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Life After Faith
The Case for Secular Humanism
By Philip Kitcher Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Yale University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21034-7
CHAPTER 1
DOUBT DELINEATED
I
Secular humanism begins in doubt, but doubt should be only the beginning. For anyone who has lived under the sway of religion, the rejection of religious commitment leaves a vacuum demanding to be filled. Tolstoy's Levin speaks for millions who have lost a once-cherished faith and who are now tormented by their nakedness and vulnerability. However forceful or well-informed or eloquent the voices of atheism may be, however convincing their denunciations of the devastating effects of religious intolerance, mere denial leaves human needs unaddressed: the fully secular life cries out for orientation. Nor is it enough to extend the atheistic critique with a hymn to the glory of scientific understanding. Listening to the choir of contemporary atheists, it is easy to sympathize with William James's pithy characterization of the fervent unbeliever: "He believes in No God and worships him."
If secular humanism is to be lived, and to be understood as a fully rewarding way for human beings to live, the humanist perspective requires positive elaboration. Purely negative broadsides arouse reactive doubts, to the effect that secularists have ignored pervasive aspects of people's lives, so that the human has entirely disappeared from view. Clusters of comfortable intellectuals may be satisfied by secular humanism, but people not primarily focused on the search for knowledge, or people bruised by the vicissitudes of the world, will need substitutes for the guidance that trenchant objections have undermined.
My principal aim in this book is to explore one way of articulating secular humanism, so as to answer complaints that it allows only an impoverished form of human existence. I shall try to understand the sources of the sense of loss, and to respond to them. The underlying concerns are sometimes intellectual, sometimes practical and social. A secular worldview is often taken to be inadequate for grounding claims that some things are valuable or are morally required of us, and that others are worthless or to be prohibited. It is allegedly unable to provide comfort in the face of death, to account for the meaningfulness of human life, and to capture the richness and depth of human experience. A secular world is supposedly bereft of institutions and forms of daily life that support important forms of conduct and community. Without the social structures provided by religion, valuable types of human relationship disappear and there is often no space for the joint pursuit of shared goals and values. I shall try to show how the intellectual questions can be answered, and how we can take steps to address the practical problems. Yet it is only right to acknowledge, from the beginning, that a fully rewarding secular world cannot be built in a day. The world's major religions, at their best, have lavished centuries on responding to the human needs of the faithful (and even, occasionally, to those of unbelievers as well). Attempts to devise secular substitutes can learn from their experiments and from their successes. So, I suggest, secular humanism does well to attend sympathetically to the most enlightened versions of religion. Listening is, of course, harder when the voices of atheism insist on treating religion as an undifferentiated mass of rubbish, to be carted away as thoroughly and as speedily as possible.
Although my primary purpose is the construction of a positive perspective, it will be useful to start by reviewing what I take to be the most powerful reasons for secularist skepticism. Secular humanism begins, after all, with doubt.
II
What kinds of doubt? About religion, of course—but to say that only provokes a further question: What exactly is religion, or what counts as "a religion"?
A popular, but incautious, answer proposes that religions consist of bodies of doctrine about the existence and characteristics of special kinds of beings—deities—who deserve our worship and service because of their impressive attributes. The deepest difficulty with this answer is that doctrines, articles to be believed by the devout, need not be central to all forms of religion. A more straightforward problem is that not all of the many religious practices of human cultures are centered on deities: some focus on spirits, or ancestors, or even on impersonal "forces," with which it is important for people to align themselves. Setting the deeper concern aside for the moment, an obvious refinement of the incautious proposal will address the straightforward objection: Religions are distinguished by their invocation of something beyond the mundane physical world, some "transcendent" realm, and they offer claims about this "transcendent." Although the term thus introduced is as vague as it is popular, the intent in using it is clear: the transcendent is radically different in kind from mundane reality, and (perhaps) not accessible via the methods people use to investigate other aspects of nature.
All around the world, religious people avow doctrinal statements, and thereby offer their preferred versions of what the transcendent is like. They declare that God made a covenant with Abraham, or that an angel who visited the Prophet commanded him to recite the divine message, or that Jesus rose from the dead (to take three salient examples). Part, but only part, of secular humanist doubt consists in the denial that any of these statements (or any of their counterparts in other religions) are true.
