Thinking God

Thinking God

Owen F. Cummings & Andrew C. Cummings

Thinking God

Copyright © 2011 Owen F. Cummings and Andrew C. Cummings. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Introduction

There are many books in the market introducing students to topics in the philosophy of religion and/or philosophical theology. What makes this particular book different? First, the book is written by father and son. Such books are relatively rare. Second, the father is a theologian and the son is a philosopher. Both teach at the same institution, Mount Angel Seminary, and while they share a common background in Catholicism, their approach is ecumenical, drawing upon many Christian traditions, and they come at the things of the faith from different vantage points. While the faith remains the same, the approaches they take invite different kinds of insight. No attempt has been made to harmonize matters of style, methodologies, or ways of thinking. This is quite deliberate. The hope is that the reader will realize that different approaches to similar topics will be both complementary and enriching. Third, the table of contents attempts to straddle contemporary issues in the church and in society generally alongside more traditional topics in the philosophy of religion. Finally, the book is short. That means that it can be used for an adult study group in theology or philosophy of religion, as an introductory textbook in college, or as a textbook for seniors in high school serious about the study of religion. Andrew has authored chapters 2 , 5 , 7 , and 8 , and Owen chapters 1 , 3 , 4 , and 6 . Each chapter is intended to introduce the reader to the topic in question. It is in no way intended to be exhaustive. Both authors hope that their approaches to the topics will whet the appetite of the readers to continue to read, to think, and to probe these important questions.

1

Why Believe?

If he is not to be convicted of special pleading or of belonging to the intellectual equivalent of a holy huddle, the theologian must take his place on the common ground of intellectual learning, teaching and research.

—George Pattison¹

We are, in fact, each one of us, intolerably complex: confused, bewildered, bombarded by discordant signals and demands, subject to conflictual desires and motives, unstable moods and fragile loyalties; driven by insecurity and ineffectively smothered by fear.

—Nicholas Lash²

Orientation

Why believe? Why believe in a religion, or in a particular worldview for that matter? How do we know what’s true and what’s not? Isn’t it a matter of opinion since there is no universal acceptance on most issues that are of real human significance? The material in this chapter may be somewhat discomfiting as it moves towards an initial discussion of the nature of truth. Most people, including students of theology, experience a degree of frustration, at times tending towards a judgment of irrelevance, when it comes to more obviously philosophical matters of epistemology and truth. Those who specialize in these foundational aspects of philosophy and theology sometimes write in a language that is far from accessible, even to the philosophical or theological initiate. To help lever us into the chapter let us spend some time thinking about the orientation quotes at the beginning. They will provide us with a nuanced platform from which we may launch our exploration into Why believe?

For theologian George Pattison, in speaking about faith, the theologian must be able to speak intelligibly to his peers and contemporaries in language they can understand. Unless this can be achieved, believers indulge themselves in religious positivism, requiring no intellectual underpinning whatsoever. Theology becomes almost a private language with no bridges or connections with the ordinary language of the public forum. For theologian Nicholas Lash, it is more than attempting to articulate our religious point of view in ways that are intelligible to the general public. Lash acknowledges that it is not just about being reasonably clear. We are not discarnate intellects articulating truth in perfectly clear and distinct ideas, in objective and value­-free language. On the contrary, we come carrying a lot of baggage, emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual. So, we ought to look for the greatest possible degree of clarity without subscribing to a specious kind of objectivity. At the outset, these thinkers help us to see that we are not dealing here with black-and-white approaches to truth, with un-nuanced avenues of knowing and believing. To help us situate more carefully our question Why believe? some, albeit very brief, telling of the Western intellectual story seems necessary if we are to make headway in this chapter.

From the Beginning to the Enlightenment

Although it is not possible to date with precision the emergence of human beings on this planet, it seems to be the case that from the earliest recoverable moments of human self-expression, our ancestors have cherished some kind of religious faith or other. One needs to be careful here and not claim too much. The scholar of religions, Ninian Smart, points out that we shall never know, on purely scientific and historical grounds, what the emergence of human consciousness was really like. The evidence is gone for ever. Smart is simply stating a fact. He speculates, however, that from earliest times, when we examine the scanty remains, mixed attitudes, and the complicated fabric of beliefs of the ancients, the seeds of religious faith are present.³ Certainly, in the ancient world of common existence between Jews, Christians, and Graeco-Roman pagans, religion was a common bond, even if Christians in their atheism seemed to be undoing that bond by insisting on their God alone as real. People did religious things, participated in religious rituals, and accepted religion as part of the natural fabric of society. This remained very largely the norm in the West right up until about the eighteenth century when matters began to change.

