Religion is a Sin

7/28/2019 Religion is a Sin

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Religion is a sin

Galen Strawson

Saving God: Religion after Idolatryby Mark JohnstonPrinceton, 198 pp, 16.95, August 2009, ISBN 978 0 691 14394 1

Surviving Death by Mark JohnstonPrinceton, 393 pp, 24.95, February 2010, ISBN 978 0 691 13012 5

Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and Imtempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem aboutas good as terms get in this strange part of the park. I dont, however, agree withhis reasons or share his motive for attempting to explain how we can survive death,and I doubt the necessity of some of the matriel in his admittedly fabulousargumentative armamentarium. Ill be jiggered if I survive death on Johnstonsterms; I dont know whether he holds out much hope for himself. And his successwont please anyone who believes in anything supernatural. Any conception of Godas essentially a supernatural being is idolatry in Johnstons book. All regularadherents of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity aretherefore idolaters. And they go further: they want a personal God, a CosmicIntervener who might confer special worldly advantages on his favourites. Theyshould be ashamed of themselves, at least if theyve had any education; theyremoral babies.

Here Johnston seems close to Iris Murdoch, who asserted that there is noresponsive superthou. Its this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagelto say: It isnt just that I dont believe in God Its that I hope there is no God! I

dont want there to be a God; I dont want the universe to be like that. In Murdochand Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or religious temperament,which never invests in supernatural entities. It finds that the natural is enough, andsimply asks, in Nagels words: How can one bring into ones individual life arecognition of ones relation to the universe as a whole, whatever that relation is? Is there a way to live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it?

Nagel says hes using the term religious temperament in a way that may seemillegitimate to those who are genuinely religious, but it wont seem illegitimate tothose engaged in what Johnston calls the truly religious life, only to most ofthose who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as religiousby sociologists and by themselves. You dont have to go all that far in these

matters, although you have to go farther than most sociological believers, to realisethat its impossible no exceptions for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse toachieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural personalGod. There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because theyvesomehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in factabandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and StAugustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religioustemperament. Its easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as westick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of


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egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, isabout self.

This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take theterm morally worse as purely descriptive, denoting people whose charactersgenerally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention

to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find thatpeople who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than peoplewho lack them. Are the religious worse because theyre religious, or are theyreligious because theyre worse? The first direction of causation is well known, butits the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologicallyspeaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with aframework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. Inconverts those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, orwithout having previously taken it seriously the correlation between religiousbelief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is notincompatible with charm) is particularly striking.

Johnston ticks off undergraduate atheists like Richard Dawkins and ChristopherHitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for theirerrors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris)companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant stress. Johnstongives ground to no one in his disdain for the idolaters all ordinary believers andtheres a great deal to be said from his perspective that can be read ascomplementing the undergraduates. He agrees with them on Lucretius point theextraordinary power of the all too human institution of religion to lead people intoevil (tantum religio potuit suadere malorum) and to such external criticisms addsmany ferocious internal ones.

Johnston has, in fact, the genuine spiritual impulse. The consequence is that SavingGod and Surviving Death are a slap in the face for many who may be attracted bytheir titles: regular believers, supernaturalists, are likely to feel suckered ratherthan succoured. But really its the other way round. Theyve already been suckered;the question is whether they can be succoured. The titles arent false advertising,even if the books might also have been called Saving Death and Surviving God. Inthe present state of our knowledge, Johnston holds, a truly religious (hence non-whingeing) person who is properly aware of the options is bound to start fromontological naturalism, the view that the domain of the natural sciences iscomplete on its own terms; that every causal transaction ultimately consists insome utterly natural process, for example, mass-energy transfer. Such a personshould in any case hope that this naturalism which has nothing to do with

scientism is true, because it provides a complete defence against thesupernatural powers and principalities that could otherwise exploit our tendency toservile idolatry. The natural is already extraordinary enough: read any issue of theNew Scientist. The overall nature of the physical is little understood, in spite of allthe achievements of physics. To appreciate this, consider how strange the truthabout physical reality must be, given that consciousness is itself a wholly physicalphenomenon.


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Spinozas God is simply nature, i.e. the universe, and since the universe certainlyexists, God certainly exists. Johnston has affinities with Spinoza (the noblest andmost lovable of the great philosophers, as Russell said), but he rejects simpleSpinozan pantheism, which identifies God with the universe, in favour ofpanentheism. Drawing on a familiar philosophical distinction between the is ofidentity and the is of constitution, he claims that God is not simply identical with,

but is rather wholly constituted by, the natural realm. In Aristotelian orhylomorphist mode, he takes nature to be the matter of which God is the form. InHegelian mode, he finds the universe engaged in a process of increasinglyadequate self-disclosure, of which a fundamental engine is the evolution by naturalselection of creatures like ourselves. In Heideggerian mode, he characterisespanentheism as the outpouring of Being by way of its exemplification in ordinaryexistents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Being. I was a hidden treasure anddesired to be known, as God says to the prophet David according to the Islamichadith. Stitched in with these themes is a difficult doctrine of the nature of presencethat is bound up with Johnstons striking views on the nature of perception.

