62. Rahner speaks of three central mysteries in Christian faith. Speaking of religion in a general sense, Haught believes it is consistent with Rahner’s thought to only speak of two.
63. See Rahner, Theological Investigations, 67–73.
64. This formulation is, of course, a Tillichian one.
7: Religion65
“There is communion with God, and communion with the earth, and communion with God through the earth.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin66
If nature is not all there is, then what else is there, and how do we know about it? Religions are convinced that there is more, indeed infinitely more, but they tell us we can know about it only if we are disposed to receive it. The infinitely “more” cannot be known in the same way that ordinary objects are known. In fact, religion is less a matter of knowing than of being known. It is a state of being grasped rather than of grasping. Not every person is ready for religion, and even self-avowed religious believers cannot truthfully claim to be ready for it most of the time. Indeed, much of what we usually call religious life consists of avoiding or running away from the demands of religion. Religious understanding—as most theologians see it—is impossible without surrender, worship, and prayerful waiting, along with struggle and frustration. Yet, to those who wait, the rewards can be peace and joy, as well as profound intellectual satisfaction.
Religion, at least in any conventional sense, cannot get along with scientific naturalism, but it can get along quite well with science. Science deals with what can be sensed or, at least, what can be inferred from sensation. Religion is based in experience too, but of a different kind from science. Religious people testify to having felt, beneath all sensible appearances, the very real presence of an elusive mystery that takes hold of them, invites them, sometimes unsettles them, and often reorients their lives. They profess to having been carried away, as it were, by something “more” than nature. Their sense of a mysterious presence beyond the world, beneath the surface of life, or in the depths of the universe, evokes responses of vague anxiety sometimes mixed with overwhelming excitement and the impulse to worship. Religion often also involves the encounter with unseen agents, powers, and personalities, but these are experienced as emerging out of the background of a more fundamental transcendent mystery. Religion, taken here in a very broad sense, is a conscious appreciation of and response to the mystery that grounds, embraces, and transcends both nature and ourselves. There are other ways of defining religion, of course, but the issues raised by scientific naturalism have to do especially with religion’s bold claims that there is more than nature. A good name for this more is “mystery.”
Religion, therefore, means that the universe available to science and ordinary experience is not all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. To most religious persons, there is something other than the physical universe. This mysterious presence is not separate from the universe, but it is not identical with it either. It simultaneously penetrates, encircles, grounds, and enlivens nature without being reducible to nature. Religions are convinced that reality does not end at the limits of nature, but instead includes an incomprehensible dimension that extends beyond the scientifically knowable world. The infinite scope of mystery provides religious devotees a permanent reason for hope and a sense of freedom. It allows for limitless breathing room in the face of nature’s obvious constraints and ultimate perishability.
It is especially those whose thoughts and passions reach toward infinite mystery who are most prone to feel imprisoned by naturalistic doctrine. Religious believers, unlike naturalists, do not look to nature for either ultimate fulfillment or ultimate explanation. Still, a wholesome communion with ultimate reality can take place through nature. Healthy religion is gratefully aware of the riches of life and the resourcefulness of the natural world. It is appreciative of science as well. But it also senses that nature imposes obvious limits on life, most notably suffering and death. Religion, then, is a kind of route-finding that looks for pathways beyond the boundaries that nature places on life.67
It is imperative that naturalists be fully sensitive to this point even if they vehemently disagree with it. Religious persons may turn out to be wrong, but clearly they are seeking ways to get beyond what they take to be the natural limits on life. This does not mean that they have to despise the world—although in some cases they do—but that they relativize it. They neither take nature to be ultimate nor do they see science as ultimate explanation. Characteristically, no matter how large science has shown the universe to be, religious people look upon the claim that “nature is enough” as itself an arbitrary confinement that they must get beyond.
To religious ears, including those attuned to the monumental scale of contemporary cosmology, the assertion that “nature is enough” sounds like a prison sentence. This is because religious awareness generally involves a sense that the human mind (or spirit) has already transcended the limits of nature, not finally or decisively, but at least by anticipation. In the next chapter, I will show that human intelligence, in spite of all attempts to understand it naturalistically, extends itself beyond the limits of nature in every act of questioning, understanding, and judging. Religion is inseparable from the intellect’s anticipation of an infinite fullness of being. In biblical circles, religious anticipation of this fullness of being takes the form of hope. And so, to those who hope for final transcendence of death and suffering, naturalism is the most dreary and suffocating of dogmas. Instead of limitless horizons, naturalism offers only an ultimate captivity, unbearable to those who sense that at the core of their being they are capax infiniti—open to the infinite.
Of course, to the naturalist, religion is fully part of nature and, like everything else, it must submit to being explained naturalistically. There must be a purely scientific answer to the question of why so many humans have longed for the infinite and thereby experienced nature as a limit. To many naturalists these days, it is evolutionary biology that seems best equipped to provide the deepest account of humanity’s persistent religious tendencies. If evolutionists can come up with a purely natural explanation of the habit religious believers have of looking toward limitless horizons, then this will supposedly expose infinite mystery itself as empty fiction rather than ultimate reality. Therefore, the most efficient way to disabuse religious people of the illusion that there is anything beyond the limits of nature is to explain, in purely scientific terms, how that illusion could have arisen in the first place. Nowadays, Darwin’s idea of natural selection, brought up to date by genetics, seems to provide the best, perhaps even the ultimate, explanation of the human conviction that reality overflows nature’s boundaries.
Naturalists today often attempt to explain not only religion but also morality in Darwinian terms. There was a time not long ago when the moral instincts of people seemed to be the best evidence for God’s existence. Indeed, moral aspiration was a clear indication of the direct imprint of a transcendent, divine goodness on each soul; conscience was the stamp of God’s will on the inner core of each personality. Hints of an infinite perfection could be found in the insatiable anticipation of the goodness, truth, and beauty that drives the questing human heart. Humans were said to be restless only because an infinite goodness, truth, and beauty had already made itself tacitly present to their moral, intellectual, and aesthetic sensibilities.
The scientific naturalist, however, will have none of this, at times even rebuking religious people for being so “greedy” as to look for fulfillment beyond the limits of nature. In a book whose every page chastises those of us with cloudier images of reality than his own, the philosopher Owen Flanagan asserts that there is nothing beyond
