In the past few years there has been a rising tide of books advocating the demise of religion and the triumph of secularism. Apparently, this evaluation strikes a chord with a large portion of the American public. In his book, The Case for Religion, Keith Ward describes our contemporary environment:

Many writers and philosophers of the first rank, from David Hume to James Frazer, from Auguste Comte to Karl Marx, have argued that religion is obsolete, even if people in general do not seem to have realized the fact. It is, they say, a mass of superstitions and delusions, and it has been superseded by science. It is also intolerant and dangerous, and we are only too well aware that civilization might yet be destroyed by religious hatred. Only when we get rid of religion, they say, will the world be safe to live in and free from delusion and superstition. As civilizations begin to be liberated from superstition, developing and becoming technologically advanced, they will inevitably leave religion behind. The chief hope for humanity, according to such thought, lies in the advance of education and the extinction of religion, which naturally go hand in hand. (1)

Keith Ward is unwilling to give up on religion. In his book, he ably defends its value and relevance while also charting a way forward for the various religious traditions.

Ward defines religion “as a set of practices for establishing relationship to a supernatural or transcendent reality, for the sake of obtaining human good or avoiding harm” (3). His definition focuses on practices rather than beliefs. Limiting religion to beliefs is too intellectual or rationalistic. Religion is multi-dimensioned. Using Ninian Smart’s categories, Ward writes of “seven general descriptive categories under which we can list religious activities. These are: myth or narrative, doctrine, ritual, ethics, social institutions, experience, and the material dimension (buildings, artworks and so on)” (17-18).

Religion as Primitive Illusion, Social Construct, and Wish-Fulfillment

Ward begins by demolishing “some influential arguments against religion which are supposed to be based on science, sociology and psychology” (5). Some view religion as nothing more than a primitive illusion. Those who do so approach religious studies as a subset of anthropology. In other words, religion is simply a childish survival tactic of the primitive mind, and thus, in our enlightened age can now be discarded. Ward argues that this secular evaluation of religion is itself an ideologically committed and value-laden approach that reveals more about researchers than it does the topic of research. Surely, religion may be “a mistake, a deep and ineradicable human illusion” but this is not proved by a scientific study of religions from a perspective of methodological atheism (51). All this demonstrates is how the ideology of secularism rejects religion outright.

Some view religion solely as a social construct. Feuerbach taught that God is a merely a projection of human imagination. In other words, God did not make us; we made God. Karl Marx decried religion for its negative social consequences, claiming that it consoled the oppressed and justified the status quo. But again, these conclusions reveal more about their advocates than they do of reality. Certainly, religion is partly a social construct, but it also seems to be something more: “it seems likely that the questions of meaning, of what value and purpose there is in life, will continue for many to have a transcendent dimension, to require some reference to, or hope for, fulfillment in relation to one supreme and unchanging value which cannot be destroyed by time” (67).

Some argue that religion is nothing more than a psychological projection of unconscious needs and wishes. Some explain the religious impulse as motivated by repressed sexual guilt or as serving a deep psychological need for a parental figure. “Explanations in terms of sexual repression and imagined father-figures are illuminating for some religious conditions. But such explanations are simply too general to cover more than a tiny number of religious attitudes” (78). For example, these psychological explanations do not account for people who reject religion and view the world as a purely material reality. What explains this fact? Though secularists condescendingly speak of underdeveloped believers who need a transcendent parental figure to soothe their pathetic souls, Ward turns the tables and demonstrates how the rejection of God for secular materialism can also serve as a sign of developmental childishness:

It can seem that there is a sort of materialist neurosis, which drives people to seek just one sort of explanation for the whole range of diverse phenomena, and to reduce all sorts of realities to just one basic kind. This would be a monothematic neurosis, possibly due to fixation at an anal-retentive stage. We seek to exercise control over the universe by subordinating it to one simple and fixed scheme that is our own product. Control is absolute (the theory wholly orders the world), and nothing ‘dirty’ or messy is allowed to exist. The scientific cosmos is the perfectly potty-trained neurosis. (78)

Four Models of Spiritual Reality

Having demonstrated that religion cannot be adequately explained away simply by declaring it to be a primitive illusion, a social construct, or psychological wish-fulfillment, Ward moves on to “show how the great traditions developed four basic models of spiritual reality, the idealist (only the spiritual ultimately exists [and matter is only an appearance]), the dualist (spirit and matter both exist in relative independence), the theistic (the spiritual and the material both exist, but the material exists in total dependence upon the spiritual), and the monist (spirit and matter are different aspects of the same unitary reality)” (3). In the past few hundred years, two additional views have arisen: reductive materialism (matter can be seen as the only reality, and consciousness is an illusion, or an epiphenomenon or by-product of material processes) and emergent materialism (spirit and matter can be seen as different, while spirit depends for its nature and existence upon matter) (116).

All religious traditions embrace one of the first four models of spiritual reality. Though each model radical differs in its view, they are all united in that they “see human life as finding its true fulfillment in appropriate relation to a transcendent spiritual reality or state” and that this “relation involves an overcoming of selfish attachments and a physical and mental discipline that will establish the relation securely in human lives” (145).

