What's shocking is that Johnson's point is not perfectly obvious to any educated American. Yes, Judeo-Christian principles provide an important interpretative backdrop for our Constitution. But much more fundamental to our republic is the concept of freedom of thought, which flows directly from the Constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a state church or religion. Freedom, not subscription to a religion, is the secret of our success.
We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They equate religion with being stiff, intolerant and small-minded, and imagine that the faithful exercise their belief primarily in a punitive fashion. Of course, such examples exist, and surely in the past were far more prevalent, but these are the fault of man, not God. It's ok to be uncertain, and it's only human to doubt - that's why it's called the "mystery of faith". But the rights we enjoy in Western, Judeo-Christian culture all spring from the belief in the divinity of man. We possess these unalienable rights because humans are different than the rest of the animal kingdom - we are children of God, created in his image, and thus are divine. Freedom of thought, speech, conscience . . . all those hallmarks of our culture which provide the medium for humanity to flourish are our divine inheritance. Reason, empathy, the idea of the human soul - all gifts from a kind and loving creator. The Founding Fathers didn't just hint at these ideas, they said, quite out loud in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That part about being "endowed by their creator" is kind of a dead giveaway. The Constitution lays-out the structure of government specifically to "secure the blessings" of this divine liberty. And though they separated church and state pretty clearly, they were quite explicit that such freedoms could not be sustained in the absence of faith and the role it plays in public morality. I am religiously non-practicing, i.e. don't go to church, have certain doctrinal quibbles with mainstream religion, etc. But I am a man of faith. I dont understand how you can't be. I am surrounded every day by miracles beyond my comprehension, by beauty so profound that it sits like a weight upon my chest, and by forces so vast and immutable that I am reduced to nothing. Nobody has an adequate explanation of "how" or "why", we're just left to marvel.
Judeo-Christian tradition is not an interpretive backdrop to the Constitution or a just, orderly society, it is the wellspring. Everything we have flows from the central premise. To reject that, like rejecting God, is extraordinarily arrogant and thoughtless. When faith is in short supply, man is bound to suffer
So we can't be free unless we have faith in what precisely? A God? A set of principles?
And prescribed by whom or what? One can't answer those questions without specifying a religious content with which I am free to disagree, and it is precisely that freedom that forms the core of our Constitutional republic. Your requirement of faith as a precondition of our political system is just a warmed over version of precisely the error Johnson identifies.
Faith was a precondition of the establishment of our republic (see John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But see the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were Deists) and is essential for its continued health and prosperity, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to go along with it. What has been built here by people of faith can and does accommodate those who believe otherwise. I'm on no way arguing for a "state religion" or anything of the sort. As far as I know, however, commandments 6-10 of the chart toppers provided my Moses still stand as good law (1-5 being more related to God staking out his territory). All these freedoms we talk so breezily about were directly attributable to rights bestowed by God. Ironically, people today have the luxury of being Godless because of those rights. Athiests and non-believers aren't deserving of punishment (hell, I'm married to one), and certainly not state sanction, but the failure to recognize and/or appreciate the fact that faith in God allows others not to believe if they so chose is a yawning gap in those who run down faith as small or anachronistic. I think its a losing proposition for both the individual and greater society, but I can't force anyone to believe. I just think its an error of epic proportion.
And history demonstrates conclusively IMHO that religious belief of any type is a mistake of epic proportions, both for the individual and for political society. We will all be vastly better off when we stop relying and needing to rely on metaphysical support for living an ethical and good and politically positive life. The metaphysics do nothing good.
When Newton uncovered that there is a perfect proportionality between the weight of an object and the speed that it falls, he found yet another example of what he called God. But he was Christian and that was the only real name he had for this. How do we know numbers really always work to describe the real world? Yes it is faith but a very different category of faith than the faith that murder will take you to heaven. So there is the real trick. Son of Sam had faith he had to kill kids in parked cars, Sam the dog told him so. How is that faith different than the faith that E = mc2... ALWAYS?
Great response. Knowledge as justified true belief is the conundrum of it all isn't it? Plato came up with this and it always hinges on the what we mean by justified. Yes, Kierkegaard says to have faith is to surpass justified belief; faith is an infinite act of free will. But do not overlook that Kierkegaard also says you cannot get to this infinite subjective faith (the Religious stage) until you have first gone through the stage of justified true belief. Faith comes after reason not before reason. Science does not answer the problem of despair and sickness unto death, the sickness of the alienated soul. That is the moment of the leap of faith beyond belief! You simply cannot science your way to God for Kierkegaard.
Salvatore, you write that we - everyone - needs faith in a "kind and loving creator". I assume that you believe this god exists, rather than us having faith in the existence of something which does not exist.
Many people believe that it is righteous and necessary to worship whatever god or gods they believe in. Yet, for thousands of years, all this human effort into understanding "god" (whatever it means to each individual) has produced a great deal of disagreement, argument, conflict, harm and death.
