The background to religious naturalism

The theism more or less closely associated with the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) provides the background against which naturalism in its various forms should be understood today.

According to these theists, there was in the beginning (or has always been) something with mind, namely God, who is, or at least is similar to, a rational, thinking agent; and this God is the creator of everything that exists. This God has created the stars, planets, and galaxies, and all living things, including human beings. Consequently, reality consists of God and all that God has made. All things depend on God as their source of being. God, on the other hand, is self-existent: has always existed and will always exist. Moreover, such theists do not think that God just launched things into existence and thereafter allowed them to persist on their own. Rather, God is the sustainer of all created things. God continually supports things in existence, moment to moment, throughout their existence. If God did not do this, all things would cease to exist. The idea is that just as God creates a thing at the first moment of its existence, God re-creates it in all subsequent moments at which it exists. This last point captures the difference between theism and deism.

If you believe these things, or at least some things of this sort, you are a theist. If we add the ‘omni’ attributes (that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good) or see God as the greatest possible being, we have classical theism. If we add that God has revealed who he or she is and his or her intentions in a revelation such as the Bible or the Qur'an, we have revealed theism or, more specifically, Biblical theism or Qur'anic theism.

Panentheists or process theists, like other theists, believe in a personal God, but reject the idea that God is a being who is distinct from the world. Rather, the world is God's body, through which God lives his or her life, as we live our lives through our bodies. God, like a human person, is physically embodied in a body and is growing older through time and changing as God's body changes. Since the world constitutes a part of God, God is affected by the world, but God alone is everlasting and does not perish. God is within, but not totally confined by, the temporal order and nothing comes into being except through God. But God nevertheless needs a body (a world) for God's existence.

How then should naturalism be related to theism? One option is that naturalism is used as a euphemism for atheism. Anthony Kenny thinks that many atheists prefer to call themselves naturalists in order to avoid entering into a debate about what kind of God they are denying (Kenny (Reference Kenny2006), 22). Mario de Caro and David MacArthur (Reference Caro, MacArthur, Caro and MacArthur2004) seem to hold a similar view, in that they maintain that naturalism has primarily been understood in terms of the rejection of the Judaeo-Christian God (but also add that it would include the denial of the immaterial soul). James Robert Brown says that, according to naturalists, ‘There is no god, nor any corresponding religious understanding of the world’ (Brown (Reference Brown2001), 118–119).

Typically, a classical theist such as Alvin Reference GriggPlantinga defines the naturalism which he rejects as ‘the view that there is no such person as the God of theistic religion nor anything like God’, so a naturalist will be an atheist (Dennett & Plantinga (Reference Dennett and Plantinga2011), 16). The same would hold true for a process theist such as Nicholas Rescher, who writes:

The problem with this way of understanding naturalism is that there are a number of people who describe themselves as religious naturalists. Donald A. Crosby writes that:

Richard Grigg defines radical theology, another name for religious naturalism, as ‘a position that rejects the notion of a transcendent personal consciousness who created the world’ (Grigg (Reference Grigg2008), 4). God or the religious ultimate is to be understood in a different way. Grigg tells us that: ‘Most theologians today do not understand God in the same way as is being criticized so heavily in such works as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. In fact … most theologians left behind an unalloyed, classical theism about two hundred years ago’ (ibid., back cover). Thus we have to get beyond the God delusion and explore how it is possible to be religious in a scientific age.

Edward Farley makes a similar observation. He thinks that ‘Anti-theism is now so powerfully articulated and so widely persuasive that to confess to be a “theist” is almost a breach of theological etiquette’ (Farley (Reference Farley1996), 40). What anti-theists oppose could be different things, but often it is a belief in a God above or beside the world, a conceptualization of God as an entity or a being; or they see theism as a form of dualism, or both theism and atheism as idols. For instance, Gordon D. Kaufman writes, in agreement with Immanuel Kant, that: ‘To regard God as some kind of describable or knowable object over against us would be at once a degradation of God and a serious category error’ (Kaufman (Reference Kaufman1981), 244). Earlier in The Theological Imagination he maintains that: ‘It is a mistake, therefore, to regard qualities attributed to God (e.g. aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-revelation) as though they were features of or activities of such a particular being’ (ibid., 29).

Religious naturalism is thus best conceived as a reaction against both theists who are religious and naturalists who are atheists: the best option is to be a naturalist who is religious. I therefore suggest that we see religious naturalism as a position which rejects both theism and atheism.

Theism

In what follows I would like to take these considerations into account and propose how to explicate theism, non-religious naturalism, and religious naturalism – as well as scientific naturalism, about which I have not said anything so far – in a way which, one hopes, is illuminating and unbiased, but which conveys the significant differences between them.