That denial cannot be understood, nor its grounds appreciated, without first considering what the statements are supposed to mean. A familiar distinction separates "literal" construals of religious claims, usually presented in particular scriptures, from alternative interpretations that are metaphorical, or allegorical, or poetic. The division, however, is only a crude way of marking the ends of a continuum. At one pole are readings supposing that an ancient Mesopotamian pastoralist was once visited by an imposing old man with a long white beard (in the manner of Blake), that a Meccan estate manager had repeated encounters in the desert with a large gleaming figure outfitted with magnificent wings, and that the son of a carpenter from Nazareth was completely dead and later alive again, where the criteria for life and death are those of current medical practice. Perhaps there are Jews and Muslims and Christians who subscribe to precisely these interpretations—just as there are some who believe that the world was created in six periods of exactly twenty-four hours, and that all major kinds of plants and animals were formed at the very beginning. Most people who profess these faiths probably do not intend anything so detailed and specific when they make their credal declarations. They allow that ordinary descriptions are incomplete, that the doctrines contain "mysteries."
Many religions, including the three Abrahamic versions of monotheism, supply a rich body of statements for the faithful to interpret and to affirm. Idealizing from the messy facts of human psychology, we might assign each religious believer a doctrinal profile, resulting from the level of detail and specificity with which she reads each of the doctrinal statements. Sometimes she may import all of the everyday implications of the words used: "Jesus wept" is construed as claiming that a particular historical figure shed tears on a particular occasion. In other instances, she may retreat from the commonplace allusions and implications: Muhammad, in the Meccan desert, had an extraordinary experience in which what he conceived as an outside source inspired him to repeat certain words (there would be no commitment to the magnificent wings or even to any gleaming figure). Extreme literalists are those who insist that all of the doctrinal statements associated with their religion be read with the maximal amount of specificity—and for them, the warfare between science and religion is typically real and intense. For many others, however, the idea of a single doctrinal profile is clearly fanciful: when pressed, they feel unsure exactly how much of the everyday implications they want to import into the credal avowals that are most significant for them. Confessing to doctrinal indefiniteness, they resist producing clear and unambiguous translations of statements that play a central role in their lives.
To unsympathetic outsiders, doctrinal indefiniteness, or even the milder practice of retreating from the everyday implications of the language used in formulating religious claims, can appear evasive. Critics who detect a contradiction within the body of religious doctrine, or between articles of doctrine and well-confirmed results of inquiry, are informed that the apparent inconsistency is the product of simplistic reading, or worse that the exact content of the doctrine resists specification. Insistence on providing definite content for doctrinal statements ignores the long history of subtle interpretive strategies for reading the scriptures, as well as the more obvious point that the main religious texts were not written by people intending to submit articles to a modern scientific journal. Flexibility of interpretation is nonetheless easily abused, allowing retreat in response to criticism and a compensatory advance later, in exhortations to an audience of the faithful.
How, then, in such murky waters can secular humanism follow any clear current? By permitting many questions to go unanswered, but demanding a reply to one. The core of secularist doubt is skepticism about anything "transcendent." Believers may retreat from committing themselves to all-powerful creators with long white beards or to gleaming figures with magnificent wings or to the living physical presence of someone who was previously fully medically dead, but so long as they interpret their doctrines as recording episodes that were connected with something beyond the physical, organic, human world, secular humanists doubt the truth of what is claimed. Only when the believer is prepared to declare forthrightly that the resurrection is a metaphor to convey an important ideal—stating, perhaps, that when the man we know as Jesus died permanently, there was no abrogation of normal physical and organic processes, but that his acceptance of injustice and agonizing punishment reveals the wonderful human possibility of self-sacrifice—will the secularist conclude that nothing is left to provoke resistance. Strategies of interpretation may vary, doctrines may be admitted to be indefinite, but one question must be addressed: Does this doctrine presuppose some claim about something transcendent?
So far, I have only attempted to become clear about the character of secular humanist doubt. Let's now turn to the grounds for skepticism.
III
Many religions that once pervaded human societies have surely vanished without trace, but even when attention is focused on those known from ethnographic studies and from the historical record, we find an astounding variety in religious doctrines. Impersonal forces, sacred places, ancestors, ghosts, spirits, demons, and a wide diversity of deities have all figured as supposed manifestations of the transcendent. Sometimes religious cultures are aware of part of this variety, allowing tolerantly (as the Romans tended to do) that the divinities of the neighbors are, although inferior, fully real; sometimes they assert a more aggressive exclusivity: ours is the true religion, all the rest is primitive superstition. Assuming, for the moment, that the doctrines are understood with relative specificity, so that distinct religions give very different descriptions of the transcendent realm, an obvious question arises. How is it possible to make sense of this diversity of religious doctrine?
