concepts, and generalization may assist people in finding their moral duty, many may always continue to need rituals, symbols, and beliefs. In Kant’s understanding, if one never reaches the autonomy of willing the good by himself, but does so simply because of some believed external source, one would continue in heteronomy, thereby missing out on the flourishing human life that can exist only within a mutual autonomy of equals. Without a real autonomous sense of moral duty or owning of the social contract, Kant did not think the individual was being responsible, and society could not function if citizens were not autonomous and actively participated in formulating universal laws. So while rationalizing of religion has been around for many millennia, this does not mean it is uniformly utilized by every religion or by every individual belonging to any religion.
To the degree that rationalization of religion necessarily involved morality or ethics, it raises the question of the relation of autonomy to morality. Kohlberg felt that a child could develop moral sensitivity but his conclusions about the more typical adult was that few adults actually arrive at autonomy, even though Kant felt it imperative in order to have a social contract. That presents a huge problem. On the metaphysical side, Kant tried to eliminate the question entirely since he saw all the metaphysics that lacked clear moral value as being only “pseudo-religion.” Yet few Christian groups would accept his ethical interpretation of Christianity, which, among other things, insisted that the moral ideal is not conceivable as embodied.41 So now the question is whether any religious institution would be capable of allowing individual members to have such autonomy, to ignore the “pseudo-religious” aspects of the metaphysics the religion propagates, as well as to have a voice in the determination of a morality that is determined by universalizable principles rather than some telos or even metaphysics? That easily becomes the deeper issue.
Attached to this question is also the issue of how each individual sees his or her freedom. Most adults feel a need to serve as an authority to their children while the latter are immature. But most adults also hope for the day when the children will have matured sufficiently that they can be “on their own,” reasoning, evaluating, deciding what to believe and how to act. On the other hand, this kind of “freedom” or “autonomy,” we will later see in both Eric Hoffer’s True Believer as well as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, seems to be something many people would like to have removed from them. That desire to relinquish one’s freedom is precisely what Kant meant by “self-incurred tutelage,” which was the barrier the “Enlightenment” hoped to eliminate. It seems to me that no one really wants to have such a lobotomy performed on her by the removal of freedom unless the prospects of the choice are exaggerated to the point of being terrorizing. That may explain the situations of “mass movements” attracting converts in Hoffer’s analysis as well as people’s embracing the church during the days of the Inquisition when they viewed the torturous deaths of so many.
But the specter of autonomy also can be foreboding in less extreme scenarios, such as one deciding to become responsible for determining the validity
