Philosophy: All That Matters by Baggini Julian

Author:Baggini, Julian [Baggini, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: 1-Philosophy All That Matters
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2012-07-26T20:00:00+00:00

One reason why the persistence of religion seems baffling to many is that they see it primarily as the belief that there is a god; there is a heaven; we have immortal, immaterial souls; God has inspired or dictated sacred texts; miracles have been performed and people have been brought back to life; and so on. If none of these things is literally true – and who in the twenty-first century could believe they are? – then religion is simply false and should be left behind, like other childish things.

This bafflement underestimates both how stupid and how clever people can be. Stupid because there are plenty of people who believe the most absurd, literal versions of their various religions, with no understanding of why they defy good sense. Clever because there are also people who believe some, if not all, of these traditional creeds, who understand full well where they seem to clash with modern science and history, but are able to reconcile these beliefs in ways that cannot be dismissed as simply ignorant. The mere existence of very intelligent believers is evidence that the persistence of religious belief cannot be put down simply to human stupidity.

But religion is about more than just a set of doctrines anyway. Religion can also be a practice, a way of life, a moral and social community. Rituals, texts and stories can serve as important elements of these without anyone having to believe that they are literal history, or alternatives to science. It is a basic mistake to think that religious texts and credos are making factual statements about the world. They are, rather, pointing to ‘spiritual truths’.

But what exactly does this mean? Over recent decades, influenced by Wittgenstein, many have argued that religious language needs to be understood in a different way from scientific or historic language. Whatever a phrase like ‘blood of Christ’ means in the communion service, it does not indicate the presence of haemoglobin. Similarly, perhaps, ‘eternal life’ is not the literal continuation of individual humans after bodily death, but a way of living in connection with that which transcends the particulars of our own time and place and partakes in universal values. Even to talk of ‘God’ may be to talk not of a real entity but of an eternal principle of love.

This view is often called ‘non-realist’ religion, because it affirms the value and importance of religion while denying the real existence of gods, heavens and all things supernatural. It might be true that most religious believers do and have believed that God is real and that at least some of the claims of religion are literally true. But even if the person kneeling to pray in the church may believe that God is a kind of person, listening in, the reason why praying plays such an important part in his life could be that it provides a ritual of moral reflection and an orientation towards the eternal.

This might sound too subtle by half, but perhaps back in

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