HDS - News - In Dialogue - Philip Clayton

In Dialogue is a recurring HDS web feature that showcases faculty commentaries on issues of religion and contemporary life, and encourages readers to submit responses for public posting. Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology and Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at HDS, addresses the challenges that the scientific worldview raises for the Western religious traditions.

For many, belief in a transcendent being who supernaturally influences the world is no longer plausible. Science seems to suggest that "emergent complexity" is sufficient to account fully for the evolution of biology and culture, and indeed for human religious experience as well. Thus the question for debate: are there any limits to the "naturalization of theism"? Should we strive to give a purely immanent and this-worldly account of belief in God? Or does some theistic belief and practice compel us to retain the language of transcendence? (It goes without saying that science raises very different sets of issues for other, nontheistic, traditions such as Buddhism.)

The motives for naturalizing theism are clear enough. Contemporary science owes its impressive track record to the assumption of naturalism, the belief that the world is a closed causal system and that every event is the result of other natural causes. Moreover, naturalists argue, if there were supernatural interventions—acts of God that set aside natural law—the very practice of science would be undercut. It's an either/or choice, we are told: if there are events to which natural laws don't apply, then both the practice and the results of science are invalidated.

Moreover, naturalized accounts of religion can appeal to an impressive arsenal of explanatory tools and research results. Multiple theories explain why religious beliefs would arise and be retained in a population—so much so that anthropologist Pascal Boyer's book title, Religion Explained, treats the project as a fait accompli. The anthropologist Scott Atran explains in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science: "Science is not particularly well suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness, and the longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs."

The trouble for religious believers is that the evolutionary success of religion appears to be explainable apart from any appeal to the truth of the beliefs. To the contrary, religion's functional success owes much to the initial implausibility of religious beliefs. Atran notes, "All known human societies—past or present—bear the very substantial costs of religion's material, emotional, and cognitive commitments to factually impossible, counterintuitive worlds. From an evolutionary standpoint, the reasons why religion shouldn't exist are patent."

Theologians such as Gordon Kaufman and scientists such as Stuart Kauffman suggest that these evolutionary accounts are good news for religion. Once one is willing to let the old dogmas go, new and exciting links emerge between evolutionary creativity and the traditional language of the sacred. In fact, even the term "God" (understood in a sufficiently broad sense) can and should still be employed to describe creative natural processes—without of course importing any supernatural assumptions.

What of the other side? The specter of a fully naturalized theism has given rise to vehement criticisms from its critics. Even liberal Jews, Christians, and Muslims resist Gordon Kaufman's idea that one might employ the language of divinity to describe purely natural systems. Why use the name of God to describe what is in fact a purely materialist view of the world? Nor are theists the only critics. Ecofeminists, for example, also resist this program: why take a liberated religious naturalism and enslave it again to the God-term? For traditional theists, the battle against naturalism (or "secular humanism") is a matter of life and death, since it affects what they take to be the defining beliefs of their traditions.

Thus the question: should more liberal theists fight to retain something that transcends the natural order? Three reasons are often cited for doing so. First, a Creator God must by definition precede the natural order and give rise to it. No initial act of creation by God can be explained in purely naturalistic or immanent terms. Second, the three Abrahamic traditions have traditionally distinguished themselves from deism, the view that God creates the world and then is no longer causally active in it. Belief in providence or divine action implies a God who continues to intervene in the natural order. Finally, theism generally involves teleological claims; it affirms a certain goal-directedness to history. There are significant differences between the advent of the Messiah, the second coming of Jesus Christ, and Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of the Resurrection. Also, the role of these "final things" ranges from central to nonexistent (e.g., in non-messianic forms of Judaism). But to the extent that one affirms an eschatology, one has placed a limit on naturalism.

It may be, of course, that theism and naturalism present one with a forced choice; one or the other can be true, but not both. If so, which option should one select, and why?

But it may also be that some mediating options exist. Consider just two possibilities. Perhaps the same evolutionary phenomena that appear random from the perspective of biology will exhibit a meaningful pattern when viewed from the standpoint of transcendence. And perhaps the Abrahamic traditions can actually handle a much higher level of naturalism than was traditionally thought. Admittedly, their scriptures make regular appeal to supernatural interventions. But what if, motivated by the ascendancy of modern science, one looks for the most minimally supernaturalist account of divine influence possible? Could theists be naturalists in mindset and daily life, and yet still view the world as a whole as involved in an ongoing dance with the divine? Perhaps science's inevitable mysteries are a continuing invitation to religious response.

This is uncharted territory for the Abrahamic faiths (not so for our Buddhist colleagues, of course). Can what is essential to these theistic traditions be retained if one enters the terrain of naturalism, and how far is it appropriate for one to go? The difficulties are immense; still, constructive religious reflection is uncovering and may continue to uncover new responses to these problems. Only a new form of dialogue, one that is not afraid boldly to go where no theists have gone before, will be able to make progress on the issues.

Readers can submit responses to indialogue@hds.harvard.edu. Harvard Divinity School reserves the right to edit responses for space considerations. Not all submissions can be posted.