One thing that may weigh with Johnston, when he rejects Spinozan pantheism, isthe idea that the simple identification of God with nature or the universe entails thatthe natural sciences can say everything there is to say about reality. But we can putthis point aside by noting the fundamental sense in which physics, with itsequations, only ever gives abstract structural descriptions of reality. It never tells usanything about the intrinsic nature of matter, in so far as its intrinsic nature is morethan its structure. Eddington and then Russell developed this point well in the early20th century: Physics is mathematical, Russell wrote, not because we know somuch about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only itsmathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest, our knowledge isnegative. He went further, observing that as regards the world in general, bothphysical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derivedfrom the mental side and again, many years later that we know nothing aboutthe intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that wedirectly experience.

This leads to a further point about the limits on science. For although consciousexperience is wholly part of the natural order, basic principles of scientific methodexclude the possibility that it can receive strict and comprehensive scientifictreatment (it isnt possible to satisfy the requirements of public observability andexperimental repeatability). This doesnt put any limit on naturalism, only onscientifically codifiable knowledge. But we can put this point aside, for even if thenatural sciences could say everything there is to say about reality, a thoroughgoingcomprehension of what that everything amounted to, when considered as a whole,

would remain something that couldnt be codified in any way within the naturalsciences. There would, for example, be the experience about which Wittgensteinsaid that the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at theexistence of the world. (Never mind that Wittgenstein went on to say that theitalicised sentence was nonsense a word he greatly overused and to give a badreason for doing so.)

Does this point about comprehension answer Johnstons worry when he says that ifthe natural realm were all that existed, the natural sciences would reveal not only


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the ultimate constitution of the world but also its overarching form? Im not sure. Ibelieve such comprehension lies in what Johnston calls the realm of sense, therealm we need to explore in order to work our way inside a serious panentheism,and which is distinct from the natural realm. But here I feel out of my depth, giventhat Johnston ties this realm to the notion of modes of presentation, the way thingspresent themselves, and proposes that the Divine Mind may be construed as the

totality of fully adequate and complete modes of presentation of reality.

I hope Johnston will write more about these ideas. For the moment, Im inclined tohang on to the idea that Spinozan pantheism may not be in such bad shape, even ifthere are other good reasons for preferring panentheism. Its arguable, furthermore,that pantheism and panentheism can fall in step, and the distinction between formand matter fade away, if no universe other than the existing one is possible, and if itcouldnt have failed to exist. Both these possibilities are, I think, very real. Perhapsthe cunning of reason is, at bottom, the cunning of matter or the cunning ofspace-time, which some take to be an object, indeed the only object there is.

But why speak of God at all in this case, rather than just the universe? Spinoza waswidely held to be an atheist (he inspired Shelley to write The Necessity ofAtheism). To ask is probably to have misunderstood, but Johnston also has thisanswer: because the universe is a place in which it makes sense to speak ofsalvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specificallyChristian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has aparticular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but anyreligion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with anotion of salvation, and that includes Islam and many versions of Judaism, in spiteof the latters agreeable vagueness about the afterlife. Hinduism and Buddhism alsohave an account of salvation, a good final outcome for the good.

As for the second question, about whether the idea of salvation is childish, nothingcould be further from the truth on Johnstons wholly naturalistic and rigorously non-idolatrous terms. Salvation, in his book, is an extraordinarily difficult thing. Its amatter of genuinely overcoming the centripetal force of self-involvement, in orderto orient ones life around reality and the real needs of human beings as such. Itrequires achieving a certain kind of radical selflessness, a state for which Johnstonuses the Buddhist term anatta (no-self). One needs to work ones way to anunderstanding of the claim that there is no persisting self, a claim for which

Johnston, in a controlled fusion of Buddhism, Christian morals (not dogma) andSocrates, produces a long and markedly original argument. He concludes that thedoctrine ofanatta can be seen to pave the way for the command of agape thecommand to love the arbitrary other as oneself.