The "kind and loving creator" you seem to believe in, if he exists, still controls the universe he made. If so, we are his pets. There's no evidence that such a "kind and loving creator" went to any effort in many moments of impeding grave disaster, such as by orchestrating a minute or so blanking out of concentration for the bombardiers of the planes which dropped their hideous weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We think dimly of anyone who ignores his or her pets.
You think we should all believe in, and perhaps worship, this "kind and loving creator".
I think Jesus was right to found a religion on the basis that there is something beyond physical life which expects the best of us. But the theology, or numerous branches of theology, he gave rise to - like all theologies - is gravely mistaken because there is no such "kind and loving creator".
There may well be a creator. If so, then he, she or it doesn't give a rat's arse about humanity or any other species. The dinosaurs were doing fine until an asteroid ended their party. The same could happen to humans, though our demise is more likely to be nuclear war. Intolerable, life and soul crushing, suffering is not just the result of human malevolence, carelessness or moral failing, as some believers like to emphasise. It happens naturally - natural disasters and numerous other horrors, not least pandemic diseases and neurodegeneration (dementia) which would be rare if people supplemented enough vitamin D3 to run their immune systems properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
If there was a kind and loving creator who wanted or expected some or all humans to know him - and perhaps to worship him - he would not be so cruel and obscurantist as to expect humans to correctly derive such clear and important knowledge from thousands of years of raucous debate, often based on nothing more than little scraps of tatty scripture.
The fact that some elements of Christianity were directly valuable to the best elements of Western civilisation, and that the clear-headed rejection of other elements of it were also decisive in building the best of what we have now, does not mean at all that any of these beliefs have a basis in fact.
They could still be effective in building a good civilisation in their adoption, or in rejecting them, if they are entirely fictitious, but widely believed to be true: myth which is widely believed to be concrete reality.
Many people are so desperate to imagine a Big Daddy uber-Chieftain who will look after them and their family in this life and in whatever follows, that they invent such characters and base their lives around such beliefs.
Likewise the fact that Christianity or any other religion provides meaning in many people's lives, which tends to prevent them from seeking meaning in Wokeness (such as being an "ally" of some marginalised group, writing or reposting something on social media to make the world a better place by inducing guilt in those who they think should feel guilty) does not mean that those beliefs were correct, or that any or all of the meaning believers derived from their religion was good, or bad (however judged). It just means that people's often intense need to fill a meaning gap in their life was fulfilled, at least in part, by one of these recognised religious belief systems rather than the recent Woke / progressive mashup social contagion which grew out of leftist politics and post-modernism.
I have no idea how the universe came into being. No-one has any knowledge of why there is anything at all, anywhere - any universe (time, dimensions, gravity, electromagnetism, the perplexing wavelike properties of matter which allow so-called fundamental particles to assemble as stable atoms and molecules, plus whatever gives rise to energy / matter) or any creator which could create what we observe in the universe. But here we are! And - as you write - there are many wonderful and indeed gorgeous aspects of life and our universe, along with extreme horrors.
I think there is something beyond the physical which we are already part of, which loves us and expects the best of us, and that attempts to guide us. However, it is obviously not the creator of the universe. If it was, it would intervene from time to time: It would care for its pets. It doesn't do this, so it is not the creator. I guess it emerged as part of who we - and surely other species - are.
Most people are not at all interested in such a cosmology or framework for thinking about life and whatever lies beyond our physical life. It lacks the high drama and all-powerful, all-protecting, love, wisdom and guidance which comes with belief in in a big-boss daddy of all who loves and protects us.
Freud describes the God you describe as a pathological illusion and I agree with Freud on this. Daddy God is not God but a destructive illusion we create to deal with our mortality and to justify our murderous desires. That God should have died when Nietzsche said so, but it persists in many sick religions. The question is whether life is good and what sort of god would embrace life? Is there order in the universe or is it random and disordered. Physics suggests order, and order suggests life is a good thing: an exquisitely, if very fragile and temporary, ordering of star dust indeed.
Thank you, PSW. That’s very kind. I have to give TFP a big round of applause. Where else could I expound on what faith means to me without looking like the skunk at the garden party? TFP broaches topics that actually matter, rather than wallowing in guilt porn over non-issues like “climate change” or those poor Hamas members.
Very well said. I would add, however, that We need to look much more closely at our faith in theological terms, not merely according to the faith demanded by our religious tribe. Which truths are self evident which are not?
But that is not mere faith. There is good reason that we each have a natural right to life, liberty, property etc. Those ideas are all derived from our ideas about a well ordered universe. Thomas Jefferson also said and did some things we mostly disagree with for good reason too. God is the source of logic, reason and truth. God does not cower before reason! We should always say "amen" after we mathematics and physics.
The problem for the human condition is that we all have to believe in something. Consider the concept of scientific theory. There are those who reject a scientific theory based solely on their beliefs. There also those who accept the same scientific theory as dogma based, again, on nothing more than their beliefs.