I shall take theism (or minimal theism) to contain essentially three theses:

1. (T1) In the beginning was (or has always been) something with mind, namely God, who is, or at least is similar to, a rational, thinking agent; and this God is the creator of everything that exists.

2. (T2) We can, by reason, experience, faith, or revelation, come (to some extent) to know God, or at least be rationally entitled to believe in God.

3. (T3) We should let our lives be guided by God, or at least strive to come into a right relationship with God and to the rest of God's creation.

Thesis (T1) can be developed in different ways. One issue is whether one should think of the world as a part of God, or whether God and the world are distinct from each other. Another question is whether or not God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. A third issue concerns how to understand God's actions in the world. Thesis (T1) is a metaphysical claim, whereas (T2) is an epistemological claim. Thesis (T2) says that we can have some knowledge of, or at least hold rational beliefs about, who God is and perhaps also about some of God's plans for the created world. Theists can, however, have different ideas about how we can know or rationally come to believe things about God. To simplify, we could say that their idea is that we can gain epistemic access to God through reason, experience, faith, or revelation. Either way, theists maintain that the scope of knowledge and rational belief goes beyond what science can deliver. Thesis (T3) is what turns theism into a religious view. Theism first becomes an expression of religious belief when it becomes life-orienting or gets entwined with certain religious attitudes such as worship or love of God.

It is not easy to say exactly what function a belief has to acquire or fulfil to become a religious belief, but roughly we might say that it must have a regulative function, in the sense that it must guide people in their lives, must be life-orienting or life-defining (Stenmark (Reference Stenmark1995), 235–52). The beliefs must be integrated into one's conception of oneself and one's life. If you have theistic religious beliefs, you cannot think of yourself as leading a merely human life. Instead, it becomes a life in the sight of God, or perhaps an element in the life of the world soul. Religious believers try to bring this conception of the universe and their relation to it into their life, as part of the point of view from which it is derived. Plantinga (Reference Plantinga2007) expresses a similar idea when he says that to ‘be a religious belief, the belief in question would have to be appropriately connected with characteristically religious attitudes on the part of the believer, such attitudes as worship, love, commitment, awe, and the like’. Thus, as noted above, theistic beliefs first become religious beliefs when they become life-orienting or are entwined with certain religious attitudes.

Non-religious naturalism and scientific naturalism

I shall take ‘naturalism’ as the most general name for any position that maintains that there is nothing beyond or besides nature, and consequently everything that exists is a part of nature, and then go on to define the more specific positions that have that as their common denominator.

Non-religious naturalism contains a set of theses different from those of theism. These are, I suggest, at least that:

1. (N1) There is nothing beyond or besides nature, and consequently everything that exists is a part of nature.

2. (N2) There is no personal God or anything like God, nor are there any non-natural entities such as ghosts, spirits, or an immaterial human soul.

3. (N3) There are forms of knowledge other than the one provided by the natural sciences, such as the forms of knowledge which we can find in the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and in everyday life.

I shall also explicate scientific naturalism before I say something about the theses of non-religious naturalism, because it is easier to understand them if they are contrasted to this more extreme form of naturalism. Scientific naturalism (sometimes also called scientism) contains essentially two theses:

1. (SN1) The only things that exist are the ones that the natural sciences can discover.

2. (SN2) The only kind of knowledge we can have is the one provided by the natural sciences.

Let me just give a few instances of people who hold this view or quite similar views. We have philosophers who maintain that: ‘science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’ (Sellars (Reference Sellars1963), 173); and

Similar views are expressed by natural scientists. In his essay ‘The Limitless Power of Science’ Peter Atkins advocates the ‘omnicompetence of science’ and believes that ‘science, with its currently successful pursuit of universal competence … should be acknowledged king’ (Atkins (Reference Atkins1995), 132).

Scientific naturalists typically take (SN1) and (SN2) to entail or justify (N2); so they, like the non-religious naturalists, are atheists. Science has not discovered God or anything that indicates that God exists, and since science sets the boundaries for what we can know (and for what exists), there are no good reasons to believe that God exists.Footnote ¹

Other naturalists are troubled by their more radical cousins, because they regard the world-view of scientific naturalists as too reductionist. They reject the exclusively scientific conception of nature and of knowledge, as embraced by scientific naturalists. Although non-religious naturalists have respect for the results of the natural sciences and believe that those sciences provide paradigmatic examples of knowledge and rationality, they still believe that there are things we can know by means other than the methods of the natural sciences. They believe that things such as values, norms, meaning, reasons, intentions, and beliefs exist, and that we can know that these things exist or at least be rationally entitled to believe that they exist. These natural things cannot be discovered by the methods of the natural sciences and in that sense be ‘naturalized’. Thus non-religious naturalists embrace (N3) and not (SN2), and maintain that (SN1) is a much narrower claim than (N1), because (N1) extends the notion of nature beyond scientific nature and fully includes the various aspects and normative dimensions of human nature. Moreover, as Mario de Caro and David MacArthur point out:

In short, non-religious naturalists maintain that nature consists of more than what the natural sciences can discover, but they nevertheless deny the existence of a personal God or anything like God, or any non-natural entities such as ghosts, spirits, or immaterial human souls. Notice, here, that non-religious naturalism is stronger than atheism, in the sense that as a non-religious naturalist you do not merely deny that God exists, you also reject belief in disembodied souls, spirits, or ghosts. Quentin Smith maintains further that other ‘examples of hypothesized supernatural realities that govern or create in some sense the universe [whose existence the naturalists deny] are the governing mind posited by the Stoics or the “Absolute I” posited by the early Fichte’ (Smith (Reference Smith2001), 202). We could perhaps also add to this list Plato's Idea of the Good, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, or Hegel's Absolute. The existence of all non-natural entities or realities is denied by the non-religious naturalists.

Moreover, if one accepts (N1) and (N3), it is assumed, but not always stated, that one should not be religious. It is taken more or less for granted that the point of being religious is gone once one embraces (N2).Footnote ² Non-religious naturalists would then not only deny that there is anything beyond nature (while still affirming that there is something beyond what the natural sciences can discover), but would also deny that it is reasonable to adopt a religious attitude towards nature or some part of nature. I therefore suggest that we add, in order to be able to differentiate between non-religious naturalism and religious naturalism, a fourth thesis to non-religious naturalism:

1. (N4) Since there is no personal God or anything like God there is no point in being a religious believer; religious beliefs and attitudes are just unnecessary add-ons.

This is so since no religious meaning, value, or significance can be found in nature. Nagel (although he does not embrace it himself) thinks that this is the default position of atheism, and maintains that most of the heroes of analytic philosophy – people such as Hume, Russell, Moore, Ryle, Quine, Davidson, and Strawson – have embraced it (Nagel (Reference Nagel2010), 7–8). If there were a God responsible for the existence of the universe and our place in it, the sense of everything would depend on this God, but since there is no God, there is nothing by reference to which the universe can either have or lack sense. There is then no way in which sense can be either present or absent on this cosmic, in contrast to individual, level. The world which the natural and social sciences present is a world to which the religious attitude, or a religious quest for meaning, has no application.

Religious naturalism

How should we then understand religious naturalism? It could be understood in a number of different ways, but I shall focus on three ways in which it might be explicated, two with and one without God-talk.

In either version, religious naturalists tend to reject the two theses of scientific naturalism. The natural sciences set the limits neither for what exists nor for our knowledge of what exists. Religious naturalists typically resist reductionist interpretations of the natural sciences, but many of them still privilege the natural sciences when it comes to knowledge about nature or the natural. Sometimes they do so to the extent that they seem close to accepting (SN2). Donald A. Crosby identifies two camps on this issue (and belongs to the second one himself):

Religious naturalists maintain that nature in some shape or form is all there is now, ever has been, and ever shall be. If they did not do so they would not be naturalists. Hence, one essential thesis of religious naturalism is:

1. (RN1) There is nothing beyond or besides nature, and consequently everything that exists is a part of nature.

Moreover, and as Stone highlights, a religious naturalist ‘seeks to explore and encourage religious ways of responding to the world on a completely naturalistic basis without a supreme being or ground of being’ (Stone (Reference Stone2008), xi). Thus both non-religious naturalists and religious naturalists embrace:

1. (RN2) There is no personal God or anything like God, nor any non-natural entities such as ghosts, spirits, or an immaterial human soul.

But religious naturalists, in contrast to non-religious naturalists, maintain that we can find religious meaning, value, and significance in nature or in some aspect of the natural order. On this reading, what distinguishes religious naturalists from non-religious naturalists is:

1. (RN3) Religious meaning, value, or significance can be attributed to or found in nature or in some aspect of the natural order.

Notice also that theses (RN2) and (RN3) are not taken by religious naturalists to be compatible with so-called New Age spirituality: belief in crystals, tarot cards, reincarnation, karma, aura, channelling, and the like. These beliefs could be held by a New Age practitioner even if he or she maintains, like the religious naturalist, that there is no personal God or anything like God, and that there is nothing beyond or besides nature. Nor are these theses taken by religious naturalists to be compatible with the animism which we can find in, for instance, hunter-gatherer societies. Animism is the idea of pervading life and will in nature, i.e. a belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. Animists believe everything to be (both material and) spiritual in nature, but they do not necessarily believe in God or gods.

Before we try to explicate (RN3) – which is indeed a tricky issue, because it must of necessity be given content that non-religious naturalists would deny, otherwise the two positions would collapse into one – I would like to focus in more detail on (RN2).

