IF MY ARGUMENTS in Prolegomena are sound, then the possibility of faith, which might seem to have been taken away by the results of Skepticism, has never been absent. Thousands of pages of apologetics have been premised on the view that no one can be religious, or procure the benefits of religion, without the attitude of religious belief. But this view is false. Faith and skepticism are perfectly compatible.

Now some who were religious in a traditional way before encountering skepticism may find in this fact a quick way home: the path from the dark valley through which they have traveled they will see as a path circling back to the starting point. That is to say, the religious inquirer reduced to nonbelief by our arguments in Skepticism may now seek to return to the traditional, sectarian claims she was there persuaded to lay down, simply substituting a faith response for one grounded in belief. In the first part of this book, however, I argue against such a re turning or turning back. Skeptical considerations concerning our immaturity not unrelated to those making religious and irreligious belief rationally impossible in the first place also conspire to prevent such a move (these are developed in terms of certain rational aims of openness, authenticity, and stability in Chapter 1). And when we straightforwardly and openly address the facts of our situation, exploring the radical nonsectarianism that seems rationally mandated instead of shrinking from it on the assumption that it must be corrosive of religious attitudes and dispositions, we will find ourselves attracted to a quite different and unexplored understanding of religious commitment (this understanding is fleshed out in Chapters 2 and 3). All things considered, then, the best religion—the only form of religion that could possibly be justified for twenty-first-century skeptics—is completely simple and nonsectarian, skeptical not just in form but also in content.

C H A P T E R 1

One of the main ways Skepticism opens up space for religion, as noted in the preface, is in what it has to say about our future, which may be ridiculously longer than the human past. Estimates vary, but it is about 50,000 years since the Earth first saw beings anatomically and behaviorally like us, capable of practicing some form of religion. Now contrast that with the fact, so routinely overlooked or neglected, that although the Sun will eventually scorch our planet, Earth may remain habitable for as long as another billion years more.1 The moral of the story is that we (and/or other intelligent species of the future) may yet have an extremely long way to go—this is epistemically possible.

What emerges from this idea—and here we move beyond Skepticism though proceeding on the foundation it has laid—is that we need more fully to apply what I call a diachronic conception of religion, according to which religion is a propensity having many possible incarnations, a feature of human life (and perhaps other forms of life to come) that can in important ways grow and change and evolve throughout the life of species and of the planet. Most philosophical discussion of religion these days appears to be carried out under the influence of what I call a synchronic conception, by which I mean a view that identifies religion with attitudes and/or practices of religious humans living at the present time, in the early twenty-first century (together, perhaps, with whatever from our past is presupposed thereby). This is a severely and inappropriately restricted view. For even if all existing religion were seriously flawed and all existing religious claims false, one would intuitively want to say, in the light of a broader evolutionary awareness, that these facts provide no good reason to give up on religion—thus revealing the presence and operation of the diachronic conception. Because the intellectual results of the exercise of the religious impulse may over much future time become greatly improved, we ought not in this context tie religion to its existing instantiations. We should, indeed, get used to thinking about the possibility that religion may flourish even if its presently existing instantiations are eventually well covered over by the sands of history.

But to this a critic may be inclined to respond: “You have yet to show how the story you’re telling is compatible with rational religion in the present. I’m ready to accept that the future includes new religious possibilities that we ought not ignore. And I can also see the point of a diachronic conception of religion. But what do these realizations provide one now, other than a basis for a kind of evolutionary religious skepticism, and for wishing one had been born 100,000 or 1,000,000 years later to see how things pan out? How can we ourselves, today, approach any unequivocally positive perspective on religion?”

The skepticism to which the critic refers is indeed justified; it is defended at length in Skepticism. But precisely because this is a skepticism dynamically turned toward the future, we can provide a crucial distinction to answer the critic’s distinction between future possibilities and rational religion right now. This crucial distinction is a distinction between what rational religion might be expected to look like at later times in an evolutionary process and what it might be expected to look like at earlier times. The point is that we must recognize how rational religion may look very different at an earlier time, such as ours, than at later ones (100,000 or 1,000,000 years in the future). When considering whether the problem of faith and reason can be solved, therefore, we need to think about what form of religion, if any, is fitted to our place in time.

This point cannot be overemphasized. And now we need to go all the way back to Prolegomena to apply it: for even if any kind of detailed religious belief and religious practice grounded therein is arguably premature at present—appropriate, if ever, only after much more time has elapsed—perhaps some form of beliefless religious faith will still be appropriate today. And perhaps among the evolutionary shifts that will belong to human religion given its diachronic nature is precisely the one we can ourselves instigate by noticing this distinction and acting on it.