Beginning with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, questioning of such traditional religious faith and practice took a radical turn. Skepticism about authority emerged, about authority of any kind—philosophical, theological, political—as people looked for sure and certain foundations that would match the new discoveries of science. Think for yourself! was the great slogan of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s proclamation is not necessarily bad. His cry frees us from thinking that is harmful or destructive, confining and cramped, and it frees us from superstition. It holds out a certain liberty. It would be sheer foolishness not to applaud the accomplishments of the Enlightenment. Not everything before the Enlightenment was good! John Macquarrie wryly reminds us that there were plenty of evils in the old pre-Enlightenment days when Christianity had things all its own way and missed its chances.⁴ In our post-modern world there is much reflection on the Enlightenment, pointing out its flaws and failings. Even criticism of the Enlightenment, however, seems to stem from a way of thinking espoused by the Enlightenment. This has been well grasped by the philosopher Louis Dupré: "In my opinion . . . critique of the Enlightenment continues to rely on principles inherent in the Enlightenment itself. Its summons to uninhibited critical thinking—sapere aude—challenges any principles that stand in the way of such a critique, including the Enlightenment’s own. Formerly, few dared to turn the power of their critique on the rule of reason itself. Today’s critics are prepared to do so, though the source of the critical impulse lies in the very movement they criticize."⁵ If the Enlightenment gave us modernity, the critics of post-modernity are using the same Enlightenment-given tools to make their critique of the Enlightenment. Perhaps most critics might agree that the major Enlightenment flaw was to equate thinking for yourself as thinking by yourself, to isolate one’s thinking from tradition, tradition understood broadly as conversation with others, past and present.⁶ Simply put, it is impossible to free one’s own thinking from the thinking of others, both past and present. Even if the word tradition carries too much freight for some people, the reality behind it, that is to say the thinking of other people, is impossible to avoid. It is there, recognized or not.

Historical Consciousness, Pluralism, and the Free Market of Ideas

Cardinal Avery Dulles suggested that there have been three primary consequences of the Enlightenment for Christian faith: historical consciousness, pluralism, and the free market of ideas.⁷ First, the development of historical consciousness, that is to say, that people at any given time in history have but a partial access to truth, and indeed, that the understanding of truth is formed and molded by the cultural presuppositions of any given period. Each idea, each person, is a history, and not only has a history. Second, pluralism is the recognition that there are many different and often competing ways of understanding reality. The benefit of pluralism is a respectful tolerance among people of differing views. The downside of pluralism lies in a pervasive sense that it is impossible to know the truth in any clear way. The recognition of many options, of many ways of understanding reality, may make any particular commitment more difficult if not weaker.⁸ Third, is the free market of ideas, a phenomenon closely related to pluralism. Just as we are surrounded in the West with a free market of goods and services answering to every conceivable human need and at times every imaginable human vice, so we are also provided with a free market of ideas through instantaneous and omnipresent information about everything. The benefit here is incremental knowledge leading to genuine enlightenment about so much that is important and that impinges on our lives. At the same time, there is real loss from this free market of ideas. A person may feel so entirely overwhelmed with philosophical and religious choice, as it were, that she succumbs to the notion that personal temperament and individual taste determine the nature of truth.

These three primary consequences of the Enlightenment have contributed to a contemporary crisis of religious faith, as people struggle with the questions: Is any worldview really true? How do I know? Such deeply existential questions have led for some to a real crisis of religious belief and decline in religious practice. It is difficult not to agree with John Macquarrie when he says, The past two hundred and fifty years have been marked by a steady decline of religion in the West and a corresponding growth of secularism.⁹ Macquarrie’s judgment seems to be more true of Europe than it is of the United States where active religious practice remains very high, and the question of secularism/secularization takes us into murky waters where both sociological data and philosophical reflection throw up different possible points of view. Having made these various admissions and acknowledgments, probably few would deny that the question, Why believe at all? presents itself in a very compelling way for people today, and it is a question that we must face as Christians.

Why Are We?

Is there any absolutely final, absolutely clear, and absolutely objective meaning to human existence? A very difficult and disturbing question! John Macquarrie writes: No one can prove beyond doubt either that there is a meaning and purpose to human life, or that there is no such meaning and purpose. Here believers and agnostics are in the same boat.¹⁰ I think Macquarrie is right. If such purely objective meaning were available, it would seem to follow that all reflective human beings would espouse the same basic perspectives, and clearly they do not.

It may, however, be possible to make a beginning of an answer to the question, Why are we? Immediately there comes to mind the great question put by the philosopher Leibniz, the question surely that is the ground of all metaphysics: Why is there anything rather than nothing? That is the more objective and less personal form of the question, Why are we? or, Why am I? Thinkers put it in different ways. The Oxford Anglican