Religion

Philosophical Theology, Volume Three

Robert Cummings Neville

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438457000, 9781438456997
• eBook ISBN: 9781438457017
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Teología

Religion is the third and final volume in Robert Cummings Neville's systematic development of a new philosophical theology. Unfolding through his earlier volumes, Ultimates and Existence, and now in Religion, philosophical theology considers first-order questions generally treated by religious traditions through philosophical methods while reflecting Neville's long engagement with philosophy, theology, and Eastern and Western religious traditions. In this capstone to the trilogy, Neville provides a theory of religion and presents a sacred worldview to guide religious participation. His philosophical theory of value enlightens religions' approaches to ethics, spirituality, and religious institutional living and collaboration. With a detailed examination of plausibility conditions for sacred worldviews, the book concludes with an exploration of "religionless religion" for which institutions of religion are of penultimate value. Through the development of philosophical theology, Neville has built a unique, multidisciplinary, comparative, nonconfessional theological system, one that addresses concerns and provides tools for scientific and humanistic scholars of religion, postmodern thinkers, intellectuals from both secular and religious backgrounds, and those interested in the global state of religion today.

PART I

Understanding Religion

PART I

Preliminary Remarks

Religion is to be understood as the symbolic engagement of ultimacy by means of signs expressed cognitively, existentially, and socially. Such is the hypothesis elaborated throughout Philosophical Theology and defended in detail in Philosophical Theology Three. The engagements are real activities and what is engaged is real. Perhaps what is engaged is not well interpreted by the symbols in the engagement; this might be because it is misidentified in the reference, because it is interpreted in respects other than the ones the engagement intends, because it is interpreted in unimportant respects, or because the interpretation is muddied, too ambiguous, or just plain wrong. Nevertheless, what is putatively engaged, the ultimates, are real; otherwise they could not be badly interpreted or be interpreted mistakenly.

That religion is the symbolic engagement of ultimate reality (or ultimate realities, or ultimate dimensions of mundane domains of experience, or any of the other cognates we have discussed) is justification for beginning the study of religion with what science can tell about how human beings engage the ultimate boundaries of their natural and cultural environment. Evolutionary biology and cognitive science, including neuroscience, have made interesting proposals about how to understand the origins of religion in the evolution of human biological and social structures. Religion always is symbolic engagement, however, which means that it is guided by symbols or signs that take their meaning within cultural semiotic systems. Therefore, a crucial task is to understand the evolution of semiotic systems capable of engaging ultimate matters. In certain respects, this too is a scientific question about a phenomenon more or less universal to all human beings. In other respects, however, it is a question calling for study of the actual semiotic systems that provide symbols of ultimacy. These are the symbolic systems studied by the social sciences involved with religion, including history of religions; they also are studied by the interpretive disciplines of the humanities and arts. The rudiments of religion might be understood in evolutionary terms, such that what “explains” is the adaptive advantage for carrying on genes for those rudiments. Yet, to the degree that religion has evolved with symbolic engagement, that which “explains” is how human beings learn from their symbolic engagements so as to symbolize better. Symbolic culture evolves, too, not just by forces of adaptive advantage but through the correction of symbolic interpretations in engagements. These are the topics of Chapter 1.

How do the scientific approaches identify religion in the first place, however? The Pleistocene rudiments of religion—ritual behaviors, beliefs in supernatural agents, and so forth—are also the rudiments of science, government, art and literature, and most other dimensions of civilized experience, just as much as they are rudiments of what we now understand as religion. How do we track the development of those rudiments into religion as opposed to their developments into those other dimensions? The argument in Philosophical Theology is that religion is the engagement of ultimacy. Therefore, those rudiments are religious insofar as they can be tracked to the symbolic engagement of ultimacy. This is to say, we read back from a current understanding of religion, defined as engaging ultimacy, to see the history of religion as it developed in some distinction from those other dimensions. The most important historical nexus in that development was the Axial Age, in which, for the first time, large-scale cultural conceptions of ultimate conditions were formulated in what became the dominant religious traditions of East, South, and West Asia. Pre–Axial Age religions had symbols that functioned as symbols of ultimacy, demarking and describing boundary conditions for worldviews. But Axial Age religions formulated conceptions of the world as such, the nature of human obligation, of human wholeness, of relations of people to other people, of ultimate personal identity relative to the principles of the cosmos, and of the contingency of all this. These considerations shape the agenda of Chapter 2.

