“Philosophy of Religion”

“Philosophy of Religion” July 31, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray Click here to see the video

Martin Heidegger, “Sentiments, even the finest, have no place in philosophy. Sentiments, it is said, are something irrational. Philosophy, on the other hand, is not only something rational but is the actual guardian of reason. In making this assertion we have come unawares to a kind of decision as to what philosophy is. On what may well have been the absolute worst day in my four decades in parish ministry, I was called to the home of some close friends and church members by the police. I arrived as an ambulance was speeding out of the driveway and I was ushered in by the police who were testing my friend’s hands to see if there was gunpowder residue on his hands. His wife had attempted suicide with a pistol that my friend said that he had forgotten was on a closet shelf; but she was not dead. Once the police were satisfied that my friend had not, in fact, shot his wife, we rushed to the emergency room where we were met in the hallway by the neuro- surgeon who had been working on Marjory. The surgeon said to us, “I might be able to keep her alive, but she will have lost her ability to see or to speak, and she certainly will never walk again.” He escorted us into the emergency room where we saw his wonderful, intelligent, talented, and loving wife with two gloved nurses literally holding her brain inside her shattered skull. With all the feeling that a used car salesman might have in asking what color car you wanted, the surgeon looked at my friend and said, “What do you want for me to do?” Their two sons lived out of town, and he didn’t want to make a decision without consulting them but there was no time to make phone calls. He screamed, “I can’t play God! I can’t make a decision like this!” I was so glad that the staff could see that they needed to keep the flood of hospital chaplains away from us. And I don’t say that to diminish them. I am sure that their prayers and formulaic intonations of piety are helpful to the kind of people who hold onto that kind of supernatural theistic view of God and the world, but they would have only made this situation worse, by trying to hide a tragedy behind a vail of pious words and passages of scripture. We didn’t need for them to lead us in a prayer for a miracle and we sure didn’t need them in the ER as we watch Marjory die, telling us, “She is in a better place now.” Such platitudes would only have made matters worse. I was joined there by the hospital’s ethicist, a good friend of mine, a former Trappist monk who had earned a PhD in philosophy and now worked, not as a chaplain, but literally as an institutional philosopher helping people to grapple with complex ethical decisions. Together we assured my grieving friend that he was not being put in the position to play God. Restoring his wife to her former life was not on the menu of choices…. That might have been a “God-like” choice. But really, his only choice was to either make her pain last a little longer, a couple of weeks, at best, or to let her go now. It was still the hardest thing he ever had to do, but it wasn’t much of a decision. We agreed to let her go as quickly as possible. It was a horrible day, in every way. The whole family was deeply grateful for my having been there although, honestly, I didn’t do anything. There was nothing to be done. I conducted the memorial service in a standing room only large sanctuary for this very popular and beloved victim of suicide, surrounded by hundreds of people who obviously felt about as sad as I did. When it was all over, the hospital ethicist and I had a quiet moment together in which he made the observation, “You know, all we really do is assure people that what they already know is true and it is ok for them to act on what they know is right.” Philosophy, when it is applied in the most meaningful way, can help to clear out the rubbish of superstition and unfounded social expectations and allow us to apply reason to the most difficult moments and problems of life. Creedal religion is often basically whistling through the graveyard, trying to deny our fear, our pain, our grief. The ethicist and I both certainly represented religion in that moment, but at heart, we were two philosophers determined to simply make it safe for reason and reality to take the stage in the midst of the kind of crisis that could have gotten a lot worse if magical or superstitious thoughts were interjected. For most of the past two hundred years, colleges and universities had a department that was called “Philosophy and Religion.” They put the two together for a host of very logical reasons. Most theologians wrote and thought like philosophers and many philosophers often wandered into discussing matters of metaphysics. When I was a student in those departments, we often teased one another saying that philosophers, in their search for truth, were looking for a black cat in a dark room. But theologians, who tried to clarify the nature of God, were looking for a black cat in a dark room that wasn’t there. But finding that black cat is exactly what attracted me to the philosophy department in the first place, as a 17 year old college student raised in rural Kentucky where the only social outlets were the public schools and my family’s church. I had been taught to believe a whole lot of things that didn’t really stand up to even casual examination, and I wanted to find proof. I wanted a persuasive, believable argument that could prove that the religion that I had been brought up to believe so whole heartedly, was actually true. At least initially, to my young mind, the great philosophers were some reassurance: Anselm and Rene Descartes argued deductively in what we call an Ontological proof. That is, without resorting to any external evidence, reasoning only through logic, saying that God was that being of whom none greater could be conceived and as existence is greater than non-existence, God must, therefore exist. Anselm seemed quite bright in the 11th century, and it satisfied me as a college freshman but it didn’t have much staying power. We have a process in philosophy called, “reductio ad absurdum,” or reduce the idea to absurdity. We could ask Anselm, “What about the burrito of which none greater could be conceived?” Ontology It wasn’t as persuasive as he thought it would be. Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas took an inductive approach, offering several cosmological arguments based on observation of the known universe. At least for Leibniz, it was the simple concept of the “unmoved mover.” That is, the universe is in motion and some force must have set it in motion and we’ll agree to call that unknown force God. Aquinas, though he didn’t mention a watch specifically, basically offered several views of cosmology or teleological argument, that said, “Look, if you find a watch, you have to know that there is a watch maker somewhere.” The universe is infinitely more complicated than a watch and so it must have a maker and that maker is God. This is what many conservatives still appeal to as the argument from intelligent design. It has a certain appeal. Our air is a mixture of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, we have to have oxygen but if our air was just a little more oxygen rich, it would kill us, or a little more nitrogen rich, it would choke us. And our gravity is just strong enough to keep a layer of air around us that makes more meteors burn up upon entry and thick enough to protect us from radiation. Our planet is the only one in the solar system with a surface temperature that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow for life to exist. It is appealing to think that this wasn’t just chance, that the presence of water, soil, sun, all the right gases, all of the right elements to make life possible must come from divine will. However, you just have to flip it around to realize that the reason there is life on this planet and not on any others that we know of is because we have the right gases, temperature, water, soil, and sun to make it happen. If this is all a divine plan, then God would have messed up on billions and billions of other planets, only to finally get it right here…. Which is not appealing in that whole, being-none-greater-can-be-conceived of category. Philosophy provides us with the means and the methods to think about what we believe critically but it cannot provide us with certainty. You cannot prove that one religion is either right or even more right than others, either by pure reason or by an appeal to evidence. Which often does matter much to most religious people who just lift high their as yet unread copy of the Bible and declare that their interpretation of certain key passages is true, and the rest of the world be damned. In that sense, the famous TV preachers are not much different from the famous TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who says “We have lots of theories about voter fraud, we just don’t have any evidence.” Quoting the Bible or any other holy book is not proof of anything unless you are willing to grant the first absurd premise that God wrote this mess. Training in philosophy makes it easier to live with ambiguity than to live with false certainty. Heidegger calls philosophy the “guardian of reason,” where no mere sentiment should be allowed to hold sway. You use logic, critical thinking, to examine your beliefs, to test your religion, straining out the magic and the superstition. But then, and I think that even Heidegger would agree, once you have the ground cleared, you bring the sentiment back into that rational universe. You take someone as rational, as smart, as Albert Einstein, and after everything he has theorized and helped us all to understand, he says: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” The trend in colleges and universities over the past generation is to abolish their Philosophy and Religion departments entirely or to assign those topics either to their history or their anthropology departments. At least where I used to teach, our Philosophy and Religion department was assigned to the History department and their chair of that department just never schedules many classes in philosophy or religion and what few that you may find offered are typically only regarding eastern religions, ignoring western traditions, and Drury, I may remind you, is a church related college. I understand what has prompted this. Religion is so often an intellectual embarrassment that there is some reason to regard it as more of a historical artifact than as an operative way of understanding the world, but I am afraid that they are missing the point of why we have considered the study of philosophy and religion to be crucial to education. We are turning liberal arts colleges into vocational schools that exist only to help students to get a more lucrative job when the purpose of a liberal arts education was never intended to be vocational, it was supposed to teach students how to think critically, how to understand the world, and how to grasp the meaning of our own existence. I realize that may be too esoteric for people to consider these days. Trust me, before I shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for my daughter’s university education, I wanted to be sure that it was going to lead to a better future for her. I totally get it. And I am a big advocate for vocational education. I’m not saying that many people need to endure earning a degree in philosophy but, I am saying that there is more to life than getting a higher paying job. And, the church, the government, corporations, and even the sciences are impoverished if we lose the ability to combine critical thinking with a sense of awe and wonder about our own existence. I hope that you are never in as dramatic a circumstance as the one I described earlier but we are all mortal and life and death decisions will come to all of us from time to time. I just hope that when that moment comes, that we are all able to think beyond empty religion and far beyond the bottom line of profit and loss. To move from the absurdity of superstition to the callousness of mere economic practicality is to skip over everything that makes life meaningful. When was the last time you visited an art museum? When did you last read a book of poetry? Have you been to a planetarium since you were made to go in grade school? Do you still have a library card? How often do you attend a live concert or live theater? I’m just making the modest proposal that, in light of our mortality, you should remember that there is more to life than going to work and staring at your phone.