Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit?

This exploration highlights the contributions of early Enlightenment theologists on the nature of religion and the issues their positions raise. These ideas will then be considered in the frames of later thinkers of esteem, and finally focus on application in modernity. Roles that religion has played will be identified, the purposes it has served identified, the needs it has met identified, and where those needs still survive it will be sought how, if they can be met, shall we find the way to meet them. While the discourse these Enlightenment thinkers set into motion is essentially relevant, the the practice of discrediting the unlikely truth of religion leaves us in a spiritual vacuum. Karen Armstrong presents in her paper “The Great Western Transformation” a possible way to fill that vacuum in an application of myth as art, and this paper endeavors to relate the various voices to be introduced so as to outline the character of this vacuum, and place Armstrong's suggestion as a part of the answer in filling that void.

Theology will remain relevant provided religion continues to loom authoritatively on morality, identity, mortality, and politics. The media and social dialogue of modern Western society frequently mocks religion. It does so sometimes affectionately but often enough in derision. This implies some popular movement away from religion. Nonetheless, a significant number of Americans believe in miracles and angels, celebrate the religious holy days, rely on religion to inform their values, politics, and define their identities. Whether the degree of devotion of a believer to their faith is vague social convention or enthusiastic, rigorous study, practice, and promotion of the doctrine when the custom calls for it, the institutions of religion aren't going anywhere until science can provide some answers about our natural realm, abiogenesis, space, time, and matter. Notwithstanding these mysteries, human experiences such as identity, community, and mortality may perpetuate religious tradition in need of a philosophy through which to practically relate to them. As long as religion remains in the popular psyche, theology in one form or another will flourish. The challenge seems to have become how to place these religious elements of the psyche in some rational, sane, and ideally peaceful way.

Generally, the scope of this examination is limited to consider religion in the Judea-Christian sense, as the primary models of the authors cited and that of this work are those of the West. Prior to and unfortunately during and after the Enlightenment, in waxing and waning frenzies, combinations of Church and State holding authority persecuted those who antagonized that authority in heretical or blasphemous deed. The works of Spinoza, Reimarus, and Hume, in opening up the dialogue and working an honest attempt to examine religion through the lens of reason at the dawn of the Enlightenment, marked the beginning of an era that allowed unfettered debate regarding incongruous religious features in public discourse.

Spinoza challenged the veracity of the interpreted accounts of miracles but kept a divine entity in regard. His approach in “Of Miracles” indicated the need to give canonical accounts license for poetic turns of phrase, hyperbole for increasing the impact of the account, and allowance for the limitations of the authors' grasp of sciences in their renditions. Importantly, he points out the problem of miracles being events which require the suspension of natural law to come to pass, seeking to explain the contradiction in the authors' subjective, motivated, and otherwise limited perspective rather than to consider that a divine actor should suspend its own natural law in the course of deeds. Reimarus, in “Third Fragment: Passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea” focuses but exclusively on the logistical improbabilities of the account. The Reimarus piece does not address divinity or religion any more than in challenging the truth of the words in the scripture, and so seems to follow Spinoza's line that it all doesn't add up as written.

Hume has a different approach, less reverent and more ordered to do away with what he presents the miraculous core of Christian religious belief as being: bigotry, superstition, and delusion. He writes, as introduction to his piece which adheres very much to a purely rational approach:

“I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature (decisive arguments that silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, freeing us from impertinent solicitations), which, if just, will, with the wise and learned,be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion...”

His argument is that belief must be proportionate to the evidence. With scriptural accounts being at best founded on the accounts of eye-witnesses, he sums, “Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses” with the further logic that the credibility of the evidence is diminished in passing to the disciples' disciples, as no account from another sourced by yet a third party can compare with the evidence of what one personally experiences. It could be argued that this line is extraneous, until it becomes clear that he asks his reader to consider the distinct lack of supernatural occurrences one witnesses, or hears testimony of from credible or multiple source. He mentions specifically the core Christian belief that a dead man came to life as exemplary of the very implausible nature of miracles as they contradict all evidence of our experience. In light of his challenge to the essential Christian belief, it is reasonable to interpret his view as one of anti-religious nature.

