In an article published in the current New York Review, H. Allen Orr describes, in the course of reviewing Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin, two "varieties" of religion--the "providential" and the "supernaturalist"--that have been pretty well annihilated by, respectively, the problem of evil and "the enlightenment case." Does anything remain? Well, yes, possibly: there is something called "spiritual religion," which, since it "neither makes explicit claims about the state of the world nor holds up any body of sacred texts as literally true . . . cannot . . . be contradicted by the findings of science or scriptural scholarship."
This general discussion put me in mind of Antony Flew's three-page essay "Theology and Falsification," first published in 1950, wherein Flew describes how a brash assertion may be "killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications." The argument is that, for something to be asserted, the opposite is being denied, and that therefore if religious assertions--"God is love," etc.--are to have any meaning at all (as opposed to just being "happy talk") there must be some opposite assertion that, if shown to be true, would cause the religious affirmer to admit that he must have been wrong. The concluding paragraph is worth reproducing in full:
Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding "There wasn't a God after all" or "God does not really love us then." Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made--God's love is "not merely a human love" or it is "an inscrutable love," perhaps--and we realize that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that "God loves us as a father (but, of course . . .)." We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say "God does not love us" or even "God does not exist"? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?"
Now it seems to me that "spiritual religion" is what's left after the death by a thousand qualifications has occurred. It cannot be falsified because it makes no claims. Kitcher evidently sees the danger, too. "In an important move," writes Orr, "Kitcher places on defenders of spiritual religion the burden of distinguishing themselves from secularists." Read that sentence again. Of the three kinds of religion, two are unavailable to those who combine intelligence with honesty, and it is an open question whether the third can be meaningfully distinguished from atheism.
I don't think the defenders of "spiritual religion" can succeed at the task Kitcher assigns them. His taxonomy, however, has the merit of shining the light on the (possibly unconscious) perfidy of contemporary apologists who talk one way in order to achieve a stalemate with their skeptical interlocuters and quite another way when back among the faithful. The whole scenario reminds me of the opening to John Updike's Roger's Version:
I have been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile--there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living.
With such gentle disdain do theological sophisticates regard the rubes who actually believe. Kitcher only suspects a fraud. The divinity school professor blandly confesses.
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