Donald Wiebe

Milestone or millstone? Does Norenzayan's book live up to the hype?

In this book Norenzayan maintains that the mechanisms that make possible cooperative behavior among members of hunter-gatherer bands and tribal societies cannot account for what he calls the ‘scaled-up’ cooperation of humans in cities and states. Only the fear of being watched by an omnipotent and omniscient supernatural being who is able and willing to punish those who do not play fair can account for the emergence of the ultrasociality on which complex societies are based. The author shows here that neither the experimental nor historical evidence he brings forward supports that claim.

Benson Saler, 'conceptualising religion'

In this book, Saler focuses his attention on the problems attending the definition of religion in various academic discourses. In the introduction, he begins his exploration of the conceptual options regarding religion by contrasting essentialist and nominalist approaches to the task of definition which lead, respectively, to the use of digital and analogue scales in representing religions. In chapters 1 and 2, he pays particular attention to the role of the notion of the transcendent. He reviews the nature and value of various types of monothetic definitions. In the final three chapters, Saler attempts to provide an alternative way of putting the notion of religion to use

Science and Religion: Is Compatibility Possible?

To raise the question of the possible compatibility of science and religion must, in light of the historical relations of the scientific and religious communities, seem utterly naive. Since the days of Galileo and Urban VIII, it can be argued, the image of conflict has appropriately dominated all discussion of the relation of religion to science. The dominant picture, as Andrew White’s famous History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology (1896) illustrates (although some what onesidedly), has been one of the religious faithful fighting the progress of the sciences, particularly when new discoveries threatened the security of cherished dogmas. And today the image of conflict is reinforced, despite the fact that contemporary scientific beliefs are more congenial to religious (and especially Christian) doctrines than those of a few generations ago,1 for the conflict, it is maintained, is basically methodological. Both science and religion, that is, seem to be playing the ‘cognition game’and yet religion, so it is claimed, seems to follow an entirely different set of rules in its achievement of ‘knowledge’from those of science.2 The point of the modern view of the conflict image, is that science provides us with a clear and straightforward paradigm for knowing — a ‘morality of knowledge’3 — which religious thinking obviously contravenes. Despite such claims, however, there is a reluctance on the part of many to accept the image of conflict as an appropriate category in discussion of the relations of science and religion, for both science and religion have made valued contributions to our lives and neither is likely to whither away in the very near future. That reluctance to deny the value of either community has inspired alternative interpretations of the meanings of science and religion that ‘entail’ compatibility. And it is the variety and significance of these various ‘compatibility systems’that I wish to look at in this chapter.

Is Religious Belief Problematic

A discussion of religious belief, as a discussion of belief in general, must indicate clearly and precisely the object and intention of the analysis to be undertaken. Care needs to be exercised, for example, in distinguishing kinds of belief — behavioural beliefs from rational beliefs, conscious from unconscious beliefs, ‘belief that’from ‘belief in,’and so on — if confusion is to be avoided.1Similarly it must be made clear whether the analysis is to concern itself with ‘the logic of belief’or ‘the psychology of belief’, with the justification, confirma-tion and acceptability of beliefs or with their genesis and ‘social legitimation’. Bearing in mind that these distinctions are largely ‘analytical’and that one cannot rigidly separate the different ‘aspects’of belief in any simple fashion, I shall nevertheless restrict attention in this chapter to the question of belief as a conscious men-tal state. I shall be concerned only, or primarily, with ‘belief that’— with belief as the conscious acceptance of a statement or proposition about some state or states of affairs in ‘the world’, so to speak, whether past, present or future.‘Believing’in this sense is a cognitive state of mind, although this is not meant to imply that there are no emotional and expressive overtones connected with such beliefs, or that such overtones are of no importance. And it seems to me that religion also understands ‘religious belief’to imply a ‘cognitive act’or to involve reference to a ‘cognitive state of mind’. H. H. Farmer is quite right to claim, I think, that ‘once persuade the religious man that the reality with which he supposes himself to be dealing is not ‘there’in the sense in which he supposes it to be ‘there’and his reli-gion vanishes away’.2 Stressing the theoretical character of religious belief, however, need not imply that religion is nothing but such an intellectual act. Religion is, to be sure, more than intellectual assent to belief claims (propositions, statements, etc.), since it involves the adoption of a particular style of life and a commitment to a peculiar set of moral ideals, as well as participation in ritual and liturgy, and so on. But it also concerns itself with an external reality. As Boyce Gibson puts it, ‘Religion has an intellectual as well as a moral com-ponent. It is not a way of life imposed upon a state of affairs, it is a way of life with a conviction about a state of affairs built into it.’3 Religious belief, therefore, is not merely symbolic and/or expressive but also theoretical and cognitive. That religious belief has a cogni-tive status, however, does not preclude its acceptability. The ques-tion to be considered in this chapter, then, is ‘Is religious belief as theoretical problematic?’; ‘Is religious belief ‘cognitively significant’— worthy of inclusion in our “system of knowledge” of the world?’