This possibility of a shift from belief to faith was one of the hoped-for contributions of Prolegomena. But only in the light of Skepticism and the diachronic thinking based on it do we truly come to appreciate its potential value. For now, even if religious belief is unjustified and skepticism must be the order of the day, there is no reason to think that we have arrived at the end of religion. Religion can be born again.2

The shift from belief to faith is important. But another is equally so, and also to be grounded in Prolegomena. This is a shift from theism or any other detailed “ism” to ultimism as the object of faith. It is only with the conceptual distinction between theism and ultimism that such a shift and its ramifications for immature beings like us can even be contemplated. This distinction was a long time coming. Religion has been so caught up in attempts to say more exactly, in fuller detail, what the Ultimate is like (God, Brahman, the eternal Buddha-Nature . . .), and reflection on religion has been so caught up in assigning names to the corresponding claims (theism, monistic Hinduism, Buddhism . . .), that the central claim of all, the intellectual heart, the core of religion, has until now been largely overlooked—not receiving so much as a name! Having brought it into focus, however, and having given it a name, we can also consider its religious contribution. I want to argue that the latter is significant indeed.

Let’s start here by considering more closely the relation between ultimism and other religious claims. In this context it is helpful to refer to ultimism itself as simple ultimism and to the other claims as qualified versions of ultimism. The former is simply the claim that there is (metaphysically and axiologically) an ultimate reality in relation to which an ultimate good can be attained; the latter are all those claims—often large conjunctive claims—that entail simple ultimism but add religious content to what it says about ultimates, filling that out in some way (thus they entail simple ultimism whereas simple ultimism can only be said to entail their disjunction). Perhaps something more specific and detailed is said about the nature of the ultimate reality, or else about the nature of the good realizable in relation to it. Typically, of course, content will be added about both of these things. Think, for example, of orthodox Christian doctrine concerning the existence of a personal and triune God who created the world and also lived and died in it as a man in order to facilitate, for humans, the life of the Kingdom of God, or the Hindu idea that through awareness of reality as one and spiritual, our souls, eternal but bound by the law of karma to the world of matter, may be released from the cycle of rebirth and realize identity with the One Reality, Brahman. (The more spare claim that there exists a personal God who will bring at any rate some of us to salvation—i.e., traditional theism—also counts as a qualified version of ultimism, by my definition.) When I sometimes refer to such claims as “sectarian,” it is because through their additional content they typically generate incompatibilities and divisions between themselves and many other actual and possible interpretations of ultimate things.

All such propositions, being religious propositions, are possible objects of propositional religious faith. And each of them, entailing simple ultimism as it does, represents a possible “faith response to ultimism” in the broadest sense of that phrase. (After the discussion of this part of the book is concluded, that phrase will be given a more restricted interpretation, which focuses on simple ultimism alone, but here at the beginning there are more possibilities to consider.) Our question in this first part of the book can be stated as follows: Should any of these propositions be seen as having more of a claim on our attention than others? When thinking about what to bring to the bar of reason for scrutiny, can we already see that it will have to be a form of faith whose propositional component is directed to some one of these objects rather than others—that there is some one form of propositional religious faith such that, if any form of propositional faith is justified (i.e., negatively or positively justified), it is that one?

Now it may seem that which propositional faith to seek to justify (what object of faith to select for examination) is a minor matter—just stake out the terrain that interests you, someone may say, and focus on that, leaving open the possibility that many other objects of faith are also appropriate. May not many forms of ultimistic faith be justified? Might not many different objects of faith each be involved in a rational religious commitment? But I suggest that, because of what can be learned from Skepticism, especially about the open future and human immaturity, it is possible to narrow the field of candidate objects of faith to one—to simple ultimism alone. It seems to me that there is good reason to break out of the circle of particular religious claims and consider instead the general claim they all presuppose, which they must by definition presuppose to be religious. (Persons dissatisfied with one set of particular claims have often simply exchanged it for another, going from one set of details to different details, instead of leaving details behind altogether, as I am recommending—think of the various attempted “reformations” of Christian doctrine all the way down to our own day.) A commitment to this general claim, the forgotten center, can ground an interesting and genuine form of religion in its own right. Leaving the dilemmas and dead ends of traditionalism and sectarianism behind, we simply break into a new religious possibility, a possibility that comes into view only with the clarification of simple ultimism and the distinction between that proposition and qualified versions thereof. One who has faith of this sort, while recognizing that religious belief is unjustified, voluntarily assents to simple ultimism alone (propositional faith) and acts on her assent (operational faith), seeking to do what it is appropriate to do given the truth of that claim.