No personal God or a God beyond human conceptions?

Recall Grigg's point that he and most contemporary theologians reject the notion of a transcendent personal consciousness that created the world. Farley made a similar observation in saying that theologians nowadays reject a conceptualization of God as an entity or a being. And Kaufman maintained that if we were to regard God as some kind of describable or knowable object over against us this would be at once a degradation of God and a serious category error.

So far I have taken these claims to entail the denial of (T1) and consequently as entailing the affirmation of (RN2). Often that is a reasonable interpretation of statements such as these, but it is not the only possible interpretation. I say this because it appears, at least sometimes, that such people reject not merely theism but also atheism. They reject, then, what they take to be the anthropomorphism of both theism and atheism. Instead of thinking of God as some kind of superman, an infinite, supreme, or perfect being, they think of God as being beyond all human categories – so much so that it is a mistake even to say that God exists or that God does not exist, much less to say anything else about God's properties or intentions. For this reason, Kaufman thinks that it is a mistake to ascribe qualities to God (e.g. aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-revelation) as though they were features of a particular being. Most well-known is perhaps Paul Tillich's idea that the God of theism must be transcended in the sense that we must suppose that the fundamental reality is a God beyond God, to whom none, or perhaps just one, of our concepts and categories apply – namely, God as being-itself (Tillich (Reference Tillich1951), 235–236).

Since we cannot say anything, strictly and literally speaking, false or true of God, metaphors and symbols are at the core of religious faith. Because of God's otherness, all talk of God is symbolic. Religious language is irreducibly metaphorical, except perhaps for a few propositions such as: ‘God is being-itself’ (Tillich), ‘God is the ultimate mystery’, or ‘God is the ultimate point of reference’ (Kaufman). Thus these theologians do not take saying that God exists, is love, or is a personal being, as stating anything literally true or false about God, but rather as summoning certain metaphors to symbolize God or ultimate mystery in a particular way.

But if religious naturalists are to be understood in this way rather than in the way that Stone characterizes the position (see the earlier quotation), then it becomes misleading to say that (RN2) is a central thesis of religious naturalism. Religious naturalists of the type under current discussion reject both theism and atheism, that is to say, they reject both the affirmation and the denial of (RN2). These religious naturalists would rather embrace a thesis with roughly this content:

1. (RN4) There neither is nor is not a personal God or anything like this God, because what we call God is not a being of some sort but is (completely or almost completely) beyond human categories and conceptions.

The last part of this thesis is important, because it makes it possible for us to distinguish these religious naturalists from positivists. A positivist such as A. J. Ayer would say that since the theist's assertion that God exists is cognitively meaningless, so is the atheist's assertion that God does not exist equally meaningless. It is not, however, a particular principle of meaning and verification which motivates why these religious naturalists reject both theism and atheism, but God's otherness.

Hence we seem to have religious naturalists of at least two kinds: those who embrace (RN2) and those who would rather embrace (RN4). I deliberately write ‘seem’ because typically religious naturalists continue saying things such as these:

Kaufman is also quite explicit about the importance of science on these religious matters. He writes that ‘as far as we know, personal agential beings did not exist, and could not have existed, before billions of years of cosmic evolution of a very specific sort and then further billions of years of biological evolution also of a very specific sort had transpired’ (Kaufman (Reference Kaufman2001), 412–413). How, then, he asks rhetorically, can we today think of a person-like creator-God as existing before and apart from any such evolutionary developments? The answer is that it seems to Kaufman ‘increasingly impossible’ (whatever that means) to make sense of such an idea of God as creator of the heavens and the earth.Footnote ³

Religious naturalism 1

Let us, despite these last remarks of Grigg and Kaufman, proceed on the assumption that the difference between one group of religious naturalists and another is that the former embrace (RN2) whereas the latter embrace (RN4). The first form of religious naturalism is fairly straightforward and states, I think, the default position of God-talking religious naturalism. The idea is that there are good moral, intellectual, or scientific reasons to reject theism, but the God symbol – even when we reject a literal interpretation of it – is still of great importance because (a) it sums up, unifies, and represents what are taken to be the highest and most indispensable human ideals and values, (b) it present itself as the most powerful and significant symbol in our western tradition, and (c) it can provide concrete objects of consciousness standing in for abstract ideas. The kind of reality God has is then the reality of an ideal or ultimate symbol.

Religious naturalists reject theism and thereby accept naturalism or more precisely embrace the thesis (RN1). They do not adhere to traditional theistic conceptions of God, but reinterpret the concept of God so as to make it compatible with naturalism. Hence we have to add one more thesis to religious naturalism, namely:

1. (RN5) God is the best metaphor or symbol we have to sum up, unify, and represent what are taken to be the highest and most indispensable human ideals and values, and no other abstract concept such as Nature or the Universe can replace it.

