RELIGION WITHOUT GOD. By Ronald
Dworkin. Harvard University Press. 180 pages. $17.95.
To be religious is to believe in God,
pray, go to church, that sort of thing. At least, that’s the popular conception
of religion, which holds that humankind is part of a grand, miraculous and
eternal creation, that the divine is discernible and, under the right
circumstances, achievable.
Against this notion the secular
humanists fight. They argue that there’s no physical or scientific evidence for
God, Heaven or Hell, that belief in the supernatural is superstition (or
worse) and that religion obviates human agency, leaving an unjustifiable moral
loophole permitting the faithful to forego their earthly responsibilities.
Most religious people don’t want to give
up their faith, so the arguments of the secularists aren’t likely to make much
of a dent. Similarly, most atheists probably won't suddenly subscribe to a
religious tradition, so attempts at proselytizing tend to be futile. The two sides, separated by a chasm of
misunderstanding, talk right past one another.
Ronald Dworkin, the much-respected legal
philosopher who died earlier this year, transformed a lecture into a short book
recently published by Harvard University Press called “Religion Without God,”
which essentially sidesteps the regular theist vs. atheist debate to argue
something altogether original and refreshing: that the religious impulse is (a)
widely shared and (b) much bigger than a belief in God.
“Religion is a deep, distinct, and
comprehensive worldview: it holds that inherent, objective value permeates
everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human
life has purpose and the universe order,” Dworkin writes in the introduction.
“A belief in a god is only one possible manifestation or consequence of that
deeper worldview.”
Since that value is independent —
religion only serves to reinforce it — a commitment to this underlying
objective reality is available to both believers and nonbelievers, Dworkin
argues. “So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more
fundamental than what divides them, and that shared faith might therefore
furnish a basis for improved communication between them.”
Religious people surely experience
drudgery, just as atheists are capable of appreciating profound mystery. What
they have in common — or should have in common — is a devotion to moral truth.
Convictions of value are the common glue
of humanity, Dworkin writes, and this idea is so appealing and so thoughtfully
rendered in “Religion Without God,” that it is hard to find any fault with his
logic, unless you happen to be a biblical literalist, or a die-hard naturalist who believes there is
nothing, not even moral truth, beyond what nature provides, that all else is
illusion.
Dworkin does not dismiss religion; he
acknowledges that some people will gaze upon the Grand Canyon and attribute its
beauty to God. Others will stand at its edge and marvel at the geology. Beauty
is not necessarily evidence of the divine, Dworkin writes. Take the Taj Mahal,
with its stunning symmetry: its beauty (who would deny it?) is a result of
mathematics.
A believer will retort that math itself
is a product of God’s divine creation. Fine, says Dworkin. But it is fair to
propose that math is self-sufficient, or part of the universal order that
transcends religion, needing no deity to legitimize it or deign it with what we
might call the sublime.
But is beauty real? Is it our response
to what we perceive as divinely inspired or is it a consequence of a different
kind of inevitability, perhaps natural or human-caused? It is hard to imagine
that Raphael’s “Madonna of the Meadow,” with its triangular composition and
luminous coloring, should have been made differently, or that a Bach fugue is
the product of chance.
Dworkin thinks that art is great when it
conveys this sense of ineluctable destiny, and the idea can be expanded to
include all we know. As Einstein said, using a religious metaphor, “God doesn’t
play dice with the universe.”
This inevitability is evidence of
something vaster than any particular religion, according to Dworkin, and proof
that all people, regardless of affiliation or cultural inheritance, can find
common ground. So when he uses the term “religious atheism,” it is no
contradiction. For Dworkin, one can be religious — susceptible to the
awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe and the beauty that nature and human
creativity provide — without believing in what he calls the Sistine God, the bearded
figure painted by Michelangelo who, with the touch of his fingertip, made
mankind.
“Religion Without God” is a tiny book,
only 159 pages of text, that inexorably lays out in lucid terms Dworkin’s moral
philosophy. The logical argument he makes is itself an example of the sort of
inevitable beauty he describes in chapter two, “The Universe.”
In his chapter on religious freedom
(remember, Dworkin was a scholar of the law) he argues that true political
liberty depends on ethical independence, which holds that government cannot
restrict freedom “just because it assumes that one way for people to live their
lives — one idea about what lives are most worth living just in themselves — is
intrinsically better than another.”
Ethical independence, therefore, ensures
religious freedom (among other things). “It condemns any explicit
discrimination or establishment that assumes — as such discrimination
invariably does assume — that one variety of religious faith is superior to
others in truth or virtue or that a political majority is entitled to favor one
faith over others or that atheism is father to immorality.”
The final short chapter is about death
and immortality. It was written by a man who knew his time was up. And here, in
these last few pages, Dworkin reveals the profound humanism that has informed
his life’s work. He believes, tenaciously, that there is objective ethical and
moral truth, “a right way to live” that is independent of theistic assumptions,
and therefore available to religious atheists.
“What matters most fundamentally to the
drive to live well is the conviction that there is, independently and
objectively, a right way to live,” he writes. “In this most fundamental respect
religious theists and religious atheists are at one. The existence or nonexistence
of a god does not figure in the instinct of value that unites them. What
divides them is science: they disagree about the best explanation of the truths
of matter and mind, but it by no means follows that they disagree about the
further truths of value.”
And living well leads to its own kind of
immortality. When one makes a perfect painting that speaks across the
generations, or leaves a lasting mark on philosophical discourse, he is doing
so in answer to human existence. These are achievements within life, but
sometimes one’s life itself, with its gestures large and small, its expressions
of love, its useful consequences, is a noble achievement.
“If we do crave that kind of
achievement, as I believe we should, then we could treat it as a kind of immortality,”
Dworkin concludes. “We face death believing we have made something good in
response to the greatest challenge a mortal faces. That may not be good enough
for you: it may not soften even a bit the fear we face. But it is the only kind
of immortality we can imagine; at least the only kind we have any business
wanting. That is a religious conviction if anything is. It is available to you
whichever of the two camps of religion, godly or godless, you choose to join.”