Has Philosophy of Religion a Place in the Agenda of Theology

Accepting the invitation to comment on the value of philosophy and the philosophy of religion to theology was, it seems to me now, rather foolhardy. Assurances that a fully developed statement on the issue was not expected made the exercise appear far easier than I found it to be. The simple question presented for comment — Has Philosophy of Religion a Place in the Agenda of Theology? -is not so simple, for even what philosophy, religion and theology are in themselves is not at all clear — all three being hotly contested notions on which agreement is seldom achieved and never widespread. I shall, nevertheless, attempt an answer to the question, despite the difficulties, proceeding on the basis of provisional characterizations of its three central concepts.1

Is Science Really an Implicit Religion

Our modern Western (that is, European/Anglo-American) civilization has come to be what it is, a religious and, scientific structure, both at once. It cannot be denied that it is both a religious and a scientific culture, but neither can it be denied that there has existed a constant tension between its scientific and religious communities at least since the emergence of modern Western science at the close of the Middle Ages. Indeed so often has that tension deteriorated into outright hostility that it is not at all inappropriate to describe the relationship between them in warfare imagery.2 And that has made us rather uneasy, for we suspect that the conflict between the two communities is indicative of a more profound and significant con-flict of concepts and ideas — indicative of the fact that science and religion provide not just different sets of concepts for coming to terms with the world but rather mutually exclusive conceptual structures or frameworks for doing so. Thus, even though there can be no doubt that a modus vivendi between the two communities and, in a sense, between the two sets of concepts, was achieved and gave birth to our simultaneously scientific and religious civilization, there is no longer the confidence that once existed in its validity. The perpetual conflict between the two has come to constitute a kind of prima facie case against it. And there is some apprehension — given that in our society we tend to think more like scientists and less like the religious devotees of bygone days — that religion will somehow succumb to science; that our culture will‘degenerate’into a purely scientific culture. We are loath to give up the benefits that either the one or the other of the structures of thought has conferred upon us — religion having provided us with meaning (meaningfulness) and science with knowledge (power) — although even putting the issue that way may be to draw the distinction too precisely between the two for us to feel comfortable with it. And so we seem to be committed to finding some new interpretation of science, or religion, or both, so as to entail their compatibility and complementarity, both substantively and methodologically. Anything less would force us to acknowledge a fundamental contradiction at the core of our cultural inheritance and existence.