Or, we might say that the idea here is that God is the best metaphor or symbol we have to express the religious meaning, value, and significance which can be attributed to or found in nature or in some aspect of the natural order. (RN5) would then be linked to and taken to support (RN3). God-talk is of utmost importance for these religious naturalists. Kaufman writes that his conviction is ‘that the principal Christian symbols continue to provide a significant resource for the orientation of human life’ (Kaufman (Reference Kaufman1993), xii). Religious naturalism in its default position is thus equivalent to embracing (RN1), (RN2), (RN3), and (RN5).

Religious naturalism 2 or divine transcendentalism?

Let us now consider the second form of religious naturalism. What is clear is that its advocates reject (RN2) and replace it with (RN4). What is unclear, however, is how (RN4) is related to (RN1). This is the problem: if you believe that God is not a being of some sort and is (completely or almost completely) beyond human categories and conceptions, why then also believe that there is nothing beyond or besides nature and that consequently everything that exists is a part of nature? Is it not rather the case that you then believe that there is something beyond nature, namely God? It is just that we cannot say anything substantial about this God. Moreover, mystics in the apophatic tradition have thought that we can experience what we call God, although we cannot really speak about God or if we do speak about God, God must be spoken of by means of metaphors.

I would take John Hick to be a contemporary advocate of this kind of view. He thinks that there is a transcendent reality to which religion is a response, but it – God or ‘the Real’, as Hick calls it – is something which is beyond human conceiving. We cannot say that God is personal or impersonal, good or evil, substance or process, one or many, because God is beyond human categories and conceptions. It is here we can locate the category mistake that Kaufman talks about. People can be selfish or unselfish; trees or genes cannot be, because they are not the sort of things that could be either: ‘And nor is the Real. Indeed it is not a kind of thing at all. It is, using inevitably metaphorical language, the ground of everything. So human language can describe the various forms taken by the “impact” of the Real upon us, but not the Real as it is in itself’ (Hick (Reference Hick1999), 10).

If you hold this or a similar view you are, I would say, a divine transcendentalist and embrace divine transcendentalism. It seems though that you could be a divine transcendentalist and yet deny the truth of (RN1). But if you do that, you are not a religious naturalist because I have taken the acceptance of (RN1) to be a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition for being a religious naturalist. In postmodern terms, if theologians do not commit the deadly sin of onto-theology, they do not thereby necessarily end up as religious naturalists. Hence, there seems to be no obvious logical connection between the acceptance of (RN4) and of (RN1).

I therefore suggest that we distinguish divine transcendentalism from religious naturalism and define the former view in terms of two theses:

1. (DT1) There neither is nor is not a personal God or anything like this God, because what we call God is not a being of some sort and is (completely or almost completely) beyond human categories and conceptions.

2. (DT2) We can experience what we call God in our lives, but all these experiences and the beliefs they generate can only be expressed metaphorically; all talk about God is irreducibly metaphorical in character.

Notice also that (DT2) is not compatible with (RN5). The God of the divine transcendentalist is not a metaphor for the highest and most indispensable human ideals and values, but for something utterly non-human; it refers to the God beyond the God of theism, to the ground of being, or something of that sort.

Perhaps the reason why Kaufman thinks, or assumes, that if one accepts (RN4) then it is also reasonable to hold (RN1) and (RN5) is that he denies that one can experience what we call God. He maintains that: ‘God is, in the last analysis, utterly unknowable. As German hymn writer Gerhard Tersteegen (d. 1769) put it, “A God comprehended [that is, successfully captured in, and thus mastered by, our human concepts and images] is no God.” Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, Luther, and others all understood this, though unfortunately they often compromised this insight by claims about special “experiences” of God or “revelations” from God …’ (2001, 413–14).

Religious naturalists of Kaufman's kind, on the other hand, maintain then that if God is beyond human categories and conceptions and it is not possible for us to experience God, then there are good reasons to believe that there is nothing beyond or besides nature and consequently everything that exists is a part of nature.

Another possible reason why religious naturalists who embrace (RN4) might think that if we accept the scientific account of the emergence of life we cannot any longer – in a non-metaphorical way – believe that God is personal and the creator of the world, but should instead embrace thesis (RN1), is this: if for the sake of argument we assume that the reasons for thinking that (RN4) is true are not conclusive, then theists should at least understand that there are convincing scientific (and intellectual and moral) reasons which undermine their particular conception of God.

So the default position of religious naturalism would consist of theses (RN1), (RN2), (RN3), and (RN5). A second form of religious naturalism would contain theses (RN1), (RN3), (RN4), and (RN5), although, to me at least, it remains unclear how to understand the relationship between (RN1) and (RN4).

Religious naturalism 3

A third important group of religious naturalists do not think that we can reconceive the idea of God within a naturalistic framework. Crosby writes that, for this group of religious naturalists,

Others, such as Stone, are not quite so negative. In circumstances where religious language is called for, he simply uses his

So we should either reject God-talk altogether or at least urge extreme caution in the use of it. We gain nothing, quite the contrary, by reinterpreting God-language or the idea of God so as to make them consistent with religious naturalism.

Still, these no-God-talking religious naturalists maintain that religious meaning, value, or significance can be attributed to or found in nature or in some aspect of the natural order. What exactly this means is not quite clear, however, and different religious naturalists explicate it in different ways. I shall offer one interpretation.

Loyal Rue says that the central core of religious naturalism is this: ‘Nature is the sacred object of humanity's ultimate concern’ and he believes that what characterizes religious naturalists is their reverence and awe before nature and their love of nature (Rue (Reference Rue2005), 366). There is a way to live in harmony with the universe or nature, rather than merely in it, and this is obtained if we let nature become our ultimate concern. So certain religious attitudes are added to naturalism and it is this extra element which justifies the qualifier ‘religious’ before the word ‘naturalism’, even when all God-talk is rejected. One is, on this account, a religious naturalist only if one's naturalism is life-orienting and appropriately connected with religious attitudes such as love, awe, reverence, and the like. If that is not the case, one is simply a non-religious naturalist or a scientific naturalist. We should accord to nature itself the reverence and commitment formerly assumed to be appropriate only to the God of theistic religions. Religious naturalists sense and appreciate an essence, grandeur, and magnificence in nature, in which they take great joy. They are awed by its vastness and complexity. They revere these qualities but do not worship them.

Loyal Rue writes that religious naturalists will

Thus religious naturalists also find certain values in nature, or develop certain emotional responses or ethical attitudes towards nature. We should grant to nature the kind of reverence, awe, love, and devotion which we in the western world have formerly reserved for God.

Hence religious naturalists of this third form espouse theses (RN1), (RN2), and (RN3), but reject (RN4) and (RN5). That is to say, there is nothing beyond or besides nature and consequently everything that exists is a part of nature; there is no personal God or anything like God, nor any non-natural entities such as ghosts, spirits, or an immaterial human soul; and furthermore, God is neither beyond human categories and conceptions nor the best metaphor or symbol we have to sum up and represent what are taken to be the highest and most indispensable ideals and values – yet religious meaning, value, or significance can be found in nature or in some aspect of the natural order.

Two challenges to religious naturalism

So far I have suggested how we might understand religious naturalism and some of its rivals. I now want briefly to discuss two of the challenges that religious naturalism faces. One concerns the relationship between God-talking religious naturalism and theism, and the other concerns the relationship between no-God-talking religious naturalism and non-religious naturalism (or the default position of atheism). Let me start with the second of these concerns.

Richard Dawkins is a well-known advocate of non-religious naturalism or atheism.Footnote ⁴ He is also well known for expressing the wonder of living things that he thinks science inspires (Dawkins Reference Dawkins1998). Real science does not diminish the enchantment of nature, but rather enhances the poetry of experience by revealing the workings of the natural world in their full wonder. He says that, when it comes to feeling awe about living things, he has more in common with the Reverend William Paley than with atheists such as Ayer and Hume. Nature is worthy of our reverence. But why should we not classify him as a religious naturalist? If religious naturalists are to be known for their reverence and awe of nature, Dawkins seems to qualify as one. But how could this be the case if he is a non-religious naturalist? It appears that religious naturalists have work to do here to distinguish their view from non-religious naturalism.

Nagel might offer religious naturalists some help here. He writes that he is resistant to the broad acceptance of scientific naturalism as a comprehensive world-view, including what he calls ‘affectless atheism’ or ‘hardheaded atheism’. He takes theism to be one form that such resistance can take, but believes that there must be naturalistic alternative modes of resistance. He wants to develop a version of naturalism which is characterized by a religious temperament:

On this construal, the religious naturalist would be one who thinks there is a naturalistic answer, or at least is one who desires such an answer, to the cosmic question: how can one bring into one's individual life a full recognition of one's relation to the universe as a whole? The religious temperament regards a merely human life as insufficient and asks for something more encompassing. This is what it means to have a religious attitude to life. The cosmic question is about attitude, and it is neither an expression of curiosity, however large, nor a general intellectual problem of how to combine a scientific conception of the universe with the local perspectives of the creatures within it.

An example of a religious naturalist's answer, Nagel considers, is the view that each of us is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up. Our own lives are small pieces of a much-extended expansion of organization and consciousness. Our life, even if it is the most advanced version of consciousness we know of, is only a part of the process. So the identification it encourages is not a form of humanism. Humanism is too limited a response to it; instead our awareness and its expansion are part of the history of life and the natural evolution of cosmos.

What characterizes non-religious naturalists (or, in Nagel's terminology, hard-headed atheists) is, then, that they reject the cosmic question – they regard it as meaningless – whereas religious naturalists embrace it, but at the same time they reject a theistic answer to it. Naturalists feel no yearning for harmony with the cosmos, but rather think that the world which the natural and social sciences present is a world to which the religious attitude or the religious quest for meaning or sense has no application. The universe revealed by the sciences, however beautiful and awe-inspiring, is meaningless in the sense that it is incapable of meaning. The scientific world as understood by the non-religious naturalist abolishes not only cosmic meaning but also its absence. It requires that we leave the largest question unasked, because there is no such question. According to this view, Nagel writes, the

Such naturalists are devoid of the religious temperament.

Nagel offers one suggestion on how to differentiate between non-religious naturalism and religious naturalism, although he does not himself use the notion of religious naturalism. Nevertheless this is a crucial task which religious naturalists face: what is it, more exactly, that makes a religious naturalist religious and is such that it does not, at the same time, make a non-religious naturalist religious?

This last-mentioned task is not a problem when it comes to God-talking religious naturalists because their very use of God-language and the God symbol, as well as their participation in religious communities and rituals, distinguishes them clearly from naturalists. Nevertheless, God-talking religious naturalists do face another problem, the one which I mentioned earlier as something I would also like to consider. This concerns their relationship to theists. It is not a problem of demarcation (as the one I have just considered), but is perhaps more of a moral or theological problem. It concerns, more precisely, those God-talking religious naturalists who want to remain a part of the Christian or, say, the Islamic community; who want to say ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am a Muslim’. I will exemplify the problem by focusing on Christianity. Plantinga states this challenge quite bluntly. He maintains that the kind of reconstruction a religious naturalist like Kaufman is involved in ‘encourages dishonesty and hypocrisy; it results in a sort of private code whereby one utters the same phrases as those who accept Christian belief but means something wholly different by them. You thereby appear to concur with those who accept Christian belief; in fact, you wholly reject what they believe’ (Plantinga (Reference Plantinga2000), 42).

Maybe there is a problem here, but things are not quite as straightforward as Plantinga seems to think. Christianity is after all a pluralistic religion and has adapted to changing cultural situations for more than two millennia. So we have Christians who belong to different denominations, who emphasize, believe, and do different things. Moreover, we have more or less liberal and conservative Christians within these various denominations.

We could say that conservatives are those believers whose primary concern is to safeguard the religious tradition – to ensure that no perceived element of truth or of what is good and right in it is lost – and that liberals are those who primarily want to do full justice to the perceived truth of modern thinking, scientific discoveries, and contemporary experience. Conservatives are afraid of losing something they already have, whereas liberals are afraid of missing something new. Radicals are those liberal believers who favour extreme changes in existing religious doctrines or traditions, whereas fundamentalists are those conservative believers who favour no change at all, or as little change as possible, in existing religious doctrines or traditions.

So we have Christian fundamentalists who interpret Genesis literally, believing that God created the earth roughly ten thousand years ago and that there actually was a Noah's ark which alone sailed the flooded earth. We have less conservative Christians who take these to be religious stories to be interpreted metaphorically but which still convey religious truths. Such people believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, who was raised from the dead by God, and that he had an important message from God to deliver to us. Liberal believers think that the incarnation should not be interpreted literally. Instead, we have in Jesus embodied, or incarnated, the ideal of human life lived in faithful response to God, so that God was able to act through him, and accordingly Jesus embodied a love which is a human reflection of the divine love. Jesus makes God real to us, and his life and teaching challenge us to live in God's presence, and to care for the poor and the oppressed. That God is love and that God cares about us, and especially about the poor and the oppressed, is literally true. Perhaps there is also a life after death in communion with God in which every person, even those whose life on earth has been a living hell, will get a chance to flourish. Other liberal believers do not think that there is a life after death. Heaven is a metaphor for our community with God here and now; to believe anything else is dangerous and a deviation from what is really important.

Quite often of course these people go to different churches, but you can also find them in one and the same church. Who, then, is it that we should think exhibits Christian belief, and who is it, following Plantinga, that we should consider dishonest? This is not an easy question to answer. Do we get into even more trouble if we add radical theologians to this picture – people who do not believe that Christians or anyone else can enter into a relationship with God through prayer or worship? We cannot interact with God since there is no God. God is, according to such thinkers, not an infinite perfect being or anything of that kind, but is instead a symbol or metaphor for the sum of our values, representing to us their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power, or something of that sort; and this is what we should confess in our churches and express through rituals and sacraments.