The Christian vision follows the theistic model. Ward offers a beautiful description of the heart of the Christian faith:

So the Christian vision is that the creator God, the supreme sovereign will, does not just declare the divine will through revelation to the prophets. God actually unites humanity to the divine being, giving up the divine glory to share in human finitude and suffering, in order that humans can in turn be raised to share in the divine life. The sovereign will of God comes to be seen as a will to share in creaturely weakness and suffering, and unite the created cosmos, in a renewed form, to the divine being itself. The theistic model here unites the spiritual and the material more intimately, though the basic model remains that of the total dependence of the material cosmos upon the spiritual reality of God. (123)

Ultimately, material and spiritual reality find their integration in the incarnation of God in Christ. This belief declares “that God acted in a proper human nature, without ceasing to be God and without completely overwhelming that nature. To Christians, it even seems that this would be the fullest possible sort of revelation God could give of what the divine nature is like” (124).

The Secular Challenge to Spiritual Reality

The authority of all religious traditions – and most particularly, the Christian tradition – was challenged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Enlightenment. “The two greatest challenges were the principle of evidentialism – that all beliefs should be proportioned to publicly testable evidence – and the principle of autonomy – that beliefs, especially moral beliefs, should not be based on authority. If you accept these two principles religious belief, in its traditional form, cannot survive” (4).

The empirical or scientific method demands “that every factual assertion should be based on sense-observation, and that belief should be proportioned to evidence” (157). The problem is not with the method itself, but with privileging it above all other methods, and reducing facts (or truth) to only that which can be ascertained by the scientific method. Ward admits, “The scientific worldview is one of the triumphs of the human spirit. And its gains have been immeasurable. But it errs if it claims to cover the whole of human knowledge and experience, and if it reduces physical nature to little more than a mechanism without objective value or purpose” (163).

The problem with the scientific method is that it does not encompass the whole of human experience. Our experience is much wider than publicly testable evidence, and, for many, includes experience of a transcendent reality. Historical assertions or assertions about disputed facts in criminal law cases do not conform to the scientific method “founded on public and repeatable observations under controlled conditions, which can be verified by their high predictive accuracy” (81). Furthermore, much of what we feel and value is not publicly accessible, repeatable, dispassionate, measurable, experimentally controlled, predictive, precisely describable, or convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. Much of our human experience does not conform to the scientific method and yet we embrace our experience as true (158-162). Finally, limiting all factual assertions to what can be proved by the scientific method rules out all that we learn and know through personal interaction with others. This has devastating consequences:

Those who insist upon the sole sufficiency of scientific method are forced to ignore the most important testimony available to human persons, the testimony of personal experience that can only be known by introspection. All feelings, evaluations and interpretations are set aside as purely subjective and unreliable, while all reliable knowledge must conform to the paradigms of empirical science – it must be objective, value-free and established by dispassionate observation. The scientific worldview, at least when taken to its extreme, can threaten to depersonalize and desacralise nature, leaving it as a machine to be observed and manipulated, rather than being an object of respect and compassion as a valued creation of God. Eventually, humans themselves will come to seem parts of the machine, and belief in freedom and rational enquiry will begin to be undermined. (157-158)

Truth cannot be reduced to what is observable by the senses, publicly and repeatably. To demand that religion conform to this narrow methodology is misguided: “To ask whether I have enough evidence to put the matter beyond reasonable doubt is to ask the wrong category of question. It is to turn religious insight, commitment and empowerment into quasi-scientific observation, evidence and dispassionate belief. If I do that something has gone terribly wrong. Of course religious beliefs will fail the evidential test. But enough should have been said by now to suggest that the evidential test does not apply to some of the most important areas of human experience” (163).

Revelation

All religions are founded upon divine revelation given by spiritual masters and codified in sacred writings. As they develop, all religious “traditions adopt a set of canonical texts, traceable back to founders who are their source or inspiration” (145). These generally consist of “the teachings of people with special insight into the way of achieving true human fulfillment” (4). As such, they hold a certain level of authority and guidance for their respective religious traditions.

God does not simply put sentences into human minds. Rather, God makes the divine presence known in a powerful way to inspired human minds, which then respond to that disclosure by forming the ideas and feelings and hopes they have in new ways. The inspiration of God, we might say, does not replace human thinking. It guides and directs it, perhaps ensuring that some central understandings are put in place, but leaving human imagination and freedom of thought a great amount of play. This gives an understanding of religious authority that permits critical analysis of evidence and argument, even when they occur in canonical scripture, while accepting the reliability of the testimony of the founding teachers of a religious tradition. (173)

Thus, revelation is “[n]ot the reception of inerrant truths, but the apprehension of a deeply mysterious and perhaps infinitely complex spiritual reality” (178).