To set the record straight, freedom of worship in the colonies predates Thomas Jefferson. Residents of Charleston (SC) in the late 17th century and Savannah (GA) in the early 18th century enjoyed a level of religious freedom that was unknown in the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Excellent article. I am a philosopher professor and a theologian and I agree. Yet I would make a clear distinction between points that Johnson takes for granted. God is not Religion and Religion is not Theology. Theology is literally the application of reason to understanding God, and religions are at their core rituals that are performed to bind groups together for political action . The point is though religions do not overlap, theologies often do, and God is ultimately beyond human comprehension. So God as understood post enlightenment is essentially the God of Deism and Science. Math works within us, and it reflects the order of the universe. But what is God's name? That is religion not theology. Does God exist? Again that is a theological question not a religious one. I would distinguish between lower faith and higher faith: Lower faith is rigid adherence to a religion without need of a reasonable theological foundation, and I would say that is dangerous; Higher faith is apophatic, one feels it, but is unable to name it. For the apophatic theologian, God is not great; God for the apophatic is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" and therefore is always beyond our comprehension. God is not religion and religion is not God, and to confuse that is dangerous. It would not be a contradiction to say theology at its most fundamental level is opposed to religion entirely, since religion requires fully thoughtless unreasonable faith. We are looking therefore not at the rise of one more battle between religions but a conflict between Theologians and the West is woefully underprepared. Our theologians are mostly woke fools these days.
I’m not sure I understand this. I’m in philosophy too and one of my specialty areas is philosophical theology. My taxonomy is a little different.
Philosophical theology is concerned with logical puzzles posed by religious doctrines, e.g. identity puzzles posed by the doctrine of the Trinity, which I do. Religion is liturgy, hymnody, art, ceremony and beliefs about supernatural beings or states of affairs. Ethics is another matter and, I believe, a purely secular business. As a Christian my religious beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with my views about moral issues: you can’t derive ought from is—not even the theological is. I’m just a plain Utilitarian.
Ironically, it was only since Kant got liberal clergy scared about metaphysics that they tried to make out that religion was ‘really’ just ethics to keep themselves in business. And now that’s backfired. We don’t need Christianity to provide moral principles any more than we need it to provide information about the origin of the universe or the origin of species. And the moral views and social/political agendas that conservative Evangelicals claim follow from 'Biblical principles' are pure garbage.
Agreed, pure garbage. Hume's so-called naturalistic fallacy: One cannot derive an ought from an is. We do monstrous things regularly, and horror abounds in our natural universe constantly. That IS so, but certainly it ought not be, if God is so great. So theologically what is wrong with that if indeed God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent? This is the problem of theodicy. Is Leibniz right to say somehow this is nevertheless the best of all possible worlds? How does God allow children to die of leukemia and drowning and simply choking to death on candy? What God is that???
I dunno. I don't do the Problem of Evil--leave it to wiser heads. I just do identity puzzles posed by the Trinity doctrine and also the Real Presence doctrine. Personally, even though I know there's a problem the Problem of Evil never really grabbed me.
I struggle with those constantly, and have come to some likely heretical conclusions. I seem to be a monophysite when all is said and done. But my deepest fascination is the human need for sacrifice. Christianity seems to have solved this most elegantly: the final sacrifice is to sacrifice God to God. Of the three Abrahamic religions only Christianity fully eliminates our most primitive need for perpetual sacrifice to God. We gave God God and there is no more sacrifice needed, no more individual sacrifice would mean anything. No more children for Moloch, no more goats or bulls or lambs necessary. Of course we still seem to want to bribe God to get what we want. And sadly people regularly do cause themselves pain to prime the divine theurgical pump.
The true story of how the universe, life on Earth and humanity began and developed is as magnificent as you could ask for from an origins story. If we're not getting enough from it, maybe because the deal by which evolutionary science and mainstream religion agreed to peacefully coexist doesn't allow us to
Any time we come within a thousand feet of meaning and purpose, ethics and morality, what's the best way to live and what's the best way to get there, we're required to whip out the old prepared statement and rote-repeat "Science has nothing to day about..." We need to free ourselves from that restriction.
I’m a ‘mainline’ Christian. With friends like the New Theists we don’t need any enemies.
‘Christian’ has now become a code for the political right—‘more of a political statement than a religious affirmation’. In fact, not a religious affirmation at all: religion is metaphysics, not a social or political agenda. Starting with working class MAGAs who identify as ‘Evangelical’ it has moved upscale with Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and the like. Like Heterodox Academy, the ‘University’ of Austin, etc. it’s the right’s political agenda packaged for the educated upper middle class, funded by conservative plutocrats.
And they’ve been empowered by the grinding anti-religious sentiment of the left. Occasionally the media feature tame Evangelicals as rare birds, but ordinary liberal mainline Christians, who are many, are invisible. In part that is because it’s embarrassing to be identified as a Christian and many of us, including me, are mostly in the closet.
It’s a vicious circle. The anti-religious sentiment of the left drives Christians to the right (or, more often, under cover like me) and generates more anti-religious sentiment.
Of the many things I am concerned about regarding the coming presidential election is the desire of some to institute a Christian from of Sharia law in the US. As is common in such political movements the motivation increasingly moves from sincerity to self-serving as one gets higher in the leadership.
"Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult . . ."
"Many" is the aspiration, but it certainly can't be all, or probably even most.
