PART III — On Religion: What the Secular Mind Cannot Afford to Learn

PART III

On Religion: What the Secular Mind Cannot Afford to Learn

Or: Three Things the Philosophers Missed When They Declared God Dead

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives — who will wipe this blood off us?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

3. The Most Uncomfortable Reaffirmation

I want to be precise about what this part of the book is not doing, because the subject invites misreading.

It is not arguing that God exists in the sense that any specific religious tradition claims. It is not asking you to return to the faith of your childhood, or to adopt someone else's. It is not a conversion document and it is not a defense of institutional religion, which has committed sufficient atrocities to make any uncritical defense philosophically irresponsible.

What it is doing is harder and less comfortable than any of that: it is arguing that the secular intellectual tradition that declared religion obsolete made several serious philosophical errors, and that these errors have costs that are now visible in the specific forms of emptiness that characterize contemporary secular life. It is arguing that religion, examined at its most philosophically serious rather than its most institutionally corrupted, knows things that secular thought has not yet learned to know. And it is arguing that the religious impulse — the reaching of the self toward something that exceeds and precedes the self — is not a cognitive error to be corrected but a genuine response to a genuine feature of the human situation.

The person who has outgrown the specific forms of religion they were given has not necessarily outgrown the need that the forms were responding to. To confuse the container with the content is a philosophical error available in both directions: to the religious person who cannot separate the symbols from the reality the symbols point toward, and to the secular person who, having rejected the symbols, believes they have thereby addressed the reality.

3.1 What Religion Knows About Limitation

The first thing religious thought knows — and knows with a depth that secular philosophical traditions have not replicated — is human limitation. Not limitation in the sense of specific incapacities, the things we cannot do or cannot know because of current technological constraints. Limitation in the ontological sense: the radical contingency of the human being, the fact that we did not make ourselves, did not choose to exist, did not author the conditions of our existence, and will be taken out of it by a process we did not initiate and cannot stop.

The great religious traditions organized their entire architecture around this recognition. The Islamic submission — islam meaning precisely the giving over of the self to something larger — is not the abasement of the self but the accurate acknowledgment of its position: the created before the creator, the contingent before the necessary, the temporal before the eternal. The Buddhist recognition of anatta — not-self, the dissolution of the ego's claim to be the fixed center of experience — is not nihilism but the liberation that comes from no longer needing to defend a fiction. The Christian doctrine of grace — that the good the person achieves is received rather than self-generated — is not a diminishment of human agency but a correction of the hubris that claims the agency is self-sufficient.

Secular humanism inherited the moral aspirations of the religious traditions that preceded it while rejecting the metaphysical humility that underwrote those aspirations. The result is a tradition that demands that human beings be good, but that cannot account for why goodness is genuinely demanded, and that cannot address the human experience of failing to be good with anything more than an encouragement to try harder. This is insufficient. It was always insufficient. The religious traditions knew this, which is why they were not primarily traditions of moral demand but traditions of grace — of the recognition that the demand exceeds the capacity, and that this excess is the condition from which genuine spiritual life begins.

3.2 Religion as Technology for the Untransmittable

There are experiences that cannot be transmitted in propositional form — that cannot be put into sentences and communicated directly, but that are nevertheless real and important and formative. The experience of genuine awe: the encounter with something so vastly exceeding the self that the self's normal categories of assessment collapse. The experience of genuine gratitude: not the social performance of thanks but the felt reality of having received something that was not owed, that arrived from outside the system of exchange, that cannot be repaid because the debtor and the creditor are not on the same scale.

The experience of the sacred: the recognition, in certain moments and certain places and certain qualities of attention, that something is present that is more than the sum of its physical components, that demands a response different from ordinary response, that cannot be adequately approached with the instruments of ordinary knowing.

These experiences are real. They are reported across cultures, across historical periods, by people with no interest in coordinating their reports. The materialist has several responses: they are neurological events, they are projections of psychological needs onto neutral phenomena, they are the product of the pattern-matching systems that human brains use to impose order on chaos. These responses may be correct. They do not explain the experiences away. An experience that is produced by a neurological event is still an experience. The mechanism of its production does not determine its significance.

What religious traditions have that secular culture lacks is a developed technology for cultivating, naming, and transmitting these experiences — a set of practices, symbols, narratives, and communities that make the untransmittable somewhat more transmittable, that create the conditions in which the encounter with the exceeding is more likely to occur. This technology took thousands of years to develop. It is not trivially replaceable.

When the secular world dismissed religious practice as superstition, it dismissed a technology it did not understand as unscientific. The dismissal was scientifically premature and humanly costly. The meditation practice the secular world is now slowly rediscovering — stripped of its metaphysical context, repackaged as mindfulness, sold in apps — is a fragment of what the religious traditions had whole. The fragment helps. The whole was more than the fragment. The loss is real even to those who cannot accept the metaphysics.

3.3 The Validity of the Religious Impulse

Consider the human experience of standing at the edge of what can be understood — the limit of the explicable, the point where the causal chain runs out or becomes circular, where the scientific account stops being able to tell you why rather than how. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do the laws of physics have the values they have rather than different values? Why is there experience at all?

These are genuine questions. They are not answered by science, which is not a criticism of science — science is not designed to answer them, and the pretense that it is produces the scientism that masquerades as rationalism. The questions point toward a genuine feature of reality: that the explicable is surrounded by the inexplicable, that every explanation rests on a ground it cannot itself explain, that the chain of whys terminates in a mystery that is not a gap to be filled by future knowledge but a permanent horizon of human understanding.

The religious impulse is the response to this horizon. The reaching toward something that exceeds the explainable, the orientation toward a ground that is itself ungrounded by anything further — this is not a cognitive error. It is the appropriate response of a finite being to its own finitude. To suppress this response in the name of rationalism is not an achievement of reason. It is the suppression of something reason cannot itself provide a replacement for.

The person who no longer reaches toward anything that exceeds the explicable has not become more rational. They have become smaller. Rationality is a tool for navigating what is within reach. The religious impulse is the recognition that something lies beyond reach and that the reaching — even when it grasps nothing — is not thereby meaningless. Perhaps reaching is itself the point. Perhaps the orientation matters more than the arrival. Perhaps this is something the mystics knew that the philosophers are still learning.

3.4 The Critique of Religion That Religion Deserves

This is not a blank defense. Religion has been the vehicle for extraordinary suffering — for the organization of cruelty into doctrine, for the suppression of inquiry in the name of orthodoxy, for the political management of populations through the promise of posthumous reward and the threat of posthumous punishment. These are real. They are not peripheral. They are what happens when the technology is captured by institutions with interests that diverge from the genuine spiritual needs the technology was built to serve.

The critique of institutional religion is philosophically necessary and morally urgent. It is also different from the critique of the religious impulse itself. The corruption of a thing is not the thing. The institutional church is not the mystical tradition it emerged from. The televangelist is not Francis of Assisi. The jihad of the political movement is not the jihad of the soul that the Sufi poets describe. To conflate the corruption with the origin, the institution with the impulse, is a philosophical shortcut that purchases the comfort of dismissal at the cost of accuracy.

The most honest relationship with religion is the most demanding one: to take it seriously enough to distinguish what is genuine from what is corrupted, to ask what it knows that you need to know, to refuse both the easy believer's uncritical acceptance and the easy critic's uncritical dismissal. This relationship requires more from the philosopher than either belief or rejection. It requires engagement. Engagement is what the subject has always deserved and rarely received.