Regardless of these authors' beliefs, their pieces do represent the natural questions that will come to those that encounter the claims and demands of belief that religious doctrine make. Their work opened the honest public examination of the veracity of claims of religious institution and the hermeneutic awkwardnesses involved. It would appear that the institutions of religion had long been protected from question as representatives of god, brokers and proxies of god's will, by the fear of the common believer to blaspheme or appear blasphemous. Whatever the reason it had not been previously addressed publicly, Spinoza, Hume, and Reimarus were among the vanguard of Enlightenment writers applying reason to religious institutions' claims.

Unlike doctrinal accounts of miracles and the dictates of god inherited from history, modern claims of divinity and miracle would now be examined through the Enlightenment's frames of reason. For instance, if a contemporary man claiming to be god, cultivating a following and persuading witnesses of miraculous powers encountered state authority, the result would undoubtedly differ from historical accounts. Imagine said authority executed this man by hanging, yet he was subsequently discovered invigorating crowds and proselytizing in his miraculous reanimation. He may become a cause célèbre, but this account would certainly invite examination.

Modern scientific examination would apply reason in examining the effectiveness of the hanging, the manner of his death pronouncement, the consideration that he may have an identical twin, and other potentially viable explanations. Interestingly, the existing religious institutions may label this returned messiah a charlatan, an impostor, and a heretic while chastising his followers for offending god and truth. For, as Hume put it, "...let us consider, that, in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and that it is impossible the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam, and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation." In other words, these competing and conflicting truths are an impossibility. It is in this Enlightenment critique, and in working with Hume's presentation of the practice of weighing evidence anchored in experience, that the claims of religion leave it in an awkward and, in varying degrees, incredulous position.

Yet today religious temples fill regularly and people on the street proselytize, hawking salvation and pamphleteering of eschatological doom. People see Jesus in toast and ultrasounds. Claims are made that statues of religious figures cry and bleed. Like Harris observes in The End of Faith, pentecostal congregations test scriptural promise by trying their fate with venomous snakes. In fairness, this is representative of a minority of extremist believers. The majority practice their religious rituals with moderate and cautious regard for all things supernatural. Sampling a few dozen persons on the street in metropolitan or small-town America will reveals a belief in entities like angels and life after death. This means what, though?

Bultmann, in the 20^th century, makes clear that mincing words and feigning beliefs is not worth much to the believer and is dishonest of the cleric. One of his many cogent observations is the obsolescence of a three tiered realm, with heaven “up” and hell “down”, God and angels' strings attached to us in influence against contrary Satan and demons' persuasions. This myth leaves us in the middle of a planar realm, which the scientific revelations of Copernicus rendered absurd. That we can abandon this myth, on his line, gives that we must continue. As a man of the clergy, he notably addresses the paradox of claimed belief and actual belief, that people on the street may claim to believe in things that they cannot really possibly believe. Ultimately, Bultmann leads to a conclusion that, in modernity, we must regard the New Testament as myth and charges his readers to regard the symbolism in terms of the experience of existence in individual responsibility for action and redemption. The claim of belief in angels and miracles, while a very loyal act, is fundamentally complicated in the direct challenge to the standards applied for belief in every other area of the believers' lives.

Strauss, along Bultmann's examination of the claims of belief, moves to divide those who would preserve the historical accuracy of scriptural text from the preference of a view where god can intervene supernaturally in affairs. He leaves the options of scripture being either mythological or contradictory. He extends the line that Spinoza and others made that nothing occurs outside of the laws of nature by handling the accounts of supernatural as myth, and undermining the apparently desperate rationalist attempts of theologists to save Jesus from being thrown out with all of the scriptural bathwater. The aforementioned thinkers have left the concept that the ideal is the relevant value, the meaning of scripture and religion is what is important, not the perhaps irreconcilable accounts of miraculous affairs. Strangely, given the legacies of Hume and Spinoza, centuries later scholars are still wrestling with familiar theological ideas.

