Religion Without God

Ray Billington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415217859
• eBook ISBN: 9781134602667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

This criticism of theism, especially monotheism, questions the assumption that rejecting God means rejecting religion. Drawing on Western philosophical critiques of religion and non-theistic Eastern religions, Ray Billington shows how a religion without God could work.
The concept of religion without God has informed not only the theories of Nietzsche, Kant and Spinoza, but also expressions of belief in Indian and Chinese religions-Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism Zen and Taoism. Concluding with a look at the "the future of faith, " this is a wide ranging and lucidly-written look at what it means to "have faith" and how this is distinct from religious belief.
Ray Billington is an experienced and respected author on Eastern religion and philosophy. His books include Understanding Eastern Philospophy, Living Philosophy and East of Existentialism, all published by Routledge. He also writes occasional journalism most notably as a contributor to The Guardian's 'Face to Faith' column. An ex-Methodist minister and onetime chaplain with the SAS, he has now retired from his post as Principal Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England.

Chapter 1

Clearing the decks

Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practise to believe.

(Walter Scott, adaptation by Laurence Peter)

‘God’ is the most abused and overused word in the English language. Other words may emerge from time to time to rival it for a while, but their pop-ularity is ephemeral in comparison. ‘God save the Queen’, the British sing on formal occasions; ‘in God we trust’ proclaims the American dollar; ‘God bless us, everyone’, we echo Tiny Tim and, less innocently, ‘I’ll have his blood, God help me’. Natural catastrophes are termed in legal documents as ‘acts of God’; when asked a conjectural question the most convinced materialist may well reply, ‘God knows’; ‘Oh my God’, people (usually non-believers) say at crucial moments; and the film director Buñuel crowned it all by declaring, tongue-in-cheek, ‘I’m an atheist, thank God’. ‘God’ seems to be as essential to the language as salt to the sea or oxygen to the air.

Of course, this is not to say that the idea of God has been universally accepted. Although the majority of the populace may well have given their support, tacit or otherwise, to a belief in his existence (as they still do, according to all contemporary surveys), voices have been raised expressing considerable, and in some cases total, scepticism on the matter. In the field of philosophy, for instance, while some, such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Spinoza, Berkeley and Kant, expressed confidence in his existence (even if the God they envisaged was not that of the theistic creeds), others, particularly over the past three or four centuries, have openly expressed doubts on the matter or have rejected the whole concept as irrational and unworthy of consideration. Among this group are Hobbes, Hume, Mill and Russell (to name a British philosopher from each of the last four centuries).

The most belligerent of God’s opponents among the philosophers was Nietzsche, with his proclamation of the death of God:

Where is God gone? I mean to tell you! We have killed Him—you and I! …God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed Him!

(The Gay Science)

Whether Nietzsche coined that vivid phrase autonomously or had come across it elsewhere is uncertain. It was used in 1854 by Gérard de Nerval in his Les Chimères (Chimeras, or Myths):

Dieu est mort! le ciel est vide—Pleurez! enfants, vous n’avez plus de père. [God is dead! Heaven is empty—Weep! children, you no longer have a father.]

It was Nietzsche’s use of the idea which had the lasting impact, however, even if it took nearly a century to become an in-house phrase. This happened with the Death of God controversy in the early 1960s, inspired by the impact of existentialist thought (chiefly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre) on the English-speaking world. In that decade, writers whose background lay primarily in theology were challenging what seemed to many confused readers like kicking the ground from under their own feet. John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published his Honest to God in 1963, in which he famously rejected the concept of a God ‘out there’ in favour of ‘the ground of being’. His article in the Observer newspaper, ‘Our image of God must go’, presented the issue to an even wider audience. Other titles were even more explicit in their rejection of the God image. Tom Altizer published his Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) in New York; and in 1971 Penguin published Alistair Kee’s The Way of Transcendence, subtitled Christian Faith without Belief in God. The significant aspect of these writings is that they were penned not by disgruntled secularists or fervent materialists, but by people whose ambience, the context of their lives, was confessedly Christian. In the past decade further examples have sprung from the same stable. They include Karen Armstrong’s History of God, published in 1993, and described by A.N.Wilson as: ‘the most fascinating and learned survey of the biggest wild goose chase in history—the quest for God.’ Wilson himself contributed inimitably to the discussion with his God’s Funeral (1998)—a natural sequel to the death of God; and for a quarter of a century Don Cupitt has been exploring the future of Christianity (in particular) with such works as The Sea of Faith (1984), which led to the formation of a body of Christians under that name, some of them exploring how far their faith could withstand the demise of God, and After God (1997) which seeks, in the author’s words, ‘a new theory of the twilight of the gods’.

The historical developments which cradle and inspire these enquiries can be traced back to the Renaissance, when scholars first began to challenge across a broad spectrum the God-centred doctrines which had been the required focus of previous explorations. Wilson, in particular, has pinpointed some of the most eminent thinkers over the past half-millennium who have tried to come to terms with life without God.

The supreme catalyst in this field has been the advance of science which, despite the affirmation by many of its pioneers that they remained believers, has effectively appeared to make God redundant by offering a naturalistic account of what had previously been held to be miraculous. We can identify three major steps in this process. The first, after the invention of the tele-scope, followed the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. The cosy picture of the earth as the centre of the universe, with Homo sapiens as its guardian under God, had to go: the solar system could be explained without the hand of God. The second, two centuries later, was the bio-logical revolution culminating in Darwin’s The Origin of Species, arguably the most important, if most unread, book ever penned. Those who, no longer able to accept the God of ‘the spacious firmament on high’, had turned to the one who had made ‘all things bright and beautiful’ and of whom they could sing ‘All things praise thee, Lord most high’, were now brought face to face with Tennyson’s ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’; with the realisation that all its manifestations were brought about by trial and error rather than purposiveness; with Tom and Jerry rather than the lion lying down with the lamb. The effect of this teaching was to make God redundant in the evolution of species. We shall study in Chapter 9 the sense of awe, mystery and mysticism which nature evokes; but it is a sense which is totally independent of—and is in some ways repugnant to—the concept that, where nature’s manifestations are concerned, ‘the Lord God made them all’.

Where, then, was God to be found? The later Victorians turned their attention to the inner light and identified God as the voice of their consciences. To whatever extent creation and evolution could be satisfactorily explained without recourse to a divine instigator, nothing, surely, could remove him from the inner self. Then, in the early decades of the twentieth century, arrived the psychoanalysts with, in particular, Freud’s teaching about the unconscious mind, suggesting that the idea of the conscience as the still small voice of God must go, to be replaced by that of an accumulation of experiences and ideas encountered at all stages of any individual person’s life, which may be forgotten but never lost.

In our own time, study of our genetic structure and, in particular, the discovery of the human genome, have thrown the question of God’s place in human life into even more intense relief. If we can now choose not only what sex we wish our children to be, but also whether they should be dark or fair, tall or short, brainy or just average, healthy or taking their chances as in the past, what role is left for God?

There are two problems facing anyone who is looking for an answer to this dilemma. First, as is indicated in every opinion poll about God’s possible existence, while church-going is clearly on the decline, about seventy per cent of the British population (more in the USA) express a belief in God, even if it is no more than ‘a God of some sort’. As one participant in a televised teach-in on the subject stated, ‘Well, there must be someone there, mustn’t there, else how did it all come into being?’ —unwittingly (perhaps) outlining the cosmological argument for his existence. Belief in God’s existence is expressed more fervently in the United States than in other Western countries, frequently from the viewpoint of the conservative evangelicals or biblical fundamentalists. It is an astonishing fact that in 1999, a century and a quarter after the publication of The Origin of Species, one of the states of the USA (Kansas) banned the teaching of evolution in its schools on the grounds that it was anti-scriptural, alien to the so-called ‘Word of God’ (one of the most potently destructive phrases in the language, as will be illustrated later). Many other states insist that the myth of biblical creationism be taught alongside the ‘theory’ of evolution, but to ban it totally meant a return to the so-called ‘monkey trial’ in Tennessee in 1926, when a teacher was found guilty in court of propagating this scientific ‘heresy’. So to sug-gest—as I shall do—that the time has come for Homo sapiens to dispense with the idea of God in toto, whether we’re referring to the Jewish Jehovah, the Christian Father of Jesus Christ, or the Islamic Allah, is to court trouble. But courted it must be.

The second problem springs from the first. With an overwhelming majority of the human race confessedly believing in God (even though the percentage is considerably lower among those aged below thirty) we’re looking at not only an enormous number but also a wide range of people: rich and poor, black and white, scholarly and illiterate, sophisticated and simple, cultured and superstitious. Inevitably, with such a range of believers, the concept which is believed in varies considerably. In fact, if it were possible to gather into one volume what people mean when they express a belief in God, the cornucopia of descriptions must challenge, if not totally defy, the kind of analysis on which we are embarking. Yet some sort of analysis is essential if the discussion is to be any more than a sequence of vague generalities.

Ironically, one of the main grounds for dispensing with the word God altogether is the very fact that it is laden with such a superabundance of meanings, many of them mutually contradictory. It is possible, for example, to hear one person say ‘I don’t believe in God’ and another ‘I believe in God’ and so reach the conclusion that they are on opposite sides on the matter. On analysis, however, it could be found that the non-believer is actually denying belief in the almighty-being-in-the-sky, the heavenly father who ‘holds the whole world in his hand’, while the second is simply affirming a disbelief in any kind of God ‘out there’, but would not reject what has been termed a ‘ground of being’ in which his life is focused—that is, a basic motivation or drive which inspires him to get on with his daily duties: a belief with which the first speaker might well be in total agreement. In any other sphere of human thought such a state of affairs would be viewed as ludicrous, confusing, and even potentially dangerous: yet it seems to be tolerated in religion.

What is required, then, is not just a process of linguistic analysis—though that must be included—but an examination of what people have in mind when they speak about God—or god, or gods. Granted that many use it mindlessly— ‘my God, it’s broken’ is hardly an act of prayer or a declaration of faith—there are manifestly huge numbers of people who could give some kind of explanation both of what ‘God’ means in general and of what he means to them in particular. Further, although no two accounts would be exactly the same, a number of ideas would surely recur (it would be remarkable, with such a subject, if this were not the case) from which could be extrapolated some core concepts, which become the central themes of a valid enquiry or analysis. It may not be possible to write QED at the end of the enquiry, but it will at least be one conducted without vagueness as to terms of reference.

To make such an assessment as comprehensive as possible, a number of perspectives will be necessary. This will of course include the scientific, but this is only the beginning of the story. Over the past century there has been increased communication with the East, and consequently a deepening of understanding of the religions which have played a dominant role in creating its varied cultural traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, for example. The fact that God plays no part in a large proportion of these religious beliefs is highly significant and often overlooked by the increasing numbers in the West who are turning to these religions for some kind of insights deeper than the shallow—as they view it—capitalist philosophy which pervades the air they breathe, pollutes the water they drink and poi-sons the life-giving earth. It is often considered that to reject God is to embrace this materialist outlook because it appears that by rejecting him the unbeliever is also rejecting spiritual values in favour of earthly treasures, dedicating his/her life to what the Hindus term maya, illusion. This misconception must be nipped in the bud.

In its turn this leads to a consideration of the other key word used in this book. The word ‘religion’, even if not as broadly as the word God, has a plethora of connotations and manifestations. Mussolini described fascism as a religion; Aneurin Bevan said the same of socialism; Keats of love. These examples water the word down to such an extent that it becomes difficult to discern anything distinctive in it. If, for example, our chief interest is our religion, then we’re all religious, whether we’re football enthusiasts, physical fitness fanatics, sexual athletes or crossword buffs. I shall be trying to illustrate that being religious is a condition shared by many more than those who express a belief in God; but it doesn’t include everybody, despite Samuel Butler’s assertion: ‘To be at all is to be religious more or less’.