Isnt this intolerably demanding? No, demandingness isnt really an issue, becausethe command of agape is extensionally equivalent to the command that werespond to the actual structure of the practical reasons that there are. In that senseit is reasons own command. That is, were being asked to do only what we do infact have most reason to do (and anyway, we can only ever be asked to do ourbest).Anatta-agape is, furthermore, the only way in which we can survive death, on

Johnstons terms. Survival doesnt have anything to do with possessing an immortaland immaterial soul: thats supernaturalism again, ethically irresponsible


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supernaturalism, religious defilement. If there is a sin against life, Camus says, itconsists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and ineluding the implacable grandeur of this life. That sin, it may be said, is a religioussin the sin of ordinary religion.

Actually, soul-supernaturalism isnt as widespread as one might suppose, for

although ordinary (sociological) believers have no formal principles of infidelity, yetthey are really infidels in their hearts, as Hume observed, and have nothing likewhat we can call a belief of the eternal duration of their souls I ask, if thesepeople really believe what is inculcated on them, and what they pretend to affirm;and the answer is obviously in the negative because they couldnt possibly act asthey do if they really believed it. They themselves protest their belief, in the 21stcentury as in the 18th, but actions speak louder than words.

Which is all to the good, as far as it goes, for Camuss reason if for no other. But itdoesnt undo the deep harm the irreligiousness relative to true religion ofsubscribing to belief in the immortal soul in ones speech and everyday thought,while having no such belief in ones heart. Nor, more importantly for Johnston (notto mention the mortalist Milton), does it mitigate the offensiveness of any religionthat demands belief in such an entity as a condition of faith. It is at best anempirical and unsettled question whether there are such things as non-materialsouls, and in demanding belief in their existence, Johnston says, religions moveillegitimately beyond faith; they make faith hostage to empirical (and philosophical)fortune, and in that sense they place a millstone around the neck of the faithful,especially those with a genuine intellectual curiosity.

Here Johnston speaks from experience. A Catholic upbringing lay behind hisdecision to join the Columbans, having previously left school in his final year for amore taxing if more informal academy Walter Lindrums Billiard Centre in

Melbourne. His reasonable aim at that time was to become the world snookerchampion, and he got as far as becoming the amateur champion of the state ofVictoria before intellectual curiosity unmastered him, snookerwise, and propelledhim into the Columban Mission in Ku-Ring-Gai Chase, Sydney a group that he hasdescribed as the missionary equivalent of the Navy Seals. He was only 15 when he

joined the Columbans, having skipped three grades in school before moving toLindrums, but a growing sense of the millstone eventually forced him to moveagain. He left for Melbourne University, where he did degrees in philosophy andpsychology simultaneously. From there he went to Princeton, where he teachestoday.

So what are the genuinely religious to do? Stripped now of idolatry and millstone-

free, alienated by conscience from any existing supernaturalist faith, they must faceup to the large-scale structural defects in human life:

arbitrary and meaningless suffering, the decay of ageing, untimely death, ourprofound ignorance of our condition, the destructiveness produced by our tendencyto demand premium treatment for ourselves, and the vulnerability of everything wecherish to chance and to the massed power of states and other institutions. A trulyreligious or redeemed life is one in which these large-scale defects are somehowfinally healed or addressed or overcome or rendered irrelevant.


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These defects are not overcome by theodicy, an unsurpassably disgusting practicewhich seeks to show that everything is ultimately for the best. Genuine belief in anomniscient, wholly benevolent and omnipotent God is, in my judgment, profoundlyimmoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed anyintense suffering. There are things so horrible and tragic, Johnston says, thatnothing that subsequently happens can diminish the tragedy or the horror the

attempt to put an otherworldly frame around such things, so they seem not to bethe tragedies or the horrors that they manifestly are, borders on the childish andthe obscene. The large-scale structural defects are overcome, rather, by salvation:

Salvation is not making it all better; it is the grace of finding a way to live that keepsfaith with the importance of goodness and love even in the face of everything thatcan happen to you Salvation, understood as the goal of religious or spiritual life,is a new orientation that authentically addresses the large-scale defects of humanlife, and thereby provides a reservoir of energy otherwise dissipated in denial of,and resistance to, necessary suffering.

Faith in the importance of goodness is central. Here Johnston makes what isperhaps his most important move, arguing that faith in the importance of goodnessrequires the idea that the good those who have or have acquired a good will may be rewarded in a life after their biological death. He has Socrates and Kant onhis team. Socrates doesnt just hope that there is something for us in death, butalso that there is something better for the good than there is for the bad. Kantargues (in Johnstons words) that we are as rational beings obliged to hope foranother life that makes moral sense of things. What are we to do, otherwise, whenwe consider the professional torturer who dies calmly in his sleep at a ripe old agesurrounded by his adoring family, and the nurse who, for her whole adult life, caredfor the dying only to herself die young and alone from a horribly painful anddegrading illness? If biological death is final, as it seems to be, if the good and thebad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores upthis basic moral difference between their lives, say by providing what the gooddeserve, then the distinction between the good and the bad is less important. Sogoodness is less important.