The great religious traditions of the Axial Age have different symbolic systems from one another for engaging ultimate matters. It would seem, then, that each tradition would have theologians who explicate these symbolic systems, interpret them for various circumstances, and, in particular, develop interpretive tapestries that connect the popular symbols that have such intimate forms that they can orient life in proximate detail with the transcendent symbols that more directly engage the ultimate conditions of life. Following the current language in Christian theology, these can be called “confessional” theologians because they start with (“confess”) the symbolic system of their tradition and elaborate this for the circumstances of life and history, including the history of their community defined by their symbolic system. Accordingly, there are Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Daoist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim theologies, each with sub-branches. Also there are theologies of Axial Age religions such as Jainism, Paganism, and Zoroastrianism that have shrunk in importance compared to the others. The organizing principle of this particular way of thinking about tradition-defined theologies is that each flows from some defining source—person, text, event, and so forth—and ramifies in various directions that can be described in a chronological narrative. Because of the source, the religions can be defined by their names.

This organizing principle is misleading, however. At any given historical situation for a religious group, the causal, especially symbolic, antecedents are not just those identified with the semiotic symbolic system that might name the group but come from a wide variety of other sources. Buddhism’s roots are in Brahmanical religions, and renouncer traditions, and in Dravidian resistance to Aryan religions, and in social conditions to which Jainism also responded at about the same time as early Buddhism with somewhat different symbolic resolutions. To study traditions organized around their name, or uniquely identifying founding symbols, is like doing a genealogy by studying a man’s male descendants for many generations, all bearing his name (in a patrilineal culture). Much can be learned from that. The study, however, is not likely to be very alert to what is brought into the succeeding generations by the women who come from other lineages. Perhaps more to the point would be to do a genealogy by studying a person through the branching of ancestors through many generations. That is, the study of religious traditions should begin with their concrete characters now and look to the interweaving of factors that have led to them. In this way, far more of the interactions and multiple locations of religious practices, beliefs, and motifs of spiritual and social life will become apparent. The current symbolic systems of religious practitioners are not exclusively those of the founding systems, even when they include interpretation of early or original texts. The current systems reflect the influences of many interpretive strands coming from “other” traditions. To be sure, strong movements to purify religious practice in terms of a quasi-immediate relation to a founding text or person occur, as in the seventeenth-century Christian Puritans or the twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalists. But even these have internalized reactions to the intervening developments. To read religious traditions starting from some “beginning” and tracking them to the present is to run great risks of missing the actual mixtures of religious life and thought. Far better it is to read the present religious situation and to back-read into the interactions of its sources. This task itself points up the necessity, often obscured in historical research, of taking responsibility for assessing what is important and true for understanding the present symbolic systems available for engaging ultimacy. Perhaps the most profound lesson of postmodern critical studies, particularly the liberationist approaches of feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, is that our contemporary assumptions about both religion and methodology require reflective analysis and critique. Our views of the past and of the current lay of the land with respect to religion and religions depend on the ever-fallible but ideally thorough vulnerability to critique and amendment. These considerations are the topic of Chapter 3.

If reality does have ultimate conditions, if these can be known at least in part through the metaphysics of ultimacy developed in the other volumes of Philosophical Theology, and if there is an historical evolution of different symbolic systems for engaging those ultimate conditions, then a central philosophical theological task is the development of sacred worldviews that are adequate for our time. Because of the importance of intimate symbols of ultimacy that are connected with the diverse symbolic systems and cannot be reduced to one another, such sacred worldviews will legitimate several different embodiments in traditional practices. What will be common to all will be the transcendent symbols of ultimacy, phrased in terms of some common metaphysics of ultimacy. Where the different embodiments diverge will be in their intimate symbols and the hermeneutic procedures for relating the intimate to the transcendent. The viable sacred worldviews thus build in explicit tolerance for different embodiments. Many viable worldviews can exist with Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Daoist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim embodiments. Or, since those names are likely to be misleading, there might be many more embodiments reflecting diverse versions and new combinations, plus adaptations of pre–Axial Age religions, such as shamanisms of various sorts. Of course, not everything that has been associated with these “named” traditions and their subgroups can become embodiments within viable sacred worldviews. In fact, everything that resists interpretation in consistency with the transcendent metaphysical symbols of ultimacy is likely to be rejected from a viable sacred worldview. Still an extraordinary diversity exists in the ways to be religious within the viable sacred worldviews, and recognition of that diversity is part of the worldviews. These are the topics of Chapter 4. The chapters of this part present the rudiments of a theory of religion as well as sacred worldviews for how to be religious as best we can now.

CHAPTER ONE

Science and Culture

What does “understanding religion” mean? This has to be an underlying question from the beginning, as the introduction of this volume pointed out and it remains a contested issue throughout the inquiry. If the inquiry can be said properly to end, the question can be rephrased to ask what the understanding of religion has turned out to be. The discussion here will be to start with the proposal popular among evolutionary biologists and cognitive scientists interested in religion that understanding religion means to “explain” it in terms of some more primitive concepts from which it is derived.