There are a large subset of cultures, traditions, religions, political movements or whatever which are so opposed to whatever ideal arrangement we (generally, those who would agree with this article) are aiming for as "a liberal society". We need to identify them as enemies of the quest, rather than attempting to integrate their followers, with all their beliefs, passions, certainties and opposition to our project. Obvious examples include those whose beliefs impel them to kill individuals or whole groups of people who don't abide by their religious dictates. (Other such dictates include Ideological frameworks which concern what others should do and think, racial/cultural/religious claims to territory.)
But my previous paragraph is arguably such a dictate. Are we all (now expansively - all humans) just members of one tribe or another, or multiply members of multiple tribe-like divides on various questions of truth, meaning and morality in a multi-layered Venn diagram which probably looks like soap bubbles from afar?
I can't rule out this possibility. Only a tiny fraction of the world's population can live peacefully among a subset who kill anyone who insults their beliefs (blasphemy). Some groups of people in the West now have very high needs regarding who they can get along with without fuss, complaint, accusations of bigotry etc. Most obviously the supposedly, and I guess sometimes actually, trans people who insist that everyone else must behave and think in accordance with their supposed belief that they actually *are* a man or a woman, despite being physically female or male. They should be happy to have some subset of the population indulge their beliefs politely, within practical limits, to the extent these represent a genuine part of their sense of self. Instead, thanks to the current social contagion their expectations go far beyond this and would, if satisfied, screw with every person's conception of what humanity really is.
The post-modernists grin like Cheshire cats from a safe distance as the wannabe architects and participants in a "liberal society" try to protect their fragile attempts at oasis from the ravages of those who consider them infidels to be killed for the glory of God, or from those who burst into tears and start lawsuits if we fail to act as if they really *are* whatever it is they claim to be.
I wrote mainly to say Thanks for this great article. I can stop any time.
Please do not stop though. America is founded on deism ultimately coming from Descartes and Spinoza, and deists have no reason to squelch freedom of speech since only through reasonable dialectic does the divinity reveal itself throughout all of Nature.
I didn't stop. I continued in a reply to Salvatore Monella. However I am sure he won't like it, and I suspect you won't either, because I argue that there is no supreme creator which loves us.
All depends how we define love or human understanding. Certainly God is not Zeus. And Jesus is pure conundrum so no simple answer there either. Spinoza's God seems a good one though. His idea of intuition, a flash of certainty that defies explanation seems right. We certainly do not know God since that would make God a very prosaic god. God is certainly not great since that would limit God. I guess the question is do we feel alone or do we feel we belong in the universe somehow. Remember ever quark that makes us is ordered and part of a reasonable universe. If all the parts have order and those parts conjoin then it is not impossible that we at least have the ability to resonate reasonably with that order. All the strings that make up the 17 quantum particles in every atom and cell within us hum and perhaps we do hear them, a divine symphony. Pythagoras suggested we do.
Real history is usually much more complicated than people generally think, especially people who try to give historical “arguments” to prove a particular religious or philosophical proposition. Genetic fallacies are always popular with superficial thinkers. It’s as though someone had a car in their garage and started off on a journey in it, leaving the garage but somehow thinking that they were still in the garage the whole trip.
A very well written article with many important points as regarding history and liberalis. One important point you could have mentioned is that civilisationism is anti-liberal since it is about promoting right-wing collectivism combined with religion.
Excellent essay, but the author ends with the same kind of unnecessary assumptions that he rightly criticizes in the "New Theists".
I'm a believer and, like the author, I don't really understand people who adopt religion as a way to improve society, or their own lives. If one doesn't believe the truth of the religion, how is the acceptance of, say, the Ten Commandments any more useful than the acceptance of the liberal principles listed by the author?
But the author makes the opposite mistake of thinking that religious people have to water their belief down in favor of principles that "transcend" religion: democracy, pluralism, individual rights, free speech, and of course, freedom of conscience. Why? Even were these ideas/practices at odds with one's belief, why can't one believe that in a perfect world they'd be superseded but in 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 world they have value?
It's also possible that these values really are a weak reed on which to rest one's life's meaning and asserting that they're all we can have if we want to live together doesn't change that. That's exactly the kind of idea that the author's principles -- our principles, as Americans -- should allow us to examine, individually or together, coming with our various sincere beliefs.
Oh and to be fully "heterodox" the Decalogue should certainly be in all public institution so long as its presence entails mandatory logic and theology education as a part of our public education. The most disruptive question is whether Decartes was right in regards to geometry and by extension all science: Truth is real... or perhaps as Plato asks in the Euthyphro: Does God do what is good because it is good or is it good simply because God does it?
What's shocking is that Johnson's point is not perfectly obvious to any educated American. Yes, Judeo-Christian principles provide an important interpretative backdrop for our Constitution. But much more fundamental to our republic is the concept of freedom of thought, which flows directly from the Constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a state church or religion. Freedom, not subscription to a religion, is the secret of our success.