Religion, as an institution brokering knowledge of the will of god, such knowledge vested in antiquity to and preserved by the faithful, and offering a relationship, if by proxy, with god makes an indefensible presumption of proprietary knowledge of truth that can not endure the standards of reason. Simple agreement with any of the irreligious perspectives, however, without consideration of the methods and determinations of the philosophes, Aufklärer, British, and other Enlightenment philosophers on religion is to make a “leap to faith” in their own doctrine, and no more steeped in careful self-conscious thought than the stubbornly religious zealot's antics.

One of the best defenses the faithful to a religion can make is that god is omnipotent and omniscient, beyond understanding and thus irrefutable. After all, can one really understand the notions of an infinite universe if this universe should be infinite? This concludes the discourse, but makes only one point. The faith of an individual is based on that individual's standards. While some public claims that could be described as magical thinking might, in some cities, be grounds for a committed psychiatric evaluation, a popular belief with a history of tradition is somehow exempt from this. This indicates, in the midst of popular movement away from religion, a significant degree of tolerance and acceptance of belief and thinking in the religious vein.

Attempts to explain the need for religion anthropologically, along the lines of Frazer's suggestions of early ritual manipulation of microcosmic models to affect the macrocosm, imitative ritual magic, and the petition of deities for favor, or Tylor's proposal that religion is a "survival" of a phase along a track of progress in human social evolution are borne in reason. It is difficult to imagine credibility of a method outside of rationale and science to explain some of the features of shared human spiritual habit and thought. Yet the fact that reason, as consideration of evidence and premise of experience through rationality and logic in search of conclusive explanation, is the most sound and preferred intellectual method does not necessarily oppose religion with any hostility.

The functional and reductive approaches these examinations employ in attempting to identify the social role played by religion and those elements that constitute religion do not reveal an outright hostility towards religion. If the enlightenment critique may be characterized as challenging the credibility of the unseemly accounts of miracles and prophecies in scriptural canon and tradition, a potential threat to religious institutions, then Pals' remark that this indicates the enlightenment critique is still at work could be correct. Hostility or none, the dialogue remains alive and relevant.

Modern multiculturalism and relativism may have stunted the effect that Enlightenment thinking makes on moderate believers. Harris observes that by offering tolerance of other faiths, it grants moderates license for personal beliefs in fundamental elements of doctrine that are, if not impossible to prove, beyond the need for proof. Crucially, though, the believer doesn't have to meet any standards for their beliefs but those they choose to accept.

Whether or not a believer professes biblical inerrancy, the core of Christian belief is that Jesus literally died and after literally being killed, he literally came back to life from having been dead and, after a brief posthumous sermon, literally traversed the heavens. Without that belief, one is not really a Christian. While the symbolism is inspiring, even if the myth of Jesus is meaningful, true Christianity requires literal belief in the resurrection. A believer can't explain this belief rationally without denouncing the core doctrine or finding an explanation within the realm of natural experience. Accordingly, reason and religion appear mutually exclusive.

If reason cannot explain questions like, "What is the universe expanding into?" and "Where did all this matter come from?", even the most reasonable, enlightened thinker is at a loss to place themselves in life and the universe. Spinoza's proposition of divinity as a set of natural laws is not only more congruent with reason, it is also perhaps more palatable to believers finding a need to reconcile their views with their living experience and reason. Spinoza, like Newton, allows for some god of order.

Science as an enterprise in reason does not claim to authoritatively present the answers to questions it cannot. The scientific method allows for theory to be modified. Importantly, religion also must accommodate developments in science. Evolution, for example, is a theory. It is not proven, but it is a theory that works, in spite of the challenges of intelligent design arguments, because science is a search for answers rather than a catalogue of them.