The ‘Centripetal Theology’ of The Great Code

If Frye’s disclaimer is taken seriously the theologian qua theologian will have little interest in The Great Code.1 This book, as he put it,‘is not a work of Biblical scholarship, much less [one] of theology’.2 It has, he insists. none of the system — historical, scientific, or meta-physical — that characterizes theology but is, rather, a work of brico-lage, as is the Bible itself.3 The ‘putting together of bits and pieces of whatever comes to hand,’whether in the Bible or in his book, he suggests, however, yields a deeper comprehension of reality than does abstract, scientific and rational thought. And that suggestion, his disclaimer notwithstanding, I shall argue here, indicates that The Great Code is very much a theological, or at least a metatheological, exercise and that it should, therefore, be of considerable interest to theologians. Frye’s acknowledgement of the ‘emotionally explosive’character of the thesis he presents indicates, moreover, the radical, and therefore important, nature of his (hidden) theological agenda.4

Comprehensively Critical Rationalism and Commitment

The theologian’s claim to cognitive significance for his or her religious beliefs is today under sustained attack from philosophical quarters as an outrage against not only reason, but morality as well. Reason, it is claimed, can provide us with an adequate account of knowledge and its growth — an account which needs no recourse to concepts such as ‘faith’, ‘belief’, or ‘commitment’. Religious beliefs, however, as everyone knows and the theologian is quite ready to admit, are often espoused in direct contravention of such ‘rules of reason’— they follow rather from religious experience; from ‘the immediate utterances of faith’. Faith and reason therefore are assumed to be incompatible. Consequently the theologian is forced either to deny cognitive significance to faith (belief statements) or give up the claim to intellectual integrity. To affirm both is therefore to deny the possibility of a ‘morality of knowledge’— a system of rational principles able to account adequately for our knowledge. And such a denial, it is warned, opens ‘the gateways to intellectual and moral irresponsibility’.1

Philosophical Reflections on Twentieth-Century Mennonite Thought

There is a sense in which one might reasonably query the possibility of the task suggested by the title of this chapter. One might justifiably argue, that is, that there is really no substantial body of thought both characteristically Mennonite and characteristically of the twentieth century upon which reflective attention might be focused. This is not to say that the intellectual is non-existent in the Mennonite community, for Mennonite artists, writers, musicians and various kinds of ‘academics’abound. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to find ‘the thinker’in contemporary Anabaptist/Mennonite circles. There are few Mennonite theologians with originality and flair and even fewer, if any, Mennonite philosophers. The Mennonite Encyclopedia, interestingly, boasts not a single entry under ‘philosophy’; and theology, according to the Encyclopedia, seems to emerge only under the stimulus of an unacceptable ‘liberal influence’ .1 My concern in this essay, however, is not with an examination of any particular expressions of the twentieth century Mennonite mind but rather with the impoverished state of that mind.

Postulations for Safeguarding Preconceptions

The study of religion in an academic/scientific setting is in need of close philosophical scrutiny. It is unfortunate, therefore, that philosophy of religion has for the most part been seen as an activity continuous with the religious life itself. It has usually been understood, that is, as a rational explication of the import of religious experience; or, perhaps, in a more critical vein, as an examination of the doctrinal/dogmatic contents (whether explicit or implicit) of religious traditions. Although I do not wish to argue that such activity is either unwarranted or of no value at all, it does seem to me that there are more pressing matters regarding religion for philosophy to attend to — namely, ‘the study of religion’as a possible discipline, and the claims made on its behalf.1 That kind of epistemological concern, with its ‘turn to the subject’, so to speak, will, at least in some senses, bring the philosophy of religion into the modern period and give it a relevance it seems to have lost in our own times.2 Given the claims that students of religion have made regarding the scientific character of that undertaking, one might have expected the philosophers of science — and in particular the philosophers of the social sciences — to turn their attention in that direction. But they have not. It is quite appropriate, if not imperative, therefore, that the philosopher of religion take up precisely that task. Indeed, that kind of philosophy of religion, I venture to suggest, may have more to tell us about religion and the religions than can philosophy of religion as traditionally understood. This chapter, then, is intended as a first step in changing the focus of attention for the philosopher of religion, and in that process, to rejuvenate the philosophy of religion so as to make it, once again, an interesting and significant philosophic activity. In taking up the issue of the nature of the study of religion here, however, I shall pay particular attention to that study as it is undertaken in the North American academic setting.