We don't need religion to save America, strictly speaking (insofar as it relates to doctrinal practices), but we sure as hell DO need faith. More than ever, we need humility, gratitude, awareness and reverence. Too many "educated" people shun God because they focus on the harms done, often in the distant past, in the name of faith. They equate religion with being stiff, intolerant and small-minded, and imagine that the faithful exercise their belief primarily in a punitive fashion. Of course, such examples exist, and surely in the past were far more prevalent, but these are the fault of man, not God. It's ok to be uncertain, and it's only human to doubt - that's why it's called the "mystery of faith". But the rights we enjoy in Western, Judeo-Christian culture all spring from the belief in the divinity of man. We possess these unalienable rights because humans are different than the rest of the animal kingdom - we are children of God, created in his image, and thus are divine. Freedom of thought, speech, conscience . . . all those hallmarks of our culture which provide the medium for humanity to flourish are our divine inheritance. Reason, empathy, the idea of the human soul - all gifts from a kind and loving creator. The Founding Fathers didn't just hint at these ideas, they said, quite out loud in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That part about being "endowed by their creator" is kind of a dead giveaway. The Constitution lays-out the structure of government specifically to "secure the blessings" of this divine liberty. And though they separated church and state pretty clearly, they were quite explicit that such freedoms could not be sustained in the absence of faith and the role it plays in public morality. I am religiously non-practicing, i.e. don't go to church, have certain doctrinal quibbles with mainstream religion, etc. But I am a man of faith. I dont understand how you can't be. I am surrounded every day by miracles beyond my comprehension, by beauty so profound that it sits like a weight upon my chest, and by forces so vast and immutable that I am reduced to nothing. Nobody has an adequate explanation of "how" or "why", we're just left to marvel.
Judeo-Christian tradition is not an interpretive backdrop to the Constitution or a just, orderly society, it is the wellspring. Everything we have flows from the central premise. To reject that, like rejecting God, is extraordinarily arrogant and thoughtless. When faith is in short supply, man is bound to suffer
So we can't be free unless we have faith in what precisely? A God? A set of principles?
And prescribed by whom or what? One can't answer those questions without specifying a religious content with which I am free to disagree, and it is precisely that freedom that forms the core of our Constitutional republic. Your requirement of faith as a precondition of our political system is just a warmed over version of precisely the error Johnson identifies.
Faith was a precondition of the establishment of our republic (see John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But see the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were Deists) and is essential for its continued health and prosperity, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to go along with it. What has been built here by people of faith can and does accommodate those who believe otherwise. I'm on no way arguing for a "state religion" or anything of the sort. As far as I know, however, commandments 6-10 of the chart toppers provided my Moses still stand as good law (1-5 being more related to God staking out his territory). All these freedoms we talk so breezily about were directly attributable to rights bestowed by God. Ironically, people today have the luxury of being Godless because of those rights. Athiests and non-believers aren't deserving of punishment (hell, I'm married to one), and certainly not state sanction, but the failure to recognize and/or appreciate the fact that faith in God allows others not to believe if they so chose is a yawning gap in those who run down faith as small or anachronistic. I think its a losing proposition for both the individual and greater society, but I can't force anyone to believe. I just think its an error of epic proportion.
And history demonstrates conclusively IMHO that religious belief of any type is a mistake of epic proportions, both for the individual and for political society. We will all be vastly better off when we stop relying and needing to rely on metaphysical support for living an ethical and good and politically positive life. The metaphysics do nothing good.
I’m all for ethical, good and politically positive life. Thx!
When Newton uncovered that there is a perfect proportionality between the weight of an object and the speed that it falls, he found yet another example of what he called God. But he was Christian and that was the only real name he had for this. How do we know numbers really always work to describe the real world? Yes it is faith but a very different category of faith than the faith that murder will take you to heaven. So there is the real trick. Son of Sam had faith he had to kill kids in parked cars, Sam the dog told him so. How is that faith different than the faith that E = mc2... ALWAYS?
Faith is not the same as justified rational belief. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. See Kierkegaard.
Great response. Knowledge as justified true belief is the conundrum of it all isn't it? Plato came up with this and it always hinges on the what we mean by justified. Yes, Kierkegaard says to have faith is to surpass justified belief; faith is an infinite act of free will. But do not overlook that Kierkegaard also says you cannot get to this infinite subjective faith (the Religious stage) until you have first gone through the stage of justified true belief. Faith comes after reason not before reason. Science does not answer the problem of despair and sickness unto death, the sickness of the alienated soul. That is the moment of the leap of faith beyond belief! You simply cannot science your way to God for Kierkegaard.
Salvatore, you write that we - everyone - needs faith in a "kind and loving creator". I assume that you believe this god exists, rather than us having faith in the existence of something which does not exist.
Many people believe that it is righteous and necessary to worship whatever god or gods they believe in. Yet, for thousands of years, all this human effort into understanding "god" (whatever it means to each individual) has produced a great deal of disagreement, argument, conflict, harm and death.
The "kind and loving creator" you seem to believe in, if he exists, still controls the universe he made. If so, we are his pets. There's no evidence that such a "kind and loving creator" went to any effort in many moments of impeding grave disaster, such as by orchestrating a minute or so blanking out of concentration for the bombardiers of the planes which dropped their hideous weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We think dimly of anyone who ignores his or her pets.
