The Maternal Factor by Noddings Nel

Author:Noddings, Nel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

RELIGION AND WOMEN

So far, care ethics has been distinguished from virtue ethics, Confucianism, and Christian love. In care ethics, there is no need for God as intermediary, model, or enforcer. However, because religion has had such enormous influence on women’s lives, we must say more about the possibility of freeing women from its domination.

We might ask, more generally, why religion has developed universally. If it is a product of evolution, what is its survival value? Perhaps, as Richard Dawkins has suggested, religion has arisen as an evolutionary by-product; that is, religion may be a by-product of a characteristic that does have survival value.20 Dawkins suggests as a possibility the survival value of childhood trust and obedience. In order to live and eventually reproduce, children have had to listen to adults, believe their warnings, and obey. The tendency to seek and maintain the authority of religious figures might well be an offshoot of this childhood mentality. As already noted, however, reliance on an authority that initially provides protection and the assurance of love can easily be perverted to a reliance that allows one to escape personal responsibility. Acknowledging that we do not yet have an answer to this, Dawkins invites readers to explore other possibilities.

Paul Bloom discusses the inherent tendency of humans toward dualism. Apparently, most of us—at least some of the time—feel an inner spirit in ourselves, something different from our physical bodies.21 We see the world made up of bodies and souls. Bloom uses the results of studies of child development to explain how it is that so many of us remain lifelong dualists. Perhaps, because we have thoughts not always shared with others and become aware that others also have hidden thoughts (minds), we identify these thoughts with spirit or soul—a part of us separate from our physical bodies. These thoughts are the source of our intentions, and we try to discover the intentions of others. Children tend to see an intention or purpose behind everything, asking repeatedly, What is it for? This tendency, too, might extend to adult thinking about God and natural phenomena. Why did God cause the hurricane? Why did God save our family?

David Linden, in his discussion of the “accidental brain,” explores the possibility that the human propensity for “creating coherent, gap-free stories . . . is part of what predisposes humans to religious thought.”22 One can see how the tendencies to seek intention in everything, to confuse mind with soul, and to create stories to explain it all might well lead to religious thought.

Notice that nothing discussed in this section is intended to affirm or reject the existence of God or, more generally, spiritual beings. My target is religion as it has developed in cultures invented and described by men. If humans are, by evolutionary development, inclined to believe in souls and spirits, to see intention in everything, and to tell stories to explain natural events, that still doesn’t explain why religions—especially the three great monotheisms—have taken the form with which we are

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