By James Ryerson NEW YORK TIMES
The philosopher Tim Crane is an atheist. Though educated in a Catholic environment, he has come to believe that nothing exists beyond the world of everyday experience and scientific explanation — nothing transcendent. Some people look around and think, this can’t be all there is. Crane is not one of those people. That he avows atheism, as opposed to agnosticism, does not strike him as presumptuous or arrogant. He has considered the relevant evidence and arguments as best he can and drawn the most reasonable-seeming conclusion. What more is a thinker supposed to do? He is convinced religious believers are wrong.
But his qualm is not with them. As he explains in his lucid and thoughtful book “The Meaning of Belief: Religion From an Atheist’s Point of View” (Harvard University, $24.95), he is more troubled by some of his fellow atheists — specifically, those who campaign against religion as an irrational vestige of primitive thought outmoded by modern science.
A notable feature of this campaign, Crane observes, has been its general failure to change the minds of religious people. Maybe those people are just foolish. Or maybe, as Crane is inclined to think, they do not recognize themselves or their beliefs in the picture of religion under attack.
The atheists miss their target because they are aiming elsewhere. And because they fail to understand what religion is, they lack a suitably “realistic and feasible way to relate” to people of faith — which is to say, most people.
In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers. Religion is an immense, sprawling and variegated affair. Any attempt to define it, however comprehensive, will omit some aspects, and most attempts to define it, however crude, will capture something. The name of the game is what you see as central. Crane resists the notion, common to combative atheists, that the core of religion is an archaic cosmology (beliefs about things like the origin of the universe and supernatural agents) grafted onto a moral code. If you conceive of religion this way, as bad science plus arbitrary injunctions, of course you will think it should be replaced by good science and rational ethics.
For Crane, the religious worldview is better understood as the combination of two attitudes. First: a sense of the transcendent, of an unseen moral order to the universe, often known as God. Second: an identification with a community that tries to “make sense of the world” by attempting to bring its members into alignment with this moral order through a tradition of narratives and rituals. Crane concedes there is a cosmology here; a belief in the transcendent is “a claim about the universe.” He also grants that religion, like science, is trying to explain things. But the kind of explanation and the kind of cosmology offered by religion, which does not “expect all aspects of the world to be intelligible,” are nothing like those of science, which strives to eliminate mystery.
The atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested that the idea of God is a “hypothesis” about a supernatural agent, ventured as a possible account of perplexing natural phenomena. Crane disagrees. The god of actual religious people — the source of the unseen order that imbues everything with significance — is both vaguer and more nuanced than that. Science takes “complex or confusing things” and tries to explain them in terms of “simpler or clearer things.” God is not simple or clear. Religion isn’t supposed to be a neat explanation of causal forces. It’s supposed to be a difficult explanation of the meaning of life. This explanation, Crane contends, is destined to be forever incomplete, always a struggle to fathom, not because it is missing some key facts, but because it involves “attempts to encounter” the transcendent.
Crane himself thinks there is no transcendent reality, but he knows there can be no proof of this. Given the ineluctable enigma of existence, he believes religion can be a rational, “intelligible human reaction to the mystery of the world.”
This picture of religion would no doubt strike the sociologist Christian Smith as “too cognitive, cerebral, intellectualist.” In his substantial, richly informed book “Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters” (Princeton University, $35), Smith offers a social scientific theory that disputes the notion, advanced by titans of social thought like Clifford Geertz and Max Weber, that religion is a cultural meaning system. “Religion is not at heart a set of replies to existential questions,” Smith writes, “even if it often involves this.”
For Smith, the paradigmatic expression of religion is something like praying to God to cure your wife’s cancer, or beseeching a cloud spirit to bring rain to your withering crops. Having surveyed religious traditions across the world and throughout history, he sees religion, at its core, as a set of “culturally prescribed practices” that aim to help people access “superhuman powers” in the hope of “realizing human goods” and avoiding bad things, typically “in conditions and situations they cannot control and with problems that they cannot solve.” Smith is quick to acknowledge that this is not all religion provides, nor the sole reason people practice religion. But he maintains it is the “central” reason. And unlike other things religion does, like providing an identity (which a profession can also do) or seeking existential meaning (which philosophy can also do), it is “unique to religion.”
A methodological hazard of discussing religion at this level of abstraction is the need, as Crane says, “to generalize the views of billions of people.” Smith hopes to avoid this difficulty by focusing less on subjective religious belief and more on public religious practices, which are “more or less objective.” This has allowed him, he believes, to focus on what religion is. He distinguishes this from what religion can do, its “secondary outgrowths” (things like fostering identity, meaning, community and so on). Though these derivative features are “often crucial” for the personal experience and institutional strength of religion, they do not constitute its “ultimate raison d’être.”
Smith’s is a theoretical work, but he provides ample illustrations of his theory, including religious traditions that might at first seem like counterexamples, such as American Protestant evangelicalism, which stresses the importance of beliefs and attitudes over rituals and customs. In all cases, he finds formalized calls for heavenly assistance to be central. Worries about things like the meaning of life and the problem of evil are peripheral. “If religion could not promise the help of superhuman powers,” he concludes, “then religion would not exist.”