To stave off this threat, Johnston needs a wholly naturalistic account of how aperson can become good acquire a good will and survive death. The details ofthe account are finely complicated and involve three different tribes: theHibernators, the Teletransporters and the Human Beings. The root idea issimple, however, and its one on which Johnston finds massive consensus, acrossthe major religions, which harbour correct ethical ideas in spite of their endemicidolatry. Acquiring a good will is a matter ofanatta as above complete dissolution

of the selfish local self. A good will is a disposition to absorb the legitimate interestsofanypresent or future individual personality into ones present practical outlook,so that those interests count as much as ones own. If you do this, if you acquire atruly good will, you will live on in future people who have legitimate interests. Youwill live on in what John Stuart Mill called the onward rush of humanity. It may beobjected that really youre expanding your self in this case, rather than dissolving it.But to do the former is to do the latter, given the practical human situation, and

Johnston gives a central role to reason and argument. You make progress on thisroad by coming to see that there is no persisting local self worth caring about.


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Were a long way from St Paul, for whom surviving death is personal payback forbelief: If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die (1Corinthians 15:32).

Russell thought the best way to overcome fear of death was to make your interestsgradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,

and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. Its an old idea. ButRussell didnt think that the outcome would be personal survival, only that theprocess would ease a mans fear of death, since the things he cares for willcontinue. Johnston runs it differently. Its not just metaphorically true that you canlive on, given his account of personal identity, its literally true. For, briefly, youractual, lived conception of what it is for you to survive determines what it is for youto survive. This being so, you, the very person that you are now, can live on solong as you have come to conceive things in such a way that others legitimateinterests have truly become your own. In this way the genuinely good, those whohave a truly good will, survive death. The bad dont, and that is their punishment.

The afterlife may not be eternal, but its a very great deal better than nothing, andit meets at least some of the demands of justice. Those who get to be goodenough without being truly good wont live on, but there are Russellianconsolations for them, and more: theyre better placed to face death down, to seethrough it to a pleasing future in which individual personalities flourish. For thosewho are good enough, death will appear differently. To the extent they are goodthey will find that death, although it obliterates their individual personalities, leavesmuch that is fundamentally important behind. In that case there remains, even inthe face of death, something to rejoice in.

Those like myself who can be classified as atheists relative to all non-Spinozantheistic religions may find it hard at times not to choke on the conventional religious and in particular Christian language in Saving God (Surviving Death is easier),but they shouldnt be put off. There is a huge amount to learn in these two books.Philosophy for Johnston is a profoundly concrete, sensual activity; hes someone forwhom ideas seem tangible, with specific savours, emotional tones, curves, surfaces,insides, hidden places, dark passages, shining corners. Taken as a whole, his theoryis quite a stretch; but its enormously suggestive, a mine, a fertile organism.

I dont, however, agree that death threatens the importance of goodness. I dontthink we need the apparatus of an afterlife not even Johnstons naturalisedversion. The intrinsic importance of goodness survives the injustice of the torturersand the nurses fates, even when the injustice is eternal. It survives monstroustragedy undiminished. That is itself a tragedy, perhaps. If so, its just one moretragedy that the importance of goodness survives undiminished. Reasons for doing

the right thing remain untouched. If someone demands (not unreasonably) anexternal metaphysical account of how or why this is so, I think the best thing to sayis that good acts, good states of mind, are part of the history of the universe forever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frostcomes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: There is nofuture life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.

It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good inlife, experience nothing but intolerable suffering to the point that they are unable


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to have any sense of their value and are then extinguished for eternity. Thissinking feeling can seem like a proof: a proof that the importance of goodness is, as

Johnston says, at risk from the insult of unmitigated death. Certainly many peoplewho want there to be an afterlife care more about the idea that it will allow for

justice to be done than they do for their own personal survival. Others simply wantthere to be a space where those who have suffered intolerably can know something

else, and this is all too understandable. The fact remains that goodness isnt ahostage to fortune; pay-offs and balancings are irrelevant. Goodness isntthreatened by the fact that absence of hope can be appropriate, and hope a vice(Camus again: Lespoir, au contraire de ce quon croit, quivaut la rsignation. Etvivre, cest ne pas se rsigner.) Johnston may be right in his account of how we cansurvive death, but the bar is very high. It seems that few of those who havesuffered intolerably will clear it. To that extent its fortunate that we dont needsuch an account to keep faith with the importance of goodness. We are, however,left to face the fact that tragedy is absolute.

Religion is a Sin

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