You think we should all believe in, and perhaps worship, this "kind and loving creator".
I think Jesus was right to found a religion on the basis that there is something beyond physical life which expects the best of us. But the theology, or numerous branches of theology, he gave rise to - like all theologies - is gravely mistaken because there is no such "kind and loving creator".
There may well be a creator. If so, then he, she or it doesn't give a rat's arse about humanity or any other species. The dinosaurs were doing fine until an asteroid ended their party. The same could happen to humans, though our demise is more likely to be nuclear war. Intolerable, life and soul crushing, suffering is not just the result of human malevolence, carelessness or moral failing, as some believers like to emphasise. It happens naturally - natural disasters and numerous other horrors, not least pandemic diseases and neurodegeneration (dementia) which would be rare if people supplemented enough vitamin D3 to run their immune systems properly: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
If there was a kind and loving creator who wanted or expected some or all humans to know him - and perhaps to worship him - he would not be so cruel and obscurantist as to expect humans to correctly derive such clear and important knowledge from thousands of years of raucous debate, often based on nothing more than little scraps of tatty scripture.
The fact that some elements of Christianity were directly valuable to the best elements of Western civilisation, and that the clear-headed rejection of other elements of it were also decisive in building the best of what we have now, does not mean at all that any of these beliefs have a basis in fact.
They could still be effective in building a good civilisation in their adoption, or in rejecting them, if they are entirely fictitious, but widely believed to be true: myth which is widely believed to be concrete reality.
Many people are so desperate to imagine a Big Daddy uber-Chieftain who will look after them and their family in this life and in whatever follows, that they invent such characters and base their lives around such beliefs.
Likewise the fact that Christianity or any other religion provides meaning in many people's lives, which tends to prevent them from seeking meaning in Wokeness (such as being an "ally" of some marginalised group, writing or reposting something on social media to make the world a better place by inducing guilt in those who they think should feel guilty) does not mean that those beliefs were correct, or that any or all of the meaning believers derived from their religion was good, or bad (however judged). It just means that people's often intense need to fill a meaning gap in their life was fulfilled, at least in part, by one of these recognised religious belief systems rather than the recent Woke / progressive mashup social contagion which grew out of leftist politics and post-modernism.
I have no idea how the universe came into being. No-one has any knowledge of why there is anything at all, anywhere - any universe (time, dimensions, gravity, electromagnetism, the perplexing wavelike properties of matter which allow so-called fundamental particles to assemble as stable atoms and molecules, plus whatever gives rise to energy / matter) or any creator which could create what we observe in the universe. But here we are! And - as you write - there are many wonderful and indeed gorgeous aspects of life and our universe, along with extreme horrors.
I think there is something beyond the physical which we are already part of, which loves us and expects the best of us, and that attempts to guide us. However, it is obviously not the creator of the universe. If it was, it would intervene from time to time: It would care for its pets. It doesn't do this, so it is not the creator. I guess it emerged as part of who we - and surely other species - are.
Most people are not at all interested in such a cosmology or framework for thinking about life and whatever lies beyond our physical life. It lacks the high drama and all-powerful, all-protecting, love, wisdom and guidance which comes with belief in in a big-boss daddy of all who loves and protects us.
Freud describes the God you describe as a pathological illusion and I agree with Freud on this. Daddy God is not God but a destructive illusion we create to deal with our mortality and to justify our murderous desires. That God should have died when Nietzsche said so, but it persists in many sick religions. The question is whether life is good and what sort of god would embrace life? Is there order in the universe or is it random and disordered. Physics suggests order, and order suggests life is a good thing: an exquisitely, if very fragile and temporary, ordering of star dust indeed.
Robin -thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'll respond in kind when I have a few free minutes to address you points appropriately.
Wow, beautifully said Salvatore.
Thank you, PSW. That’s very kind. I have to give TFP a big round of applause. Where else could I expound on what faith means to me without looking like the skunk at the garden party? TFP broaches topics that actually matter, rather than wallowing in guilt porn over non-issues like “climate change” or those poor Hamas members.
Very well said. I would add, however, that We need to look much more closely at our faith in theological terms, not merely according to the faith demanded by our religious tribe. Which truths are self evident which are not?
Thank you for your comment. Per the self
Evident truths, I don’t know on which side of the ledger they all land, but I’m more than content with the ones in our national charter.
But that is not mere faith. There is good reason that we each have a natural right to life, liberty, property etc. Those ideas are all derived from our ideas about a well ordered universe. Thomas Jefferson also said and did some things we mostly disagree with for good reason too. God is the source of logic, reason and truth. God does not cower before reason! We should always say "amen" after we mathematics and physics.
And a hearty Amen to you. Thank you
The problem for the human condition is that we all have to believe in something. Consider the concept of scientific theory. There are those who reject a scientific theory based solely on their beliefs. There also those who accept the same scientific theory as dogma based, again, on nothing more than their beliefs.