That religion is frequently inherited and serves to define identity are principal features of its survival. Environment strongly informs morality, society, values, integrity, and order. Most importantly, parents are the first arbiters of right and wrong. Before a mind can work freely to place itself in life, society, and the universe through personal experience and commerce of ideas, learning to frame thought in reason and rationale, it must first subjugate the dogmatic certainty instilled by parents, encouraged by community, and echoed by state leaders. It may be practically disadvantageous or psychologically contrary to do so. Historically and today, families, relationships, communities, and civilizations are fractured and never repaired because of conversions between faiths and other modifications to religious identity. We are plagued by war and threat, perpetrated and suffered from collectives identified by, among other features, religion.

Armstrong informs that Newton believed he was proving the existence of god in the context of Francis Bacon's imposition “All the myths of religion should be subjected to stringent criticism and if they contradicted the proven facts they must be cast aside.”

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who synthesised the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific disciplines of experiment and deduction. He believed that he was bringing his fellow human beings unprecedented and certain information about the world, that the cosmic system he had discovered coincided completely with the facts, and that it proved the existence of God, the great 'Mechanik' who had brought the intricate machine of the universe into being.

While Bacon's rule would set to determine the provability of myths, he would have us cast aside the tradition of a spirituality that which we appear to have needed socially and psychologically as long as history has been written. Maintaining a respect for Bacon's rigor of determination in what is worth keeping and the demand that Hume's reason makes for purpose of evidence of belief, religious institution has long served us in various capacities.

Religion has served to repose knowledge and religious institutions have served as centers of information exchange and social organization. In recent history, for example, the civil rights movement was substantially coordinated in the American South through church networks. Churches have acted as patrons of art. The Gutenberg bible became a gateway to literacy in the 13^th century and onwards, and various translations had given slaves in the United States opportunity to teach themselves to read. Along with these practical services and the charities that religious institution has provided, the symbolism and framework of life have been a precious asset to our developing civilizations.

While it has come with a price, religion has given us a way to make sense of our lives, our place in the universe. With Copernicus' revelations, we began the journey to our present condition where one, if one follows the rigors of scientific thought, we find ourselves as primates on a rock rotating and revolving around a star of limited lifespan. Further along this line, one finds an idea that the only value of one's life is that which one ascribes to it. In this barren cosmos there is no need to be virtuous unless it is to one's personal advantage. There is a figurative Pandoran jar that is opened, and we are left in an existential crisis. Among other problems, one can fairly ask “what is the purpose of living?” and arrive with equal substance at suicide or an epicurean life. The psyche suffers, if not in the individual, certainly in the social. For when one decides they only have but to think of themselves they are already primed for criminal deed that imposes on others.

Armstrong makes a succinct vignette of the essential role that myth is needed to play in our collective psyche:

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource'. This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

We are not ready, willing, or well advised to abandon our mythology. As Armstrong presents, we should not if we want to survive as a species. What would serve us, and mark progress, would be a recognition of the value of symbolism in religious myth as we come to terms with the notion that our religious traditions are legacies of more primitive eras, and a promotion of humility and self-consciousness in regard to the beliefs we adopt and abandon as we grow and evolve individually and socially. It is one thing to identify as coming from a particular religious tradition and heritage, but until we can place the myths of religious doctrine as such, we are stalled and stagnant in a precarious place in our social evolution.

Armstrong suggests that we may find inspiration in heroes of aspirational character. Her suggestion places them in novels, and while there are complications with that idea it is in the right track of multicultural and tolerant form. Perhaps Spinoza and others have shown some example. As dogmatic religious institutions become more and more recognizable as very much human organizations, and as modernity pushes the genuine belief in the supernatural farther from our collective frame of reference, we may intuitively salvage the god of order that Spinoza presents. Our motives, divorced from the mythological scale of evaluation where the balance of transgression and virtue determines an infinity of suffering or pleasure, may very well be compassed on notions of honor represented in myths and recognized as such. This magical sort of thinking may be more practical than the most critical agnostic or fanatic religious would accede. So long as the myth is recognized as myth and has a function that provides for society, it is by far a more reasonable answer than notions of existential space-time and personified diety.