Religion, Reason and Reality

‘Religion’ is standardly defined either as ‘a particular system of faith and worship’ or as ‘recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship’ (OED 1971: II 2481). The focus, that is, may be on religion either as a practice or as a framework of ideas and beliefs, but the two elements are interdependent; faith and worship are unintelligible without some idea of that to which they are directed, and religion's characteristic conceptions are such that certain practices and responses are seen as appropriate—even mandatory. Indeed, it has often been argued that ‘religion’ derives from religare (‘to bind’), witnessing through its very etymology to the characteristic religious sense of binding obligation, a duty of ‘obedience, reverence and worship’, as well as of social bonding. The contemporary notion of religion as a matter of free human choice is of comparatively recent development, strongly influenced by secular pressures; more characteristic of classic religious consciousness is the implicit demand mediated through both Old and New Testaments: ‘I have chosen you, says the Lord of hosts’, ‘You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you’ (Haggai ii 23; John xv 16).

This title represents, I suppose, a kind of challenge; for there seems at first sight some incompatibility between the practice of logic and mysticism, a contrast between the rational and the intuitive, the tough minded and the tender-minded. In taking up this challenge, I propose to argue with the help of two thinkers commonly admired for their attention to logic and its rights. I shall refer for the most part to St Thomas Aquinas but with occasional reference to Wittgenstein. Whatever may be said of the latter, it seems to me quite clear that St Thomas was a mystical thinker in that he was centrally concerned with the unknown and, in one sense, ineffable mystery of God and that he devoted a great deal of thought and writing to the problems associated with speaking of what is, in this sense, ineffable. I want to argue that in what is sometimes misunderstood as his dryly rational approach, even in his arguments for the existence of God, he is in fact engaged in, and inviting the reader to be engaged in, a mystical exploration, which is not at all the same thing as a mystical experience. Here the key notion is that of what he refers to as esse.

Perhaps I should say right away that for St Thomas we come to see the need for the particular use he has for the word esse (which is, after all, only the Latin infinitive of the verb to be) as the result of an argument not as the result of an experience—not even the experience of being convinced by an argument.

Biblical Interpretation

‘There is a kind of eloquence’, maintained St Augustine,

That noted Augustinian, Blaise Pascal, wrote of the Christian Revelation more tersely: ‘There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.’ (Pascal 1966: Pensée 149) The paradigm of sacred eloquence for Augustine is, of course, that of Christ, and there are echoes here of two Dominical sayings: one is the use of Isaiah vi 9–10 to account for the obscurity of the parables as devices to conceal (Matthew xiii 10–16; Mark iv 11–12; Luke viii 10; see also John xii 37–40); the other is the indication towards the end of the Johannine farewell discourses that so far ‘I have said these things (ταvτα) to you in figures’ (ἐν παϱοιµíαις; ‘in dark sayings’) though a time is coming when it will be be appropriate to ‘tell you plainly (παϱϱησíᾳ) of the Father’ (John xvi 25); here the obscurity can more properly be conceived of as ‘salutary’.

It was, I believe, Thomas Arnold who wrote: ‘Educate men without religion and all you make of them is clever devils’. Thus the Headmaster of one famous school summarized pithily the view of the relationship between religion and ethics which informed educational theory and practice in this country for at least a further century. There is a confusion of two different assumptions usually to be found in this context. The first is that religious belief can provide an intellectual foundation (logical, or epistemological, or sometimes both) for moral belief; the second is that the effect of religious teaching is to improve behaviour according to the norms of some particular set of moral beliefs.

The second assumption offers too many hostages to fortune if it is construed as implying a one-to-one causal relationship, not to be vulnerable to a whole range of specific counter-examples. Thus there are examples of kind humanists and good atheists who clearly do not depend upon religious beliefs being either causes of, or reasons for, the goodness of their deeds. Equally there are all too many examples of evidence of the the activities of a worm at the moral core of piety, examples even of religious zeal giving rise to hatred or cruelty. It has been argued that in a less crudely individualistic fashion the social context of religious practice can provide nurture and support for good moral practice, but this is a rather vague notion unless it is refined significantly.

Introduction

In this paper I shall be examining the following claims:

Having contended that neither (1) nor (2) are plausible, I shall then raise the question of what it is to offer an account of the meaning of a word. For present purposes I put forward a Wittgensteinian account in terms of ‘use’ mentioning various uses of the term ‘God’ in Christian activity. I then ask whether the uses mentioned rest upon a more basic use or meaning. I shall hold that they do so rest upon a more basic use or meaning—a ‘descriptive’ use or meaning.

I then turn to the problem that ‘God’ in Christian Theology appears to have no single descriptive use or meaning but rather a variety of such uses or meanings some of which seem incompatible with one another in more or less radical ways.