To set the record straight, freedom of worship in the colonies predates Thomas Jefferson. Residents of Charleston (SC) in the late 17th century and Savannah (GA) in the early 18th century enjoyed a level of religious freedom that was unknown in the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Excellent article. I am a philosopher professor and a theologian and I agree. Yet I would make a clear distinction between points that Johnson takes for granted. God is not Religion and Religion is not Theology. Theology is literally the application of reason to understanding God, and religions are at their core rituals that are performed to bind groups together for political action . The point is though religions do not overlap, theologies often do, and God is ultimately beyond human comprehension. So God as understood post enlightenment is essentially the God of Deism and Science. Math works within us, and it reflects the order of the universe. But what is God's name? That is religion not theology. Does God exist? Again that is a theological question not a religious one. I would distinguish between lower faith and higher faith: Lower faith is rigid adherence to a religion without need of a reasonable theological foundation, and I would say that is dangerous; Higher faith is apophatic, one feels it, but is unable to name it. For the apophatic theologian, God is not great; God for the apophatic is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" and therefore is always beyond our comprehension. God is not religion and religion is not God, and to confuse that is dangerous. It would not be a contradiction to say theology at its most fundamental level is opposed to religion entirely, since religion requires fully thoughtless unreasonable faith. We are looking therefore not at the rise of one more battle between religions but a conflict between Theologians and the West is woefully underprepared. Our theologians are mostly woke fools these days.
I’m not sure I understand this. I’m in philosophy too and one of my specialty areas is philosophical theology. My taxonomy is a little different.
Philosophical theology is concerned with logical puzzles posed by religious doctrines, e.g. identity puzzles posed by the doctrine of the Trinity, which I do. Religion is liturgy, hymnody, art, ceremony and beliefs about supernatural beings or states of affairs. Ethics is another matter and, I believe, a purely secular business. As a Christian my religious beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with my views about moral issues: you can’t derive ought from is—not even the theological is. I’m just a plain Utilitarian.
Ironically, it was only since Kant got liberal clergy scared about metaphysics that they tried to make out that religion was ‘really’ just ethics to keep themselves in business. And now that’s backfired. We don’t need Christianity to provide moral principles any more than we need it to provide information about the origin of the universe or the origin of species. And the moral views and social/political agendas that conservative Evangelicals claim follow from 'Biblical principles' are pure garbage.
Agreed, pure garbage. Hume's so-called naturalistic fallacy: One cannot derive an ought from an is. We do monstrous things regularly, and horror abounds in our natural universe constantly. That IS so, but certainly it ought not be, if God is so great. So theologically what is wrong with that if indeed God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent? This is the problem of theodicy. Is Leibniz right to say somehow this is nevertheless the best of all possible worlds? How does God allow children to die of leukemia and drowning and simply choking to death on candy? What God is that???
I dunno. I don't do the Problem of Evil--leave it to wiser heads. I just do identity puzzles posed by the Trinity doctrine and also the Real Presence doctrine. Personally, even though I know there's a problem the Problem of Evil never really grabbed me.
I struggle with those constantly, and have come to some likely heretical conclusions. I seem to be a monophysite when all is said and done. But my deepest fascination is the human need for sacrifice. Christianity seems to have solved this most elegantly: the final sacrifice is to sacrifice God to God. Of the three Abrahamic religions only Christianity fully eliminates our most primitive need for perpetual sacrifice to God. We gave God God and there is no more sacrifice needed, no more individual sacrifice would mean anything. No more children for Moloch, no more goats or bulls or lambs necessary. Of course we still seem to want to bribe God to get what we want. And sadly people regularly do cause themselves pain to prime the divine theurgical pump.
The true story of how the universe, life on Earth and humanity began and developed is as magnificent as you could ask for from an origins story. If we're not getting enough from it, maybe because the deal by which evolutionary science and mainstream religion agreed to peacefully coexist doesn't allow us to
Any time we come within a thousand feet of meaning and purpose, ethics and morality, what's the best way to live and what's the best way to get there, we're required to whip out the old prepared statement and rote-repeat "Science has nothing to day about..." We need to free ourselves from that restriction.
I’m a ‘mainline’ Christian. With friends like the New Theists we don’t need any enemies.
‘Christian’ has now become a code for the political right—‘more of a political statement than a religious affirmation’. In fact, not a religious affirmation at all: religion is metaphysics, not a social or political agenda. Starting with working class MAGAs who identify as ‘Evangelical’ it has moved upscale with Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and the like. Like Heterodox Academy, the ‘University’ of Austin, etc. it’s the right’s political agenda packaged for the educated upper middle class, funded by conservative plutocrats.
And they’ve been empowered by the grinding anti-religious sentiment of the left. Occasionally the media feature tame Evangelicals as rare birds, but ordinary liberal mainline Christians, who are many, are invisible. In part that is because it’s embarrassing to be identified as a Christian and many of us, including me, are mostly in the closet.
It’s a vicious circle. The anti-religious sentiment of the left drives Christians to the right (or, more often, under cover like me) and generates more anti-religious sentiment.