Ward then integrates revelation into a broader sweep of sources of religion that includes reason, experience, and tradition. He describes their interrelation:

Revelation provides originative and normative experience; reason seeks an integrating vision of reality within which such experience can find an intelligible place; personal experience confirms revelatory experience to a lesser degree, while extending it to new contexts; and tradition preserves the memory of a cumulative chain of spiritual experiences which, it is to be hoped, leads to ever more comprehensive and inclusive perspectives. (174)

Abusing Religion… And Reason

Though Ward argues for religion, he is quite aware of how easily religion is abused. Many who presently call for the abolishment of religion or its removal from public life recognize this. But what they often fail to recognize is that secularism also holds great potential for abuse.

But precisely because it speaks of that which is of greatest value to human beings, that upon which their lives are ultimately centred, it must become involved with what people actually value and pursue – and that is, however much we seek to conceal the fact, wealth, property and power…

That is why people should not look to religion for salvation or for a solution to the ills of the world. Failure to see the possibilities for corruption and destruction in religion is a failure of spiritual perception of the first order. Few people fail to see the destructive possibilities of other people’s religions, but they can be remarkably blind to their own. While Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx saw the oppressiveness or ignorance of the religions they knew, they completely failed to foresee the oppressiveness of communism or state socialism, an atheist programme, the crusade of humanism, which exterminated heretics to an extent the Inquisition had never dared to attempt.

When all is said and done, it is no reason for renouncing politics that it is corrupt and corrupting. It is no reason for renouncing religion that it is involved in the political and cultural conflicts of all human societies. These considerations, however, do give a powerful reason for seeing all political and religious systems as ambiguous, as needing constant self-criticism and as in constant need of reform.

In a world like this, the claim (even if justified) to possess the most perfect political or religious system, beyond criticism and irreformable, is apt to lead to the most irreformable tyranny. (146-147)

Secularists must also realize that secularism does not necessarily privilege reason as the highest value or norm. This is a philosophical and epistemological choice. It is not inherent to secularism. Indeed, one could argue that the reason contemporary secularists are so militant in their stance against religion is because they are feverishly fighting for the primacy of reason in a postmodern culture that has come to dethrone it.

The rejection of religion was seen by many as a clearing away of superstition and obscurantism. But then in a quite unexpected way critical reason came to be turned against itself. In a world in which there is no God and no structural intelligibility, why should reason be important? How can the ephemeral contents of human brains, thrown up as accidental products of evolutionary processes, pretend to understand absolute truths? Reason itself comes to be seen as an evolutionary survival strategy, subordinate to the drive to reproduction and the will to power. It is in that way that critical reason undermines its own authority. The European Enlightenment produced a crisis, not only in religion, but in the understanding of human beings as rational agents with unique moral value and dignity. (192)

Inclusive Religion and Convergent Spirituality

Ward advocates a humble religious inclusivism as the way forward. He rejects John Hick’s “hard pluralism” as self-refuting. All religions are not equally true. Furthermore, latent in Hick’s claim is that his “hard pluralism” is “more correct than any views that oppose it (and many religious views do oppose it). Therefore some religious views are more correct than others” (227), namely, John Hick’s religious view!

In contrast to exclusivism (only one tradition has the truth) and hard pluralism (all traditions are equally true), Ward argues for “inclusivism,” that is,

one tradition has a more adequate grasp of the central truths about spiritual reality than others. But other traditions do contain important spiritual truths – and enough spiritual truths to set people on the path towards ultimate salvation. Everyone will be saved (if they are) by accepting the truths found in this one tradition, eventually. But meanwhile, through no fault of their own, they follow ways in which there are less adequate formulations of truth, and therefore relatively incomplete paths to salvation…

Inclusivism is thus one form of pluralism, which accepts that there can be many ways of relating to one spiritual reality, some of them more adequate in one respect and others more adequate in other respects. But one of these ways might contain a most adequate conception of what ultimate spiritual reality and ultimate salvation will be like. That will in no way devalue the experiences and beliefs of those in other religions. But it will maintain the full seriousness of claims to truth in religion. (229)

Inclusivism allows one the freedom to continue to advocate the advantages of one’s religious tradition, while humbly recognizing that, if we are truly dealing with transcendent spirituality reality, there will always be more to learn and experience. “No religious tradition, as it is actually received and understood, includes all possible truth about God and human destiny” (232). Therefore, “[a] certain degree of humility and respect for the best in other traditions seems to be in order” (234).

We should not condemn others for conscientiously holding the view they believe to be best justified. And we should not be too certain that we have formulated the truth as adequately as possible. It could well be that diverse views flourish precisely because the way we formulate ours is so inadequate, and because it omits aspects of spiritual practice and experience which other traditions may emphasize. In this way different traditions may have much to learn from each other. (230)

Ward calls this “convergent spirituality.” “A convergent spirituality becomes possible in the modern world, which is not an agreement on doctrines or practices, but is an acceptance that many diverse paths of prayer and meditation converge upon one supreme reality of wisdom, compassion and bliss. That, it may be felt, is the heart of true religion” (232). If we possessed more of this “heart of true religion,” then perhaps the secularists would not feel so threatened by religion.

Quotes excerpted from The Case for Religion by Keith Ward
© Richard J. Vincent, 2007