The New New Zealand by William Edward Moneyhun

Author:William Edward Moneyhun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2020-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

The complementarity of culture and religion

Theologically speaking, in the Western world there have emerged two broad opposite approaches to religion.33 Persons treat it as either entering the world as something imposed or gifted from the outside or as something that is wholly internal to human experience. In other words, religion either comes to humankind as something bestowed through an act of divine revelation or it comes about naturally as an internal quality in the development of the human species. We may then subdivide the latter into the question of whether religion is permanent to human development or whether it is merely transitory. Put in the form of a question: Is religion something that is temporary, serving a particular purpose in the present moment which will disappear as humankind outgrows its need for some idea of transcendent power; or is religion permanent, being rooted in some actual form of enduring transcendence?

The modern communications formats of social media and the various incarnations of television and radio provide a venue for arguments first one way and then another. Some hosts and commentators draw attention to the rise in atheism over the last several decades while others, especially of the more right-wing religious sort, who may or may not recognize the validity of the atheists’ observations, challenge the conclusions which justify the move of so many to a position of atheism. Others take a more neutral position of declaring themselves spiritual but not religious, a claim that can mean virtually anything in between the extremes of classical theism and hard core atheism and often includes a good measure of agnosticism. If the various groups share anything in common, it is likely to be the view that religion serves to establish a relationship between human beings and divine beings, even if the divine beings are imaginary. This, of course, is an update of Paul Tillich’s last century observations to which he applied his existential philosophy of religion.34

An existential approach such as Tillich’s allows us to deny both theistic (belief in a Supreme Being that exists alongside other beings) and atheistic (denial of a Supreme Being that exists alongside other beings) positions. The gauntlet goes down toward the former based on the scientific observations of the latter that there is no objective evidence of any sort for the existence of a divine being. It goes down toward the latter based on the ability of the former to appeal to the limits of science in describing the various constituents of the cosmos. For existentialist philosophers and theologians, human existence is fundamental, and those such as Tillich relate human existence to a non-physical ground that they refer to as Being or being (as opposed to a Being/being), that underlies a human being, and is thus the basis of the depth dimension of human experience. Even though they run the risk of taking fire from both theists and atheists, their attempt is to establish their position in actual experience. For persons such as Tillich, religion is no more a phenomenon alongside other phenomena than God is a being alongside other beings.

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