But why suppose that this simple (or, as we might more provocatively say, purified) faith has the distinction of being the form of religious faith that is justified for twenty-first-century religious skeptics, if any is? There are several reasons. But all can be developed in terms of one of the principles arrived at in Prolegomena (see Appendix B) in the context of a discussion of circumstances in which faith is unjustified (note that in this principle “faith” refers to a combination of propositional and operational faith):

According to the first reason for focusing on simple ultimism, an aim that should all things considered be pursued by twenty-first-century religious skeptics who adopt a religious faith response is the aim of maintaining as much openness to actual and possible religious claims as may feasibly be combined with a clear and substantial religiousness (call this the “openness aim”). And this point, in conjunction with P12 and some other highly plausible propositions (or propositions that can be made plausible), yields the desired conclusion that only simple religious faith can be justified, as we will soon see. But before getting to that, let me explain and defend the openness aim.

The first questions likely to arise in connection with the openness aim ask what I mean when I say “as may feasibly be combined with a clear and substantial religiousness” and why I have introduced this constraint. Let’s start with “religiousness.” What I mean here is simply religion in the sense of that word developed in Prolegomena, where it was argued that religion should, for philosophical purposes, be understood as involving a commitment fundamental among one’s commitments to cultivate dispositions appropriate to the state of affairs represented by ultimism, which either in belief or in faith one takes to obtain: religious persons, perhaps without deploying this terminology, and usually in connection with some qualified version of ultimism, make central to their lives the project of conforming how they live to the standards suggested by there being an ultimate reality in relation to which an ultimate good can be attained. This may sometimes be a struggle, and the dispositions involved may be stronger or weaker, but so long as the commitment in question is the most deeply influential among one’s commitments and regarded as such, it counts as a religious commitment.

As can be detected in these points, religiousness, as I understand it, is really just operational religious faith under another name: it centrally involves a commitment to do certain actions (though notice that these involve the cultivation of various dispositions, including emotional ones) which one sees as appropriate given the truth of the claim or set of claims that provides one’s focus, be it believed or voluntarily taken on board in propositional faith—perhaps actions not at all appropriate otherwise.

What about “clear” religiousness? Well, this is just religiousness with a definite shape: delimited and articulable, not fuzzy and indeterminate. And “substantial” religiousness? Here I have in mind that a form of life could evince clear religiousness and nonetheless be somewhat thin and undemanding, not lending itself to much development, not involving a wide range of dispositions that need to be cultivated or many actions that should be done—not something that can truly fill a life, seriously engaging the attention of an intelligent and dedicated person for a significant proportion of his or her time. Substantial religiousness is religiousness to which such descriptions do not apply.

That brings us to “as may feasibly be combined with.” Notice first that I do not say “as is compatible with”: I mean more than would be realized were some skeptic in some possible world to, for a time, bring off the combination of religiousness and the relevant degree of openness; I mean that it should be practicable in the long term for skeptics in the actual world—that any of us is able to combine those two things by trying hard enough and can live out such a life without disruptions or sacrifices that a skeptic seeking faith rightly would not wish to make. All of this is still somewhat vague, but it is clear enough for present purposes and will become clearer as, in the next two chapters, we consider challenges to the clarity, substantiality, and feasibility of the form of “religion plus openness” which I shall be urging skeptics to regard as their only rational option.

So why build such a constraint into the openness aim—why is the imperative one of openness to the extent that may feasibly be combined with a substantial religiousness? One answer to this question must be given in terms of argumentative strategy. Simple ultimism alone, which I wish to defend as the proper object of propositional religious faith, would commonly—precisely because of its limited content, because of a certain “emptiness” from which it may seem to suffer—be regarded as somewhat less than capable of grounding a form of religion that is clear and substantial as well as feasible. Precisely because of this apparent fact, it would also often be dismissed by those seeking a suitable object of faith, even if its minimal content were shown to be in a certain intellectual respect attractive. My emphasis on simple ultimism will therefore be most persuasively defended by reference to the openness aim if I build into my statement of that aim a reference to clarity, substantiality, and feasibility. (If that emphasis is persuasively defended by reference to this aim, then the cit...