I. COGNITIVE SCIENCE WITH EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Biological evolution concerns the ways in which traits carried in human DNA that favor the reproductive capacity of those who carry them get passed on with greater prevalence than traits with less favorable reproductive capacities. Part of the complexity in this idea has to do with the different senses in which individuals and populations carry the adaptive traits. A population might carry a suite of traits that does not favor the reproduction of all individuals but that, when mixed with other suites of traits in the population, gives adaptive advantage to the reproductive capacities of the entire population.1 The suites of traits, for instance, that typically are expressed in homosexual impulses and behavior, and those expressed in sterile intersex anatomy, do not favor the reproductive capacity of those who bear them but must have some adaptive advantage for the population. Otherwise, they would not have been passed down so universally in so many animal groups, including humans. Apparently, situations exist with some steadiness in which the genetic palette of the population has greater adaptive force for reproduction if not all individuals in the group are breeders.

Some controversy exists over whether religion, or its early elements, is adaptive in the sense of biological evolution, or whether it is a side effect of something else—for instance, the development of language—that is adaptive for other reasons.2 Such side effects are called exaptations or spandrels.3 The likelihood is very high, however, that the early roots of religion are indeed adaptive in the biological evolutionary sense. Consider two examples.

Anthropologists argue that ritual behavior is essential for the biological evolution of the human (II, 13, i ).4 Ritual, of course, is present in a number of “higher” animals and in all cases serves the purposes of group solidarity either well or ill. Group solidarity is adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the disposition of human genes was worked out. Now, to be sure, ritual is not only religion: In the ancestral environment it was the government, the artistic output, and economic structure too. Confucians have known that learned ritual behavior reaches down into patterns of posture and meaningful eye contact up into language and imperial court rituals to celebrate the seasons.5 But the genetically adaptive disposition to ritual behavior continues in religion to the present day and has become distinct from many dimensions of government, the arts, economics, and other elements of social life. The specific cognitive elements in religious ritual today might make little adaptive difference to contemporary group solidarity compared with the simple cohesiveness of the war band and child-rearing cadre.

Patrick McNamara, a neuroscientist, argues that religious experience is biologically adaptive to human evolution in the following sense.6 By religious experiences he means psychological states that “decenter” the self; these include states produced by exercise and posture, by prayer and meditation, by drugs, music, and other mind-blowing activities. His hypothesis is that the self is ordinarily a dicey achievement of partial integrations of many cognitive, emotive, and physical factors, and that under ordinary circumstances the self is stuck with that achievement. Religious experiences decenter that stuck self and allow for a better integration that is more ideally rational, integrated, and capable of self-control. This characteristic of religious experiences contributed over time, he argues, to the evolution of higher executive control functions that are mediated mainly in the right prefrontal cortex and right anterior temporal lobe, precisely the neural organs mediating much of the kind of religious experience at stake. Although the evidence is sometimes indirect and speculative, McNamara not only shows that the evolution of executive control functions is aided by religious experiences but also describes some of the underlying neural mediation of that. Here is an instance of a universal religious practice—decentering religious experience—that is adaptive to the evolution of more rational, integrated people who therefore have an evolutionary advantage.

Some people who worry about religion as genetically evolutionary identify religion not with ritual or cultivated religious experience but with beliefs, particularly beliefs in the supernatural, which they immediately classify as false beliefs and therefore lacking in direct adaptive value. Most cultures, at least in their early forms, do include beliefs in supernatural agents, particularly agents who “know what you are thinking.” But these beliefs are likely not to be adaptive for their intellectual religious content as much as for their advantage in imputing agency to external things in the face of uncertainty: Wildman’s example is the sound in the bush that might be a tiger or the wind; people genetically disposed to impute agency (It’s a Tiger!) will run away to pass on their genes another day.7 Children of wholly secular parents who have been taught nothing about religion still develop beliefs in supernatural omniscient agents until they are taught otherwise.

Cognitive science with evolutionary biology is a relative newcomer to the disciplined study of religion. Insightful attempts to understand religion in terms of its evolution in human nature and society are not new, however, notable milestones being Lucretius’s De rerum natura, David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. What is new in recent decades is the attempt to study religion within the clearly reductive tools of evolutionary biology; the psychology in cognitive science is closely connected with biology. Biology includes neuroscience, both as it understands neural-mental human functions and as it understands the genetic evolution of these neural structures and functions. Evolution is understood in Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian senses having to do with the passing on of genes. This is to say, what is taken to “explain” religion, strictly speaking, is some human function that evolved as part of human nature because it was adaptive in the Paleolithic environment for the passing on of genes.8

The significance of this sense of understanding by reductive explanation needs to be noted (I, 2, ii). First, hardly any scientifically educated person for the last century or so has doubted that the cognitive and emotional aspects of religion are made possible by the evolution of the human brain that can perform them. The great promise of contemporary cognitive science, especially its neuros...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Cross References
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding Religion
• Part II: Historical Religions
• Part III: Normative Religion
• Part IV: Religionless Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover