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A John Haught Reader. John F. Haught
Читать онлайн.Название A John Haught Reader
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isbn 9781532661044
Автор произведения John F. Haught
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
It is especially those whose thoughts and passions reach toward infinite mystery who are most prone to feel imprisoned by naturalistic doctrine. Religious believers, unlike naturalists, do not look to nature for either ultimate fulfillment or ultimate explanation. Still, a wholesome communion with ultimate reality can take place through nature. Healthy religion is gratefully aware of the riches of life and the resourcefulness of the natural world. It is appreciative of science as well. But it also senses that nature imposes obvious limits on life, most notably suffering and death. Religion, then, is a kind of route-finding that looks for pathways beyond the boundaries that nature places on life.67
It is imperative that naturalists be fully sensitive to this point even if they vehemently disagree with it. Religious persons may turn out to be wrong, but clearly they are seeking ways to get beyond what they take to be the natural limits on life. This does not mean that they have to despise the world—although in some cases they do—but that they relativize it. They neither take nature to be ultimate nor do they see science as ultimate explanation. Characteristically, no matter how large science has shown the universe to be, religious people look upon the claim that “nature is enough” as itself an arbitrary confinement that they must get beyond.
To religious ears, including those attuned to the monumental scale of contemporary cosmology, the assertion that “nature is enough” sounds like a prison sentence. This is because religious awareness generally involves a sense that the human mind (or spirit) has already transcended the limits of nature, not finally or decisively, but at least by anticipation. In the next chapter, I will show that human intelligence, in spite of all attempts to understand it naturalistically, extends itself beyond the limits of nature in every act of questioning, understanding, and judging. Religion is inseparable from the intellect’s anticipation of an infinite fullness of being. In biblical circles, religious anticipation of this fullness of being takes the form of hope. And so, to those who hope for final transcendence of death and suffering, naturalism is the most dreary and suffocating of dogmas. Instead of limitless horizons, naturalism offers only an ultimate captivity, unbearable to those who sense that at the core of their being they are capax infiniti—open to the infinite.
Of course, to the naturalist, religion is fully part of nature and, like everything else, it must submit to being explained naturalistically. There must be a purely scientific answer to the question of why so many humans have longed for the infinite and thereby experienced nature as a limit. To many naturalists these days, it is evolutionary biology that seems best equipped to provide the deepest account of humanity’s persistent religious tendencies. If evolutionists can come up with a purely natural explanation of the habit religious believers have of looking toward limitless horizons, then this will supposedly expose infinite mystery itself as empty fiction rather than ultimate reality. Therefore, the most efficient way to disabuse religious people of the illusion that there is anything beyond the limits of nature is to explain, in purely scientific terms, how that illusion could have arisen in the first place. Nowadays, Darwin’s idea of natural selection, brought up to date by genetics, seems to provide the best, perhaps even the ultimate, explanation of the human conviction that reality overflows nature’s boundaries.
Naturalists today often attempt to explain not only religion but also morality in Darwinian terms. There was a time not long ago when the moral instincts of people seemed to be the best evidence for God’s existence. Indeed, moral aspiration was a clear indication of the direct imprint of a transcendent, divine goodness on each soul; conscience was the stamp of God’s will on the inner core of each personality. Hints of an infinite perfection could be found in the insatiable anticipation of the goodness, truth, and beauty that drives the questing human heart. Humans were said to be restless only because an infinite goodness, truth, and beauty had already made itself tacitly present to their moral, intellectual, and aesthetic sensibilities.
The scientific naturalist, however, will have none of this, at times even rebuking religious people for being so “greedy” as to look for fulfillment beyond the limits of nature. In a book whose every page chastises those of us with cloudier images of reality than his own, the philosopher Owen Flanagan asserts that there is nothing beyond what scientific naturalism is able to discern. How he knows this he does not say, but he is certain that people who look beyond nature for fulfillment “are still in the grip of illusions.” “Trust me,” he says, “you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough. Don’t be greedy. Enough is enough.”68
My own work brings me into contact with many good scientists and philosophers from all over the world. Some are religious, but many others are naturalists like Owen Flanagan. Naturalism is now so entrenched in science and philosophical faculties around the globe that it constitutes one of the most influential “creeds” operative in the world today. Scientific naturalists are still a small minority in the world’s overall population, but their influence is out of proportion to their numbers. Generally speaking, their beliefs quietly determine what is intellectually acceptable in many of our universities. Naturalism has now spread from science and philosophy departments into social studies and the humanities. Even departments of religion are no longer immune.
The academic world now harbors numerous scientific naturalists who prefer to keep a low profile in order to avoid controversy wherever religion is considered important. Flanagan wants them to come clean. Likewise, the Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Natalie Angier believes that most scientists are closet naturalists, but are reluctant to state openly what they really think about religion and theology. In a recent issue of The American Scholar, she cites studies showing that as many as 90 percent of the members of the elite National Academy of Sciences are nontheists, and less than half of other scientists believe in a personal God. She upbraids scientists for not being more vocal in criticizing the “irrationalities” of religion in all of its forms. Most scientists are no longer afraid to state publicly that Darwinism has made creationism obsolete, but Angier is annoyed that they pass over in silence the larger body of religious illusions. In her own opinion, the entire history of human religiousness is a preposterous mistake—since there is no scientific evidence for its empty musings. And so she is agitated that most scientists refuse to wear their de facto naturalism on their sleeves.69
It is annoying to scientific naturalists such as Flanagan and Angier that religious people can’t come up with “evidence” for what they take to be more than nature. But to religious experience, this “more” will always be something that grasps us rather than something we can grasp. We can know it only by surrender, not possession. It will never have the clarity of scientific evidence, nor should it be presented as an alternative to science. The most immediate “evidence” for it is the fact of our own anticipation of more truth, deeper goodness, and wider beauty, an insatiable reaching out toward a fullness of being that is by no means illusory, but instead the very core of our rationality. Biblical religions refer to this transcendent dimension as God. They think of God as possessing the most noble of attributes: infinite goodness and love, unsurpassable beauty and splendor, the fullness of being and truth. God is also the epitome of fidelity, creativity, freedom, healing, wisdom, and power. As one who allegedly makes and keeps promises, this God is understood to be “personal” as well, since only persons can love and make promises.
Naturalists, on the other hand, consider such a belief untenable, especially after Darwin. To them, the universe is, at heart, utterly impersonal. Their persistent question is: where is the evidence for God in this imperfect world? Religious people, however, do not usually claim to be able to see the mystery of God directly—“nobody can see God and live.” God is the light that lights up everything else, but one cannot look directly into that primordial illumination without being blinded.