The use of violence for social/political ends, whether by individuals, organized groups, or the state, is a troubling feature of contemporary life. On the one hand, we denounce it, even as we increasingly encounter it on all sides; on the other, we often find ourselves wanting to pick and choose rather more carefully the objects of our denunciation. Is the view we take of Middle Eastern kidnappings and bombings or the many killings perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army in Britain and Western Europe to be the same as that we take of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress? What is to be our view when a group within a state, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, resorts to violence against the majority Sinhalese population, in the names of religious and political freedom? And what are we to make of Indian and Sinhalese attempts to crush the Tigers? More locally, how exactly are we to regard those who blow up abortion clinics? Are we to see them in the same light as those who break into animal laboratories? And what of those people who experience – and resist – rather violent police methods, including, after arrest, those employed in interrogation? The overwhelming temptation for many of us is to favor some causes as opposed to others and to do so on the ground that we think these causes just.

Coercion matters to almost everybody, and almost everybody thinks that it is often or always bad. Yet few agree on what counts as coercion. The theorists of coercion propose “analyses” of the concept of coercion, and are promptly refuted by rival theorists. In a recent essay with the implausible title “The Last Word on Coercive Offers …(?)” Daniel Lyons criticizes numerous complex and competing analyses of coercion proposed in recent philosophical discussions. (His topic isn't only “offers” in a narrow sense that contrasts with “threats,” but the whole gamut of proposals and demands that might be judged coercive.) He hopes to have the last word because, he claims, his own proposal of a few years earlier has stood up to trial by counterexample not perfectly but still rather well.

The debates that have led to this type of claim strike me as a reductio ad absurdum of certain procedures often used in ethical discussion. These procedures assume that “our” intuitions about possible examples and counterexamples can be treated as data, by which we may test and either refute or confirm proposed analyses of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of moral concepts. However, trial by counterexample cannot get going unless there is agreement on the classification of cases. It breaks down when examples and counterexamples cannot be reliably distinguished. In discussions of coercion there is no agreement about cases: Consider the long-running dispute between liberals and socialists about whether the wage bargain under capitalism coerces.

This is a book about liberalism. Its central thesis is that the modern liberal state is best understood as energized by a distinctive ensemble of public purposes that guide liberal public policy, shape liberal justice, require the practice of liberal virtues, and rest on a liberal public culture. Liberal purposes, so conceived, define what the members of a liberal community must have in common. These purposes are the unity that undergirds liberal diversity; they provide the basis on which e pluribus unum ceases to be a raw and shifting balance of contending social forces and becomes instead an ethically meaningful characterization of the liberal state.

This affirmative thesis entails a triple negation. The liberal state cannot be understood along Michael Oakeshott's lines as a purposeless civil association structured by adverbial rules. Like every other form of political community, the liberal state is an enterprise association. Its distinctiveness lies not in the absence but, rather, in the content of its public purposes.

Nor can the liberal state be properly understood as “neutral” in any of the senses in which that term is currently employed. Like every other political community, it embraces a view of the human good that favors certain ways of life and tilts against others.

Nor, finally, can the liberal state be understood as an arena for the unfettered expression of “difference.” In the very act of sustaining diversity, liberal unity circumscribes diversity.

PHILOSOPHY AND VIOLENCE: SOME ANXIETIES

This essay asks some quintessentially philosophical questions about violence and terrorism – is violence “special,” demanding a particular kind of moral treatment; can a state properly be called “terrorist”; is there anything worthwhile in the old radical distinction between “Red” and “White” terror? It begins with a prior question, whether philosophy has anything to contribute to the discussion of violence in the first place. The philosophical treatment of violence, and particularly of terrorist violence, suffers more than most political philosophy from a disproportion between the inevitable and proper impracticality of philosophical inquiry and the all-too-urgent practicality of the problems addressed. Every time the IRA blows an innocent family to pieces, and each time an Israeli reprisal raid on a Palestinian camp reduces a child to bloody rags, the life of reason is mocked, and the hope recedes of a politics based on debate and conciliation, a politics based, if you like, on “reflective equilibrium” rather than partisan passion. It is all too easy to see why an ordinary citizen, not otherwise ill disposed to intellectual activity, might question the point of a philosophical account of violence and terrorism. He or she would surely think a political sociology of terrorism was worth having; if it was soundly based, we might understand what drove the warring factions into violent conflict, and that might enable us to see the terms of a peace treaty, and how we might deflate their readiness to act violently.

THE PROBLEM FOR KANTIANS AND THE LARGER ISSUE

Terrorism poses a practical problem that is urgent and difficult. How, within the bounds of conscience, can we respond effectively to violent terrorist activities and threats, especially given the ideological fanaticism and nonnegotiable demands that typically accompany them? The problem is partly instrumental and partly moral. The instrumental task is to find, among the morally permissible means, the best way to minimize terrorist violence, taking into account our other goals and values. The moral task is to determine what means of response are morally permissible. I shall focus here on this second problem, or rather on one way of thinking about it.

Terrorists, of course, often claim that their ends are morally worthy and that their means are morally justified in the context. Some of these claims deserve a serious hearing, and even the more outrageous claims can pose challenges that moral philosophers should not ignore. For present purposes, however, I shall simply assume that terrorism is morally indefensible, at least in the cases to be considered; and I will not be discussing why this is so. My inquiry, instead, is about what responses are permissible when terrorists immorally threaten the lives of innocent hostages.

Even this somewhat more limited question is too large to undertake here. To give an adequate answer would require us not only to resolve deep issues in moral theory but also to investigate relevant matters of fact, make careful distinctions among cases, review our moral judgments regarding similar problems, and so on.