Even when religions make no explicit claim to exclusivity, it would strain credulity to admit all of the rival accounts as true. Nobody thinks the world is so full of mystic forces, sacred places, spirits, and divinities that the entire population of claimants can be accommodated. So long, then, as the interpretation of religious doctrine is sufficiently specific, literal enough to assert the existence of personal and impersonal beings, a distinction must be drawn between those religions that have an approximately accurate inventory and those that are utterly mistaken. Yet the bases of belief are remarkably similar across the entire array of religious traditions, including those condescendingly characterized as benighted superstitions. Leaving what are taken to be religious experiences on one side for the moment, the religious convictions of many contemporary believers are formed in very much the same ways. Often the faithful are born into a religious tradition whose lore they absorb in early childhood and continue to accept throughout their lives; sometimes, when the surrounding society contains adherents of a different doctrine, acquaintance with a rival religion prompts conversion, and a shift of allegiance. In either case, however, religious believers rely on a tradition they take to have carefully preserved insights once vouchsafed to privileged witnesses in a remote past. Because that pattern is so prevalent in undergirding the religious beliefs of the present, it is very hard to declare that one of the traditions has a special status, or even that a manageable few have transmitted truth about the transcendent. The beliefs of each tradition stand on much the same footing: complete symmetry prevails.
How can a devout person, deeply convinced of some specific, substantive doctrine—the claim that the world is the creation of a single personal deity, say—come to terms with this predicament? To face it clearly is to recognize that if, by some accident of early childhood, he had been transported to some distant culture, brought up among aboriginal Australians, for example, he would now affirm a radically different set of doctrines, perhaps about the reverberations of the Dreamtime in the present, and would do so with the same deep conviction and as a result of the same types of processes that characterize his actual beliefs. Insisting that his reading of the favored scriptures is accompanied by some special feeling, a "sensu divinitatis," is fruitless, a fig-leaf covering for dogmatism. His Australian counterpart would avow similar feelings, aroused by listening to narratives about the sacred places, although he would not decorate his own professions with a Latin tag.
Confronted with this challenge, thoughtful religious people incline to one of two strategies (or sometimes opt for both). Symmetry is supposed to be broken either by the fact that some religions—the more "advanced" ones—come with an arsenal of theological weapons that can be used to repel doubt, or through the recognition that, beyond the familiar ways in which people can acquire new information—perception, memory, and the like—there are reliable means of gaining basic religious knowledge.
Appeals to the justifying power of rational theology propose an analogy between the judgments of scientists about the natural world and those of sophisticated theologians about the transcendent. Different cultures adopt alternative views of the same natural phenomena, about the facts of biological heredity for instance, but the diversity of belief doesn't provoke doubts about well-entrenched parts of science like molecular genetics. By the same token, the believer contends, the conclusions of intellectually well articulated religions can be differentiated from the religious ideas of cultures that have not yet developed rigorous ways of fathoming the transcendent.
The analogy not only divides the "advanced" religions from their "primitive" counterparts, but also fragments the community of those who profess a sophisticated religion, separating a tiny group of intellectuals who bestow religious enlightenment on the unwashed mass of the faithful. Does that image correspond to the self-understanding of the devout? Can it be reconciled with doctrines that the truth about the transcendent is available to all? Yet worse is to come. For, although diversity decreases when you suppose that only religions with a well-articulated intellectual tradition can acquire doctrinal truth, enough differences remain to revive the problem of symmetry. Christian theology is developed differently by different denominations, Islam and Judaism have their own constellations of alternative versions of rational doctrine, and beyond them lie the even more distinctive and diverse accounts provided by the many sects of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and of other Eastern religions. Disagreement in doctrine is mirrored in disagreement about cogent modes of religious argument. Finally, a closer look at the motivating analogy shows it to be broken-backed. In the scientific case, the methods used to generate and defend the conclusions can be tested independently for their reliability, and the conclusions themselves can be put to work in a host of successful predictions and interventions. Molecular geneticists can do remarkable things on an impressive scale, producing organisms to order and using them to manufacture a host of medically valuable substances (for example, growth hormones, clotting factors, or insulin). Nothing like that is apparent in even the longest-surviving traditions of rational religion. Instead arguments about the transcendent, including those directed at establishing the existence of a deity, are presented, rebutted, refined, and questioned again, in a process that makes no progress, in which no question is ever settled, in which opinion never converges and disagreement never abates. No basis can be found for supposing that this process is well suited to lead to transcendent truth. It seems to continue (indefinitely?) only because those committed to pursuing it already believe, on independent grounds, the doctrines of their favored tradition. Small wonder, then, that in many schools of rational religion, the official point of the enterprise is not to produce "proofs" to confound the unbeliever, but the more modest goal of elaborating a religious vision whose real sources lie elsewhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life After Faith by Philip Kitcher. Copyright © 2014 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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