Of the many things I am concerned about regarding the coming presidential election is the desire of some to institute a Christian from of Sharia law in the US. As is common in such political movements the motivation increasingly moves from sincerity to self-serving as one gets higher in the leadership.
Thanks!
"Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult . . ."
"Many" is the aspiration, but it certainly can't be all, or probably even most.
There are a large subset of cultures, traditions, religions, political movements or whatever which are so opposed to whatever ideal arrangement we (generally, those who would agree with this article) are aiming for as "a liberal society". We need to identify them as enemies of the quest, rather than attempting to integrate their followers, with all their beliefs, passions, certainties and opposition to our project. Obvious examples include those whose beliefs impel them to kill individuals or whole groups of people who don't abide by their religious dictates. (Other such dictates include Ideological frameworks which concern what others should do and think, racial/cultural/religious claims to territory.)
But my previous paragraph is arguably such a dictate. Are we all (now expansively - all humans) just members of one tribe or another, or multiply members of multiple tribe-like divides on various questions of truth, meaning and morality in a multi-layered Venn diagram which probably looks like soap bubbles from afar?
I can't rule out this possibility. Only a tiny fraction of the world's population can live peacefully among a subset who kill anyone who insults their beliefs (blasphemy). Some groups of people in the West now have very high needs regarding who they can get along with without fuss, complaint, accusations of bigotry etc. Most obviously the supposedly, and I guess sometimes actually, trans people who insist that everyone else must behave and think in accordance with their supposed belief that they actually *are* a man or a woman, despite being physically female or male. They should be happy to have some subset of the population indulge their beliefs politely, within practical limits, to the extent these represent a genuine part of their sense of self. Instead, thanks to the current social contagion their expectations go far beyond this and would, if satisfied, screw with every person's conception of what humanity really is.
The post-modernists grin like Cheshire cats from a safe distance as the wannabe architects and participants in a "liberal society" try to protect their fragile attempts at oasis from the ravages of those who consider them infidels to be killed for the glory of God, or from those who burst into tears and start lawsuits if we fail to act as if they really *are* whatever it is they claim to be.
I wrote mainly to say Thanks for this great article. I can stop any time.
Please do not stop though. America is founded on deism ultimately coming from Descartes and Spinoza, and deists have no reason to squelch freedom of speech since only through reasonable dialectic does the divinity reveal itself throughout all of Nature.
Hi Someone, as best I understand deism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism you may be right about deists being happy with free speech.
I didn't stop. I continued in a reply to Salvatore Monella. However I am sure he won't like it, and I suspect you won't either, because I argue that there is no supreme creator which loves us.
All depends how we define love or human understanding. Certainly God is not Zeus. And Jesus is pure conundrum so no simple answer there either. Spinoza's God seems a good one though. His idea of intuition, a flash of certainty that defies explanation seems right. We certainly do not know God since that would make God a very prosaic god. God is certainly not great since that would limit God. I guess the question is do we feel alone or do we feel we belong in the universe somehow. Remember ever quark that makes us is ordered and part of a reasonable universe. If all the parts have order and those parts conjoin then it is not impossible that we at least have the ability to resonate reasonably with that order. All the strings that make up the 17 quantum particles in every atom and cell within us hum and perhaps we do hear them, a divine symphony. Pythagoras suggested we do.
Thanks for this great essay.
Real history is usually much more complicated than people generally think, especially people who try to give historical “arguments” to prove a particular religious or philosophical proposition. Genetic fallacies are always popular with superficial thinkers. It’s as though someone had a car in their garage and started off on a journey in it, leaving the garage but somehow thinking that they were still in the garage the whole trip.
A very well written article with many important points as regarding history and liberalis. One important point you could have mentioned is that civilisationism is anti-liberal since it is about promoting right-wing collectivism combined with religion.
And not only national solidarity but global as well. I mean, from local to global.
Excellent essay, but the author ends with the same kind of unnecessary assumptions that he rightly criticizes in the "New Theists".
I'm a believer and, like the author, I don't really understand people who adopt religion as a way to improve society, or their own lives. If one doesn't believe the truth of the religion, how is the acceptance of, say, the Ten Commandments any more useful than the acceptance of the liberal principles listed by the author?
But the author makes the opposite mistake of thinking that religious people have to water their belief down in favor of principles that "transcend" religion: democracy, pluralism, individual rights, free speech, and of course, freedom of conscience. Why? Even were these ideas/practices at odds with one's belief, why can't one believe that in a perfect world they'd be superseded but in 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 world they have value?
It's also possible that these values really are a weak reed on which to rest one's life's meaning and asserting that they're all we can have if we want to live together doesn't change that. That's exactly the kind of idea that the author's principles -- our principles, as Americans -- should allow us to examine, individually or together, coming with our various sincere beliefs.
Oh and to be fully "heterodox" the Decalogue should certainly be in all public institution so long as its presence entails mandatory logic and theology education as a part of our public education. The most disruptive question is whether Decartes was right in regards to geometry and by extension all science: Truth is real... or perhaps as Plato asks in the Euthyphro: Does God do what is good because it is good or is it good simply because God does it?