You are, perhaps, dishonest if you are not explicit about your radical theology (or for that matter about your conservative theology, if you belong to a liberal church). But these people seem to be explicit about their views, at least in their academic writing, and I see no reason why we should assume that they would be any less so when in church. Still, with regard to radical theology, one may wonder if one has not reached a bottom line where the whole point of being a Christian seems to be gone. At least we need an account of why the Christian symbols and metaphors, and the values they presuppose, are so special.

Whatever happened to religious agnosticism?

My problem with this latter form of religious naturalism is rather different from Plantinga's, although I have some sympathy, as I have expressed, with his objection. It is this: if one is a God-talking religious naturalist of the sort we have considered and not a divine transcendentalist, why not be an agnostic rather than a naturalist? Or to put it slightly differently, their view makes, in my eyes at least, much more sense if agnosticism rather than naturalism or atheism is presupposed.

I am not talking about all forms of agnosticism, but about what I shall call religious agnosticism. Religious agnostics do not believe with any confidence that God exists, nor do they believe with any confidence that God does not exist. They think that there are things that count against and things that count for the existence of God. Religious agnostics take the universe as known to us to be ambiguous with regard to religious belief. They may be like Paul Draper, who says that he would not be terribly surprised if one day he meets his maker, but he also takes seriously the possibility that he has no maker, that nature is a closed system (Draper (Reference Draper, Howard-Snyder and Moser2002), 197-214). But religious agnostics regard God's existence as a real possibility and this makes them behave differently from how they would if they were atheists. They bet, so to say, on God. They could pray, because unlike atheists, they believe that there just might be a God listening. They could cultivate, or at least prepare for, a relationship with God. They might even want there to be a God and want there to be a life hereafter, so that those among us who have been very unfortunate in the lottery of life have a chance to experience genuine joy and goodness. For these or similar reasons they might participate in religious practices such as those provided by Christianity.

At the same time, religious agnostics might think that many of the things that Christians believe are false, probably false, or unreasonable. They may believe that if there is a God, this God is not omnipotent or a supernatural helper who intervenes in the course of history, or in the course of our lives to rescue us from disasters. Religious agnostics may think that some of the metaphors which have been used to talk about God are dangerous and ought to be rejected and replaced, and for this reason they might get involved in the imaginative construction that Kaufman advocates. But religious agnostics still use the term ‘God’ as a title that signifies a just and loving creator of everything that exists and who is worthy of worship. They are just uncertain whether there is a titleholder, that is, whether such a God actually exists.

Kaufman, in fact, sometimes says things that point in this direction. He writes, for instance, that

But perhaps the theology which Sallie McFague develops is a more obvious example of religious agnosticism. She maintains that

Does the future belong to religious relativism?

There is of course also the possibility to opt for a ‘postmodern’ rival to religious naturalism, namely to embrace religious relativism. The attraction of this kind of view to people (and to theologians and philosophers) seems to be growing. It seems as if the relativistic qualifier – ‘for me’ or ‘for us’ – has become almost a reflex these days.Footnote ⁵ What seems to be true about the pluralistic western world is that more and more people in it think that the scope of what is relative is significantly greater than what people have previously thought. There is a growing suspicion – awareness the relativist should say – that what we earlier thought was fixed and universal when it comes to morality, religion, knowledge, truth, and science actually is malleable and local depending on human interests, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, or world-view.

This new spirit of the age could encourage the development of what we might call a postmodern conception of truth. In The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, Kevin J. Vanhoozer writes that: ‘Truth on this view [postmodernism] is a compelling story told by persons in positions of power in order to perpetuate their way of seeing and organizing the natural and social world’ (Vanhoozer (Reference Vanhoozer and Vanhoozer2003), 11). So we have different truths which different groups of people embrace, in consequence of the compelling stories told by persons in position of power within these groups. We could perhaps say, generally speaking, that to relativize truth is to maintain that what is true – and not merely what is taken to be true – is dependent upon (is relative to) group, community, society, culture, and the like, and is not just true in a universal way, that is, the same for everyone and everywhere.

Religious relativists would then claim that their religious beliefs are true relative to their faith community, but that other people's religious or world-view beliefs can, at the same time, be true relative to their respective faith communities. Joseph Runzo, for example, maintains that his relativism makes it possible for him to remain fully committed to his most basic Christian truth-claims about God and at the same time take full account of the religious diversity so very much present in the world (Runzo (Reference Runzo1988), 344).

Religious relativism, on one interpretation, would then imply that theologians like Kaufman and Grigg are struggling within the Christian community to make their story about God and naturalism true, and if they fail to make it compelling to these people then their story about God and naturalism is false. According to another interpretation, their story about God and naturalism is actually true, but it is true relative to the Christian community of radical theologians; at the same time, however, it is true that the God of theism exists, relative to a different, theistic community. Or perhaps the relevant group is the western world, which would mean, I take it, that what is true when it comes to the God question has not been negotiated yet.