My primary concern lies with the essential difference between the ‘more’ and the ‘less’, and what it is that brings about the difference. Certainly, there are some human experiences with their associated activities which some people have described as religious, even though they take place in different contexts from those usually considered to be religious (such as places of worship). These spheres include, in particular, the arts and a reverence for nature. Some remarks made to Beethoven toward the end of his life illustrate how smoothly music slots into this category. His friend Karl Peters wrote to him in 1823: ‘Granted that you don’t believe in [immortality] you will be glorified, because your music [is] religion.’ Others have expressed similar convictions about poetry, drama and imaginative literature, about painting and sculpture. For these people, to be in thrall to a work of art is, I shall suggest, a religious experience, producing a profound sense of awe. We may not be able to analyse the nature of artistic achievement (Freud described it as ‘psychologically inaccessible’), but we can learn from Henry Moore when he said of his sculpting that he could ‘really be in control, almost like God creating something’.

The same intensity of feeling has frequently overtaken people when com-muning with nature. Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, which I shall discuss on pp. 101–2, suggests that the poet was undergoing a religious experience and that the poem is a religious poem. Those committed to the God hypothesis may well describe both these spheres as channels through which God reveals himself; but this is to add a superfluous concept, and I shall be suggesting that art and nature are real expressions of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘the beyond in the midst’. Whatever religion is, it certainly includes a sense of the reality of this experience.

But this is already jumping several guns. We need to investigate the meaning of the word religion—no straightforward task, as sociologists and psychologists, as well as theologians, know full well. But since my purpose, indicated in the title, is to retain the religious element in human experience without recourse to God, an examination of the word and its usage is essential. The position adopted in what follows may be described as somewhere between the materialistic stance (in its strictly philosophical sense that only matter is real) and the theological, in its etymological sense as writings about, or understanding of, God. There are theologians who don’t believe in God, certainly not in the traditional sense of that phrase. Don Cupitt is one, and the organisation which he founded, the Sea of Faith, regularly explores this way of thinking in its journal. It is in fact now quite possible to study theology while remaining devoutly atheistic, which I don’t recall of any fellow-student when I first tackled the subject. But it will make for greater clarification if the word theology is used in its original sense (its Urbedeutung, as the Germans would say) so that its denotation can be contrasted with that of religion without causing confusion.

With this in mind, the purpose of this book can be simply stated: it is to rid religion of theology, to rescue it from God, to declare God redundant. It requires us to look anew at our cultural and natural heritage, and to appreciate that the religious experience is one that is potentially available to everyone without their having to make obeisance in the direction of the supernatural. Religion is not a gift bestowed upon grateful receivers by an act of revelation from on high: it is a natural part of human experience which embraces many more people than actually claim to be religious. I shall in fact be suggesting that belief in the God hypothesis is not per se an expression of religion at all: for many of the alleged eighty per cent who express belief in him it is no more than a superstition which, inter alia, indicates a lack of willingness either to think, or accept responsibility, for themselves.

There are a number of practical implications for anyone who advocates the removal of God from our thought and speech processes, and they are discussed in the latter stages of what follows. There is, first of all, the problem of what, if anything, we are to put in his place, bearing in mind Chesterton’s wry comment that if people don’t believe in God, they won’t believe in nothing—they’ll believe in anything. With the growing popular-ity of New Age concepts, and the (less desirable) proliferation of cults of various kinds, this stricture cannot be ignored. Most of the cults are directed towards a charismatic person (usually male) who seems able to achieve a remarkable control of people’s minds, and who exploits this power unashamedly. The result is the phenomenon of people laying aside all common sense and abandoning themselves to outbursts of unbridled emotion which, at least for one who has witnessed such displays, are offensively subhuman. Whatever may emerge as the essence of religious experience, and acknowledging that the human faculty of reason is not broad enough in its scope to contain the whole of—or even to explain—that experience, reason must not be cast aside. Religion may be super-rational: it is not irrational, as Wittgenstein affirmed when he described his mind-blowing investigations into logic as a religious activity.

A further problem is the sociological and cultural hold that God still exerts. As already stated, parliament in Britain begins daily with prayers, seeking his blessing on the day’s proceedings (a triumph of optimism over experience, perhaps). God’s strength is invoked at the crowning of monarchs, and his comfort at their fun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Clearing the decks
• 2 Religion
• 3 Images of God
• 4 Why God?
• 5 Mysticism
• 6 Non-dualism in Hinduism
• 7 Buddhism
• 8 Taoism
• 9 Profane religion
• 10 Beyond good and evil
• 11 Substance without form
• Select bibliography
• Index